by Nalini Singh
Stepping back inside the tent, she found the box of wet wipes she’d grabbed from the little shop next to the Alaris offices and glanced over at Stefan. He hadn’t moved, his breathing steady. Six hours he’d said, and six hours it would be. Turning her back to him, she stripped off the clothing on her upper half, her skin burning at the idea of being near-naked with a man who wasn’t her husband, then quickly wiped herself down as much as possible, before getting into a fresh bra and T-shirt.
Her clean clothing wasn’t going to last, since she’d brought only three changes, but that was a nonissue given the devastation. Tazia had been dirty before, would be again. Putting the used wipes in a plastic bag for later disposal, she placed the box of wipes by Stefan’s duffel so he’d see them when he woke. That done, she grabbed her jacket—dusty and grease streaked from the day before—and went to see what she could do about a damaged generator that was the backup power source for the village’s small medical clinic should its primary generator malfunction.
• • •
Stefan woke after exactly six hours of sleep. Like any trained soldier, he’d been aware of Tazia coming and going, but his mind knew she was no threat, and so he’d continued to sleep. Had it been otherwise, she’d have been immobilized before she realized he’d moved. He might’ve been deemed too psychologically flawed to be an Arrow, an elite black ops soldier, but the training had stuck.
And officially an Arrow or not, the men and women of the squad considered him one of theirs. He’d been given off-the-books training, and still sparred with active-duty Arrows whenever possible, considered them his brethren. No one could sneak up on him even when he slept—but with Tazia, the risk profile was nil.
Violence was simply not part of her nature.
Getting up, he did what needed to be done, then returned to the location of the worst collapse. If he could have, he’d have worked through the night; he knew there were people trapped under that rubble. He’d had to force himself to be logical, to remind himself that he’d be useless to everyone for far longer than six hours if he burned out his psychic abilities.
Now, recharged, he focused on the most unstable section and got to work. He was conscious of Tazia moving around the village, picked up her voice speaking a language that was close enough to the one spoken in this land that she was understood. When she said, “Stefan,” he glanced down.
Her head only just reached his breastbone but he’d never thought of Tazia as small. She had too much inside her to be small—like a storm gathering up its power before it struck.
“Is there a problem?”
“You haven’t had a drink of water in three hours.” Frowning, she passed him a reusable bottle filled to the brim. “You know you can’t do that, not in this heat, especially with the amount of rubble you’re shifting.”
As he took the water, he catalogued his body and realized he’d come perilously close to dehydration. “Thank you.” No one had been concerned about his welfare, except as it impacted their own needs and wants, since he was a child.
“No thanks needed.” Her eyes took in the area in front of him as he drank the water in slow, measured swallows so as not to overload his parched body. “This is bad enough, but I keep waiting for the aftershocks.”
He nodded, lowering the bottle after emptying half of it. “They’re apt to be severe, given the magnitude of the quake. That’s why I have to get the trapped out now—the rubble is too unstable to hold in a major tremor.”
Working without a break for the next four hours—not stopping even when Tazia passed him water and he gulped it down—he got half the trapped out before the world shook again. Screams pierced the air as things crashed and people bled, but his first thought was for Tazia. Reaching out with his mind as he crouched down to ride out the aftershock, he searched for the brilliance that was hers. He didn’t invade her mind to find her—he didn’t have to. Tazia’s mental signature was as unique as a fingerprint to him . . . and there she was.
Safe.
When the shaking finally stopped, he could no longer sense living minds below the closest section of rubble. As, long ago, he’d no longer been able to find his mother or brother, though he’d searched for hours. Until rescue services had arrived and found him wandering barefoot over the debris, his skin cut and bleeding and blood pouring from his nose and ears as he continued to try to shift the entire landslide on his own.
“They’re dead,” a Psy-Med specialist had told him, cold and no-nonsense, the words like stones smashing into his face. “You aren’t strong enough to assist. Sit here and don’t be a nuisance.”
No longer was he a child, but he couldn’t help the dead here, either.
Leaving them, he moved to a section that still held the living, and when Tazia came by again with water, he saw the tear tracks in the dust on her face. His instincts zeroed in on her. “You’re hurt?” He scanned her body to check for injuries.
She shook her head. “There was this little girl—she followed me around all day yesterday, said she wanted to learn what I did. The aftershock . . . She was . . .” Sobs shook her small frame, her face crumpling.
When she would’ve turned away, he stepped close, protecting her from the gaze of others. He knew she needed contact, needed touch, but he hadn’t touched anyone except out of necessity since before the landslide that had ended his childhood, for the Silent did not touch. So he simply stood close, and when her tears ended, he made her drink some of the water she’d brought him.
“I’d better go,” she said, her voice husky. “Don’t forget to eat a nutrition bar.”
The clock had just ticked past midnight when he was forced to stop. Mental muscles strained to the last degree, his uniform hanging on a frame that was burning energy faster than he could replenish it, he made himself walk away from the rubble. Tazia was inside the tent, working on a small component by the light of the solar-powered emergency lantern she’d bought in the same little shop where she’d bought the box of cleansing wipes she’d shared with him.
