Chapter 46
I can’t see any damage, but there are indications that the compound is beginning to crystallize around the implanted chip. If the process continues as modeled, the final injection should complete the crystallization and freeze the chip in place—and in its current state.
The symptoms you’ve described are most probably a side effect of the crystallization process. The models do show an eighteen percent chance of some discomfort during this phase of the project. Alert me at once if the symptoms return. Now, let’s get back before my brothers come searching.
—Dr. Atalina Suzuki Kahananui to Bowen Knight
KAIA REMOVED HER noise-canceling earplugs; everyone in the clan loved these soufflés and she enjoyed the challenge of making them, but concentration was a must. A single mistake and she’d end up with sad-looking sunken abominations. But the hard work was now done; all she had to do was take them out of the oven in exactly twenty-one minutes.
Hearing a commotion out in the atrium, she wondered if Junji had started up a dance-off. A fan of late twentieth-century breakdancing, the air-systems engineer had delusions of his own skill, but he was fun to watch. A few more months’ practice and he might actually become as good as he thought he already was.
Then laughter erupted, big and bold and brash.
Kaia’s heart bloomed. She knew the tones of that laughter, as she knew the sound of the deep male voice that answered whatever had been said.
Temper licked at her a second later, but it did nothing to lessen her searing joy. She did miss the idiots.
Walking out of the kitchen after pulling off her apron, she came face-to-face with a scene she’d never expected: all six of her Kahananui cousins, Attie included, at a table with Bowen, eating and drinking, and not killing him.
Dex leaned on his forearms on the back of Attie’s chair, listening to something habitually-grumpy-but-always-ready-to-hug Taji was saying.
Inside her, her other self dived and splashed.
So many of her pod here!
It was Bo who spotted her first, though he wasn’t facing her way. Looking back, he began to rise. But Kaia was already closing the distance to the group, came to a halt beside his chair with her hands on her hips. “What,” she said to her smirking male cousins, “are you five doing down here?”
Armand, to the left of her, snaked out an arm and tumbled her into his lap. “Hello, Cookie. We just missed you.”
“Do you think I was born yesterday?” She poked a finger into his left pectoral muscle. “This is ridiculous. The five of you have jobs.”
“We took a day off,” Teizo said from the other side of the table before shoving his mouth full of scrambled eggs and toast that a beaming Oleanna had just carried over from the kitchen.
When Tevesi and Taji complained, she winked. “Down, boys. I have enough tentacles for all of you.”
Leaving the triplets to fend for themselves against Oleanna’s attentions, Kaia pulled Armand’s perfectly combed hair. “You do realize Bowen can break your heads with his little pinky finger?”
“Hey!” came the cry from several throats.
Rolling her eyes at the insult in their tones while Atalina laughed, she finally managed to get off Armand’s lap. “How long are you idiots down here?”
“Only a couple of hours,” Taji said around a mouthful of food another clanmate had delivered. Oleanna, meanwhile, was whispering in Tevesi’s ear.
Bowen’s hand curled around hers. A slight tug. A request. She went into his lap, frowned at the lines flaring out from his eyes, but she knew him well enough not to ask what was wrong in public. “So,” she said to her cousins, “what’s happening up above?”
Their stories were as wickedly amusing as always and she was sorry to disappear even for a minute when it was time to take the soufflés from the oven, but Bowen came along to help her, which gave her time to brush her fingers over his cheekbone and say, “You’re in pain?”
“No, but I was,” he said after checking to ensure they were alone. “Dr. Kahananui says the models predicted the likelihood of pain during this stage of the process.” He put a tray of the miniature soufflés where she indicated. “It means we’re on track.”
Gut twisting, Kaia put down her own tray. “You’re sure?”
He pulled another tray out of the oven. “I’d never lie to you, Siren.” Leaning in, he kissed her. “It hurt like a bitch, but it’s gone. As if my brain misfired for a second, like it didn’t know quite how to direct the signals, then figured it out.”
Tugging off her oven mitts, Kaia walked into his arms after he’d put down the final tray. She held him fiercely tight, holding off the future. She wanted to live a little longer in this impossible, extraordinary dream. Nuzzling the side of his face against her temple, he said, “Seraphina kissed Edison and I’m pretty sure he’s still on fire.”
Her lower lip trembled at how he was attempting to distract her, and inside her, the creature who was her other half slid along her skin. It wanted his touch, wanted him to swim with her in the sea. “You’re making that up,” she said, pulling back to look up into a face that held far too much life to be on the edge of oblivion.
“Cross my heart.” That too-long hair sliding over his forehead, he took a kiss of his own that left her breathless. “Come on, Siren. The men want to spend time with you.”
It was a party out there now, complete with dance music across the atrium’s system, and Junji and KJ having a dance-off while KJ’s wife egged him on. The mini soufflés disappeared at the speed of light, were replaced by bowls of tortilla chips and dip, along with thick sandwiches, and plates of chocolate cookies from Kaia’s emergency party stash.
“It’s always like this,” she murmured to Bowen while they danced and Armand flirted with a blushing Tansy, having backed her extremely willing friend up against the seaward wall. “Everywhere the five of them go, they attract people to them.”
Bowen, his arms around her, bent to press his forehead to her own. “I’m not like them.” His eyes were fathomless. “It takes me time.”
