Page 2 of Jarran

“I’ll leave you here,” the liaison said. “Your quarters are on deck four. I’ll send the location to your personal device.” He paused. “A reminder, Dr. Carr: the patient’s neurological status is monitored and he has an implant that can interrupt violent behaviors. If you feel unsafe at any point, security is always ready to intervene.”

“Thank you.” Evie didn’t look at the liaison. She was watching Patient Nine gently separate the roots of a seedling with fingers that could clearly crush bone.

The liaison’s footsteps retreated down the aisle, and then it was just Evie, several thousand square feet of vegetables, and the most dangerous criminal in recent galactic history.

Great. Totally fine. She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder and reminded herself that she had voluntarily accepted this assignment. In hindsight, that may have been a spectacular lapse in judgment.

She took a breath and walked toward him. He looked up when she was about ten feet away. The movement was slow and unhurried. She knew then that he’d been well aware of her and the Baylan male’s presence this entire time. She got her first clear look at his face and felt a jolt. He was unsettlingly handsome.

All Virilians were attractive—it was one of those things humans had gotten used to grudgingly, like the existence of faster-than-light travel and decent alien coffee—but this was different. High, angular cheekbones, a strong jaw, a mouth that in another life probably curved into a devastating smile. Dark green eyes watched her from behind the inky skin that all Virilians had smudged around their eyes, like permanent eyeliner applied on an emo rock star. Those eyes were calm and utterly empty of everything his file said he should be.

To her surprise, the trepidation she’d felt up until this moment evaporated. What she felt instead was something worse. She felt sad.

“Hello,” she said in Universal. She’d spent the last three months learning it, and her accent was terrible, but it worked. “My name is Evie. I’m a doctor. I’ll be working with you.”

He watched her with mild curiosity, like someone who didn’t get many visitors and didn’t care either way. Soil clung to his hands. A smear of it darkened one cheek. Then he slowly rose to his feet, unfolding to his full height. She craned her neck and she was reminded, viscerally, of exactly how large Virilian males were.

“Doc-tor,” he repeated. His voice was deep, a little rough, and the word came out careful and deliberate, as though he was selecting it from a limited shelf. He glanced down at his dirty hands, then back at her, and wiped them on his pants. “Hello.”

“It’s nice to meet you.” She wasn’t sure if that was true, but it seemed like the thing to say. “I see you have skill with plants.”

He looked at her for another beat, as if parsing the sentence. Then he turned and gazed at the row he’d been working on—a sweep of broad-leafed plants in deep, healthy blue. His expression shifted and he nodded.

“Good soil.” He touched one of the leaves, turning it gently to show her the underside. “This kind…” He paused, searching for the word, and made a climbing motion with his hand. “Needs help.” He pointed to a thin stake he’d planted beside it.

“You trained them to grow up the stake?”

He nodded, once.

“They look wonderful,” she said, and she meant it. The plants looked healthier than anything she’d ever managed to keep alive, which, granted, was a low bar. Her last houseplant had died of what she suspected was boredom.

He didn’t respond to the compliment. He crouched back down, returned his hands to the soil, and continued working. Just like that, the conversation was over. She’d been gently dismissed by a male who had no clue he used to command a criminal empire.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said. “If that’s all right?”

He looked up briefly, nodded again, and went back to his seedlings. She could have been anyone. A doctor, a janitor, a hallucination. He likely would have nodded the same way.

Evie turned and walked back down the aisle. She didn’t rush. Her feet sank into the soft soil, but she kept her steps even and her breathing steady. She was a professional, damn it, and professionals did not speed-walk away from their patients. At the double doors, she stopped and looked back.

From this distance, he was just a large figure working in the soil, his dark head bent over a young plant he was carefully tending. Patient and focused and gentle.

But then there was his file, and it was a doozy. His list of crimes was eye-watering. If you could get through the body count, there was engineered women, and an empire of suffering supposedly built by the same hands currently coaxing plants to grow. It was hard to reconcile the horrors in the file to the male who’d wiped his dirty hands on his pants before saying hello, like a kid caught playing in the mud.

The file said he was a monster. The Virilian male in the dirt didn’t say much of anything.

Evie didn’t go to her quarters. She took the lift up two levels to a long balcony that overlooked the agricultural bay. The promenade ran the full perimeter, designed for observation. She leaned on the railing and looked down.

There he was, far below. Still working. The most wanted alien in four quadrants, gently planting seedlings.

She shivered at the possible ramification of her assignment and wondered if, ethically, there was any benefit to reuniting this patient with his memories. It was entirely likely they were gone forever, but if they weren’t, would she be restoring wholeness to a person, or resurrecting a monster?

TWO

The female walked away.

Jarran glanced up from where he knelt in the dirt, his hands still buried in the warm, dark soil. He couldn’t read her expression, but her movements were tense, making him think she wanted to be somewhere else. Most people gave that impression, though he wasn’t sure why. Her shoes made soft impressions in the dirt, and her bag swung against her hip with each step. She stopped at the lift doors and he quickly looked down before she could see him watching her. Then she was gone, and the doors sealed shut behind her with that quiet hiss he heard a hundred times a day.

He looked down at his hands. Soil packed under his fingernails and into the creases of his knuckles. He flexed them, watching the tendons move. His hands were large. He knew this because they dwarfed the seedlings he worked with, and because the Baylan-issued tools were too small for his grip and he’d stopped using them many cycles ago. His hands knew things. They knew how deep to push a seed. They knew how to separate tangled roots without tearing them. They knew the difference between soil that could nurture a plant and soil that was deficient.