Cyborg Heat: A Science Fiction Cyborg Romance (Burning Metal Book 1)

by Lisa Lace

  Heather sighed, looking at the clock. “It’s already morning, unfortunately. And I need to be at work in about eight hours. This is going to be so much fun.”

  “But not really?”

  She smiled again. “But not really.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  “You want to help me?”

  “You’re helping me,” Sabin pointed out.

  “Reciprocity,” Heather replied. “I can get with that. Just don’t try to murder me in my sleep, and we’ll call it even, okay?”

  Sabin ducked his head to hide the smile spreading unchecked across his face. “You would have to be sleeping for that to happen, so I think it’s safe to say you’re safe.”

  “For tonight, anyway.” She sighed and lifted a hand to run fingers through her hair. “What are you doing awake?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “I can’t sleep for some reason. There is...a lot on my mind.” He hoped she wouldn’t ask what. Things seemed to be much easier when they didn’t talk about where he’d come from or what he was doing here, and he wanted to keep it that way until he figured out a better way to talk about his mission here.

  Heather just nodded, though, seeming to take that at face value, which he appreciated. “Can I ask you something?” she said a moment later.

  Sabin nodded and watched as she moved to sit in the chair adjacent to his bed. He turned onto his side so he could see her better and watched as she organized her thoughts.

  “Has there ever been something you wanted to believe in so much that you kept coming back to it, even though most of the evidence pointed to it being nothing but wishing in the end?”

  He frowned, thinking that over in his mind. Things were different enough where he came from, that they didn’t often have to believe in things that they couldn’t see or things that didn’t make sense. “When I was young, perhaps,” he replied finally. “My mother would tell me stories, and I wanted to believe in them so badly.”

  Heather sighed again, looking down at her lap. “I’m not sure that’s the same as what I’m talking about.”

  She looked so sad that he was compelled to speak again. “My mother used to tell me about how when you die, your body decays but your spirit goes on to the stars. The light you see from them? That’s hundreds of thousands of spirits, shining back down on their loved ones who are left behind.”

  There was a soft gasp from Heather, and she lifted her head to look at him. “Really?”

  Sabin nodded. “Yes. Most of my people believe that.” He was getting into somewhat dangerous territory, explaining all this, but somehow he thought that she needed to hear it. At least, she was leaning forward in her chair, like she was clinging to every word. “In the stars, your spirit finds rest, and it helps those left alive to continue on because they know you’ve found peace.”

  As he spoke, his voice broke a little, and he remembered his mother and Lilera and could only hope that they had found their way to their rest.

  It was silent in the room for a moment and then when Heather spoke, her voice was soft. “My dad used to tell me that stars were magic,” she said. “He said that if you wished on a shooting star, there was magic in stardust, and as it fell to the earth, you would get your wish. He told me that all the time. We would go out and look up at the sky, find a place where it was dark enough that we could see it clearly, you know, and he’d tell me the stories about how he wished on two stars in his life and both times the wishes came true.”

  “Then the magic worked for him,” Sabin said.

  Heather nodded. “Yeah, apparently. Only, it’s never worked for me, so I don’t know. I mean. Of course it’s not real, right? There’s no such thing as magic. There’s nothing up there granting wishes. Stars are just balls of gas or whatever, right?”

  “Is that what you think?” Sabin asked her, propping his head up on one hand.

  She shrugged. “That’s what I was taught in school.”

  And he could understand that. Lessons needed to be practical. Sabin knew that stars were made up of many things, but he’d also seen them up close as he moved through space.

  “Have you ever seen a star up close?” he asked.

  Heather shook her head. “I mean, through a telescope, yeah, but that’s about it.”

  “Well, it’s different when you’re up there. When you can see them burning. I mean, of course, you can only get so close, but there’s so much light coming off of them. Imagine how much light there has to be for us to be able to see them here on Earth when they’re so far away. They’re hot and bright and beautiful, and it’s hard for me to believe that there’s nothing a little bit magical about them. So maybe your father was right.”

  He could make out her face in the semi-darkness of the room and he saw that she was staring at him with wide eyes and her lips parted. There was hope in those eyes, and Sabin could see that she wanted to believe him. “What did you wish for?” he asked, hoping he wasn’t crossing any lines. He didn’t know how humans were about sharing things like this. Among the Samis Das, they were warriors, but they also considered the people they were close to as good as family, and you shared everything with your family.

  He and Heather had just met, no matter how good humans were with sharing or not, but in the darkness of this early morning, it felt like the appropriate time to share stories and pain.

  She let out a shaky breath and pulled her legs up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around them and resting her head on her knees. The silky garment fell around her legs, clinging to the shape of them, and Sabin allowed himself to look for just a second before his eyes darted back up to her face.

