Page 17 of Thexan

“Because you matter to me.”

The words should not have landed the way they did. There were more practical things to focus on. Worse things. Immediate things.

But for one second, all I could hear was that.

You matter to me.

He seemed to realize what he had said only after the words were already between us. His hand tightened around mine, then eased, as though he had decided not to take them back.

I breathed through the first rush of fear before I spoke.

“All right,” I said. “Then we stop wasting the time I just bought us.”

“Yes,” he said.

This time, the single word did not feel empty.

It felt like a promise.

I moved back to the tray and reached for fresh supplies, working automatically as I prepared to change the bandage again. The earlier coagulant had slowed the bleeding, but it hadn’t held the way I would have expected even from a compromised system, and the energy residue he had mentioned was still interfering with the repair response. I would need to adjust for that, experiment if I had to, and hope I found something that worked before his body decided to stop compensating altogether.

“Tell me about the weapon that injured you,” I said as I set the tray beside him again.

His gaze followed my movement, sharp despite the strain that still showed in the lines of his face. “It is not a standard field weapon.”

“That much I figured out,” I said, carefully peeling back the edge of the bandage. “What does it do?”

“It disrupts cellular regeneration and neural regulation simultaneously.”

“That explains why you’re still bleeding,” I said, lifting the dressing fully and assessing the wound beneath it. The tissue had started to close, but unevenly, as if parts of it were responding while others remained locked in damage. “And why you keep going unstable.”

“Yes.”

I reached for a different compound this time, one I rarely used because it was too unpredictable on most patients. On him, unpredictability was already the baseline.

“And this is something your people use regularly?” I asked.

“No.”

That made me pause.

I glanced up at him. “Then who does?”

He held my gaze while deciding how much of the truth he was willing to give me.

“The units tracking me,” he said at last.

“Loyalists?”

“Yes.”

I went back to the wound, applying the compound with careful precision. “And they use something like this on their own?”

“They use what is required.”

The meaning landed heavily. I had seen enough of war, even from its edges, to understand the equation: efficiency over preservation, outcome over individual survival.

“That’s one way to keep people from defecting,” I said.