Her eyes burned into his. “Do you?”
He said, “Yes. It’s why I can heal when someone is very close to death, but I do not have the power that you have. I don’t know why you are so strong. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s impossible for you to have that gift. It rarely appears in humans. The last time it did was many, many centuries ago, back in a time of your history and race already forgotten.”
She looked down at the floor and then back at his face. She shook her head. “I didn’t want this. I never wanted this. How could you give me something that would kill?”
He tried to sit up, but the pain from healing her flattened him again. “I didn’t give it to you. I only gave you the knowledge of everything in the universe as far as healing goes. The gift was already yours. I gave you nothing but knowledge.”
Her voice broke. “And you gave it to me in a way that you knew could kill me. Why?”
Marik said, “Because I’ve seen war before. Because I knew that there would be a great many people down here who would need your help and that you were not prepared to help them. That you had no idea of how to do more than just simple healing and you needed to be able to do so much more. That if I gave that to you that you would be able to do so much more. That you can heal hundreds, maybe even thousands if you only accepted your gift.”
Her lip curled upward to show her teeth. “Accepted it? I didn’t even know I possessed it! Why didn’t you just tell me I possessed it and then I could’ve worked on it like a… Like normal people?”
He studied her face. “There is no such thing as normal anymore. Maybe there never was.”
Her head lowered. Tears filled her eyes. She said, “I don’t know why it feels as if nothing ever happened at all. I mean, in my body. I feel every weight of every death that I caused in my heart though. I feel it all. But in my body, I feel fine. I don’t understand.”
He said, “I touch healed you.”
She said, “I understand that. And I hate you for it. I don’t want to hate you for this. I’m so angry at you right now, and I don’t want to be. I’m angry at you for what you did to me on that ship. I’m angry at you for giving me the knowledge of how to kill. I’m angry at you for summoning that forth from me somehow. And I hate you for those things, but I don’t want to. More than anything else I do not want to hate you.”
He knew that she would hate him for a while. He only hoped that, eventually, she would forgive him. He said, “I am so sorry. I promise you that I would not have done it if there had been any other way. I…”
His mouth closed. How could he say to her now that he loved her? She would not hear him even if he did. He sat up; wincing slightly as one last bolt of pain went through his body then subsided. He said, “Have we left the surface?”
She shook her head. “It’s chaos down there. They are trying to load people onto the ship now, but they need help.”
He managed to get off the table and stand. “Then we should go.”
As soon as he said the words, he fell back into a dead faint.
