Page 42 of Silver Slayer

That knowledge landed like a brick. I closed my eyes. Opened them again, but light from the mark on my chest still pulsed against the inside of my shirt, soft and steady and infuriatingly permanent. A design I hadn't chosen, in a language I couldn't read, put there by a process I hadn't consented to because I hadn't known it was happening.

"I can feel that you're sorry." The flatness in my own voice surprised me. I'd aimed for composed and landed somewhere colder. “Through this bond, or whatever this is. I can feel that you didn't intend for it to happen this way.”

I turned to face him, and immediately wished I hadn't. The sadness in his molten gaze hit me like a physical blow, raw and unguarded. The echo of it landed in my chest alongside my own anger.

"Can you feel what I'm feeling right now?"

"Yes," he said quietly.

"Then you already know I'm angry."

"Yes."

I turned away because looking at him was making it harder to stay angry, and I needed the anger right now. It was the only thing keeping me from crossing the room and pulling him into my arms.

"I want to go home." It came out rougher than I planned, cracking open somewhere in the middle of the wordhome."That was always my plan. Survive this hellhole, get off this hellhole, find a way back to Earth. And now I've got—" I gestured at my chest, "—this glowing… tattoo that I never signed off on."

I pressed my fingers against it and felt the echo of him stir in response, not the sting of rejection I expected, but something quieter and more devastating than that. I didn't understand the whole of it. I only knew it ached, and that it wasn't mine.

"I know what Vala told me. I know what Universeval Rule means for someone like me out here, that every Yulineon patroller I cross paths with is ordered to kill me on sight just for existing off my world. I know the odds." My jaw tightened. "But, I still want the chance to try. I feel the faint longing you feel for your world, so I know you understand. It isn’t you I’m rejecting; it’s the idea of having my choice to return home taken from me.”

He didn't argue. Didn't try to reason me out of it or remind me of the dangers I'd just acknowledged. He simply looked at me, steady and aching and present, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would fix it, and he was smart enough to know it.

That should have helped. It didn't.

"For what it's worth," I said, voice rougher than I wanted, "I know you didn't plan this."

"No," he said. "I did not."

"And I know I initiated."

"You did." No hesitation. "I did not stop you. The fault is shared."

He held my gaze for a long moment before speaking.

“I cannot regret that my spirit found its complement in yours,” he said quietly. "To do so would be to deny the greatest gift they could ever bestow." Pain flickered across his features. "But I will always regret that the bond happened before you understood what it meant."

Some of the fight drained out of me. Not because he'd changed my mind, but because I could feel the quiet truth behind his words. The bond carried no hint of manipulation or false comfort, only genuine regret that my choice had been taken from me. It was infuriatingly difficult to stay furious with someone who was hurting right alongside me.

My wrist comm buzzed.

"Is Vennox awake?" Vala's voice came through, stripped of everything that wasn't the question.

"Yes," I said. "He's up and mobile."

"Good. We need you both in the cargo hold. Stern end, third hatch past the collapsed bulkhead on the right." A beat. "We found another way back to the ship. One that doesn't take us back through Spore Valley."

I straightened. "What did you find?"

“A Troken skiff.” And that was it. Comm off.

I stared at my wrist. He'd answered the question, technically. That was very Vala. Direct, complete by his own standards, utterly useless by mine. After two months, I'd learned that he wasn't being dismissive. He simply forgot that the rest of us weren't operating from the same catalog of interstellar knowledge he was. A Troken skiff could have been anything from a life raft to a bathtub as far as I knew, but whatever it was, it was apparently our way out of here without going back through Spore Valley.

That was enough to get my feet moving. I bent down, picked up the light disc from the floor, pressed the center, pocketed it, and looked at Vennox. “You ready to go see what a Troken skiff looks like?”

"Yes," he said, flatly. We were apparently both done explaining ourselves for the moment.

I found my pants in a heap near the foot of the bunk where I'd flung them with enthusiasm, and pulled them on, hopping on one foot when the ankle seam caught. My boots went on next. I was shoving my foot into the second one when movement caught my eye.