Wild Embrace (5 page)

“You should return to sleep,” he said. “The work is by no means complete.”

Hearing the finality of his tone, she did lie down, but then thought again of the way he'd pushed into her space, saw in that permission to push into his. “How old were you?” she asked quietly. “When it happened.”

A long silence, his breathing even enough that she might've believed him asleep if she hadn't been able to sense the conscious life of him, the force of it a pulse against her skin. Rather than asking again, she gave him the time to think, to decide what to share. After all, they both had their secrets.

“Four,” he said at last. “My conditioning was fragile.”

Conditioning.
Tazia turned that word around in her head, considered its meaning.

For the longest time, she'd believed that Psy came out of the womb emotionless, that this was who they were as a people—as a tiger was fierce and a snake sinuous. A simple fact of nature. Only after leaving her village had she begun to hear different whispers, begun to hear that the Psy did this to themselves. Then she'd found that old history book and her suspicions had been confirmed.

“It must've been a terrifying experience,” she said, her voice soft in the total darkness. “You lost your whole family?”

“My mother was my custodial parent. I lost her, and a sibling. An elder brother.”

Having turned to face his back, Tazia thought about reaching out and touching him as she might a fellow human in pain, but Stefan was Psy. He rarely initiated any physical contact. She didn't know much about the process of conditioning a person to be Silent, but logic told her it would fail in the face of constant physical contact.

And she didn't want him to feel any more pain, this extraordinary man who helped others even when providing that help pushed him back into memories of the most heartbreaking loss. Her eyes burned.
Four years old.
His grief and confusion would've been incalculable.

So she kept her distance, said, “I'm sorry for your hurt.”

He didn't answer, and she didn't force herself any deeper into him. But that night, she slept with an ear open for Stefan's breathing, and when he stopped again, she said, “Stefan,” until he snapped out of it.

They didn't speak otherwise.

It was two
days later, all known survivors rescued, that the villagers began the cleanup operation. Tazia continued to fix anything and everything she could. Stefan, meanwhile, was needed as much as he'd ever been, the large structures that had collapsed impossible to shift otherwise. Heavy equipment was coming, but the roads to the village were treacherous, and several trucks had already broken down.

The good news was that the water tankers had arrived on schedule. “There's more than enough drinking water, especially since it looks like the well will be fully operational soon,” she told Stefan late that afternoon, after he stopped working before nightfall for once.

The only reason he'd stopped was because a piece of debris had fallen on him, causing significant bruising to his torso. He'd have been out there minutes afterward regardless, but thankfully one of the volunteer medics had told him to rest and keep his muscles from stiffening up, or he'd be useless the next day.

“Good,” he said, doing a stretch as they stood outside their tent; his wince broke through the normal lack of expression on his face.

“Stop it,” she muttered, glaring at him. “It's a bruise, needs a cold pack on it.” Except, with power at a premium, no one was using it to make ice, much less chill cold packs.

“Heat may do as well.” Stefan glanced at the sun-warmed sand that surrounded them. “I could bury myself for a short period.”

Shaking her head, she said, “Scorpions.”

“You have a point.” He stilled as an elderly man from the village began to walk in their direction.

She could tell the elder's respectful nod made Stefan uncomfortable. His face had settled back into its usual expressionless lines, but she'd begun to learn to read his moods . . . or at least she'd fooled herself in believing she could. Now she glanced away from him to find the elder waving her over.

When she went to him, he gave her a painstakingly hand-drawn map and said a single beautiful thing in the language that mirrored that of her homeland closely enough that she could understand him. “Hot spring.”

Her eyes widened. “I thank you,” she said, then glanced at Stefan before turning back to the elder. “He will not be comfortable with others around.”

“There will be no others. It is my family's secret, the spring.” He passed her a faded photograph with wrinkled hands that held an age tremor. “Go there.” Then he pointed out the location on his map.

“I thank you,” Tazia began, but the white-bearded man waved it off.

“The gratitude,” he said, “is ours.”

Walking over to Stefan after the elder left, Tazia told him of the hot spring, showed him the photograph of the distinctive rock formation not far from that spring. “Have you enough energy to 'port there?”

Stefan considered the image. “I won't know until I try.”

“You should try,” Tazia said. “The hot spring will soothe the ache, help you be in shape for further work.” She added the last because
that was the only thing about which Stefan seemed to care—his own health was important only when it threatened to become an impediment to his task.

“You hate being dirty,” he said, to her surprise. “You can come and bathe in the spring.”