“I know.” Bowen was like water on rock, a slow, relentless, determined pressure. “I like your patience, Bowen Knight.” Such an understatement when she adored each and every part of him.
His honor.
His commitment to the Alliance.
His courage in walking into the unknown.
The way he’d never, not once, hesitated in looking into the terrible darkness that might exist in the heart of his own organization.
And most of all . . . the way he looked at her. As if she were a dream come to life.
Her stomach clenched. Only a moment, she reminded herself. Only the now.
KAIA wasn’t the least surprised when Edison found her an hour into the gathering and, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, gently walked her away from the crowd. Kaia was aware of Bowen watching them go, but he didn’t interfere.
She and her second oldest cousin walked in silence to the connecting bridge between habitat one and habitat five, then stood there looking out at the water. Schools of wild fish swam beyond, their bodies giving off a faint luminous glow. A bigger body would swim past every so often, usually a clanmate from Ryūjin.
They were drawn by the activity in the atrium and as soon as they spotted one of her cousins, nearly all headed for an entry pool. While Atalina was deeply respected and loved, her brothers were flat-out adored by clanmates as well as by Attie herself.
The boys even had the ability to make Malachai unbend.
Last time the five had taken their lone Rhys cousin for a night out at one of the bars on the closest inhabited island, all six had come back three sheets to the wind. Kaia had never before seen Malachai drunk, but that day, he’d scooped her up in his arms and swung her around in a zigzagging dance he’d insisted was a waltz.
Big as Mal was, she could do nothing but laugh and hang on until he got dizzy and decided “the waltz was fucking hard.”
“Kaia, you know what I’m going to say.” Edison’s body was warm next to her own, his arm a heavily protective weight around her shoulders.
She wrapped one of her own arms around his back. “I can take care of myself.” All her older cousins—Attie, Mal, Edison, and Armand—still saw her as the shattered, broken girl who’d come to them at seven years of age, but that had been a long time ago.
As an adult, Kaia had never wanted to live in a bubble.
Which, of course, was the irony of ironies. Because she did literally live in a bubble. But it was a bubble of her own choosing. A bubble she could leave at will. And oh, how well she lied even to herself. Big words didn’t prove the measure of a woman. It was what she did that proved that.
“I’m such a fake,” she whispered before Edison could respond. “Hiding down here and pretending I’m a big, tough, independent changeling.” None of her family would ever say that, would ever confront her with her cowardice, but no matter the justifications she sold herself, Kaia knew.
Edison squeezed her closer. “I wouldn’t mess with you.”
She snuggled into the comfort of him. He’d been fifteen the day her world ended, and he’d hugged her then, too. His scent was familiar and of family and she could let down her walls with him. “I heard Sera laid one on you.” It was easier to talk about that than the terrors that kept her swimming range limited to the areas around Ryūjin and Lantia. Never beyond the patrolled borders.
He blew out a breath. “Where has she been all my life?”
“Right under your nose.” It tickled both parts of her that one of her best friends might end up her sister-in-law. Because she’d never before heard that tone in Edison’s voice when he spoke about a woman.
It happened that way at times with changelings. Two people who’d known each other all their lives suddenly realizing they were never meant to be just friends. Kaia had always thought it was when both reached a point in their lives where they were ready for one another.
Sera was younger than Edison, couldn’t have handled his intensity even a couple of years ago. Now, however, her friend was well bedded into her role as assistant station commander and could go toe-to-toe with anyone. Including a certain Kahananui male.
“We’ll get back to my future mate,” he said in that quiet Edison way, “but first things first. Have you told him?”
She should’ve known better than to try to distract Edison. “I’ll tell him once the experiment is complete.” Not telling Bowen about the telepathy had truly been an oversight, but this was a conscious choice. “There’s no point bringing it up now.”
But she was talking to the cousin who, as a youth, had taught a fearless five-year-old Kaia to swim beyond the clan’s boundaries, the cousin who’d helped her jump fences so they could escape out into the great blue. He’d always watched over her when they played outside the fences, but she’d felt so free, so wild and dangerous even though they were only meters from the safe zone for the minnows of BlackSea.
Kaia felt a keening pang for that small girl who’d swum without fear. Who hadn’t understood the pain and death that awaited. That girl had lived.
“You have to tell him.” Edison cupped her face. “You have to give him the freedom to make that choice while he can make it.” She knew then that he’d spoken to Atalina about her experiment, understood that Bowen might not make it out of this whole. “I trust your instincts when it comes to people, so I know he must be a good man; he deserves the truth.”
“I don’t want him to see me as permanently damaged goods.”
Edison’s face tightened at her shaken whisper. “If he doesn’t see you for the gift that you are, then he doesn’t deserve you. Don’t sell yourself short, little sister.”
When Kaia didn’t answer, he said, “And what about you?” A kiss pressed to her forehead in that big-brother way of his that made her feel profoundly rooted. “You love so deeply, Kaia, that your heart breaks into a million pieces when you lose someone. How will you survive him if the experiment fails?”
Kaia laid her head against her cousin’s chest, allowed herself to be enveloped in the warm comfort of his arms. “I don’t know.” It came out a broken sound. “I don’t know if I will survive him.”
Bo wasn’t simply a lover.
He was Kaia’s.
And she was his.