Page 52 of Us Defiant Few

She intentionally slowed her pace.

Takeshi’s expression remained puzzled as he studied his palms, but when she drifted closer to his side, he stiffened, his face turning guarded.

“Why do you keep looking at your hands?” She kept her voice calm, nonthreatening.

Takeshi didn’t answer.

His glare intensified, and he increased his speed, but Khalani deliberately kept pace beside him. When he realized she wasn’t going anywhere, he sighed.

“I’m looking for signs.”

“What kind of signs?”

“Radiation poisoning,” he muttered, staring at his palm, almost willing a painful rash to appear and solve the mystery.

She finally understood.

With his memories gone, Takeshi still believed the surface was contaminated.

“You won’t find any,” she said.

“But how is that possible?” he hissed.

“The Governor of Apollo said there used to be radiation, but it’s all gone now. We can’t trust anything he said, though, considering he was a robot.”

“A what?”

Takeshi stopped dead in his tracks. His fingers trembled by his side, and he seemed dangerously close to spiraling out of control.

She halted beside him, meeting his unsettled gaze. Maybe now wasn’t the time to tell him everything, but something in her chest urged her forward.

“Are you ready to hear what really happened the past few years?” she asked.

Takeshi’s jaw worked. His weight imperceptibly shifted like he’d rather discard her on the road than listen to anything she had to say. But he glanced at his hands again, the radiation lie clearly gnawing at him.

Finally, he looked up. “Tell me.”

Khalani inhaled. This was her chance. Her small wish beaming through the dark clouds.

She didn’t waste another second and told him everything that happened in Apollo. They kept walking along the cracked concrete as she relayed how they met in Braderhelm. The crop failure. Genesis. Their escape to Hermes. How they infiltrated a prison camp.

Everything that led to this moment.

Well…almost everything.

“What about the rest?” Takeshi asked. He’d been silent the whole time, absorbing every word.

She wrung her fingers together. “What do you mean?”

“In the cell before, you made it seem as if we were…close?” His brow knitted, as if he wasn’t sure he’d chosen the right word.

He hadn’t. They were so much more than close.

But he wasn’t ready to understand the depths of her heart.

“Yes.” She cleared her throat. “We were close.”

“Tell me about that.”