"We don't have time to—"
"Twenty minutes." He's already moving into the jungle, returning in three with broad leaves and water purification moss. His hands work the compress with the practised efficiency of someone who has done this many times before, on many injuries. "Cold water moss. It neutralises the acid in the rain and filters the groundwater. The compression reduces swelling."
The cold against my heated ankle is sharp, then merciful. My shoulders drop. The fight drains out of me, replaced by the dull throb of an injury I can't afford and a growing awarenessthat I'm sitting in a clearing with a male who speaks predator language and wraps ankles with the same hands.
"Where did you learn field medicine?"
"Arena surgeons." The words come out flat. Controlled. The voice he uses when he's giving information without giving feeling. "They maintained their assets between matches. I learned to do it myself after I became… inconvenient."
"Inconvenient how?"
He finishes securing the compress. Sits back on his heels. The clearing is quiet around us, the scavengers gone, the jungle holding its breath the way it does after violence.
"They put a child in the arena."
My hands go still.
"Twelve years old. Human." He's looking at the compress, not at me. Checking his work, or avoiding my eyes. "A political prisoner's offspring. The crowd wanted blood. I was supposed to provide the entertainment."
The words land in the clearing like stones dropped into still water. No dramatic delivery. No emotional framing. Facts, laid out with the same precision he uses for everything.
"I refused."
Two words. The hinge on which everything turns. His captivity, his escape, his three months in a murder jungle, the moment in a root cave where he chose to catch a panicking courier instead of staying hidden.
"They designated it a defect." Something flickers at the edge of his expression. Not anger. Something older, more tired. "A malfunction in their conditioning. Forty years of fighting and they couldn't understand why a weapon would develop a conscience. So they transferred me to their research facility here on Ursuris Prime." His voice goes flatter, if that's possible. Emptier. "Not a prison. Prisons have legal frameworks. This was asset storage. Containment bays with monitoring equipmentand climate control, like a warehouse for expensive inventory. The handlers wore lab coats and carried datapads and referred to me by my product designation. HX-347." A pause. "The project director scheduled disposals the way your people schedule equipment decommissions. Paperwork, cost-benefit analysis, and a slot in the termination queue."
The image forms behind my eyes despite my best efforts to keep it abstract. Containment bays. Lab coats. A product designation instead of a name. A termination queue.
"Three months they spent trying to correct the defect. Trying to break whatever made me say no."
My jaw aches. I realise I'm clenching it. "And when they couldn't break it?"
"They scheduled me for disposal." He meets my eyes now. Steady. Giving me the truth and waiting to see what I do with it. "I escaped during transport. Crashed on this planet. That was three months ago."
Six months. Three months of attempted correction, three months of running. Before that, decades of arenas. Before that—
"Before all of it," I say. "Before ApexCorp. What were you?"
His hands still on the compress. The question catches him somewhere unguarded; his expression doesn't change but something behind it shifts, like a door that hasn't been opened in a long time.
"Someone else." Quiet. "On a world that doesn't exist anymore."
He doesn't elaborate. I don't push. Some doors need to be opened from the inside.
"You refused to kill a child and they called it a malfunction." My voice comes out harder than I intend. Not at him. At the universe that let this happen, at the corporation that treated a conscience like a defect, at every system that looked at this male and saw broken equipment instead of the only person inthe room who did the right thing. "That's not a defect, Horgox. That's the one thing they couldn't take from you."
He stares at me. Not the careful, assessing look I've gotten used to. Something rawer. Younger. Like a part of him that predates the arenas is looking out through the gladiator's eyes, startled to be seen.
"You say that like you believe it."
"I'm a terrible liar. You said so yourself."
His hand is still resting on my ankle, over the compress. Warm through the leaves and moss. I put my hand over his, and his fingers tense but don't pull away.
The clearing is quiet. The compress is cold. His hand is warm.
"Twenty minutes are up," I say eventually, because if I stay here touching him and thinking about what a lifetime of calling a conscience a defect does to a person, I'm going to do something that isn't in any OOPS training manual.
