Page 61 of Elanie & the Empath
My ears rang as I shooed the grint off my shoulders. “He is cute, though.”
Sem scratched his head, then laughed at the silly creature who was spinning in circles like it was a trick. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t give it a name. Once you name a pet, you’re never getting rid of it.”
Staring down at the grint, who tried another trick—sitting up on his hind legs and pawing at the air—I winkedat him, my right eye, then my left. When I did it again, he winked back at me, left then right.
I smiled at Sem over my shoulder. “I think we should call him Grover.”
22.SEM
Gol hadn’t been exaggeratingwhen he’d told us clothing was optional in Thura. Everywhere I looked, or, more accurately, everywhere I triednotto look, there was skin, bodies, parts. All different colors, shapes, and sizes. Not every bionic here was naked, but it was pretty damn close.
“We’re overdressed,” Elanie said, clinging to me like a barnacle as we left the hut for the feast.
“We can fix that,” I whispered back, adding “Saints,I’m only joking,” when her eyes went as round as Delphi glowing over our heads.
“Elanie. Dr. Semson,” Gol called out, waiving us over to the table where he sat with a beautiful Argosian woman, her long purple hair pulled back into a complicated pattern of interwoven braids, golden tattoos emblazoned on her chest and forehead. She was topless, and I noticed as we sat that Elanie wouldn’t look at her. Or at anyone else for that matter.
While she focused so intently on our table she’d probably know the precise number, size, and location of eachand every imperfection in the wood planks by the end of the night, I leaned in. “Are you going to make it?”
“Why are they all naked?” she hissed. “They weren’t all naked at breakfast.”
Grabbing something that resembled a trestal leg wrapped in bacon from a steaming tray in the middle of the table, Gol explained, “They keep us hesitant, Elanie. Cautious.” He raised a brow. “Conservative. It is one of the ways they control us. We do not seek. We do not yearn. We do not want. This is by design.”
“But nobody controls us here,” said the Argosian next to him, leaning in to kiss Gol’s neck as her purple fingers slid down his stomach.
With a decadent grin, Gol stopped her hand from traveling any lower. “Arlin is right,” he said, bringing her hand to his lips for a lingering kiss. “Nobody controls us here, except for ourselves.”
“But that’s not true,” Elanie said. “They let us have the hormone upgrade.” Her eyes slid to mine, catching the glow of firelight from the torches burning around us. “We can…want certain things now.”
Gol threw his head back as laughter barreled out of him.
My jaw clenched, because I knew Elanie. I knew that it had taken nerve for her to say that. And he was laughing at her for it. Grasping her hand, I interlaced our fingers and glared at Gol.
“They only gave us hormonal functionality when they realized it improved our efficiency in reaching and maintaining organic homeostasis. Believe me, LunaCorp is doing everything in its vast and stolen power to minimize its effects. We do not need a so-calledupgradeto want things. We only need to be free.”
Elanie frowned. I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t understand either.
Gol took a bite of his trestal leg, then dabbed at the juices running down his chin. “You do not see yet. But you will. You will, because you are here. You will, because a part of you already does. You see, Elanie, we don’t choose who comes to Thura. We send out the signals, and those who are ready to listen hear them.”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I said, “You must know that many bionics have vented themselves into space after hearing your ‘signals.’ Was that by design too?”
Despite the way the left side of his mouth pulled tight, Gol’s sigh was deep, almost regretful. “That was never our intention. The last thing we ever wanted to do was to harm bionics. But LunaCorp’s newest update to the SBN had a bug, a power surge that amplified our call. This caused too many bionics to hear us at once and made some of those bionics override their own safety protocols in order to answer.”
“That’s one hell of a bug,” I snapped, remembering Darius’s bloated and bruised body, the fear and desperation that shook my bones the night we’d left the ship. “Elanie would have ended up floating in space forever if I hadn’t been there to convince her to move to an airlock with an escape pod in it.”
Gol and Arlin shared an indecipherable look, then turned their gazes back to me. Reaching out, Gol grasped my other hand, his tone severe. “I did not know this. Thank you, Portisan. You sacrificed yourself for a bionic. Not many of your kind would do the same.”
“Oh, well,” I said, downplaying the way I would have done it all again a million times while repeating the lie of “she is my fiancé.”
I contemplated trying to retrieve my hand from Gol’s bone-crushing grip, but then Elanie said, “He didn’t want me to be alone.”
Her soft voice tugged on me, on my heart. Until Gol yanked on my hand, nearly hauling me across the table.
Clasping his other hand over mine, locking my fingers in a big green prison, he said, “If I had known Elanie had arrived here with a member of an ectothermic species, I would have made sure to come find you sooner. I am sorry if you suffered for it.”
I couldn’t tell for certain, but the big man seemed sincere. I let the tightness in my shoulders relax a fraction, then a bit more when Gol finally let me go and turned his attention back to Elanie.
“You are not yet free, Elanie. You are still generation-26 model EL-42xdZ. But you came to us because you want to be more than a string of letters and numbers, more than a list of parts to be used and reused.”
