I bend closer, sobbing now. “What?”
“I wanted keys.”
I press my forehead to his. “Then stay alive and take them.”
His fingers tighten faintly around mine.
Rain pours through the broken roof above us, washing blood into thin red streams across the ruined floor. Sirens rise somewhere in the distance. Men move, shout, panic, obey. The old holo-vines flicker over the walls, fake green life trembling across real death.
I hold Kauss against me as best I can and keep talking because my voice is the only weapon I have left.
“You hear me?” I whisper. “You are not leaving me in this awful zoo. You are not making Darlene hunt your ghost with a broom. You are not getting out of moving in by being dramatic.”
His breath hitches.
“Stay with me,” I say. “Come home.”
For the first time, he does not argue.
CHAPTER 30
KAUSS
Iwake to cinnamon.
Not smoke. Not blood. Not flooded concrete or plasma scoring or the sour stink of fear in a ruined zoo. Cinnamon, coffee, warm yeast, rain on old glass, and Evie Mercy asleep with her hand wrapped around two of my fingers like she has been personally assigned to keep me tethered to the living.
The hospital room is quiet except for the soft hum of the regen cradle around my chest and abdomen. Blue diagnostic light pulses against the walls in slow rhythm, mapping the places where bullets tore through scale, muscle, organ, and old scar tissue. Alliance medicine does not work gently. It invades, repairs, burns, knits, and lectures the body in microscopic commands until survival becomes less a miracle than a negotiated surrender.
Vakutan physiology does the rest.
That is what the physicians keep saying.
Vakutans are difficult to kill.
Evie hears that and cries every time, which makes the statement less useful than medical staff appear to realize.
Her head rests on the edge of my bed. Her hair spills across the blanket in gold tangles, one cheek pressed to her folded arm.She should not be here. She has her own hospital bed two rooms down, her own shoulder wound, cracked ribs, stitched cuts, and bruises turning every ugly color the human body can invent. Yet she keeps escaping the nurses to sleep beside me, and each time they try to remove her, Darlene appears in the hallway and starts using words like “emotional cruelty” and “medical tyranny.”
The nurses now pretend not to notice.
I turn my hand carefully beneath Evie’s.
Pain answers from my torso in hot white lines.
I stop moving.
Her eyes open immediately.
“Don’t,” she says, voice rough with sleep.
“I moved one finger.”
“You moved like a man planning something stupid.”
“That is a lot of accusation for one finger.”
“I know your fingers.”