Tazia sucked in a breath. To be naked with Stefan . . . But no, he'd never expect that. So they'd take turns. She could handle that, knew he'd never peek . . . though she might. Skin flushing, she rubbed her hands over her face. “I should stay, do some more work on the power station. Sooner I get that up and running at full capacity, the better.”

“You said yourself the fading light is dangerous. You could make an error with the finer components.”

Tazia nodded. She'd stopped work fifteen minutes prior for that very reason. “All right,” she said, but glanced around the area, guilt still gnawing at her. “Do you think it's okay?” She felt filthy, but that was nothing, not in comparison to the destruction around them. “I don't want to waste time.”

“We won't be gone long.” Stefan glanced at the rubble. “And there are only the dead waiting below now.”

Her hand rose toward his arm; she had to consciously wrench it back before she made contact. “You're sure?” she whispered.

“Yes.” No expression on his face, no change in his tone . . . but his eyes, they were fixed on the crushed ruin of the village. “At night,” he added, “when the humans fall into exhausted sleep, the area is clear and I can search with my telepathic senses. There are no longer any living minds under the rubble.”

Heart a lump of pain in her chest and mind filling with the name of the little girl who'd wanted to be an engineer, Tazia closed her eyes in a moment of remembrance. When she opened them, it
was on a swell of quiet determination. Nothing could turn back the clock, bring the dead back to life. What she could do was ensure Stefan's health.

The death toll would've been far higher without his dogged efforts.

“Come on, we should get to the spring before it gets dark.” Ducking into the tent, she grabbed a towel from her gear, and two sets of dirty clothing. She could at least rinse them out; they should dry quickly in this heat.

Stefan did the same before stepping close to her.

“Ready?” he said, as he had the first time he 'ported her.

“Yes.”

They arrived at the rock formation an eyeblink later, which spoke to the relative proximity of the area—and yet it was far enough away that she couldn't see or hear anything from the village. Taking out the map, she pinpointed their current position, then traced the line that should lead them to the spring itself.

“I have it,” Stefan said and set off without another glimpse at the map.

A ten-minute walk later, they ducked into the mouth of a cave and followed the sense of damp heat until they found themselves in a chamber lit by the fading evening light that poured in through a hole in the roof, the air hazy with curls of steam.

“In,” she ordered Stefan, putting down her stuff and taking his. “Now, Stefan.”

“You should—”

“Don't be chivalrous,” she ordered. “You're moving more stiffly already. Get in before I push you in.”

A small pause before he lifted his fingers to the seal of his jacket, their eyes locked. It felt shockingly intimate to watch him do that simple act, butterflies taking mad flight in her stomach. Turning
her back to give him privacy, she tried to focus on the wall in front of her, but was breath-stealingly aware of every tiny sound Stefan made as he stripped out of his clothes.

“You never speak so authoritatively to me on Alaris,” he murmured, his voice stroking over her skin.

She fought a shiver. “You're my boss on Alaris.”

The sound of water lapping, a slight hiss. “It is extremely hot.”

“Good.” Keeping her back to him, she frowned and stepped closer to another area of misty vapor. “I think there's a tiny spring here, too.” Smiling when she discovered she was right, she took all their clothes and began to dump them piece by piece into the water, pulling out each in turn to scrub it against a large wet stone in an effort to get some of the dirt out at least. Once she had an armful, she walked outside and placed the clothes on sun-warmed rocks to dry.

“I can do mine, Tazia,” Stefan said when she came back in and returned to her task.

Rolling her eyes, she looked over her shoulder. “Can you ever just accept a favor and say thank you?”

Wide shoulders exposed by the way he sat in the spring, his strong arms braced along the stone edge, he held her gaze. “Thank you.”

The words felt like a caress. “You need to sink lower into the water. That falling beam hit your shoulder, too.” She'd felt her heart stop beating when she'd seen him go down, had dropped everything to run to his side, check he was alive. The memory of fear made her voice sharp as she said, “Or do you want me to push you down?”

•   •   •

Tazia
was in a very bad temper today, Stefan thought, as she turned back to her chore. “Have I done something to offend you?” he asked when she came back inside the cave after taking care of the last of their clothing.

She sat down on the cave floor with her back to him. “No.”

He didn't understand emotion, but he knew she wasn't telling him the truth. “The spring is large. You can share the space,” he offered, though it was difficult for him to be in such close proximity to another being, and particularly to Tazia.

