He grunted and went back to his terminal.
I picked up the wrench. The headache pulsed. I fitted the gasket and torqued the first bolt. The headache pulsed harder. By the time I reached the fourth bolt, white light was strobing behind my eyelids with every heartbeat, and my stomach was threatening to empty itself onto the workbench.
This wasn’t the Comm-Bead.
I knew it with the same certainty I knew a system was failing before the diagnostics confirmed it. The Comm-Bead sat behind my right ear. The pain had started behind my right eye but had migrated, spreading across my skull and down my spine in a pattern that followed no neurological pathway I’d studied. It felt structural. Like the pain was coming from something deeper than tissue, something wired into a layer of my biology I didn’t have a name for.
Something that had activated yesterday, when a seven-foot alien touched my wrist and sent a current through my entire nervous system.
I put the wrench down. Carefully. Because my hands were shaking now, and dropping tools in a Life-Support Hub was the kind of mistake that got reported.
“I need to use the head,” I told Garrick.
“Block C latrines. You’ve got ten minutes.”
I walked out of the Hub on legs that wanted to fold. The corridor stretched ahead of me, rough stone walls and overhead conduit, the amber lighting making everything look jaundiced. Every step I took, the headache ratcheted up another degree. In discrete jumps, like climbing a ladder, where each rung was worse than the last.
By the time I reached the junction where the Hub corridor split from the main artery leading to Block C, I understood the pattern.
The pain increased with distance.
I stopped. Pressed my back against the stone wall. The surface was damp and cold through the thin fabric of my work suit, and the cold felt good against the heat building in my skull.
I thought about the Processing Room. The wrist-cuff calibration. The Warden’s fingers on my skin, furnace-hot, and the current that had detonated between us.
I thought about the way he’d lied, flat and immediate. “Static discharge.” I thought about his claws sliding out, involuntarily, and the look on his face when I’d pointed it out. Something closer to recognition. Like a man watching a machine activate that was supposed to be decommissioned.
The headache drove a spike through the center of my forehead, and I doubled over.
My body folded. Hands on my knees, then hands on the floor, grating, the metal ridges biting into my palms. The corridor tilted. My vision narrowed to a tunnel of amber light, and somewhere in the distance I heard the air processor stutter through its off-rhythm cycle, the sound like a drill boring into my auditory cortex.
I was going to pass out. In a prison corridor, alone, with no one who would care enough to move me before I became an obstacle someone stepped over.
Footsteps. Heavy. Rapid. The floor grating vibrated under impacts far heavier than a human footfall.
Hands closed around my arms.
The pain stopped.
Like a switch had been thrown. A ringing, absolute silence where the pain had been, filled with warmth that seeped through the thin fabric of my sleeves and into my skin where his fingers gripped me.
I knew it was him before I looked up. The heat was the tell. No one on this station ran that hot. Alien furnace-heat pressed against my human ninety-eight, and the differential should have been uncomfortable, but it wasn’t. It was like stepping from a freezing corridor into a room with a fire. My body leaned into it before my brain could register the betrayal.
“Do not move.”
His voice. Low, controlled, carrying sub-harmonic frequencies that vibrated through his hands and into the bones of my arms. I moved anyway. Tried to, at least. Tried to pull back, to stand on my own, because I was Kira Merritt, and I had survived thirteen years without anyone holding me up, and I would survive this too without the Warden of a prison station cradling my arms like I was something that might break.
The pain slammed back.
Instant. Total. The moment his hands left my skin, the needles returned with a vengeance that buckled my knees and sent me sideways into the wall.
A sound escaped my throat, cracked and involuntary, and I hated it. I hated this. I hated my body for responding to stimuli I couldn’t control, couldn’t measure, couldn’t disassemble and rebuild into something that made sense.
His hands found me again. The pain stopped again. This time, I didn’t pull away.
“What the hell is happening to me?” My voice came out ragged. I was looking at the floor grating. At his boots, which were large enough to dwarf the metal slats they stood on. At the edge of his uniform sleeve, where it met the gray skin of his wrist, and the faint shimmer of blue-violet scales that caught the corridor’s amber light.
“You are experiencing a proximity response.” He was crouched now, which put his face level with mine, and this close, I could see the scales along his cheekbones shift color. Blue to violet and back, a slow, rhythmic pulse that matched the pace of his breathing.
