Page 25 of Jarran

Evie’s heart broke for him, as sweet, gentle Jarran, who liked to tend plants, was losing his innocence. The amnesia had given him a kind of clean version of himself, unburdened by knowledge of what he’d done. Piece by piece, that version was being written on. Each new revelation carved something into him that couldn’t be erased.

Evie moved closer beside him. She placed her hand on his arm, above the cuffs, and felt the clenched muscles beneath her fingers. “Jarran.”

He shook his head. He was trying to find words. She could see the effort, the frustration, the way his mouth opened and closed as he searched for language big enough to explain what he was feeling, but the words weren’t there. She wasn’t sure hers would be, either, if their positions were reversed. His vocabulary had expanded enormously since she’d met him, but some things were too large and awful for mere words to describe.

He looked down at his hands, which had planted seedlings, caught blades from the air, and cupped her face as he kissed her. “I did this,” he said. “Some version of me did this.”

Evie shrugged. “Well, yes, but from what you told me of the laboratory, whatever they did to you as a teenager may have fundamentally changed who you became. The version of you that did this…” She nodded toward the females. “Wasn’t exactly you.”

“Does that matter?” He looked at her. “They’re still there. Those females. They exist because of what I built.”

She didn’t have a good answer for that. The ethics of culpability when the perpetrator had been neurologically altered were complex enough for a doctoral thesis. She wasn’t going to solve them in a holding cell.

“It matters,” she said firmly. “It doesn’t erase what happened. But it matters.”

He turned his gaze back to the females, who had shifted into a new drill. Hand-to-hand pairs now, sparring in matched sets. One of the females took a hit to the jaw and didn’t flinch. Didn’t react at all. Just reset her stance and continued.

“They can’t feel anything,” Jarran said.

“We don’t know that for certain. Their pain responses may be suppressed,” she said. “Or, yes. They may have been engineered without pain receptors as we know them. I’d need to examine them to know.” She wished she could, to find out if there were actual people inside those bodies, but that wasn’t going to happen.

“Can you help them? If we get out of here. Can you fix what was done to them?”

“I don’t know, Jarran.”

He nodded, accepting that with a patience that continually surprised her, given how little patience the universe had shown him.

Evie watched the operation. She was by no means an expert, but this whole thing seemed like it had been building for a long time. A desperate last stand by scattered Sifter remnants wouldn’t have such infrastructure and resources. If Durik had consolidated power since Pella Rin’s capture, he could have easily built a private army of engineered soldiers, all in the shadow of the Coalition’s victory over the Sifters, while the galaxy assumed the threat was neutralized.

And now he had the great and powerful Pella Rin himself. Or, at least, the body of him.

“What does he want from me?” Jarran asked. He’d turned from the barrier and was looking at her. His dark green eyes were steady, but the rawness underneath was close to the surface. “Durik. What does he want?”

She could guess that he wanted the name that still commanded loyalty across the criminal quadrants, and perhaps he wanted the mind that had built the bioengineering program that made those females possible. What if Durik was going to try to turn him back into the monster who had built all of this? She looked at Jarran, who patiently gazed at her, waiting for her answer with bound hands and dark green eyes full of dread.

She said the only thing she knew for sure. “Nothing good, I’m afraid.”

ELEVEN

The cell was barely wide enough to pace in, the mag-cuffs made his arms useless, and the energy barrier was impenetrable. It mocked him. Jarran wanted to punch something. He wanted to rip the cuffs apart and tear the barrier down with his bare hands and carry Evie out of this metal box and as far from here as possible.

He couldn’t do any of those things. So he paced.

Evie had stopped talking a while ago. She’d curled on the floor against the far wall with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, staring at nothing. Her eyes were open but unfocused, and now and then, she’d sigh. She looked small. She looked lost. She looked like she’d had run out of any hope of getting out of their situation.

He hated seeing her like that. And worse, he hated the way she glanced at him sometimes. Quick, sidelong looks, as if she was measuring the distance between them and calculating whether it was enough. As if Pella Rin might suddenly be the male in this cage with her instead of him.

He’d never allow that to happen, but he couldn’t blame her for worrying about it. She’d watched the darkness flash through his face and knew what lived inside him. She knew more about his past than he did, and he was sure she hadn’t told him the worst of it.

He turned at the wall and paced back. It was easier to think about the agricultural bay on Korath-7. The rows of toramdo had been a welcome sight at the start of each shift. The grow lights and the irrigation lines and the smell of wet soil had felt like home. Yes, he’d been a prisoner there, too. He understood that now. The implant, the guards, the locked doors. But it had also been safe and stable, and at the time, his mind wasn’t equipped for anything more than that. He’d had purpose with his plants, and Evie sitting cross-legged across from him, talking to him. He’d been content there. He hadn’t known enough to want more.

His mind drifted to the two Baylan guards who’d escorted him everywhere he went: Left and Right. Left had been the taller one, quieter, with a habit of standing so still he looked like a statue. Right had been more expressive, occasionally making a joke to Left, which Left reliably didn’t find amusing. Jarran had found their rapport oddly comforting. Patient males. Professional. They’d never been unkind to him.

They were almost certainly dead now, along with the other few patients in the bay. They would have tried to protect the patients. That was their job, and they died because a male he didn’t remember had burned through the ship to acquire him. Jarran felt a wave of grief for Left and Right. It felt heavy and wrong, and it sat in his gut like a rock. They hadn’t deserved any of this.

His gaze drifted past the barrier, to the training floor beyond. The females were still there. He could hear the dull thud of impacts and the sharp bark of a guard calling commands. His stomach turned and he looked away. In a dark corner of his mind, the knowledge of what he’d been festered, rattling its cage. The foundation of everything in that training bay had come from his mind. No, he reminded himself. It was from Pella Rin’s mind. But he couldn’t think about that. Evie needed him functional.

Footsteps came from the far side of the room. They were heavy and confident. Jarran stopped pacing. His body tensed as his instincts pricked up. Across the cell, Evie’s head snapped up and her gaze went alert and wary. She pulled her knees tighter against her chest. He could see her fear in the set of her jaw and the way her shoulders jerked up toward her ears.