Page 7 of Jarran

She’d read it dozens of times by now. She practically had it memorized. But she read it again anyway, because every time she came back from a session with Jarran, she needed to remind herself who he was. Who he had been.

Leader of the Sifters. Trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people. The terti flower trade, which had destroyed thousands of lives across multiple systems. The bioengineered females, manufactured from multiple species’ DNA and sold. The murder of Warlord Mek-la. The shooting of Niir, a fellow Virilian, in the chest on the Sintra-1 space station. He’d even orchestrated the kidnapping of a Virilian prince’s human mate, Anna.

These were facts. They were documented, corroborated, and real.

And then there was the male who grew fruit and flinched at loud sounds and had tears in his eyes because he felt something about a laughing child he couldn’t remember.

Evie lay back on the bed. The ceiling was the same featureless white as every ceiling on this ship. She stared at it as thoughts swirled. She was rebuilding the bridges in his mind. That was her job. Link by link, connection by connection, she was trying to give him back access to everything the terti had locked away. His skills. His memories. His emotions. His identity.

But identity wasn’t selective. She couldn’t rebuild the bridges to the boy who laughed and skip over the ones that led to the male who killed. If this worked, all of it would come back. The good and the terrible, tangled together the way they’d always been.

Was she helping a person heal, or was she helping to resuscitate a monster?

She didn’t have an answer. The ceiling didn’t offer one either.

FOUR

He’d started saving the best fruit for her.

Jarran didn’t think about it too carefully. Thinking about things too carefully led to places where the dark shapes lived, and he’d learned to stay out of those places. But every morning when he tended the plants in his assigned section, he found himself sorting the harvest with more attention than the task required. The ripest fruit was set aside, along with the grain clusters that broke apart clean and smelled faintly sweet. He’d set them on the edge of the planting bed where Evie always put her bag.

He didn’t know why her smile mattered so much. But it did. When he gave her the fruit he’d chosen for her, her face changed. The serious line of her mouth softened and her light brown eyes warmed, and the dull ache in his chest went quiet. Just for a moment. Enough to breathe a little easier.

Sixteen cycles had passed since her arrival. Maybe more. Time on the Korath-7 moved in a steady, unmarked current, one cycle bleeding into the next. But Jarran had started marking his days by her visits. Before Evie, the cycles had been the same. Wake. Eat. Plant. Sleep. With occasional unpleasant tests in there that kept him always hyperaware of who approached him. Now there was Evie. She talked to him and waited for answers and brought a clean, warm scent into the humid air of the bay.

He found himself listening for her footsteps before she arrived. The bay doors would hiss open, and he would know by the sound of the footfalls whether it was Evie or his guards, or someone else. Evie’s steps were quicker. Lighter. They had a rhythm he’d memorized without trying.

Today he heard them and looked up. She came down the central aisle with her equipment bag over one shoulder, her brown hair pulled back from her face. She was wearing the same plain clothes the Baylans wore, pale gray, but on her they looked different. She smiled when she saw him, and he felt the ache ease.

“Morning,” she said.

“Morning.” He stood, wiping his hands. “Good harvest today.”

“Yeah?” She set her bag on the planting bed and looked at the row he’d been working. “These look healthy.”

“Strong roots.” He touched one of the broad leaves. “Deep in the soil.”

“That’s the secret, huh? Good roots?”

He nodded as they both sat down. It was the secret to most things, he thought, though he couldn’t have explained that in words. Some knowledge lived in his body and came out through his hands, not his mouth.

He handed her a grain cluster as she arranged her legs cross-ways. She never complained about sitting on the dirt. He liked that about her. She popped a grain into her mouth and chewed. “Oh, these are good. Are these the ones from the back row?”

“Yes. More light there. Sweeter.”

“You can tell the difference by where they grow?”

He nodded as he adjusted himself to mirror her cross-legged sitting pose. “Position matters. Light, water, neighbors.” He gestured to the row of broad-leafed plants beside them. “These shaded the grain. Had to move them.”

“You rearranged the crops?”

“Baylan agricultural supervisor said I could...” He paused, searching for the word. “Experiment.”

She grinned. “Patient Nine, agricultural innovator.”

He almost smiled at that. Almost. The muscles in his face wanted to do it, but his face had forgotten the movement. The corners of his mouth pulled, and then stopped, and Evie’s grin faded. She looked at him a beat too long, then reached into her bag.

“I have something new today,” she said, pulling out a device. It was smaller than the scanner she usually used, flat and round, about the size of her palm. A thin wire connected it to her tablet. “This is a neural contact sensor. It reads brain activity through direct skin contact. More detailed than the scanner.”