Page 53 of Jarran

Jarran barely heard any of it. His focus was on Evie. She was all he could see, standing there in the ruined docking bay with tears on her cheeks and a fierce, hopeful expression that had grounded him since the first day she’d walked into his life. She loved him. That was all he needed for now.

For the first time, standing in the ashes of everything Pella Rin had built and everything Jarran had burned down, he felt a small, stubborn flicker of hope. That one day the fire would fade and he could help in ridding the galaxy of the Sifters for good. That the consequences would come and he would face them, and one day he might kneel in real soil, on a real planet, with sunlight on his back and Evie beside him. He couldn’t imagine anything more perfect than that.

TWENTY-THREE

Two months, and Evie still couldn’t believe she was back on the Korath-7.

The medical lab looked different now. The Baylans had rebuilt the damaged sections with newer equipment. The machines they were now working with were more advanced than what had been there during her original posting. Her white lab coat was freshly pressed. Her hair was up in a bun, pinned tight, because today she was Dr. Evie Carr and not a woman whose partner was sitting on a lab table.

She stood behind the main computer bay, a curved wall of screens and input panels that displayed Jarran’s neural architecture in real time. The scans glowed blue and white against the dark display. She’d spent weeks studying these scans, noting every altered pathway and marking every trace of the conditioning that Xill Rin had carved into a sixteen-year-old boy’s brain. She knew Jarran’s neural landscape better than anyone’s.

After he’d been deemed not an immediate threat, they’d lived here together, in her old quarters, which was secure but also more accommodating than his old, small room. The last month, since he’d been cleared to be alone with her, had been good, all things considered. They’d gotten closer, learned each other’s habits, and when he wasn’t answering endless questions, he’d been allowed to work with the crops in the agricultural bay. He still really seemed to enjoy that.

Across the lab, Jarran sat on the edge of a padded examination table wearing a thin medical robe and nothing else. His dark hair had grown longer in the past two months, and the Sifter tattoos on his forearms were visible where the sleeves of the robe fell back. His feet were bare and his legs and tail dangled off the side of the table, and he looked, for all the world, like a very large, very patient male waiting for a routine checkup.

Silca stood beside him, attaching electrodes to his forehead. The Baylan physician had survived the Sifter attack on the Korath-7, which had relieved Evie. Silca had overseen the repairs to the base ship’s medical wing, upgraded half the diagnostic equipment, and still managed to make Evie feel slightly inadequate every time she handled an instrument.

Silca pressed the final electrode into place above Jarran’s left ear. She straightened up and called over her shoulder. “Dr. Carr. Are you ready?”

Evie met Jarran’s eyes across the lab. He smiled at her, warm and steady. It made her professional composure wobble. She gave a thumbs-up.

Silca stared at her raised thumb with a blank expression.

“What is that?” Silca gestured at Evie’s hand. “The finger thing.”

“Oh, sorry.” Evie winced. “It means ready. Or good. Or okay.”

Silca’s brow furrowed. “Humans have too many strange finger signals,” she muttered, and turned back to Jarran. “Are you ready for one last procedure?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Lie back, please. Try to relax.”

He lowered himself onto the table. The robe shifted as he settled, and he folded his hands across his stomach. His dark green eyes fixed on the ceiling. He looked calm. Evie’s heart beat so hard she could hear it in her ears.

She took a deep breath and pressed the sedation control on the console. On the screen, his vitals shifted. His eyelids drooped, then closed. His breathing evened out and the neural display softened into the gentle, rolling patterns of deep sleep.

Silca crossed the lab and stood beside Evie at the console. She looked at Evie with a serious expression. “Are you really ready for this?”

Evie swallowed. “Yes.”

“Good. Because once we begin, we cannot stop the process.” Silca pulled up a secondary display and began entering commands. “The nanobots will target the artificial neural connections that bind the Pella Rin personality construct to Jarran’s brain. They will sever and reroute each connection individually. The procedure will eliminate Pella Rin permanently.”

“I know what the procedure does, Silca. I helped design it.”

“I am aware.” Silca’s fingers moved across the console without pausing. “I am also aware that the patient is your mate, and that emotional proximity can compromise clinical precision. So I will remind you. The nanobots will operate autonomously once deployed. There is a small but measurable risk of damage to adjacent neural pathways. Memory loss is possible. Personality alteration is also possible. We have minimized these risks, but we have not eliminated them.”

“I know.” Evie’s voice was steady. Her hands were not. She pressed them flat against the console. “We’ve been over the risks. Jarran has been over the risks. He wants this.”

“He wants this very much,” Silca agreed. She glanced at Evie. “The sixty-five cycles he waited since arriving here must have felt very long.”

That was an understatement. Jarran had returned to the Korath-7 willingly, as promised, and had spent most of his time with one Virilian intelligence officer or another, sharing everything Pella Rin had known about the Sifter network. Locations of hidden outposts. Weapons caches. Recruitment channels. Codes and passwords and secret transmission frequencies. The tech and methods that produced the hybrid females. Everything. He’d sat in room after room, answering question after question, for weeks. It was a condition of his release, along with providing all materials that could be used to dismantle what Pella Rin had built.

“He did what he said he would,” Evie said quietly. “All of it.”

“He did.” Silca brought up a new screen showing the nanobot deployment interface. “And it worked. The intelligence he provided allowed a coordinated strike across fourteen systems. The Sifter network has been dismantled. Their remaining cells are fractured and surrendering. The outposts have been seized.”

“And the females?”