Skarreth looked at the applicator in Nadir’s outstretched hand. At the case, sitting now on the far shelf, out of reach. At the old man’s face, which held nothing he could name and everything he needed.
He took the applicator.
“That will be all, Nadir.”
“Yes, sir.”
The old man turned. Paused. His broad, four-fingered hand rested on the doorframe for a moment, and the dry warmth that radiated from his skin left a brief impression in the air.
“She walked toward you.”
Not a question. The surveillance feeds ran through Nadir’s station before they reached Skarreth’s. He’d seen everything.
Skarreth said nothing.
Nadir left.
The room settled into quiet. Octavia breathed deeply, unconscious, and each exhale carried a faint sound, not quite a sigh, that pulled at something in his chest.
Skarreth administered the healing nanites with steady hands. He watched the shallowest cuts disappear almost instantly.
He did not reach for the other case.
He did not think about the way she’d said his name, like it was a question she needed answered. He did not think about it as he dimmed the lights and checked her pulse one final time. He did not think about it as he settled into the chair beside her bed — not the door, not the corridor, not the surveillance room where he belonged.
The chair beside her bed. Close enough to hear her breathe.
He sat in the dark and did not think about it at all.
SEVEN
The ceiling greeted Octavia like an old acquaintance she hadn’t expected to see again.
Same crown molding, same subtle gradient of color where the plaster met the walls—a warm ivory that deepened to a color closer to bone at the edges. Same constellation of micro-cracks in the far corner that her eye had traced into a pattern! before she’d known this ceiling would become the fixed point of her captivity.
She stared at the ceiling and waited for the rest of her body to report in.
Arms first. She raised them above her face, expecting the pull of sealing wounds, the bright sting of thorn cuts reopening against their mending edges. Instead, her skin was unbroken and smooth, the deep brown of her forearms unmarked. She turned her wrists and rotated her hands. Nothing. Not a scratch, not a raised line, not the faintest discoloration where dozens of razor-edged roses had carved their signatures into her flesh.
She sat up and pushed the covers off. Her clothes told a different story than her skin. The shirt she’d been wearing was ribboned—torn in diagonal slashes across the arms and torso, stiff with dried blood that had oxidized to a color between rustand burnt sienna. Her pants were worse. Shredded below the knees, crusted with dark stains that cracked when she moved, the fabric so thoroughly ruined that it looked like evidence from a murder scene. She pulled the hem of her shirt up and examined her ribs, her stomach. Healed. Whole. The disconnect between the blood on her clothes and the absence of any wound beneath it was visceral enough to make her head swim.
Healing nanites.
She knew them. Not from personal experience; she’d never been wealthy enough or desperate enough to need them. Nanite healing was one technology that made its way to Earth in exchange for human women to mate with Rivian aliens years ago. The microscopic machines could repair a body at the cellular level, accelerate tissue regeneration, administer scar prevention if the dosage was administered within the right window. It was technology that worked miracles on torn flesh and shattered bone.
Not on tumors for low-income families just trying to scrape by when the bills for chemotherapy rolled in.
Her mother had been forty-three. The cancer had started in her lungs and migrated with the patient, methodical cruelty of a conquering army, claiming territory organ by organ while Octavia—fifteen, terrified, painting furiously because it was the only thing she knew how to do that wasn’t screaming—watched it happen. Her father had taken her to every specialist, every clinic, every back-alley healer who promised alien medicine could succeed where human science had failed. Nanites had been mentioned. Discussed. Priced. Rejected—not because they couldn’t afford them, though they couldn’t, but because by the time the option surfaced, there was nothing left to heal. The nanites could rebuild tissue. They could not rebuild what the disease had already consumed.
Her father’s broken heart had been another kind of cancer that the nanites couldn’t heal. It hollowed him from the inside until what remained was a shell that answered to his name and looked at his daughter with eyes that had stopped seeing her months before his own funeral. Nanites couldn’t touch grief. Nothing could.
And they certainly couldn’t heal a broken marriage. Broken vows. Broken promises to love until death do we part when the love had run out. She’d learned early that some hurts would never heal, and she carried the lesson in the architecture of every wall she’d built around herself—the walls that kept her safe, kept her productive, kept her alone.
Octavia breathed once. Twice. Filed that old, familiar pain away in the deep drawer where she kept the feelings and memories that could break her if she let them out, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
Her feet met the floor, and her legs held without tremor, without the weakness she’d expected after blood loss and unconsciousness and whatever pharmaceutical oblivion had swallowed the hours between the maze and the morning. She stood, and the room didn’t tilt. Her muscles responded with their usual obedience, as if the night in the maze had been a fever dream her body had already forgotten.
The last thing she remembered was the beast’s eyes.