“Tazia,” he said when she didn't reply.

“I can't.” Keeping her back to him, she leaned forward as if she'd drawn up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. “I know it may seem irrational and old-fashioned to you, but I was brought up to be . . . chaste.” The words were taut. “To be naked only with the man I took as my husband. I don't live in that world anymore”—harsh strain in those words—“but I can't discard who I am like it's an old coat.”

“I understand,” Stefan said, having already guessed at Tazia's value system after so carefully noting every single thing about her in the year they'd worked together. “Your cultural mores are no more or less irrational than the protocol under which my people are conditioned.”

He saw her shoulders relax. Rising, she walked over to sit on a rock nearer the spring, her eyes on the entrance and her body in profile to him. “Have you ever thought of breaking Silence?” she asked. “I . . . broke some of the rules when I left home.”

“Important rules?” he asked quietly.

“Yes. The most important.” Her hand fisted on her thigh, small and so fine boned that he sometimes wondered how she handled the tools necessary to her profession. Even with all the advances in tech, wrenches were still heavy; torque still required muscle.

“I never did think about breaking the rules,” Stefan said. “The rules are safe. It's why my race chose Silence over a hundred years ago.” Of course, had his conditioning been without flaw, he would've had difficulty even talking about the protocol.

Tazia turned a little on the rock, enough that she could look at his face. “I've heard rumors about why, but never knew if they were true.”

“Our psychic abilities are powerful, but they predispose us to insanity and violence.”

“Doesn't that scare you?” Then she half smiled. “Of course not. You're Silent.”

Stefan thought about how to respond to that. It was something he'd never have considered before Tazia, but her honesty deserved his own. “My Silence is problematic because of the trauma I suffered in childhood.”

What even most Psy didn't know about Silence was that the conditioning for those like Stefan, people with dangerously strong abilities, was reinforced by pain controls termed dissonance. If Stefan broke Silence on any level, he'd be punished with pain. The worse the breach, the more debilitating the pain, until it was possible it could kill him . . . Or that was how it was
meant
to work.

Part of the reason Stefan had been shifted from Arrow training to the commercial arm of the Council's telekinetic arsenal was that his brain was deeply resistant to certain aspects of the conditioning process, including the dissonance controls. His psychic trainers had finally declared it to be a fundamental flaw, one that could not be fixed.

No one had wanted to release such a strong telekinetic into the commercial team, but a soldier without foolproof conditioning couldn't be trusted in the field. He might fracture and, with his dissonance controls erratic at best, no one could be certain he wouldn't take his partner or team with him when he lost control of his telekinetic powers.

Tazia's eyes widened. “So do you feel?”

“I don't know.” What he did know was that things had begun
to change in him the first time he'd spoken to Tazia Nerif, parts of the conditioning just falling away. “I'm not as perfect a Psy as I should be.”

“No, you're not.” Tazia's dark eyes held his. “You care too much about these people.”

Even if Stefan didn't know if he felt, Tazia knew. He'd almost burned himself down to the bone already.

When he straightened in the water, his shoulders and upper body came fully into view. She sucked in a breath, her gaze taking in the muscle and tendon that was all that was holding him together at the moment. “You're too thin, Stefan.” She hadn't understood until this week just how much energy psychic power burned.

“I can run until it's no longer necessary,” he said, as if he were a machine.

“Stefan.”

He met her furious gaze. “I am keeping track of my physical health, Tazia . . . I promise.”

She nodded jerkily, his words feeling as if they meant far more than he'd said. When he rose farther, she blushed and looked away. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yes. You should bathe—your muscles are as tired.”

“I didn't have half a house fall on me.” Waiting until he was dressed in a slightly damp pair of pants that she'd fetched for him, she said, “It's still hot out. Go check on the clothes I left on the rocks. Your pants will dry quicker outside, too.”

Stefan accepted the command without argument and left. Stripping quickly, she got into the water—
oh, it was hot!
—and used handfuls of the sand she could feel around the bottom of the pool to scrub her body. Might as well exfoliate if she couldn't wash properly. It would get all the dirt off.

She even used the sand on her face, albeit a little more gently. As for her hair, she dunked it under the water and hoped the minerals in the spring would help cleanse it.

Though she tried to be quick, she couldn't fight the need to linger for just a few minutes, let the heat soak into her aching flesh. Groaning as she got out, she dried off then, skin hot, wrapped the towel around herself before gathering up the clothes she'd stripped off and walking through the gloom to the entrance. “Stefan?”