Page 5 of Jarran

His hands moved. Both of them, simultaneously, fingers adjusting grip on something that wasn’t there. His right hand rotated at the wrist and his left dropped lower, and for a split second he was holding an invisible weapon with practiced ease. His neural map lit up. Motor memory, procedural recall, deep skill pathways blazing with activity.

He blinked. Looked down at his hands. The grip released.

“What just happened?” Evie kept her voice steady.

“I don’t know.” He turned his hands over, staring at his palms. “My hands knew it.”

“The blade?”

“Yes.” He flexed his fingers. “Don’t remember using one. But hands do.”

She noted the response. Procedural memory intact, conscious access severed. His body held information his mind couldn’t retrieve. She swiped again.

An orange desert sky, vast and open, two pale suns low on the horizon. Virilia. His home planet. She didn’t expect a response at all, but his breathing changed. His chest expanded, held, and released slowly. The scanner showed a cascade of activity across his temporal and limbic regions. Emotion, deep and layered. The readings were consistent with those of people experiencing longing and grief. It was a fundamental response, rooted deep.

“What do you feel?”

He was quiet for a long time. His jaw worked, and she could see him reaching for words. “I want to go there,” he said finally. “I don’t know where it is.”

“That’s okay.” She meant it. “You’re making progress.”

“What…is that planet?”

Evie paused, debating how to respond. This was the first time he’d asked a question, and brushing him off didn’t seem like a good idea. On the other hand, answering his questions was not part of the protocol she was supposed to be following. “It’s an image of the planet Virilia,” she replied. It was the truth. His question was answered, minus his association to the planet. He hadn’t asked that, after all.

He looked at her. Really looked, and held it. His dark green eyes were steady and open, and for a second, she forgot about the file and the crime sheet and the list of atrocities and just saw the male in front of her. Tall, careful, trying so hard to pull language out of a broken brain. He had such an expressive face when he was thinking about things, and it went with good bone structure. Photographers would have loved him on Earth. The smudged eyeliner-like marks around his eyes gave him a dramatic, almost artistic look, and the black hair falling past his jaw softened the angles of his face. If she wasn’t his doctor, Evie would have noticed him as a male first, and that thought needed to go directly in the disposal bin where it belonged.

She cleared her throat and swiped to the next image.

A child laughing. A still frame from a video file of a young Virilian boy, maybe four or five, mouth wide open, eyes crinkled. She’d pulled it from a generic database. It had no connection to his specific past, as far as she knew.

His whole body reacted. His shoulders drew up. His hands closed into fists on his thighs. The scanner went haywire. Deep emotional response, unresolvable. Every pathway firing, none of them connecting to conscious memory. His eyes went bright and wet, and he turned his head away from her.

“We can stop,” she said.

“No.” His voice was rough. He wiped his face with the back of one dirt-streaked hand. “I’m fine.”

He wasn’t fine. But she respected the lie and gave him a minute. She powered down the scanner and took some notes, giving him space to pull himself together without an audience. When she looked up, he was watching her again.

“The boy,” he said. “I know him.”

Her pulse kicked. “You recognize him?”

He frowned. The frustration on his face was painful to watch. “No. I don’t recognize him. But I know. Here.” He pressed his fist against his sternum. “I know him here.”

She made a careful note. Emotional memory without cognitive access. The connection was there. It was just locked behind a wall his conscious mind couldn’t climb.

That was the pattern she’d been mapping all cycle. The terti powder hadn’t destroyed his memories. They were still in there, every single one, firing when the right stimulus hit. His brain recognized things his conscious mind couldn’t access. The damage was in the bridges between the two. Millions of neural connections, severed. Her job was to rebuild them, one painstaking link at a time, and hope that what came back was the male and not the monster.

It was delicate work. Slow. And there was no guarantee it would work at all.

“Same time tomorrow?” she asked, packing up her equipment.

He nodded. Then he reached over to the planting bed beside him and picked up a piece of fruit. Round, deep purple, about the size of a plum. He held it out to her.

“For you,” he said. “I grew this.”

“For me?” She took it, and her fingers brushed his. It was not easy to ignore the sharpening of awareness that tingled her nerve endings and kicked her heart rate up a notch. The fruit was warm from the grow lights and heavier than it looked. “Thank you.”