  “My dad died,” she said finally. “A few years ago. He was really sick, and there wasn’t anything the doctors could do to make him better. I came and I sat with him whenever I had time, telling him about the things people were discovering in space, listening to him tell me the same old stories he’d told me my whole life up until then. And I remembered how much he believed that wishes on stars came true if they were meant to. He believed it with his whole self. And one night I drove out to the place where we used to watch the stars together and I waited. I waited until I saw a shooting star. And then I wished as hard as I could that he would be okay. That a miracle would happen. That he’d…” she trailed off, wiping at her eyes with the back of one hand. “But it didn’t help. He still died. If there was magic out there, why wouldn’t it work for me? For him? When he believed that much?”

  It was a heavy question, and Sabin considered his answer carefully, aware that he was being given something precious in the form of her trust in telling him this. “Maybe…” he said, trying to think of the best way to phrase it. “Perhaps the stars wanted him to come home.”

  “He was home,” Heather snapped. “With me and my mom. This was where he belonged.”

  Sabin shook his head. “Think about it this way. We all have our time here, right? To be alive? And sometimes...that time runs out. But just imagine how welcome he was when he got up there. Someone who believed so much in the magic of the stars, finally going home to them because it was time for him to rest. Maybe...maybe you got your wish.”

  “I didn’t wish for him to die!”

  “I know. But you wanted him to get better, yes? Up there, he isn’t suffering.” He realized with a jolt that his words could apply to his situation as well, and he sighed heavily. “Sometimes death is a form of salvation. I have to believe that.”

  Heather didn’t say anything for a long moment, and Sabin wondered if she was angry with him for what he’d said. But when she looked at him, there wasn’t anger in her face. “Why?” she wanted to know.

  And now it was time for him to trust her back, it seemed. In a way, there was something freeing about the fact that he didn’t know her at all and she didn’t know him. She didn’t have any expectations of him or any preconceived notions that were based on anything other than what she’d seen of him so far.

  “Because I’ve lost
people, too,” Sabin explained. “My parents, someone I thought I loved. And I’m always thinking about what I could have done to save them or where I failed in being there for them, but they were suffering in their own ways, and I need to believe that they’re in better places now.”

  “So you’ll feel better?” Heather asked.

  Sabin shrugged a shoulder. “A little, yeah. And that’s selfish, I know, but...I wouldn’t wish the life they were living for a while on anyone, so I can only hope things are better for them now.”

  Heather didn’t ask for more information and Sabin didn’t volunteer it. In this moment, the specifics didn’t really matter, anyway. They were united in their losses and their feelings about it, and Sabin just wanted to make her feel better as well as try to ease some of the suffocating pain in his own heart.

  She let out a messy sigh and looked at him, head tilted to one side. “Okay,” she said after a bit. “I guess that is a better way to look at it.”

  “I’m glad,” Sabin said. “I’ve seen a lot of death in my time, and I have to find better ways to think about it. I’m happy to be able to pass that on.”

  “You’re alright,” Heather replied, smiling at him. “For a possible ax murderer.”

  Sabin laughed, and it was a sound that surprised him. There hadn’t been much to laugh about lately. “I am not a murderer,” he said. “I’ll prove it to you, eventually.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  He watched as Heather nodded off the in the chair, feeling warmer than he had before. There was good on this planet, and he was determined to save it.

  Chapter 8: Something Good

  Heather was determined not to do this again.

  There were few things worse than having to go to the hospital for a shift on almost no sleep because nothing made her want to deal with patients less than being exhausted.

  She’d gotten up that morning feeling like kicking herself, even though some of the pain in her heart that had crawled back up there after her dream about her father had eased. Coffee had done a little to perk her up, enough so that she could shower and get dressed and make herself look presentable.

  Sabin had watched her curiously from the couch as she passed back and forth through the house and listened to her swear as she got dressed and did her makeup and hair.

  It was almost like having a large dog that watched your every movement. A large...attractive dog, who still hadn’t managed to put a shirt back on.

  ...Okay, so he was actually nothing like a dog, and she really needed to see about getting him more clothes.

  Heather didn’t know what she was thinking when it came to how she was just letting him stay with her, but she’d always had a fairly good sense of people and their motivations. However weird Sabin was, he wanted to do something good here, clearly, and he needed help. Her dad would have done the same thing and let him stay, even though Heather already knew that her mother would have been horrified and would be horrified now if she knew that her daughter was doing it.

  So that was one of those things that she just wouldn’t tell her.

  “I’ll be back later tonight,” she’d told Sabin as she grabbed her keys and her purse. “There’s food and stuff in the refrigerator, just help yourself. Do not set my house on fire. And...it’s probably best if you don’t go wandering around the town looking like that.” She had gestured to his still bare chest and his torn clothes. “We’ll see about getting you something else to wear soon, okay?”

  Sabin had looked perplexed for a moment, but then nodded his agreement. He wished her a good day, and she’d watched him for a second more before she made herself leave.

  He was a grown man, albeit a weird one, and he could handle himself for a few hours while she was gone, surely.

  The hospital was quieter today than it had been before her day off, and she was grateful for it. She was able to ease herself into her work, making her rounds and making sure that the sheets were cleaned and the bedpans were scrubbed and dealing with new patients as they came in.

  If the volume stayed low, then she was pretty sure she could manage to get through the day without falling asleep in a closet somewhere.

