I was going to argue that he was wrong, so I bit my tongue hard enough to taste blood. The pain was barely a distraction from my burning frustration.
“Tell me what I can do,” I demanded.
“Nothing. It’s over. My life is over…”
He trailed off with a pained moan.
I did not understand his disproportionate reaction. He said he was unharmed. Was the face shield part of his body? Did he somehow feel its pain?
Then a jolt of inspiration hit me. Maeleon feelers were direct links for communication. If Assistant 23 was in pain, I could divide it among us. Sharing it with him would lessen his load.
He was in no state to respond, so I made the decision for him. I lowered the tip of a feeler against his shoulders. It was covered in fabric, like the rest of his body, but the material was dotted with tiny rips. One was just big enough to slip the malleable tip of my feeler against Assistant 23’s skin.
Instantly, I was plunged into a different world. Assistant 23’s world.
Pure icy terror assaulted me. Fear was a cold blade that gutted me from the inside, and dread crawled into the hollowed space it left behind. I felt sick with anxiety.
Gasping sharply, I withdrew my feeler. I was rattled by the experience and took a few rapid breaths to come back to my senses.
But these were Assistant 23’s feelings, and unlike me, he could not escape them.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, high and strained. “Did—did you justprobeme?”
I could not respond immediately. I was still shaken by the crushing weight of his emotions.
“Yes,” I breathed. “I wished to—”
Assistant 23 yelped as if stung. He scrambled to his feet and bolted like I was a predator about to swallow him whole.
Dark feelings swirled in my chest. I only wished to alleviate his pain, but I hurt him instead. And now he was running away from me.
Unfortunately, I was too distracted by my flash of self-loathing to realize Assistant 23 was running in a direction he should not have been.
A moment later, the pale shape of his suit abruptly disappeared, and a thin squeal of surprise floated up from a sudden depth. Next came a sharper, louder scream—the scream of a trapped and terrified creature.
I knew with a cold lurch in my stomach that he had fallen into the pit of thorns.
5 /Assistant 23
The panicthat gripped me was so blistering and excessive that it felt as if I had never experienced a moment of peace in my life.
My world crumbled the second Farr’vye confirmed there was a crack in my face shield. It wouldn’t be long before the crack spread and the protective barrier fell to pieces, exposing my face to the world for the first time in eight long years.
But… there was a single, brief moment when relief broke through the panic. When Farr’vye touched me with his feeler.
Without asking.
I was mad about that. Yet I couldn’t bethatmad because in that second, it felt like a ray of sunshine breaking through storm clouds.
But then it was over, and I was upset, and I panicked even harder.
As if the weight dangling over me had finally broken free from its frayed thread, all the years of dread and anxiety caught up to me at once. My emotions were too big for my body. I was reduced to a scared little mouse instead of a rational human being.
I freaked out. I ran.
And then I tripped and rolled down a hill—right into a cluster of thorny flower bushes.
The universe was playing the world’s nastiest joke on me.
