“Harbin?” she said, louder as she twisted around and scooted herself away from this person, whoever he was.
She met his face.
It was Harbin.
“Go to sleep,” he said. “You need another hour of healing.”
She rose, pulling out of his embrace. “What are you talking about? I’m fine.”
Harbin sighed. “Now. Your systems are at about eighty-five percent recovered. You still need a little more rest to be back at full capacity.”
She furrowed her brow. “What are you going on about?”
Still lying on his side, he propped up to his elbow and stared up at her. And he seemed even larger than she remembered. Maybe it was because they were so close together. There was barely a hand width between them. His body heat radiated—so strange because she would not have thought a cyborg would run so physically warm.
“You were burned by cold,” he said. “I had to give you some nanites to repair the damage.”
“Burned by cold?” she shook her head. “Frostbitten?”
“Is that the Terran expression?”
She looked at her hand. Her fingertips looked fine to her. No sign of frostbite anywhere. “When the cold damages the skin and body, turning appendages blue and sometimes black.”
He nodded. “Your hands were blue, and you were not waking up. We call that cold burn. I gave you nanites to heal your damaged systems.”
“You injected me with nanites? It will not turn me into a cyborg, will it?” She ran her hands over her arms, feeling disgusted.
“No. They heal your broken systems. We have some Terran data about how systems work, and the nanites can repair anything if they know what they work on.”
She blinked. “Why do you have data on us? Do you have Terran war prisoners?”
He shook his head.
“Then why?”
“Your empress died here. We learned about Terran biological systems then. The knowledge we gained that day made it possible for me to heal your systems now.”
She hugged herself. “Fallon, still saving me,” she whispered. It touched her deeply to know that they could learn how Terran physiology worked and how to heal it because of Fallon's death. However, it still seemed unusual and a little creepy that she had nanites floating around in her system.
“I am not terribly pleased that I have a bunch of tiny robots roaming around in my body.”
“Why? I do.”
“But you’re a cyborg.”
“I am a humanoid too. I have organic parts just like any other humanoid.”
“I just…” She looked away to think about what he’d done. Part of her felt violated, that he’d done this without her permission. But if the frostbite had been that severe, she might have lost a limb.
And that would require an artificial one, making her a cyborg.
“No matter the outcome, I would have been destined to be a cyborg,” she said.
He raised his eyebrow again. “I do not follow your logic.”
She shook her head. “Just that if I had refused the nanites, I likely would have been badly affected by the frostbite—”
He blinked.
