A nod. “Some of the villagers managed to put together an outdoor oven, made flatbread. I had that. I think you need these bars more than I do.”
“Did you have the vitamins?” She could easily fall victim to malnutrition.
“Yes.” Putting aside the component she’d been working on, she thrust her hands through her hair, then dropped both her hands and her gaze. “Sorry about breaking down like that.”
“There’s no need to be sorry. You are human. You feel.”
Her eyes met his, so open and heavy with sorrow. “Do you remember feeling? As a child?”
“Yes.” He remembered screaming and clawing at the mountains of muddy rocks that covered his family, but the memories were distant, numbed by time and his conditioning under Silence. “You should sleep.”
“So should you.” She lay down in her sleeping bag but didn’t switch off the lantern until he’d finished his meal. “Good night.”
“Good night,” he said, and it was the first time he’d said that to anyone as an adult. In the barracks where he’d been trained before it was decided he was too psychologically fractured to make a good soldier, they hadn’t spoken beyond that which was needed for training.
And after that, he’d always been alone.
• • •
Tazia woke suddenly. A glance at the face of her watch, the softly glowing numerals visible in the dark, told her only two hours had passed since she went to sleep. About to close her eyes, she heard it again, the sound that had wakened her . . . No, it was a lack of sound. Stefan wasn’t breathing.
Scrambling up, she fumbled for the lantern, flicked it on. When she turned the beam toward Stefan, she saw he was rigid, his hands fisted by his sides and his neck stiff. Not needing to see anything further, she dropped the lantern, causing it to blink out, and put her hands on his shoulders in an attempt to shake him free from the nightmare. “Stefan!”
It should’ve been impossible, how fast he moved. One instant, she was crouching worried over him, and the next, she was flat on her back with him over her, one of his hands at her throat. Heart thudding, she kept her hands where they’d fallen when he flipped her. “Stefan, it’s me, Tazia.”
His face was shadowed, but she saw him shake his head. “Tazia?”
“Yes.” Moving very carefully, she lifted a hand to his wrist, tugged, deliberately using his name again as she said, “Let go of my throat, Stefan.”
A jerk and he was gone, back on his side of the tent. “I hurt you?”
“No.” Sitting up, she tried to catch her breath. “You just surprised me.”
“I apologize. I should’ve warned you not to touch me in sleep.”
“You weren’t breathing.”
“It’s temporary. My brain wakes me up when my CO2 levels get too high.”
Such scientific words to describe the raw pain she’d seen in him—as if he were caught in the throes of a horror so terrible, it pierced his Silence. “What did you dream?”
“Psy don’t dream.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
The pause was long and heavy. “This situation awakens memories of the disaster when I was a boy. It’s having an impact on my sleeping patterns.”
She was so used to seeing him as remote, untouched by the pain and chaos of life, that his admission shook her, made her question everything she thought she knew. Not sure what to do, she’d opened her mouth to say something—she didn’t know what—when he lay back down.
“You should return to sleep,” he said. “The work is by no means complete.”
Hearing the finality of his tone, she did lie down, but then thought again of the way he’d pushed into her space, saw in that permission to push into his. “How old were you?” she asked quietly. “When it happened.”
A long silence, his breathing even enough that she might’ve believed him asleep if she hadn’t been able to sense the conscious life of him, the force of it a pulse against her skin. Rather than asking again, she gave him the time to think, to decide what to share. After all, they both had their secrets.
“Four,” he said at last. “My conditioning was fragile.”
Conditioning. Tazia turned that word around in her head, considered its meaning.
For the longest time, she’d believed that Psy came out of the womb emotionless, that this was who they were as a people—as a tiger was fierce and a snake sinuous. A simple fact of nature. Only after leaving her village had she begun to hear