Page 21 of Delivered and Devoured
“HORATIO.” Through my teeth. “Tell me you’re ready.”
“Ninety-four percent, Captain. Six seconds.”
Six seconds with a bent rod and a corrupted predator’s teeth four inches from my face. Behind me, I can hear her breathing. I can hear her heartbeat. My body tracks her — a bass note underneath the fight. Alive, alive, alive.
The rod cracks. The middle gives. The Vrennak lunges through the gap, and I drop the halves and catch its jaw with both hands — bare hands on plated bone, claws scoring my forearms — and I hold. Boots grind. Arms scream. The slash opens wide. I hold because she is three feet behind me and there is nowhere left to go.
The rod is gone. The field is seconds away and seconds is too long and she is three feet behind me, and the math is simple now, simple the way it has not been simple in fifteen years. There is one of me and one of it and only one of us walks away from this hold.
I get a hand under the jaw and force the skull up and back, off-line, and the other hand finds the soft seam behind the plating where the throat meets the skull — the gap I cracked open two strikes ago, weeping dark — and I drive my fingers into it.
The Vrennak shrieks. Bucks. Claws rake both forearms to the bone and I do not let go. I have never not-let-go of anything this hard in my life. The bioluminescence stutters under my palm, hot and wrong and frantic, and beneath the wrongness I feel the thing that has been screaming under every charge since it wokealone.Six years asleep and it surfaced into a strange hold with the bond-place in its chest gone silent, mate-shaped and empty. The same silence I have carried for fifteen years and calledfine.It came up roaring for something that was not coming. It would never find it. No one was ever going to fix what was done to it.
I am sorry; I tell it, with no words, the way you tell anything that is past hearing. I am sorry and I will not let you suffer and I will not let you have her.
I close my hand.
The throat gives. Hot, dark, wet over my wrist. The shriek cuts to nothing. The forelimbs spasm once, twice, and the great corruptedweight of it goes loose against me, and I lower it to the deck plate because dropping it feels like an insult I am reluctant to commit. The bioluminescence fades from the spine forward, hot to dim to dark, and the four eyes lose their light, and the hold is suddenly, enormously quiet.
I kneel over it with my ruined hands and I make sure. It is gone, but no longer suffering. It will not wake up wrong in a stress-fractured pod and come for her in the dark.
Mercy and murder are the same motion when you do them with your hands. I have just learned this. I will learn it for a while.
I let go.
My hands are shaking. Arms. Legs. I am standing in a wrecked hold covered in dark blood with broken rod halves at my feet, and I cannot make the shaking stop.
Behind me. Her breathing. Alive.
I turn around.
She is sitting up. She has managed sitting up while I was holding a Vrennak’s jaw with my bare hands, because of course she has, and she is looking at me with blood on her temple and her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open and her expression is something I have never had directed at me.
I cross the hold. I kneel. My fingers find her temple, and the contact happens, and the warm-electric shock of her skin hits me, and my pupils shift, and her breath catches, and we are both breathing wrong, and neither of us corrects it.
“Captain.” HORATIO. Very quiet. None of the theatre. “The threat is neutralized. I am logging the event as a containment failure and a field termination. For the record — and I do mean the record — you had no other option.”
“There isn’t going to be a second breach event.”
“No, Captain. I did not imagine there would be.”
“Sorry,” she says. To me, to the hold, to the thing in the pod. “Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. You talked a Vrennak into lying down.”
“I talked it into lying down and then it charged me and then you killed it with your hands.”
“It was that or let it through.”
“Through to me.”
“Yeah.”
She stares. Chin up. Eyes bright and searching.
“Why?”
Because you are mine. Because my biology detonated and reclassified you as the center of everything. Because I would have let it take my arms off.
