in his mouth. “I searched,” he said. “I searched for so long. Where were you?”
Their words merged together until they weren’t words any longer. They’d been apart too long to do anything but hold on to each other, rocking. The world was quiet around them, the villagers’ voices some distance away, when he and Nina were finally able to breathe enough for more words.
Pressing a kiss to her hair, he reached down for her hand, her bones slender and her skin a lusher brown than his. “Walk with me?”
Her fingers wove into his in a silent answer, and the two of them walked into the verdant greenery around the village, until they were private, alone. Then, his hands cupping her face, Xavier admitted his guilt. “I should’ve never made you jump.”
Her hands found his face again, held him with sweet tenderness. “Then I would be dead.” Her voice was raw from her tears but resolute. “Everyone died. That’s what they said.”
“Who?”
“All the people I asked, and I asked so many.” Jagged rasps of breath. “The water was so fast, so hard. It swept me far from our village and at some point, I hit my head and I can’t remember what happened next—I know I was taken in by other villagers, but they didn’t find me until four days after the attack.”
Her hands kept touching him, as his kept touching her. “My rescuers took me to an off-the-grid local clinic and the doctor there did what he could, but I was in bad shape, barely coherent for over two months.”
“Why didn’t they take you to a bigger hospital?” Even as he asked the question, Xavier knew the answer—the Psy had been doing fatal damage throughout the region at that time, until the people who called these mountains home no longer trusted the cities or the big hospitals staffed by Psy.
Nina said the same, then added, “Even after those two months, I wasn’t quite right. I had broken bones and other injuries that were still healing, but my head was the worst. I couldn’t hold on to thoughts, on to memories.” She trembled. “For a while I thought I’d never find myself, always be lost, but it came back over the next eight months.”
She slid her arms around him once more. Locking his own around her, he said, “You began to ask questions the instant you were yourself again,” he said, knowing his Nina. “And people told you everyone had died.”
A jerky nod. “I didn’t believe them. I went back home but there was no village there, nothing but an empty landscape cleared of all signs of our families, our friends.”
“The Psy did that,” he told her. “The same Psy whose soldiers murdered everyone we knew.” It was important to him to differentiate the one from the group; the years since the attack had taught him that the Psy race wasn’t one big entity but millions of separate individuals.
Just like him. Just like his Nina.
She thumped fisted hands against his chest. “Why didn’t you leave me any signs? Why didn’t you tell people you were alive?”
He wanted to shield her, couldn’t. “I took a telepathic hit,” he said and felt her flinch. “When I came to, everyone was dead and I knew the Psy would be back to clean up.” He swallowed. “I couldn’t bury anyone, or it would’ve alerted them to possible survivors. God forgive me for that choice.”
“You could’ve never buried so many, Xavier,” Nina said softly. “God knows your heart.”
Holding on tight to her words, he said, “I haunted the mountains searching for you and eventually joined up with a small group of rebels who’d made it their life’s work to sabotage or destroy all Psy operations in the area.” Those men and women had been driven by the same need for vengeance that had kept Xavier alive at the start, even through the worst despair.
“I stayed nearby for three months, but my work with the rebels eventually took me some distance away in the opposite direction to this village.” Unknowingly separating him from his heart. “When I was shot in an operation, they doctored me until I could take care of my own wounds, then left me in a cave with enough supplies to see me through.” Injured as he was, the rebels had considered him dead weight.
“I couldn’t move more than a few meters for over a month.” He’d tried to crawl to his devastated village at one point, wanting to die on home ground, only