This time, it was a much quicker swim to reach air than it had been last night. He’d brought us up just outside the cave, and now we were floating in the water with a rocky cliff towering over us on one side, and the lake stretching out on the other. I saw the opposite bank, with its towering jungle trees and that small floating island of large leaves. We hadn’t gone far from the bank where I’d been confronted by the Radin giant at all, but last night that swim had seemed to take forever.
“Hang on to my fin,” Jaxin said, and he shifted me in his arms until I was hanging from his back—one hand on his shoulder, the other holding that sharp fin. It was less intimate than the embrace from before, but something danced in his eyes when I touched his fin that told me itwasintimate. I tried to sense what he was feeling with my gift then, but met only the same cool wall I’d been running into ever since I met him. Nothing. He was too good at hiding his feelings. It gave me a little thrill that caught me by surprise. For the first time in my life, I wanted to use my gift. I wanted to probe himfor the truth.
“Holding on,” I said, but I wasn’t quite ready for the jolt as he began swimming. So much power, so much speed. There was nothing like clinging to his back as he cut through the water with powerful efficiency. My legs dangled against him, my fingers growing tight and slick as I held on. He propelled us from the tall cliff, across the lake, until we reached the white, sandy beach on the other side. Not anywhere close to where we’d gone in last night, but miles down. That was clever, because now we wouldn’t be close to where we’d left the giant. Perhaps it was enough to get rid of our native tail entirely.
As we reached the shallows by the bank, he rose gracefully to his feet and walked out. I could not keep clinging and splashed into the water, soaked and cold, definitely more tired than I’d like to be. Slogging out after him, I discovered he was restlessly pacing, his back to me, as if he did not want to tempt himself by looking. I felt it then, the stab of pain in his chest and the struggle as he tried to contain passion as wild and vast as last time. A thrill? I was practically humming with excitement.
Now was not the time to poke at this, as much as I wanted to have him tangle with me in another kiss. So I focused on squeezing as much water from my clothes as I could. Then I tried a few Yadasca poses to limber up my muscles. It was a dance without music, and I was so familiar with it that I did not have to think as I made each move. Drops of water flew left and right in a spray of motion, but like me, they fell into a resting pose by the time Jaxin had composed himself and turned around.
There was something about his expression that made me think he might have caught the tail end of my attempt tolimber up my muscles. I needed him to think I was strong again, that the rest had put me in a good place after the exhausting, terrifying events of the last few days. I had a feeling that any sign of weakness on my part would still cause him to call off my flower sample mission. That I couldn’t allow.
“We need to travel in that direction,” Jaxin said, pointing with one hand along the side of the oblong lake into the distance. There, the lake emptied into a river that headed to the coast in a long, winding path. I hid a wince of dismay when I realized where we were going, but Jaxin’s sharp features grew sharper. “What’s wrong?”
I bit my lip as I contemplated how best to answer his question, but in the end, I simply requested my tablet from one of his waterproof pouches so I could pull up the map and show him. “These are known locations of the Radin flower I need. As you can see, they’re not fond of water, but prefer a drier, slightly elevated kind of terrain.” I tapped a finger on the Kertinal landing strip that had to be our destination. “It’s too rocky here, and too wet all along the path toward the landing strip from here… The nearest spot would be this location, and it would mean an extra day of travel.”
I had my senses stretched wide, hoping that I could pick up even the slightest shift in emotion he might feel. If I could sense just a hint of what was going on inside his head, I might be able to predict the answer that followed that long silence. His eyes went from me to the tablet, bouncing repeatedly between the spot for the flowers and the landing strip. “You can’t finish the cure withoutit?” he asked once, and when I nodded, his expression seemed to grow more defined.
I was beginning to sense something from him too, something that bordered on determination and hope. Not wild passion, that was an emotion I thought even a Rummicaron might feel in the heat of the moment, but real feelings, subtle and nuanced like any other. With it came another stabbing pain in my chest, one I struggled to hide from him.
“So we’ll go?” He nodded, secured my tablet with research once again, and then led the way. For the first stretch, we walked in silence as the two of us abandoned the lake to head deeper back into the jungle. It was still wet, and the muddy ground was tough going, but I held my tongue. If his chest ached, it had to be an injury he was hiding beneath that armor. It couldn’t be good for him to carry me like he’d done yesterday, so I wasn’t going to give him an excuse.
After we’d gone perhaps two miles in silence, he slowed the pace just a little. I did not take that as an invitation to come walk at his side; he’d gone back to feeling like the trees around us. No emotions, no pain. It was not the blissful rest it had seemed to my burned-out empathy, as it had been yesterday. It felt a little lonely, and that was a tough realization to come to. It meant I was more used to having the feelings of others in my head than I’d realized, and I wasn’t as self-sufficient as I’d like. An even more daunting prospect: what if it washisfeelings I now craved to know?
Chapter 12
Danitalin
“I’ll have to call this in,” Jaxin said from just ahead of me. He was holding a branch aside for me to pass more easily, but he did it with an expression that seemed to convey boredom. I nodded, slipped past him and the branch, and kept walking with my head high. I got what I wanted, Jaxin had not once protested that the flowers were out of our way—so why did I feel like this call was going to put a wrench in things?
