The first challenge of the new bond arrived on day three, while Pip was napping.
I made the mistake of stepping outside the house to check on the storm damage to the garden, thinking distance and walls between us would be enough. I was examining a toppled trellis when a sudden, sharp spike of distress hit me.
I pushed open the nursery door to find Pip awake in her sleep cushion, crying, arms reaching for me with a desperation that made my heart clench.
“I’m here,” I said, scooping him up. “I’m right here. I wasn't far. I was in the garden looking at the work we need to do.”
But Pip’s distress didn’t ebb for nearly ten minutes. She clung to my shirt, hiccupping through his tears, while I sat in the creaking rocking chair and sang under my breath and felt, through the bond, how large and frightening my absence had been to him.
Andrek found us there when he came to check on the nap.
“She panicked,” I said, keeping my voice soft so as not to disturb Pip’s slow return to calm. “I was only outside for a few minutes.”
“The bond is still new,” Andrek said, leaning against the doorframe. His voice was low and careful, the tone he always used around Pip during fragile moments. “Until it stabilizes,she’ll need you in close proximity. Her nervous system is still mapping you. When you disappear, it registers as a disruption to his sense of safety.”
“That's a lot of pressure to put on one person,” I said, and regretted the words. They sounded like a complaint. A precursor to leaving.
But Andrek didn’t react with alarm. “Yes,” he said. “It is. That’s why the Yxian live in communities, not as individuals, the weight distributed.”
“But Pip only has us.”
“Pip only has us,” he confirmed.
“Then we’ll just have to be enough,” I said.
Andrek was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” he said at last. “We will.”
He started teaching me to shield.
“You can’t absorb her emotions with no filter,” Andrek explained, sitting across from me in the garden while Pip slept and a breeze moved through what I’d started calling the silver trees. “Not indefinitely. It will exhaust you. Worse, it will destabilize you, and she’ll feel that destabilization and respond to it. You need to learn to receive the signal without being overwhelmed by it.”
“Like turning down the volume?”
“More like learning to listen. You cannot stop the bond. It doesn’t have an off switch. But you can develop a kind of a membrane.”
“A membrane?”
“A layer of awareness between her emotional state and yours.” He paused. “Close your eyes.”
I did, feeling ridiculous sitting cross-legged in a garden on an alien planet while a man with wings and a tail instructed me in psychic self-defense.
“Now find where the bond sits,” he said. “Not where you feel her emotions, but where the connection itself lives. Look for the thread, not the signal.”
It took me a while, but I found it. “Okay. I feel it.”
“Good. Now imagine a gauze. You want something permeable because you want, no, you need to feel her, especially alerts. But it creates a layer of separation between her experiences and yours.” He paused. “Breathe.”
I breathed.
“You’re not trying to block her,” Andrek continued, his voice steady. “You’re just reminding yourself where you end and she begins.”
It was harder than it sounded. With practice over the next few days, through multiple attempts, many of which ended with me frustrated and Pip cranky, I got the hang of it. I gained the ability to feel her hunger without becoming hungry myself. I sensed her fear without needing to deal with my own panic response.
“Better,” Andrek said one evening a few days later. “You’re improving faster than I expected.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Yes. I believe it is.”