“There’s not enough electricity to do computronic work after dark,” she murmured absently, then looked up. “Stefan, sit before you fall down.” The words were sharp.
“I’m fine, just low on energy.” But he sat, his body feeling as if it was held together by strings that could snap at any moment.
Digging into his duffel, Tazia pulled out a pack of the high-density nutrition bars he’d brought. She peeled one open and pushed it at him. “Eat.” Watching him to make sure he obeyed the order, she found some water and gave that to him after dosing it with a vitamin and mineral powder. “There’s enough drinking water that we don’t have to ration it. Tankers will be here tomorrow.”
He drank the water, ate another bar when she gave it to him. “Have you eaten?”
A nod. “Some of the villagers managed to put together an outdoor oven, made flatbread. I had that. I think you need these bars more than I do.”
“Did you have the vitamins?” She could easily fall victim to malnutrition.
“Yes.” Putting aside the component she’d been working on, she thrust her hands through her hair, then dropped both her hands and her gaze. “Sorry about breaking down like that.”
“There’s no need to be sorry. You are human. You feel.”
Her eyes met his, so open and heavy with sorrow. “Do you remember feeling? As a child?”
“Yes.” He remembered screaming and clawing at the mountains of muddy rocks that covered his family, but the memories were distant, numbed by time and his conditioning under Silence. “You should sleep.”
“So should you.” She lay down in her sleeping bag but didn’t switch off the lantern until he’d finished his meal. “Good night.”
“Good night,” he said, and it was the first time he’d said that to anyone as an adult. In the barracks where he’d been trained before it was decided he was too psychologically
fractured to make a good soldier, they hadn’t spoken beyond that which was needed for training.
And after that, he’d always been alone.
• • •
Tazia woke suddenly. A glance at the face of her watch, the softly glowing numerals visible in the dark, told her only two hours had passed since she went to sleep. About to close her eyes, she heard it again, the sound that had wakened her . . . No, it was a lack of sound. Stefan wasn’t breathing.
Scrambling up, she fumbled for the lantern, flicked it on. When she turned the beam toward Stefan, she saw he was rigid, his hands fisted by his sides and his neck stiff. Not needing to see anything further, she dropped the lantern, causing it to blink out, and put her hands on his shoulders in an attempt to shake him free from the nightmare. “Stefan!”
It should’ve been impossible, how fast he moved. One instant, she was crouching worried over him, and the next, she was flat on her back with him over her, one of his hands at her throat. Heart thudding, she kept her hands where they’d fallen when he flipped her. “Stefan, it’s me, Tazia.”
His face was shadowed, but she saw him shake his head. “Tazia?”
“Yes.” Moving very carefully, she lifted a hand to his wrist, tugged, deliberately using his name again as she said, “Let go of my throat, Stefan.”
A jerk and he was gone, back on his side of the tent. “I hurt you?”
“No.” Sitting up, she tried to catch her breath. “You just surprised me.”
“I apologize. I should’ve warned you not to touch me in sleep.”
“You weren’t breathing.”
“It’s temporary. My brain wakes me up when my CO2 levels get too high.”
Such scientific words to describe the raw pain she’d seen in him—as if he were caught in the throes of a horror so terrible, it pierced his Silence. “What did you dream?”
“Psy don’t dream.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
The pause was long and heavy. “This situation awakens memories of the disaster when I was a boy. It’s having an impact on my sleeping patterns.”
She was so used to seeing him as remote, untouched by the pain and chaos of life, that his admission shook her, made her question everything she thought she knew. Not sure what to do, she’d opened her mouth to say something—she didn’t know what—when he lay back down.
“You should return to sleep,” he said. “The work is by no means complete.”
Hearing the finality of his tone, she did lie down, but then thought again of the way he’d pushed into her space, saw in that permission to push into his. “How old were you?” she asked quietly. “When it happened.”
A long silence, his breathing even enough that she might’ve believed him asleep if she hadn’t been able to sense the conscious life of him, the force of it a pulse against her skin. Rather than asking again, she gave him the time to think, to decide what to share. After all, they both had their secrets.
“Four,” he said at last. “My conditioning was fragile.”
Conditioning. Tazia turned that word around in her head, considered its meaning.
For the longest time, she’d believed that Psy came out of the womb emotionless, that this was who they were as a people—as a tiger was fierce and a snake sinuous. A simple fact of nature. Only after leaving her village had she begun to hear different whispers, begun to hear that the Psy did this to themselves. Then she’d found that old history book and her suspicions had been confirmed.
“It must’ve been a terrifying experience,” she said, her voice soft in the total darkness. “You lost your whole family?”
“My mother was my custodial parent. I lost her, and a sibling. An elder brother.”
