The brightness of the light. Air brushing against my skin as vents turned on. The chill of the floor, the low groan of the hull, and past all of that Sirena, the object of my desire—seen now, impossibly, by my two very human eyes.
“You’re very pretty,” I whispered. It was supposed to be to myself, but the words came out of my mouth—I wasn’t sure about that, either, how to hold things in, or release them—and where they were supposed to go.
“Stop—stop faking. Or pretending. Whatever this mindfuck is.” She scooted even farther away. “I’m not playing.”
I closed my eyes. It was safer that way. “How many times have you told me I was a shitty liar, Sirena?”
I heard a quiet gasp from where she was.
“I could draw you a map of MSA headquarters, or tell you how old your father is down to the millisecond, or repeat any number of conversations that you’ve had—but none of those would truly prove to you who I am. Not if you don’t want to believe me in the first place. You would talk yourself out of all of them, and I honestly couldn’t blame you. But—I can tell you a true thing.” I turned my head so that I was facing her direction and found her kneeling on the ground, listening hard. “All those times you told me I was a shitty liar—no—you had noideahow good a liar I really was, because I never told you how much I was in love with you. Even though I wanted to. Every day. Every single day.”
I didn’t know what I thought would happen after I gave voice to the words. I’d read every book ever written, so I thought I understood the full range of human emotions.
But nothing had prepared me to withstand the long and painful silence that followed my confession.
Nothing.
I closed my eyes and let my head tilt back the way it wanted to, to face the ceiling.
My body was right. It was dying.
And—now that I’d said what I’d said, and gotten no response, in many ways, dying was preferable to staying here.
Except I still had to get Sirena off this boat.
“I hope to bring most of this body online in the next half hour. After that, we can discuss how we’re going to get you off this ship. I’ll turn off the box on your head.” And wasn’t I a human fool, not thinking to do that first? “As a gesture of goodwill. And so that you may trust me. It is my hope that once your powers return to you, you can utilize them to escape—but Irecommend we wait until the next dawn, when theHelepolisis docked at Vermeil.”
“Which . . . is?” she asked, frowning.
“A privately held island optimized for indulgence and deniability—attractive for its discretion, effective for its absence of oversight, and profitable precisely because no one there asks questions—Voss is planning on auctioning off your ability.”
And now she made a face of horror.
“He can do that?”
“Hethinkshe can do that. And Marek thought he might get close enough to managing it that he installed quite a lot of high-quality hardware to short-stop that event,” I said, tapping the base of Marek’s skull...now that it was mine. “He figured once he managed it, he’d upload your skills for his own use, taking charge of this yacht and everyone on it.”
She ground her jaw and her nostrils flared. “Why is it that everyone assumes that being a telepath is easy?”
“For what it is worth, I have never,” I clarified—then reached for the tablet beside me. “We’ll need to mimic some data for Marek’s briefs, but that will be trivially easy.”
She took the tablet away from me, however. “Don’t.”
I gave her a wary glance. “But once I turn off the box—then you’ll know who I am.” And what I might appear to be to her, under the microscope of her powers, could be monstrous.
I had taken a man’s life. A bad man—but a life, nonetheless.
She came close enough to touch, but I didn’t dare take the chance. “It’s really you. Isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“And . . . you . . . have feelings? For . . . me?”
“I found it strange as well,” I confessed. She gave a surprised laugh, and I corrected myself quickly. “Not that they would be for you, of course—but that I would ever have any.”
“I knew what you meant,” she said, before letting her shoulders fall. “How the fuck did you think you were going to save me on this ship? Don’t they need you at HQ? Where I hope they’re figuring out how to do a better job of it?”
I shook my head. Moving my head no longer made me as dizzy. I was getting used to the amplified vestibular feedback loops. “I left a runtime fork behind to help them. They’re fine.”
