Page 1 of Jarran

ONE

The Baylan research vessel Korath-7 was exactly what Evie expected and nothing she was ready for.

It hung in orbit around a pale gray moon in Baylan-controlled space, gleaming and sterile and coldly beautiful. Pretty much everything the Baylans built looked like this. They had a very specific aesthetic, which Evie suspected was all about function. The transport shuttle docked with barely a sound. The airlock cycled. And then Evie Carr, Doctor of Neurology and Psychology, with two master’s degrees thrown in for good measure, was standing on the most advanced medical research vessel in three quadrants with a bag over her shoulder and a classified file she’d dissected on the transport over.

A Baylan liaison met her at the airlock. He was tall, slim, and his bronze hair had a metallic gleam that characterized his people. His name was something with a lot of consonants that she immediately forgot.

“Dr. Carr. Welcome aboard. I trust your transit was satisfactory?”

“It was fine, thank you.” It had been twelve hours in a metal tube with recycled air and a protein bar that tasted like cardboard mixed with regret, but sure. Satisfactory. She was too nervous to deal with these pleasantries. Her employer, the Earth-Interspecies Medical Coalition, was paying her an eye-popping sum to come here. To study one single patient. To say the pressure was high was an understatement.

He led her through corridors that looked like they’d been scrubbed down to the molecular level. The lighting was cool and even. Panels of information scrolled along the walls in Baylan script she couldn’t read, and the few researchers they passed wore matching pale uniforms and expressions of intense, focused neutrality. Everything about this place whispered controlled environment. Even the air felt regulated—temperature, humidity, probably emotional output if the Baylans could figure out how to manage that.

“Your patient is in the agricultural bay on the lower decks,” the liaison said as they stepped into a lift. “He is most stable there. We have found that his agitation levels remain low when he is working with the plants.”

“His agitation levels,” Evie repeated. As though they were discussing a piece of equipment with a temperamental operating system.

“Patient Nine responds poorly to clinical settings. We attempted standard cognitive rehabilitation in the medical wing during his first cycle here. The results were”—the liaison paused—“counterproductive.”

She could imagine. “What happened?”

“He broke a scanning table. It was bolted to the floor.” The liaison said this in the same tone one might use to describe a minor scheduling conflict. “We adjusted our approach.”

The lift opened onto a long, wide corridor. The lighting shifted from clinical blue-white to something warmer and more amber. They passed through a set of heavy double doors and the air changed, turning softer, damper, and carrying the earthy smell of growing things. Evie took a deep breath of the humid air and forced her shoulders down. Fuck, she was tense.

The hydroponic agricultural bay was enormous. It stretched the length of what had to be two full decks, with rows upon rows of vegetables, orchards, and other crops growing under banks of artificial light. The plants grew in long rows of dark soil—real soil, she noticed, not the synthetic growing medium she’d expected. Irrigation lines ran overhead in a precise grid, misting at intervals. A handful of patients were scattered throughout the bay, each working alone, separated by wide distances. Gardening as therapy, perhaps. The Baylans, it seemed, understood that some things couldn’t be fixed with a scanner and a sterile room.

Her heart rate picked up as the liaison led her down a central aisle between the crop rows. She was thinking about Patient Nine’s file again. Had been thinking about it since she first opened it on the transport, and every time, her stomach made the same unpleasant flop of dread.

Patient Nine. Real name: Jarran Bando. But the larger galaxy that followed criminal intelligence reports knew him as Pella Rin.

The name alone had nearly made her decline the assignment. But the Coalition didn’t exactly hand out high-level assignments like party favors. Turning this one down would put her at the back of the line for the next three years. So here she was.

Pella Rin had been the leader of the Sifters, a sprawling criminal organization that operated across multiple quadrants. They trafficked in everything from illegal drugs to weapons to people. The terti flower trade, which produced a mind-altering powder that was as addictive as it was destructive, ran through their supply chains. But it was the bioengineering that had made Pella Rin infamous. His operation had created hybrid females, engineered from multiple species’ DNA—including human—who could handle and process the terti flower without becoming addicted. Living beings, manufactured and sold. The file had used clinical language to describe it, but that didn’t make it less horrifying.

Most recently, he’d murdered a Sislus warlord and shot a fellow Virilian named Niir in the chest during a confrontation on the Sintra-1 space station. He was wanted across four quadrants and considered dead in at least two of them.

And now Evie was supposed to help him get his memories back.

The irony of that was not lost on her. Most of her colleagues back on Earth were treating post-concussion syndrome in retired athletes. She was treating a galactic war criminal whose mind had been blown out by a massive dose of terti powder during that same confrontation on Sintra-1. One of the bioengineered females he’d created—a woman named Calinae—had triggered a device that released a cloud of the powder at close range. It had been an act of desperate self-preservation, and it had worked. The terti did what no weapon, no fleet, and no prison had been able to do: it took down Pella Rin. And it turned him into Patient Nine. Also, somewhere in there might be a Virilian named Jarran Bando, but Evie didn’t know.

The Baylans had offered to take custody of Pella Rin, and Trak Letu, Virilian prince of Exir City, had agreed to release the prisoner into Baylan hands rather than execute him, reportedly at the Baylan Saar-king’s request. The Baylans had, in the file’s careful phrasing, “an intriguing use for him.” What that use was, exactly, the file didn’t say, but the Baylans weren’t a species known for cruelty and torture. Perhaps they needed an agricultural worker. More likely, they wanted one of the worst criminals of his time watched like a hawk in arguably the most securely fortified base ship in the quadrant.

What the file did say was this: the high level of terti exposure had caused catastrophic neurological damage. The majority of his long-term memory was gone. His language centers were impaired. He communicated in broken phrases of the quadrant’s universal trade language and little else. Cognitive function was fragmented. Personality markers from his criminal profile—the calculating intelligence, the charisma, the cold strategic mind—were absent.

What remained, according to two cycles of Baylan observation notes, was a large, docile, cooperative male who liked growing vegetables and flinched when people approached him from behind.

Evie had treated brain injuries before. Traumatic cases, stroke patients, degenerative conditions. She knew what neurological damage looked like from the inside—the confusion, the gaps, the frustrating awareness that something was missing even when the patient couldn’t name what. But she’d never treated someone whose missing memories included an entire criminal career. She wasn’t sure there was a protocol for that. If there was, it probably hadn’t been written with the assumption that the patient could remember how to kill people before he remembered his own name.

The liaison stopped walking. “There.”

Evie looked where he pointed, and there was her patient.

He was kneeling in the soil at the end of a long row of leafy crops, both hands buried to the wrists in dark earth. Even kneeling, he was imposing. Evie estimated that standing, he was close to seven feet, with the powerful build that all Virilian males seemed to share. His black hair hung past his jaw, unkempt and slightly damp from the humidity of the bay. Tattoo-like marks covered his forearms and disappeared under the sleeves of the simple gray work clothes he wore. His blue tail lay still in the dirt behind him, the sharp barb at its tip half buried.

If he noticed them, he didn’t care. His gaze remained on the soil he worked.

Evie swallowed. Her mouth had gone dry somewhere between the transport and this row of blue alien lettuce.