“Right. Priority.”
The transport settles onto the compound's landing platform, and I'm through the door before I can say anything that would make this worse. She follows at a distance and we walk through corridors that echo with everything unspoken until we reach the door to her quarters. She pauses at the threshold. Turns to face me, and her dark eyes hold mine.
I should speak. Should find words for what claws at my chest whenever I see the hurt I put there. What emerges instead is: “Lock your door.”
Her human eyes spark with fire and life and everything that makes my blood sing. “Of course, Lord Draven.”
She goes inside, and the door seals between us, and I stand in the silence of my making with her scent fading in the recycled air.
I should leave, but I don't. The hours pass. Staff members give me a wide berth in the corridor, questions unasked behind their curious expressions. Let them wonder why their lord stands vigil outside a human's door. Let them speculate. I don't have answers for them. Don't have answers for myself.
Her breathing changes as sleep takes her. Restless at first. Then deeper, slower, the pattern of true unconsciousness settling over her. I should leave, but the corridor holds me captive as surely as the compound holds her. I listen to her breathe through the door that separates us, and the wanting I've tried to kill spreads through my chest like a wound that refuses to close.
Her breathing pattern shifts. Faster now, shallow and uneven. The rhythm of distress. The scream tears through the silence and rips loose inside me. I'm through her door before the sound finishes leaving her throat.
Chapter Ten
MAEVE
My mother's hand is cold in mine, her fingers skeletal against my palm, her chest rising and falling in a rhythm that grows slower with each cycle. I count her breaths the way she taught me to count stars when I was small and the universe was too large to comprehend. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The numbers are the only thing I can control, the only anchor in a universe that keeps pulling my family under while I scramble for purchase on ground that won't stay solid.
“It's okay. The medication is coming. Hold on a little longer,” I say.
The medication isn't coming. I know this with the certainty of someone who has already lived through this moment a thousand times. The administrator at the charity clinic told us the waiting list was three weeks long, and my mother had three days at most. The medication exists. It sits on shelves in pharmacies across Thessaly Station, waiting for people with credits we will never have.
Her breathing hitches. The rhythm I've been counting breaks apart. The sound she makes is wet and horrible and it will live in my ears for the rest of my life.
“Mom.” The word cracks on the syllable, splitting open to reveal the child underneath the girl I'm trying not to be. “Mom, stay with me. In for four. Breathe. In for four, hold for four...”
Her features blur and reform, cheekbones sharpening and skin darkening until it's not my mother anymore. Corporal Reyes from Kepler IV lies on the charity clinic's narrow bed, his chest torn open by shrapnel that buried itself in his lung, his blood soaking through the field dressing I'm pressing against the wound with hands that have stopped shaking because shaking hands don't save lives.
“Doc.” His words are a wet gurgle that sprays red mist with each syllable. “Doc, am I gonna make it?”
“You're going to be fine.” The lie comes automatically, worn smooth by repetition across a hundred identical moments with a hundred different faces. “Keep breathing. In for four, hold for four...”
His face shifts again. Younger now. Brown eyes that have been getting out of trouble since childhood look up at me with the terror of someone who has realized the game is over and the house always wins.
Tomás.
“Maeve.” His whisper is fading. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”
My brother lies in my arms on a charity clinic bed that has become a battlefield that has become the floor of a holding cell in the Draven compound, and his skin is grey and his breathing is wrong and I'm counting, counting, in for four but the four never comes because his chest has stopped moving.
“No, no, you're not allowed to do this. You're not allowed to leave me too.” The word tears through my throat.
His eyes go glassy. His hand goes limp in mine.
I count the breath that doesn't come.
In for four. In for four. In for...
The scream rips through me and tears free of my throat.
Arms like iron bands close around me.
The world lurches, nightmare bleeding into waking as I thrash against iron restraints. Tomás is dying and someone is holding me down and I need to get to him, need to count his breaths, need to save him the way I couldn't save the others.
“Maeve.”