  Her shift that day was from ten to six, and the morning went by slowly but easily, so she didn’t complain.

  It was easy to keep her hands busy, moving from task to task. When she had down time, she thought about what Sabin had told her in the darkness of her living room.

  The thing was, she’d never talked to someone who’d actually understood before.

  Heather had told people about her father’s thing about wishes before, and most of them just laughed or thought that it was just some kind of weird dad thing. They usually told her that he hadn’t been serious because no one was serious when they told kids stuff like that. And Heather always let it go because there was no real way to explain that yeah, Christopher Sutter had been completely serious every time he said it.

  But with Sabin, she hadn’t had to explain much. In fact, he’d had a story of his own that was similar, and his words had soothed her more than she’d been expecting them to.

  She found herself wondering what his life had been like that he’d needed to find a way to come to terms with death like that. In her line of work, there was death every day, but it only touched her a little bit. These weren’t people she’d bonded with for the most part; and when they came in, sometimes it was easy to tell if they were going to make it or not, so she had time to prepare herself and remind herself that it was just a part of the job.

  But when it was personal, then it was different.

  Apparently, she’d been in something of a daze thinking about it while leaning against the nurses’ station because when someone in front of her cleared their throat, she jumped, nearly banging her elbow on the shiny flat top surface.

  Heather blinked and had to fight the urge to groan when she saw it was Dr. Woodward. “Doctor,” she said, inclining her head. Maybe she would get lucky and this would be something about work.

  He smiled his brilliant smile, and Heather cringed internally. Probably not, then.

  “Nurse Sutter,” he said. “How are you today?”

  “You know,” she replied. “Hanging in there. Getting through the day. How about you?”

  “Oh, I’m great. Just great. So listen, I know you’re working all weekend, but I’ve got it on good authority that switching shifts happens a lot between the nurses. So I thought maybe if you wanted to switch to a morning shift on Saturday, we could do something that night.”

  To be honest, nothing sounded less appealing than switching her shift so she could come in at four in the morning on Saturday after finishing at seven on Friday and then spend the rest of her night with Dr. Woodward.

  Apparently he was just really, really bad at picking up hints.

  “I wish I could,” she lied. “But I’ve got family in town this weekend, so I’ll be spending time with them when I’m not here. I wouldn’t want to ditch them when they came all this way, you know?”

  Woodward nodded. “Of course not,” he said. “Not when they came to see you, I completely understand. Another time.”

  “Have a good day,” Heather said, not answering the ‘another time’ part because she was seriously beginning to wonder how many times she was going to have to find polite ways to turn him down.

  Glancing down at her watch, Heather decided it was close enough to lunch time for her to have a break.

  She didn’t know what benevolent creature was responsible for the fact that usually Keith was in the cafeteria when she took her breaks, but she was grateful for it. She sped through the line, getting her usual terrible coffee and something that was probably supposed to be a hamburger and fries and made her way to where he was sitting with Kelly Ann, one of the other nurses they knew.

  “Save me,” Heather said as soon as she sat down. “Hey, Kells.”

  Kelly Ann waved with a smile on her face. “Afternoon. Heather. What are we saving you from?”

&nbs
p; “Wait, wait,” Keith said, holding up a hand. “I’m almost positive I can guess. This has something to do with our favorite neurologist, doesn’t it?”

  “Ooh, Dr. Woodward?” Kelly Ann asked, putting down her cup and leaning forward. “Do tell.”

  Heather huffed and opened a package of ketchup to smear some on her burger. “He’s not my favorite anything, first of all,” she pointed out, biting viciously into a fry. “He’s a pain in the ass.”

  “He could be a pain in my ass,” Kelly murmured, and Keith cackled while Heather rolled her eyes.

  “Stop it! Or actually, don’t. Go flirt with him and maybe he’ll leave me alone, then.”

  “Heather is immune to Woodward’s charms,” Keith explained. “In fact, she finds them downright repulsive.”

  “Not repulsive,” Heather corrected. “Just annoying. It’s like, how many times do I have to say no before he gets the point?”

  “Except you don’t ever actually say no,” Keith pointed out. “You make up some kind of excuse instead, which doesn’t deter him because he’s clearly on a mission. If you just made it clear that you weren’t interested.”

  “I just want him to take a hint,” Heather whined. “I don’t wanna be mean to him.”

  Keith shrugged and took a bite of his sandwich. “Sometimes you have to let ‘em down the hard way. Men are stupid.”

  Kelly Ann giggled into her hand and nodded. “He’s right. And not to completely change the subject, but do you guys have weird patients in your wards?”

  “Weird how?” Keith asked.

  “Like, okay, so these three older people are in my section right now, right? And none of them are related or even seem to know each other from what we can tell, but they’re all really sick?”

  Heather chewed her food contemplatively. “Sick old people isn’t really a new thing, though, is it?” she asked.

  “No, but...it’s not even close to the time when we get the usual flood of sick older people, and they all have the same symptoms. Really high fevers, vomiting, a rash.”

  “And no one knows what is?” Keith wanted to know.