Having turned to face his back, Tazia thought about reaching out and touching him as she might a fellow human in pain, but Stefan was Psy. He rarely initiated any physical contact. She didn’t know much about the process of conditioning a person to be Silent, but logic told her it would fail in the face of constant physical contact.
And she didn’t want him to feel any more pain, this extraordinary man who helped others even when providing that help pushed him back into memories of the most heartbreaking loss. Her eyes burned. Four years old. His grief and confusion would’ve been incalculable.
So she kept her distance, said, “I’m sorry for your hurt.”
He didn’t answer, and she didn’t force herself any deeper into him. But that night, she slept with an ear open for Stefan’s breathing, and when he stopped again, she said, “Stefan,” until he snapped out of it.
They didn’t speak otherwise.
Chapter 5
It was two days later, all known survivors rescued, that the villagers began the cleanup operation. Tazia continued to fix anything and everything she could. Stefan, meanwhile, was needed as much as he’d ever been, the large structures that had collapsed impossible to shift otherwise. Heavy equipment was coming, but the roads to the village were treacherous, and several trucks had already broken down.
The good news was that the water tankers had arrived on schedule. “There’s more than enough drinking water, especially since it looks like the well will be fully operational soon,” she told Stefan late that afternoon, after he stopped working before nightfall for once.
The only reason he’d stopped was because a piece of debris had fallen on him, causing significant bruising to his torso. He’d have been out there minutes afterward regardless, but thankfully one of the volunteer medics had told him to rest and keep his muscles from stiffening up, or he’d be useless the next day.
“Good,” he said, doing a stretch as they stood outside their tent; his wince broke through the normal lack of expression on his face.
“Stop it,” she muttered, glaring at him. “It’s a bruise, needs a cold pack on it.” Except, with power at a premium, no one was using it to make ice, much less chill cold packs.
“Heat may do as well.” Stefan glanced at the sun-warmed sand that surrounded them. “I could bury myself for a short period.”
Shaking her head, she said, “Scorpions.”
“You have a point.” He stilled as an elderly man from the village began to walk in their direction.
She could tell the elder’s respectful nod made Stefan uncomfortable. His face had settled back into its usual expressionless lines, but she’d begun to learn to read his moods . . . or at least she’d fooled herself in believing she could. Now she glanced away from him to find the elder waving her over.
When she went to him, he gave her a painstakingly hand-drawn map and said a single beautiful thing in the language that mirrored that of her homeland closely enough that she could understand him. “Hot spring.”
Her eyes widened. “I thank you,” she said, then glanced at Stefan before turning back to the elder. “He will not be comfortable with others around.”
“There will be no others. It is my family’s secret, the spring.” He passed her a faded photograph with wrinkled hands that held an age tremor. “Go there.” Then he pointed out the location on his map.
“I thank you,” Tazia began, but the white-bearded man waved it off.
“The gratitude,” he said, “is ours.”
Walking over to Stefan after the elder left, Tazia told him of the hot spring, showed him the photograph of the distinctive rock formation not far from that spring. “Have you enough energy to ’port there?”
Stefan considered the image. “I won’t know until I try.”
“You should try,” Tazia said. “The hot spring will soothe the ache, help you be in shape for further work.” She added the last because that was the only thing about which Stefan seemed to care—his own health was important only when it threatened to become an impediment to his task.
“You hate being dirty,” he said, to her surprise. “You can come and bathe in the spring.”
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Tazia sucked in a breath. To be naked with Stefan . . . But no, he’d never expect that. So they’d take turns. She could handle that, knew he’d never peek . . . though she might. Skin flushing, she rubbed her hands over her face. “I should stay, do some more work on the power station. Sooner I get that up and running at full capacity, the better.”
“You said yourself the fading light is dangerous. You could make an error with the finer components.”
Tazia nodded. She’d stopped work fifteen minutes prior for that very reason. “All right,” she said, but glanced around the area, guilt still gnawing at her. “Do you think it’s okay?” She felt filthy, but that was nothing, not in comparison to the destruction around them. “I don’t want to waste time.”
“We won’t be gone long.” Stefan glanced at the rubble. “And there are only the dead waiting below now.”
Her hand rose toward his arm; she had to consciously wrench it back before she made contact. “You’re sure?” she whispered.
“Yes.” No expression on his face, no change in his tone . . . but his eyes, they were fixed on the crushed ruin of the village. “At night,” he added, “when the humans fall into exhausted sleep, the area is clear and I can search with my telepathic senses. There are no longer any living minds under the rubble.”
Heart a lump of pain in her chest and mind filling with the name of the little girl who’d wanted to be an engineer, Tazia closed her eyes in a moment of remembrance. When she opened them, it was on a swell of quiet determination. Nothing could turn back the clock, bring the dead back to life. What she could do was ensure Stefan’s health.
The death toll would’ve been far higher without his dogged efforts.
“Come on, we should get to the spring before it gets dark.” Ducking into the tent, she grabbed a towel from her gear, and two sets of dirty clothing. She could at least rinse them out; they should dry quickly in this heat.
