Page 66 of Reaper Said Mine

Gnash.

I do not say his name aloud. I feel it.

The connection surges again, and this time I sense him sensing me. Shock, fierce and immediate. Recognition like a blade drawn clean. Possession tries to rise with it, dark and ancient and terrifying, but something else catches it before it can become command. Restraint. Awe. Disbelief. A question formed without words.

You.

The table in front of me blurs.

I hear Rikka say something close by, but her voice comes from too far away. The gray-bearded warrior stands so abruptly that the bench scrapes behind him. Cal curses. Vesk moves. The hall is still full of sound, yet all of it arrives muffled, secondary, unimportant beside the red eyes holding mine.

I understand what this is before my rational mind can assemble the word.

Jalshagar.

One soul with two bodies.

The phrase flashes through everything I know about the Athenaverse, everything I have reported, read, dismissed as romantic mythology, and treated as an interesting sociocultural fact rather than a condition that could reach across a hall and seize my entire life by the roots.

No one is compelled, I remember absurdly.

Free will remains.

The thought is technically useful and emotionally ridiculous because my body has not yet agreed to return jurisdiction to my brain.

Gnash rises at the high table.

The movement sends a new wave of reaction through the hall. Reapers quiet first, then diplomats, then the press, confusion moving outward as people realize something has happened without knowing what. His size was imposing while seated; standing, he becomes the axis of the room. Firelight catches along his bone spurs and the etched armor across his shoulders. His face has changed. The warlord’s polished amusement has vanished, and what remains is raw enough that a part of me wants to look away to spare him exposure.

I cannot look away.

My knees threaten to forget their profession.

Rikka’s hand closes around my elbow, steadying me with surprising care. “Breathe, small scholar.”

I drag air into my lungs.

It tastes like blood, smoke, spice, and fate.

“What is happening?” Cal demands, his voice thin with panic or envy or both. “What the hell is happening?”

Vesk reaches my side, and whatever he sees on my face drains the humor from his. He looks toward Gnash, then back at me, and his expression shifts into something almost reverent.

“Oh,” he says.

I swallow. “Vesk.”

He lowers his voice. “Do not move unless you choose to.”

That sentence anchors me more than any reassurance could have.

Choice.

I grip it with everything I have.

The bond surges again when Gnash takes one step away from the high table. A thousand impressions break through me in fragments I cannot fully sort: the weight of command, the taste of bitter station caf, a knife handed from an old captain to a starving young man, laughter in a ship corridor, screams in a colony where the air had gone too thin, the fierce satisfaction of seeing a freighter dock safely because his rules held, the aching hatred of Helios, the loneliness of being obeyed by many and known by almost no one.

My own memories answer. Horus IV smoke. My mother’s hand. Dawson’s smile. The conference room’s cold air. The first sight of Guyver Station through a transport viewport. Salla saying her son was in school. Mara’s route maps. The skitterling under the bowl. My stubborn, ridiculous determination to make one powerful man answer questions.