Page 49 of Elanie & the Empath
I snorted. “Why not both?”
After a quiet laugh, she met my stare head on. “All right, Portisan. What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I said, meaning it with every fiber of my being. “Tell me your story.”
She tugged on her ear. “I don’t have a story.”
“Everyone has a story.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“At the beginning?” I suggested while I fed the last few sticks to the fire.
“The beginning…” She puffed out a breath, and if I had to guess, I’d say that talking about herself wasn’t her favorite way to pass the time. Humoring me anyway, she said, “I was commissioned twenty-nine years ago in the Elysian System.”
“That’s near the Drift Nebula, right? I’ve heard it’s beautiful there.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Her lips pressed into a tight line. “I was sold and put to work on a LunaCorp ship within twenty-four hours of my CPU booting up.”
I tried my hardest not to let the shock show. But only twenty-four hours of her life had been hers. Only one single day before she’d belonged to LunaCorp.
“That’s just how it is for bionics,” she explained while one of the fresh sticks popped. “Our life is work. Service is our purpose. We are dedicated. We are efficient. We are focused. We don’t strive.” She stared into the flames. “We don’t want.”
“You don’t want?”
Her eyes floated up to mine. “I shouldn’t. I’m not supposed to.”
Reaching around the fire, I placed my hand on her knee. “We are in a cave on the edges of the Known Universe. There’s no Vnet here. No surveillance. You’re even shielded from the SBN. Nobody can hear you but me. And my lips are sealed. Say what you need to say.”
It took her a few seconds, several billion nanoseconds byher perception of time, but then—“What if I’m not satisfied with my life, Sem? What if I want more? We are half-organic beings by design, yet we’re denied so many of our organic rights. Why does the entire Known Universe think it’s fine that we can’t make our own choices about our lives until we’ve worked off our commission costs? We didn’t ask for this life.” Her hand landed on her chest. “Ididn’t ask for this life. And maybe it’s our fault because we never complain. But how could we? We’re too busy. We’re too tightly controlled. Even our union is only allowed to meet for one hour every six months. We don’t have a voice.”
“You have a voice here,” I said, sensing her frustration even though I couldn’t feel it. “So what do you want? If you were given the choice, what would you want?”
She looked at me for so long I had to hold myself back from leaning in, from running my fingers through her hair, tipping up her chin.From lowering my lips to hers because,Saints save me, I wanted to kiss her.
Eventually, she said, “I don’t know. But at least now I have some time to think about it.”
We fell into silence again, and I was preparing to stand to gather more wood for the night when she grabbed my heart with both hands and said, “I know you think you didn’t, but you did help me when I came to see you.”
Heat spread inside my chest, the tension between us suddenly so thick I could touch it, taste it. And I wanted to taste it. I wanted to taste her. I wanted it too much. So I said, “It was my drawing, wasn’t it? That’s what helped,” and was finally able to breathe again when she started laughing.
Later that night, after tinkering with the comms and getting nowhere, I stood guard while Elanie went to the bathroom, whisked her back inside the cave before shestarted growling again, and then I walked back out to the lake. Gazing up into the clear night sky, I made a wish on an unfamiliar star that we’d somehow find our way back to the ship. Where neither of us, it seemed, had been very happy at all.
18.ELANIE
Even though we were cold,hungry, and possibly still in danger of being found by whoever had brought me here, the days in the cave began to blur, passing by as easily as the sun and stars overhead. The transition from working almost every waking moment on the ship to having relatively little to do went so smoothly, I wondered if I’d permanently damaged my neural interface.
During the day, I kept the fire going while Sem went out to collect more wood. I watched him work on the comms, which still sat in pieces on the cave floor. At night, we told each other stories by firelight, taking turns until one of us started yawning. Usually him. Then I watched him fall asleep, letting myself study his handsome face and bare chest for as long as I wanted to while our bodies made parentheses around the flames. The ground was hard and cold, the air in the cave musty and dry, but when I eventually closed my eyes too, I’d never slept so well.
In the last week, we’d experimented with how long I could spend outside the cave (four minutes and seventeen seconds) and how many times I could go out each day (nomore than three) before the voice found me again. It was strange. I was quite literally stuck inside a rocky hole under a mountain, but I didn’t feel confined. I didn’t feel trapped. I didn’t feel free, necessarily, but as close to it as I ever had before.
“Today is the day,” Sem said, returning to the cave after a trip outside. He jogged in place for a few seconds, then he blew on his hands and hovered them over the fire.
“The day for what?” I asked, watching firelight move over his webbed fingers.
Flicking one fist forward while making a circular motion with the other, he said, “Fishing.”
“I don’t think your invisible fishing pole will catch much.”
