No more was said, but after handing the medical bag to Nayla, Haggerty had gone with Lazarus. They were as safe as they could be on a planet full of killers. And ultimately, these people needed Nayla and her gift. That would have to be enough.
She followed Kesia to the end of the hall, and into a room that she instantly recognized. It didn’t matter whether it was on a ship or a planet, patient care looked, sounded, and smelled the same everywhere. The antiseptic scent of ruthless disinfection and cleaning, the low hum of advanced computers and medical monitoring, and of course, the patient beds.
There was only one bed occupied, though there were four more empty bays. Nayla immediately moved to her patient’s side, letting the medical kit slide to the floor. Her eyes roamed over him, cataloging what she could see mundanely first. Doc always said not to rely on Talent, because you’d miss important observations that could only be made with the other five senses.
He wore simple cotton clothing. The real stuff, from the looks of it. She could only see the skin of his head, neck, and lower arms. He had hair longer than most killers she’d seen. It was shoulder length and dark. His skin was pale, and the waxy pallor told her it was currently lighter than usual. His face was strongly masculine, the beginnings of a beard beginning to darken his chin. Lying here with his eyes closed, without the usual killer aura of a lethal predator, he looked like any other handsome young man.
His body appeared healthy and fit, but that would begin to change if this dragged on. First, he would lose cardio strength and stamina, then the muscles would begin to lose mass. He was young, so if she solved this, he would bounce back quickly. If she solved it soon, it would be as though it never happened.
Physically, at least. The state of his mind was another matter.
There was no bruising, abrasions, or any wounds visible. The rest of him was covered in clothing or the white sheet draped over him. It was medical grade, so she picked up the sensor attached to it and turned it on, syncing it to her datapad so it would automatically copy all information to her personal unit. Then she projected a screen in front of her.
It, too, showed no wounds. Neither internal nor external. A catalog of his general health scrolled across the screen. It began with vital statistics: age, weight, height, blood pressure, heart rate, muscle density, blood sugar…it continued until it reached his current medical condition. Unresponsive to stimuli, irregular breathing, prolonged state of unconsciousness. His blood pressure was low.
“What are you doing?”
Nayla had forgotten that Kesia was in the room. She looked up to find the other woman watching her with a neutral expression.
“Examining the patient.”
“We’ve done that. We called you because you can do things we cannot.”
“I haven’t examined him, and it’s important to be thorough. I need to know as much as I can about his condition before I approach the problem with my Talent.”
Kesia looked curious. “Why?”
“Because, if I have an idea of what I’m looking for, it can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes me to help him.”
“Ah. Efficiency.” Kesia nodded. “We killers do something similar. Talent is not always the most expedient path to death.”
Nayla thought it best not to respond to that.
She turned back to her patient.
“What’s his name?”
Silence answered her. She turned back to Kesia. “It would be expedient to have something to call him in my notes other than Patient Killer One.”
She swore Kesia’s mouth twitched. Perhaps Dem and Reaper weren’t as unusual as she thought, in their ability to feel and express emotion.
“Sevan Aros.”
Nayla noted it in her file.
“He goes by Ari. In case that’s important.”
Nayla looked up, and Kesia shrugged. “We aren’t so different. Nicknames aren’t uncommon.”
“The only one of you I know with a nickname goes by Reaper.”
Kesia made a face. “That isn’t a name he chose. It was given to him by those who don’t understand us.”
“Perhaps,” Nayla agreed. It wasn’t the first time she’d considered that the people around them had failed Dem and Reaper in some fundamental way. No one, for example, had looked beyond the surface of Dem’s cold exterior to the man he was until Sanah came along. He could be hard and dangerous, yes, but Nayla also saw him as a loving husband and father, who would do anything to make his family happy.
Perhaps something of her thoughts showed on her face, or she was thinking louder than she knew, because she was not expecting what Kesia asked next.
“How is the child?”
“Excuse me?”
“The girl. Dem’s child. I understand she has inherited an unusual blend of abilities.”
Uncomfortable, Nayla wasn’t sure how to respond. “She’s fine. Good.”
For a few tension-filled moments, Nayla focused on the scans of her patient. But part of her attention was hyper-aware of Kesia’s presence. The silence felt full of unsaid things, unanswered and unasked questions. Why was the woman interested in Tamari? Her niece was very young, and no one denied the little girl was special. But to have strangers like Kesia, dangerous strangers, asking after her was unsettling.
When Haggerty and Lazarus walked into the room, relief flooded her. Somehow, she felt sure Kesia wouldn’t resume the topic with the others present. She wasn’t sure why.
Neither man spoke. Haggerty knew her well and had worked with her many times. Though he did look at her in a way that said he’d picked up on her tension, he kept his distance, taking up his usual position against the wall. Lazarus stood not far from him.
Nayla tuned them all out. Methodically, she began to administer tests to her patient. Measuring his body’s responses to stimuli, taking samples and comparing them to others previously taken. None of them had shown the presence of drugs or toxins, but she still wanted to compare results and run her own tests. Finally, she had as much information as the scans could tell her.
But there were still gaps in the data. Her own samples had come too late following whatever had incited his condition to be useful, for one thing.
“How and when did he collapse?” she asked.
“Unknown,” Lazarus said. “He was found in one of the training areas, unconscious.”
“Was there any indication of what he’d been doing before he collapsed?”
