“Are you sure you don’t justlike him?”Thalara interrupts.
I shoot her a look. “It’s not that simple.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“No! It’snot! This isn’t me getting flustered because he’s hot, Tay—this is my body reacting toneurological imprinting. The translator sent the wrong feedback loop to my hypothalamus while I was being physically comforted by a tall, firm-handed Nyeri’i man with ridiculous pheromonal saturation and yes, okay, objectively hot tentacle hair. I waschemicallyrewired!”
Thalara tilts her head. “Okay, but…do youwanthim to touch you again?”
“I don’t know!” I shout, throwing my hands in the air. “That’s the problem! I don’t trust my own brain right now! That’s what I’m trying to explain. What if the translator created a false association—what if this response is completely artificial and I’ve lost the ability totellthe difference between orgasm and data corruption?!”
The door slides open, revealing a Skoll nurse who clearly heard the last few sentences of that conversation. He doesn’t ask questions, just raises his eyebrows before ducking to fit his antlers and broad frame through the door.
“Lyn Walker?” he asks.
I raise my hand. “That’s me.”
“Take a seat,” he says. “I’ll run your vitals.”
The Skoll gets to work going through the motions while Thalara sits patiently, pulling out her comm to scroll through it. I narrow my eyes at her.
“You cannot tell Riley what’s going on,” I say. “Or Orin.”
“I would never,” she replies.
I’m not sure if I believe her.
The nurse affixes biometric readers to my temples, my neck, my collar bones, and my wrists, then begins tapping through the data on a tablet. If this was a generalized orgasm response, I would have been moaning the whole time he was putting the readers on me…but there’s absolutely nothing. I start to panic a little, watching my own heartrate go up on the diagnostic screen beside the cot.
“Hey,” Thalara says, noticing it too. “You’re okay.”
“I’m not okay.”
The nurse looks between us.
“To be quite honest,” he says. “Your vitals are all reading as entirely normal. You said at the front desk that you were concerned about neurological damage, so we’ve ordered a brain scan…but as far as I can tell, you’re healthy.”
I let out a long sigh.
“That’s good news,” Thalara offers.
“Yeah,” I say. “Good news.”
But it really isn’t. Not entirely.
Because even if everything is normal…even if my brain scan comes back clean…something haschanged.
My supervisor’s touch makes me come. I want to go back to him. I want to do what he tells me.
And that is going to make itvery hardto keep working.
CHAPTER 10
KAELION
Eleven years old means…alot of things.
It means the development of personal interests. Sharper intellect. Emotional observation. A host of physiological changes that I am already having a lot of difficulty handling.
