Chapter 17
I worry about you, Bo. You deserve a life beyond this fight for humanity. You deserve to fall in love and to travel the world with a carefree heart. You deserve to be more than an eternal soldier.
—Leah Knight (50) in a letter to her son, Bowen (19)
“I’LL GET IT,” he said when Kaia moved to retrieve the cane for him. “I need to retrain all muscle groups.”
Broken out of the loop of memory, he bent with care for his balance and picked up the cane. He didn’t look at Kaia as he walked around the counter, but that did nothing to break the electric connection between them. And it did nothing to erase the cold, hard fact that in fourteen more days’ time, Bowen Knight might cease to exist without ever having moved beyond the panicked terror of the thirteen-year-old boy he’d once been.
High-pitched giggles infiltrated the area almost two minutes after Kaia had pushed him away, the sound accompanied by more laconic voices. He looked over to see four teenagers entering the kitchen area. All four shot him quick, curious glances, but they were more interested in their own conversations.
“Aloha, Kaia!” they called out before wandering over to a corner of the kitchen proper and pulling on aprons.
Bo had meant to leave, give himself time to clear his head, decide what the fuck he was going to do about Kaia’s accusation regarding the Alliance Fleet. As for Kaia herself . . . His abdomen clenched, his gaze going to her without his conscious volition. She’d just finished pulling both large trays of shortbread out of the oven.
The teens swarmed, but though she warned them off with swats of a tea towel, she also said, “Give the cookies five minutes to cool. After that, it’s two each. Any more missing and I’ll feed you cauliflower stew three days running.”
A boy with pale, pale skin and a shock of blond hair twisted up his face, his forehead scrunched. “Might be worth it,” he said slowly.
“I know you like cauliflower.” Kaia tweaked his nose. “For you, it’d be a special meal of wilted kale.”
Shuddering, the blond kid backed off—and Kaia slipped four cookies onto a saucer, then placed that saucer beside the food she’d dished out for Bowen. Unknowable dark eyes caught his. “I’ll heat up the casserole for you.”
And Bowen didn’t—couldn’t—leave. Not even to save himself from the chaos churning in his blood and in his brain. Retaking his seat across from her, he inhaled the food she gave him, drank the coffee she poured, and ate the cookies she’d set aside for him.
Things deep inside his chest ached.
A RIPPLE in the air currents against Kaia’s skin, like the kiss of water, followed by the sonic awareness of a familiar presence entering the kitchen. Atalina. She barely stopped herself from putting her hands on the counter and shuddering, her calf muscles threatening to knot from the sudden release of tension.
The juveniles’ chatter had helped, but the four were involved in their own talk as they worked on their set tasks and paid little attention to Bowen and Kaia. It left them in a bubble of privacy that wanted to wrench things out of her she wasn’t ready to see, to confront.
Reminding herself that he was the enemy was doing nothing to block her memory of that kiss that shouldn’t have happened, or her awareness of his quiet, intense presence. Not after he’d so categorically negated one of Hugo’s conclusions.
And he hadn’t done it with pretty justifications but with facts she could check.
Hugo would’ve warned her that Bowen was putting on an act, manipulating her, but every part of her rebelled against the idea of it. Bowen Knight had consigned himself to a ninety-five percent chance of a living death in order to find even the possibility of an answer for the people he most loved.
Kaia couldn’t believe a man with that much courage and honor would stain his soul with the ugliness of lies upon lies upon lies. Because if she believed he was a liar, then she had to believe their kiss had been a lie from start to finish. A kiss in which she’d felt his body harden against hers, had heard the thudding beat of his pulse, felt the voracious hunger of his mouth.
“Good, you’re up.” Atalina’s face was flushed with health, her eyes bright. “It’s time for a complete evaluation, starting with a comprehensive scan.”
Bowen had cleared his plate and eaten two of the cookies. He threw the third into his mouth and grabbed the fourth before rising from the stool. “Thank you for feeding me, Kaia.”
The words had been ordinary, but the reserved tone made her skin prickle as if she wore an itchy coat. She shrugged to get rid of the sensation and glared in his direction to warn him not to think he could just shut down whenever he felt like it—but he’d already turned away, wasn’t looking.
Able to watch him without being watched in return, she traced the outline of his profile with her gaze, trying to see beneath his skin, trying to find out what it was about Bowen Knight that activated the crazy gene in her blood and made her act so impetuously and with such unthinking emotion.
Because while Hugo might’ve been wrong in one conclusion, that didn’t mean his entire dossier was a mistake. The horrific photo of their battered dead flashed across her irises—an echo of pain and torture caught forever in color, smashing up against the remembered feel of Bowen’s mouth on her own.
Her gorge threatened to rise.
“Wait,” she said, reaching back to undo her apron and pull it off. “I’ll come with you.” She had to know more of this man, had to understand if she was seeing what she wanted to see, if she was being led by a primitive response that knew nothing of conscience or honor—or if there was more here than a pitiless human out to win even if it meant murder.
She made sure her kitchen hands had enough work to keep on with before she joined Atalina and Bowen in their slow walk out of the kitchen. Hex ran in partway. Picking him up, she carried him cupped in one hand.
It was as they exited into the atrium that she caught the faint glow in the water beyond the seaward wall. Wonder bloomed. “Look to the right and into the black.” Someone had already dimmed the external habitat lights.
Kaia knew the instant Bowen saw the bloom of bioluminescent Medusozoa, their fragile tentacles hauntingly beautiful in the water and their bodies pulsing with light. Like living stars caught in a sky that moved.
He went motionless, didn’t exhale until the family had passed.
The external lights glowed back up to full strength, just enough to penetrate the deep nearest the station so friends could look in and they could look out.
“I love it when they visit.” The Ushijimas lived in the city above Ryūjin Station.
“They’re changeling?” Bowen’s question was directed at her, though his eyes still searched the deep for another glimpse.
“As changeling as me and Attie.”
Hand pressing down on his cane, Bowen leaned down to whisper, “I thought jellyfish didn’t have brains.”
“Things get murky with certain water changelings,” she managed to say as his warmth rubbed against her like an affectionate cat. “Impossible transitions are possible.”
“I was lucky enough to be invited to take scans of their brains in their aquatic form.” Atalina tugged off a hair tie from around her wrist to pull back her bob into a short tail. “Their neural structures aren’t anything like those of their natural brethren. Along with a complex nerve net, they have a fully functional central nervous system—brain included. That’s why they can control their movements instead of being reliant on the ocean currents.”
“Are you sure I’m awake?” Bowen sounded less distant and more like the man who’d become absorbed in Wild Woman and talked to her about bears and walnuts. “I’m talking about jellyfish brains.”
“They don’t like the term ‘jellyfish,’” Kaia warned, not about to have her friends inadvertently insulted—and Bowen Knight stung in retaliation; Mary Ushijima did not hold back when it came to protecting the hearts of her family. “Always use ‘Medusozoa’ in direct conversation.”
Bitter chocolate eyes searching hers, so damn alive that it made her want to scream at the injustice of the choice he’d been offered. “BlackSea faux pas?”
Swallowing back the roiling wave of anger, she nodded. And told herself to take a step back, to be sensible, rational until she figured out the truth or lie of Bowen Knight. But that wild gene in her blood, it wasn’t only awake, it was in control. And it made her eyes dip to his mouth again.
“Kaia.” A rough whisper of sound.