“You did something worse,” I snap, then immediately hate myself for it.
Her footsteps stop.
“What the hell does that mean.”
I drag a hand down my face and force myself to turn back toward her.
“It means,” I say slowly, choosing each word like it might explode in my mouth, “that my nervous system is currently not calibrated for proximity. And when you step too close to me without warning, things inside my body light up that I am trying very hard to keep in a cage.”
She goes very still.
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
Silence stretches.
Then she says quietly, “Do you need more space.”
The question hits me like a blunt object to the sternum.
“Yes,” I whisper.
She nods once and takes three steps backward without breaking eye contact.
The jalshagar eases.
Just slightly.
“Thank you,” I murmur, before I can stop myself.
Her mouth twitches.
“You’re welcome, bone-knives.”
We take a break after two hours.
I sit on a concrete step near one of the old generator housings and drink water straight out of a battered canteen. My hands are still shaking faintly, the residual adrenaline and restraint burn humming through my nervous system like bad electricity.
Kimberly sits on the floor a few feet away, back against the wall, knees drawn up, breathing hard, sweat plastering her hair to her temples.
She looks at me sideways.
“You gonna tell me where you learned all this.”
I take a long swallow of water.
“No.”
She waits.
I stare at the stained concrete floor.
“I was raised in an Alliance conditioning facility,” I say finally. “They called it a training academy. It wasn’t.”
Her hands still.
“They put us in cages,” I continue, my voice flat and distant and not mine. “Individual steel enclosures. One meter by two meters. You could stand or lie down. Not both.”
