Page 86 of Spark Transform

Arco held out her hand to him. “Let’s go use the freshers before the ship goes transit. I do not want to be stuck in a jump seat with a full bladder.”

While they had been gone, someone had taken a marker to the corridor walls. Cabin numbers and last names were now written beside each door. Renner paused outside theirs. Charrascos. Brenner. Seeing the names linked together gave him unexpected satisfaction. He palmed the door open and followed Arco inside.

Arco dropped onto the edge of the left bunk with a heavy sigh. “I am just about flatlined. I need sleep, but I want to stay awake until we go transit.” She patted the narrow mattress beside her. “Come sit with me? We need to talk.”

Renner toed off his boots and climbed onto the bed. He settled with his back against the discolored metal wall. Arco shifted immediately, tucking herself between his legs and leaning back against his chest. He wrapped his arms loosely around her waist and rested his chin near her temple. The soft heat of her skin against his arms anchored him like nothing else could.

Arco covered his hands with hers. “You flux my jets every time I look at you. I want to have sex with you. Pleasure you.” She took a shallow breath. “But to be honest, I haven’t been with anyone in over a decade. I am probably terrible at it.”

Renner tightened his embrace. The subject felt like navigating a minefield blindfolded, but he owed her his absolute truth. “When I wore Davidro’s collar, I trained my body to ignore desire. He used everything against me. I made myself dead to it.” Swallowing hard, he forced the words past the lingering phantom pressure on his throat. “My new body does what it wants. Visions of sex with you have fluxed my dreams since I woke up in the rehab center. I just have no idea how to make that a reality.”

Arco turned her head, craning her neck to press a lingering kiss to his jaw. “Let’s learn together. We can go as slow as we need to.” She stroked his knuckles. “Our relationship means more to me than just sex. You are the bravest man I have ever met.”

A massive wave of emotion crashed over him. He opened his mouth, searching for words to describe the profound reverence swelling in his chest. Finding none, he buried his face in her hair and held her closer.

Arco took a deep breath and let out. “I know far too much about you from asshole Davidro’s journals. It is only fair you know something about me.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yes, I do,” Arco insisted. “I grew up in a progressive Naturalist enclave.”

Renner frowned. He found the Naturalists utterly incomprehensible, grouping them with the rest of the galaxy’s baffling religionists. He kept his opinion to himself.

“They believed minder talents were part of Gaia’s blessing,” Arco continued, “rather than the result of genetic meddling by rogue First Wave researchers. No one cared that I developed a filer talent by the time I was ten. And maybe it’s an uncatalogued talent, or maybe I was just lonely, but people liked talking to me. They had interesting stories. I wanted to hear them.”

She shifted slightly, her shoulders hunching. “Then I got sick. Failure-to-thrive sick. In a conservative group, they would have held a solemn reintegration-with-the-universe ceremony to mark my passing. In our progressive enclave, the leaders allowed my parents to take me to a city medical center.”

Renner felt the tension radiating into her arms. He smoothed his thumbs across her trapezius muscles until they relaxed a little. “The medics said my immune system was attacking itself. They gave me a year or two to live. The standard treatment required an implanted immune system. The root cause was a genetic defect that would have been caught and fixed at birth if I’d been born in a medic center. The genetic defect part made Gaia’s select circle reject my parents’ plea to save their only child. When Gaia makes mistakes, Gaia corrects them. It’s not humans’ place to intervene.”

Renner felt a stirring of anger. The universe overflowed with cruel shit-buckets hiding behind pious rules.

“My life would have ended there,” Arco said softly. “My parents had dedicated their lives to the Naturalist way. They were prepared to accept the heartbreak. Except, I remembered a story.”

Her posture straightened as her chin raised. “My friend told me his pretty eyes were cloned parts. His DNA needed fixing before the medics would let him have the new eyes. His siblings and one parent had the same treatments. I asked my parents why my situation was different. What I didn’t know, but they did, was that my friend’s grandparent was the Prime of Gaia’s select circle. The enclave’s leaders.”

Renner knew the stench of hypocrisy from way back, and it still pissed him off. He breathed deeper to give his anger a chance to bleed off.

“My parents felt massively betrayed,” Arco said. “They were also smart enough to gather hard evidence before confronting the leaders. It became a colossal clusterfuck. The enclave agreed to buy my family’s communal shares in exchange for our departure and absolute silence. My parents took the deal because they loved me. They also believed revealing the secret would shatter the community and hurt thousands of people who found a spiritual home in an enclave that accepted minders.”

Renner absorbed the weight of that sacrifice. “They gave up everything.”

“I only learned about the deal later,” Arco murmured. “I just knew my parents had to upend their lives to save me. We moved to another planet, changed our names, and they got jobs in an unfamiliar high-tech world. While I spent the next few years bouncing between medical centers, I consumed every publication I could find.”

She turned slightly, resting her cheek against his chest so she could look up at him. “Somewhere in there, my finder talent came online. It started showing me patterns. Connections. People still told me their stories. I wrote my first piece about a corrupt deal with a medical equipment supplier. I sold it to a local media company under a secret pen name. I was fifteen. I’d heard enough stories about the CPS even back then to make sure I flunked the mandatory talent testing at age eighteen.”

Renner stared down into her eyes, seeing the fierce, unyielding core of the woman he loved.

“The ‘Arco’ name became semi-famous later through luck.” A corner of her mouth quirked with a humorless smile. “It could have been any of a half-dozen identities I used at the time. I became a journalist to be worthy of my parents’ sacrifice. I needed to do something good for people. I wanted to help them get fairness and justice.”

Pieces of the puzzle came together for Renner. “That’s why you were so upset when the assassin killed your team. And why you hired me even though I didn’t like you well enough to die for you.”

Arco winced. “That was an asshole thing for me to say. I wanted to put space between us. I didn’t want you to think I was collecting a debt. I hoped your fierce will to live would keep me alive, too.”

He considered her words. “You have a talent for making people feel seen. We tell you shit we would never tell anyone else. I took the job because I needed that connection. Your words have done more to expose the CPS than violence could. My staying wasn’t a sacrifice. It was respect.” He tilted his head down to kiss her softly. “It was love.”

She smiled against his lips. The quiet moment stretched between them.

Renner realized her career had been a clever use of her unique talents. “You still have those gifts. You need a new purpose.”