Page 40 of Fractured Souls

She grabbed her arm, digging her fingers into the transformed flesh. She kicked and flailed, tugging at the lines that ran out of her body, trying to pull them out.

“Stay calm, Alexis. The procedure is going to plan.” Zharek’s words were just a blur in the background. “I am almost finished. You just need to be still for five human seconds. Trust me, it’s for your own good.”

She heard Nythian swear, but even the deep rumble of his voice wasn’t enough to calm her down. He was saying something to her, but his words failed to register.

Alexis flailed about. She was suffocating. She just wanted to be out of here.

Bring me home.

With wild, powerful strokes, she started to pull herself toward the top of the tank. Her eyes snapped open, just in time to see a silver and black blur scaling the side of the tank with impossible speed.

Whoosh.

Stasis liquid swirled around her. A massive pair of hands closed over hers as the pain in her arm intensified, becoming worse than anything she’d experienced in her life. Any moment now, she was going to pass out…

“Alexis.” Nythian pressed his lips against her ear, and even though he was submerged, his voice reverberated through the thin membrane of the monitoring cap, through the tiny sound pod in her ear, familiar yet distorted, warm, resonant, cutting through her pain like a scalpel. “Relax. It’s over. Zharek’s going to check a few things, then we’re getting you out of here.”

Suddenly, the pain died away, leaving only a mild burning sensation in her hand. Nythian’s grip was like steel; she couldn’t move an inch. He was pressed up against her, his insane warmth radiating into her body. Suddenly, she no longer felt like a cold half-dead shell.

“Hold still,” he said, and she melted into his arms, relief flooding through her.

He was the antidote to her chaos.

To think that a hard-ass Kordolian warrior could understand her better than any of the psych-heads and trauma algorithms and witness protection specialists that the Agency had surrounded her with after the attack.

She opened her eyes and turned. She saw his hard features through a pale filter of blue, saw his brilliant crimson eyes soft and unfocused, saw his tender expression.

The warmth spreading through her grew and grew, becoming a wild, unpredictable thing, obliterating the pain and filling the fractures in her mind.

The fluid level in the tank started to drop. Zharek was draining it! Lines and tiny devices detached from her body and floated away. She relaxed further, and Nythian released her wrists. His hands slipped down to her waist as their feet touched the bottom of the tank.

The blue liquid dropped past her head, her shoulders, her chest, her belly, disappearing through tiny pores in the dark floor of the tank. Nythian unpeeled the flexible membrane covering her head and removed the pods from her ears. Her head and face were completely dry, in contrast to her bare skin, which was coated in a layer of viscous blue liquid.

She quickly started to dry, heat dissipating out of her body, goosebumps rising on her skin.

Alexis’s eyes were drawn to something dark and strange… her hand.

“Whoa,” she blurted, transfixed by the obsidian second skin that covered her hand like a black glove, ending just below her wrist. Not a single trace of Tharian blue remained.

“It’s a flexible, permeable barrier of nanoparticles,” Zharek explained. “All I’ve done is construct another layer of skin over yours, only this one has Callidum particles woven into it.” He sat behind his holo-monitors, his hands flying over the controls. “The cellular transformation that Anuk initiated is reminiscent of a DNA-modifying virus. I still haven’t figured out how she did it, but it seems to spread whenever you lose consciousness or lose neurological control or fall asleep. Ordinarily, I would have suggested that you simply stay awake, but we can’t have that, so I came up with this barrier. Sleep is especially important for human brains. You people lose your minds impressively quickly when you’re deprived of it.”

“Sleep-dep is a well-known form of torture,” Alexis said mildly, mimicking Zharek’s wisp of a smile. “But maybe I shouldn’t be telling you that.” As a detective, she’d regularly used the technique to get answers out of human traffickers and their associates. It could break even the most hardened thugs.

“Don’t worry. You’re not selling out your race. Most humans aren’t our enemies, and if we have to interrogate or torture anyone, there are far more effective techniques than that.” Zharek’s mild tone belied the chilling nature of his words. These creatures were so technologically advanced that they could crush humans like bugs if they wanted.

She started to shiver, and it wasn’t just because of the cold. It was so easy to forget that she still knew very little about these silver-skinned aliens.

“Zharek,” Nythian growled. “Enough chit-chat. Get us out of here.” They were still pressed against one another, and Alexis suddenly became very conscious of how much skin she was showing.

Arms, legs, midriff, back…

She was practically undressed, yet he was still encased in his combat gear, which had dried remarkably quickly. Did the seamless obsidian suit possess special properties?

Not fair! She was far too exposed. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach as he held her a little tighter, his hands firm and protective as they encircled her waist.

The center of the tank magically split in two, smooth transparent glass sliding apart to form a person-sized opening.

“Let’s get you into something warm,” Nythian said as he ushered her out of the tank. Alexis’s eyes widened as he barked a command at Zharek’s assistant in Kordolian.

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