I was right, but I did not realize how closely Jaxin was tied to the Roka blight until he made a vehement denial to the harsh male voice on his com. “Negative, Captain. We’re going. This is too important an opportunity to let pass. Besides, what else can you do? You’re stillnegotiating our retrieval with the Kertinal, so that gives you an extra day to get it squared away.”
They were going back and forth like that, but Jaxin never unbent from his stance. To my shock, he grew more and more vehement with each new round of arguments. Anger was definitely flaring beneath his rigid control, along with another twinge of pain in the vicinity of his chest. From his face, you would never be able to tell, but he raised his voice, grew sharp and fierce, and my empathic gift was glowing with the feeling by the time the call wound down. Not just a subtle hint of anger—a taste beneath the control—but full-blown rage.
I had not realized I’d frozen in place to stare at him, halting us in our tracks as he finished his argument with his captain. I did not even become aware of it until Jaxin reached out to cup my face with one hand, his head cocked at an angle, and something that could very well be a smile slowly spreading across his alien face. “We got what we wanted, little one. Now let’s get a move on, shall we?”
Little one? That wasn’t just an intimate, strange shortening of my name, that was something a lover might say. Heat coiled through my stomach and washed up my neck to warm my cheeks, too. I liked that far too much, for Jaxin to call me things no one else ever would. I decided I couldn’t ask him about this either, not yet, because he might never call me “little one” in that husky voice again if I did.
“Why does this matter so much to you?” I said, as I allowed him to turn me on the path and usher me forward to resume our trek. Now I was in front of him, which meant I got to set the pace. It also meant I kept feeling his eyes onmy back—a tingling along my spine from how aware I was of his body.
“What makes you think it does?” Jaxin evaded. He was back to sounding calm, to feeling just like any other Rummicaron, but I no longer believed he, or perhaps any of them, were without feeling. I tilted my head to glance at him over my shoulder and discovered that he’d dropped his gaze down to his feet as he walked. Or maybe that wasn’t his feet he was watching but my ass.
“You are talking to a powerful empath, and I’m no longer burned out like I was yesterday.” No, I was not at full strength yet, but I was definitely recovering, and far quicker than I normally would. He was soon going to be unable to hide the massive secret he was carrying: that he felt. Then I thought about my time on the Rummicaron world, where I’d seen the effects of Roka production. I had never once felt rested or gotten a sense that anyone there felt. So what if it reallywasjust him? This seesawing over what I knew, what I should or shouldn’t ask, it was exhausting.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Jaxin said, regarding my statement about my gift. But I knew that he understood, I could see it in his eyes and sense it in the soft, muted tingle of panic that danced across my senses. He was scared that I’d find out what he felt; he didn’t want to admit that he could not successfully mute his feelings. Perhaps such an inability was a major flaw to a Rummicaron, but I was beginning to believe it was a gift. Even as overwhelmed, as inundated with feelings not mine as I often was, I knew the value of emotions.
“It means that I knew your anger when you felt it,” I said. “And my cure clearly means somethingto you, or you wouldn’t put us at risk to replace the samples I lost. Who was it? Who did you lose?” I thought he’d bite my head off for asking that question, it sizzled in the air, a threat. As quickly as it came, it faded, and he turned his gaze on the jungle that surrounded us. I thought that meant he wouldn’t answer; he was very good at evading questions when he felt like it.
The words, when they came, were softly spoken, as if he wasn’t quite ready to utter them out loud. “It was my sister. She raised me after both our parents perished from the effects. They both worked in one of the illegal plants on Rumcas. Bexlin couldn’t get work elsewhere either, as she was forced to drop out of school to care for me. So she had to go to the plant too. It wasn’t long before she fell ill.”
Though he told the story quietly, it was not fraught with emotion like others might be during such a recollection. I tried to picture Jaxin as a young boy and simply couldn’t, but I felt my heart go out to him anyway. First, he lost his parents to this blight, then his sister, it must have been incredibly tough. As much as I’d been alone all through my childhood and my career, at least I’d always had people in my corner. But I could already tell that Jaxin had been left with no one once his sister was gone.
“She knew she had to get us out of there,” Jaxin said, surprising me when he picked up the story in a brighter voice. My senses warned me it was a false cheer, masking what he was truly feeling: grief and pain so deep it had never healed. He’d never dealt with it because he’d been expected not to feel anything.
“Somehow, she got a job elsewhere, across the continent. We packed up everything we had, which didn’t amount to much. I remember that we could carry all of it on our backs,even Bexlin, and she was already so frail and weak by then.” Jaxin passed me on the trail, picking up the pace, as if he meant to outrun his past, but he kept talking.
“We boarded a ship in Rumcas, the capital, and sailed across the ocean to start our new life. Except… a storm struck, the ship went under, and everyone was forced to swim to shore.” He halted there, and I tried to imagine being a young child in the ocean during a storm. It was different for a born swimmer like a Rummicaron, of course; they could dive deep, breathe underwater, and swim to safety. Even as young as he might have been, he would have made it. Had made it.
“Bexlin was too weak, and I didn’t realize—didn’t see it—until it was too late. One moment she was swimming behind me; the next… she was just gone. So, you see? That’s why I’ll help you get your samples and help you make your cure. The Rummicaron government does nothing because they do not care. Someone has to help those who have no choice, like my family had no choice.” He did not look at me as he said that, but the words sank into my bones like a vow. “I ended up in an orphanage, then got drafted into the military as soon as I turned eighteen.”
