Page 75 of Alliance
“I thought you were dying, Roz.”
I breathed a laugh against his ear, petting his hackles to coax them flat beneath his sweater. “If that ever happens, you can just rebuild me from theMummer.It’s okay.”
“No,” Fás snapped. “I can’t.” He grabbed my cheeks in both palms, staring me hard in the face. “It doesn’t matter if there are other units thatlooklike you or have the same name or origin code. None of themareyou, Roz. You’re one of a kind like the rest of us.”
Heat lanced my face, riveted. Fásach was right.
[Analysis] There had been only one Gilladh too.
And now they were gone. Forever.
[Warni–Priority] No matter what had compelled me to chase that echo, I needed to find a way to stop it.
Or risk putting Fásach, Safia, and Misila in grave danger.
25
Fásach slept with his hands around my waist and his head in my lap while I charged, slumped against the wall to make him more comfortable. Although my head was angled down from the cable pressing into the charging bay, I couldn’t argue with the view. Poverty, loss, and fatherhood strained his features, but in sleep? He was beautiful and free.
I wished I could have seen him curled up in a bed of clover with his family on Byddie. How lovely would it have been to fall in love with him as a teenager? Had his pelt been as soft as a puppy then? His lips a little plush and his ears too big for his face? Had his eyes sparkled when he’d chirruped at something fun? For once, Rosy’s memories of teenage crushes and pitter-pattering heartbeats wasn’t enough. I wanted to have my own LMem files… My own memories.
For the dozenth time, Fásach nudged up my shirt and rubbed his twitching nose against the scar where the bolt had punched through my abdomen. Though the extreme cold had stopped the bleeding and the two mediplasmas had taken care of the tissue damage, my parumauxi were still at work. The bolt had dragged insulation through the wound when it pierced my coveralls, and they were in the process of dissolving it. His features strained and his lip quivered in a fleeting snarl.
I tried to comfort him, but my system was locked. My fingers ached to brush through his tresses and being denied feltpainful.A claustrophobic ache wound tighter around my chest with every breath.
I didn't have any LMem recording of what happened, of how I'd caused that new tick in Fásach's jaw or the stiffness in his shoulders. I spied the tufts of fur now missing in clumps that less sensitive eyes might have missed and the added heat along his arms and neck from bruises beneath the surface that he'd never complain to me about. [Warni–Priority] I was determined to take some of that burden away somehow, someday. Why couldn't it be now? I screamed internally at the steady tick of my timer counting down to a full charge and felt a hot, sickly hatred for the half of me that someone else had programmed to be a good little machine.
Several turns later, mid-morning by my atomic clock but still dark and windy outside, I removed my charging cable. Fásach’s ear twitched, and then his eyes were wide open, fixated on the scar. All the weight of the world crashed down on his face once more as he brushed his knuckle across the shiny skin.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Does it hurt? Have they gotten everything?” Fás asked, voice rough from sleep.
Instead of relaying that my parumauxi reported seventy-eight percent dissolvement, I said, “Almost.”
Fásach backed up until he was kneeling and brushed his hand over his antlers. Now as long as my middle finger, they poked above his crown. He tested their points with his palm, trying to brush his tresses out of his eyes.
“When you ran into me on the street, your silk was so short,” I said. He blinked at me, trying to find a way around his antlers to comb it back.
“It’s the transition.”
“It happens so fast. If I slow down my timer, I can watch you in hyperlapse, you know. They grew half an inch last night.”I couldn’t keep the admiration out of my voice. It had been one of the comforts of watching him sleep.
Fásach’s eyes widened. “That’s all?” He swore under his breath, picking up our things and stuffing them in his pack. “It should be faster.”
“Faster, really?” My wistful smile fell.
“I thought since Gil—”
Fásach stood up straight, the words dying on his lips. We stared at each other, and then he turned away, ears swiveling back with guilt that gutted me.
“I didn’t kill them,” he said quietly. “But I was going to.”
“They’re alive?” Confusion stitched my brow. A strange sense of hope fluttered then died in my chest.
“No. The wind threw us into the tower and…” Fásach’s hackles rose beneath his shirt, lifting the fabric as he inhaled sharply at the memory. “That was that.”
I stood and pulled on his elbow gently. He turned around, ears trained on my face before he could meet my eyes. When he did, I captured that blue horizontal gaze and held fast.
