Page 20 of Jarran

She pulled back with a gasp. Her hand came up between them, fingers spread in a clear message of stop. He felt the loss of her mouth like a physical tear. Cool air rushed in where her warmth had been. His hand stayed on her face for a moment, then dropped.

“Jarran—” she started.

And then the dark hit.

Pain split through his skull. Sharp, sudden, centered behind his eyes. His vision went white, then black, and a feeling crashed through him that curdled his stomach. It was cold, vast, and cruel, and felt like a darkness that didn’t belong to him, but was very much his. For a terrible moment he was someone else. Something else. He looked at the world with a calculating emptiness that made his blood turn to ice.

It was gone as fast as it came. A flash. A flicker. But Evie had seen it. Whatever the darkness had done to his expression, she’d watched it happen. How could she not, being right there in front of him? The flushed, breathless softness from the kiss drained out of her expression and was replaced by fear for the first time. Her eyes widened and her body jerked back. Her hand, which had been held up, tensed. Her fingers spread wide.

He shifted backward to give them both space. His breath came in hard, ragged pulls and his vision swam. The implant fired, hard, a sharp pulse that made him grimace and grab the back of his neck.

“I’m not safe.” The words tore out of him. “Evie, I am not safe.”

Her fear melted into a deep, resigned sadness that settled into the lines of her face. She didn’t argue with him. She didn’t tell him he was wrong. She gazed at him with those light brown eyes and he knew then that she’d been expecting this. She’d known that beyond the amnesia and the fragmented memories, she’d been waiting for the darkness to show itself.

Stars, he’d just kissed her. He could still taste her on his lips.

“Jarran, I⁠—”

Before she could finish, every grow light in the bay switched from warm white to deep, pulsing crimson. An alarm screamed through the space, making Evie yelp. The plants around them were crimson under the emergency lights. The toramdo fruit looked black. The air in his chest hung suspended as both he and Evie looked up.

“What is that?” Evie asked. Her voice was a thin whisper. “Has a patient escaped?”

Jarran listened. The alarm was a two-tone pattern. Short, long, short, long. “No. When patients have problems, lights are orange. The alarm is buzz. Not this.” His speech slipped into the old, stilted fragments he used to use as stimuli and worry flooded his mind. The only thing that mattered was protecting Evie and keeping her safe. His muscles had tensed and he got to his feet, pulling her up with him. “The ship is under attack.”

NINE

“Under attack?” Evie stared at him. The alarm screamed through the bay, the red emergency lights pulsing across rows of plants and turning everything the color of blood. “How?” she shouted over the noise. “This ship is a fortified Baylan research vessel with impenetrable defenses. Who would attack it?”

Jarran’s shoulders were squared, his weight balanced, and his eyes scanned the bay with a calm focus that seemed to ignore the chaos of the alarm. “Don’t know. But this is a full-scale alert. We need to move.”

She grabbed her equipment bag and moved toward the bay doors on legs still stiff from sitting on the ground. Her heart rate had already been elevated, after kissing her patient and preparing to deliver the news that she’d resigned and this was their last session. Now the ship was under attack. The whiplash of it was disorienting to say the least.

They ran for the bay doors. Jarran moved fast, his stride eating up the distance, and she sprinted to keep pace.

“Can you open?” he asked, well aware that he couldn’t.

Evie pressed her palm to the access panel and punched in the emergency code Silca had given her during orientation. The panel beeped twice and flashed red. Access denied. She tried again. Same result.

“The whole ship appears to be locked down,” she said with rising panic. “My code isn’t overriding it.”

Jarran tested the doors with his hands, pushing, then pulling. The metal didn’t budge.

Evie turned and scanned the bay. The agricultural space was enormous, stretching the length of three football fields, with high ceilings and rows of planting beds radiating from a central irrigation hub. The wall of windows along the far side looked out into dark space. She could see four other patients in the distance. Two had run to secondary exits farther down the bay and were pounding on them.

The two Baylan guards who’d been monitoring the bay had their hands full with the other two panicking patients. One had restrained a screaming male who was clawing at the back of his head, the other was trying to calm a patient that appeared to be convulsing. Their implants. The alarm, and the panic it was creating for the patients, had triggered every implant in the bay.

She looked at Jarran. “Is your implant going off?”

He blinked. Touched the back of his head. “No.”

“You don’t feel anything at all?”

“No.” He looked genuinely surprised. “That’s not normal, is it?”

She didn’t have an answer for that. Every other patient in the bay was in neurological distress from their implants, and Jarran was standing here, clear-eyed and alert. Either his implant was malfunctioning or his neural pathways were responding differently to the ship’s alarms. She filed it away. There wasn’t time to figure it out now.

“Okay.” She pressed her back against the sealed doors and forced herself to think. “The researchers on board are scientists, not soldiers. But the Baylan guards are well-trained. They’re strong. They can manipulate metal, which makes them powerful in close combat, and the ship’s defense systems are state-of-the-art.”