The extreme weather had given Aden and Zaira a critical advantage, one their captors couldn’t have anticipated. Injured as they’d been, with the implants in their heads and their captors in a jet-chopper, they wouldn’t have made it far without the rain hampering the chase by washing away their trail.
“Think you can keep some solid food down?” Finn asked and, at Aden’s nod, left the infirmary to organize it.
Unable to fight the urge any longer, Aden walked around his bed to get to Zaira’s. Her breathing was even, her skin tone back to its normal warm shade between cream and golden brown rather than clammy and bleached of color. When Aden picked up a scanner Finn had left nearby, Remi didn’t protest. Aden checked her vitals, focusing on the areas of injury, and was satisfied the healer had done a stellar job stitching her up. All that remained was for Zaira to punch through the veil of darkness behind which she was currently trapped.
Keep your promise, he said silently. Stay.
Aloud, he spoke to Remi. “Thank you for the assist.”
Remi raised an eyebrow. “Why exactly did you need an assist? Arrows are usually a law unto themselves, from all I’ve heard.”
“Even Arrows can’t heal bullet wounds on their own.” Not strictly true. There was one Arrow who could, but Judd Lauren’s ability was so rare it was nothing most people would ever know.
“It wasn’t a criticism.” Remi shook his head. “I don’t know how you walked on that leg if you came from where I heard that chopper circling.”
Aden had walked on it because he’d needed to walk on it to save Zaira. He’d been hit on his way back inside to her, had quickly bandaged up the wound while searching for supplies. The black of his combat pants had hidden the blood from Zaira, his decision not to tell her a conscious one. He hadn’t trusted her to agree to come with him once she knew he was wounded, too. She’d have fought to stay and hold off the enemy, give him a head start. Since Aden would’ve dug his heels in, it had been quicker to prevent the argument in the first place.
“Do you know who occupies that land?” If the RainFire alpha was willing to share data, Aden had nothing to lose by gathering it. He would, of course, double-check all information after he left the pack.
“No. They fly in and out.” Remi’s T-shirt stretched across his wide shoulders as he leaned back against the wall and folded his arms again.
A relaxed pose if you didn’t notice that watchful, dangerous gaze.
“We’ve kept an eye on them since they moved in about four months back,” the alpha said, “but they don’t impinge on our territorial boundaries so we generally mind our own business.” He glanced toward the doorway. “I can scent food on the way. Eat, wait for your squadmate to wake up, then we’ll talk.”
Returning his attention to Zaira, Aden willed her to wake up, but the brain monitor remained static.
Two hours passed.
Three.
Three and a half.
Chapter 12
ZAIRA DREAMED, WAS aware she was doing so. It was the first time in a decade that her discipline had faltered to this extent, but she was wounded, weak, and the dream pushed its way inside before she could slam the door shut. Only it wasn’t truly a dream but a memory so surreal it could’ve been a figment of her imagination.
“Zaira.”
She looked up from the table where she’d been strapped down. Bruises and cuts marred her legs and her arms, her collarbone still fractured but her ribs feeling as if they’d been fixed. She didn’t wonder why someone had fixed one of the injuries she’d sustained in the fight for her survival yet left others untouched—people liked to hurt her, that was simple fact.
The pain didn’t matter; pain was something she’d learned to handle long ago. It was the confinement, the aloneness that threatened to drive her to madness. The ones who’d come for her after she’d beaten her parents to death had trapped her in matte-black shields she couldn’t breach, the psychic loneliness crushing. “What?” she snapped in response to the sound of her name, willing to talk simply to hear another voice.
“Are you there?” she asked when there was no immediate answer, not sure she hadn’t imagined a companion. She’d done that before, had full-color “delusions,” as her parents termed them. Delusions that had been her friends. Delusions that had made her feel less alone as she existed in the place that was her cage.
“Shh.” A slender boy with dark eyes slanted above sharp cheekbones, his straight hair gleaming black and his skin light brown, walked into her line of sight. He was silent, quieter than anyone else she’d ever met. She didn’t know how he did that. Every time she tried to walk quietly, she stumbled or thumped or gave herself away.
That was why she had a fractured collarbone—she’d made a noise in her ambush and her mother had turned and hit Zaira with the datapad in her hand hard enough to slam Zaira off the chair on which she’d been standing. It hadn’t saved her mother or her father, though. Zaira’s bone might’ve cracked, but she still had a mind that had stealthily grown beyond her parents’ ability to leash.
And she’d still been able to swing the rusty metal pipe afterward.
When the boy who walked so quietly touched her restraints, she began to struggle, the bracelets cutting into her wrists and the manacles into her ankles. “Don’t touch me,” she said in a hiss of sound. “Don’t touch me.” The feeling of helplessness made her want to scream, but beneath was a cold rage.