“Nothing conclusive.”
“And no indication that anyone else was present?”
“No.”
Well, that was unhelpful. She closed the screen.
It was time to look beyond medical equipment and tests. She closed her eyes, and reached out with her Talent. The rest of the room disappeared. The slow, steady beat of his heart filled her head, the sounds of his breathing, the rush of blood through his veins. But after a few moments, these faded as she delved deeper into the contact.
It was always a little strange, connecting with someone this way. Before her training, she’d gone completely on instinct. She could identify the rush of blood through the body, the various organs and their functions, everything on the anatomy charts her brother had forced her to study and memorize. But she hadn’t really understood on a clinical level what she was doing. Now that she’d undergone actual study and training as a physician, she could better understand Doc’s insistence that ignorance was dangerous, both to her and her patients. The human body was a complex machine, one that medical science was still making discoveries about after all these millennia.
And whatever Talent anyone possessed, they were all still, at their base, human. Ari was an extremely healthy example. He was in peak physical condition, with none of the deterioration of aging, poor nutrition, conditioning, or the myriad other things that plagued so many people. Even more surprising, he had achieved this without the help of nanobots, a technological boost many people used to help keep their physical health on track. That was good. Sometimes, that interfered with her Talent. Not directly, but nanobots could sometimes be an unexpected factor, especially when her Talent didn’t directly affect them. They were tiny machines, after all, and not organic. Yet.
It wasn’t long before Nayla realized she could force Ari awake. But doing that didn’t mean she was fixing whatever had put him in this state in the first place. Waking him up could even cause more damage. Without a physical trauma to focus on as an obvious cause, she had to speculate. Sometimes, people shut down as a way of protecting themselves. The body’s reaction to mental trauma was sometimes just as extreme as physical trauma. And with the Talented, Nayla had learned that was even more common.
Coma was often a physical response to burnout, for example, but she couldn’t imagine what would cause a Killer to burn out their gift during a training exercise. Burnout happened when the Talented person overextended their abilities. A telekinetic trying to move something large, like a spaceship. A telepath after connecting with too many minds over too great a distance. Nayla herself had come close to burnout the first few times Doc had allowed her to use her Talent in the infirmary. It was all too easy to lose herself in healing the next patient, dealing with the next trauma.
But burnout left detectible signs. It could cause real damage to the brain, as taxing mentally as a physical injury. There were no such signs here. But something edged at her awareness. Something felt off. She couldn’t pinpoint it. It was maddening, like catching a glimpse of a shadow out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned her head, it was gone.
Nayla let herself drift. Sometimes, not actively trying was all she needed to do. The act of relaxing her mind allowed the answer to surface. She waited, passive, letting Ari’s physical and mental presence merge with her own until she drew breath in time with him, until her heartbeat matched rhythm with his. In. And out. In. And out. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
There.
She saw it. A shadow that discolored part of his brain, barely detectable. It was organic, but there was also a component of something unnatural to it. It reminded her of nanotech. She’d read an article recently that new nanotech was being developed as an organic component, but as far as she knew that was only in labs.
The device, whatever it was, seemed…aware of her on some level. Whenever she focused on it directly, it disappeared. A nano-weapon of some kind? Whatever it was, it wasn’t a natural organism, and it was meant to avoid scans, even hers. Someone had introduced it to him. To do what? She detected no damage to the surrounding cells. Was it possible this thing was meant to attack or inhibit Talent?
She wished Doc were here.
Deal with the problem, Nayla, she told herself. She couldn’t afford to be distracted.
The body had natural defenses to fight foreign invaders. Ari’s apparently didn’t recognize that it needed to.
Or did it? With patience and caution, she was able to examine the device more closely. She could see a hexagonal shape, with tendrils that appeared to attach to brain tissue. Some of those tendrils were no longer connected. They appeared broken or partially dissolved. It was possible his cytotoxic T cells were treating the device like a group of cancerous cells, and trying to kill it. She could help them achieve that, possibly, but the non-organic component worried her. She didn’t want to leave that floating around inside him.
She spent a long time observing and studying. Time passed, and eventually, she became dimly aware of pressure somewhere distant. She’d done this sort of thing often enough to recognize a muscle ache from holding one position for too long. She couldn’t do much more now anyway. His body was doing what it needed to, and his status was stable. For now. She came back to herself like a swimmer breaking the surface of the water. She took a shuddering breath, coughing as she remembered what it was like to breath on her own.
Haggerty was by her side in an instant, but Nayla waved him off.
“I’m fine,” she said. She hated this part. Everything felt sluggish and wrong. Lifting her hand was a clumsy, odd movement. It took her a good minute or two to acclimate back to being…just herself. Alone.
“Well?” Lazarus asked.
Nayla shook her head. “I’m going to need more time.” She wasn’t going to say anything yet. Not until she had more information. There was no way to know who had introduced the device to Ari, or what their motives might be.
“How much more?”
She looked down at her patient. Already, she felt a bond. Killer he might be, but that didn’t matter. His life was important. She needed him to wake up, to get better. It was a drive, a burning, insistent push from deep within her that wasn’t going to stop now that she’d begun. Her eyes traced the line of his jaw, the curve of his throat as it dipped down to his collarbone.
For better or worse, Ari was hers now. Her patient. Her problem.
“I don’t know,” she said.
It was the only answer she could give.