The words felt like a caress. “You need to sink lower into the water. That falling beam hit your shoulder, too.” She’d felt her heart stop beating when she’d seen him go down, had dropped everything to run to his side, check he was alive. The memory of fear made her voice sharp as she said, “Or do you want me to push you down?”
• • •
Tazia was in a very bad temper today, Stefan thought, as she turned back to her chore. “Have I done something to offend you?” he asked when she came back inside the cave after taking care of the last of their clothing.
She sat down on the cave floor with her back to him. “No.”
He didn’t understand emotion, but he knew she wasn’t telling him the truth. “The spring is large. You can share the space,” he offered, though it was difficult for him to be in such close proximity to another being, and particularly to Tazia.
“Tazia,” he said when she didn’t reply.
“I can’t.” Keeping her back to him, she leaned forward as if she’d drawn up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. “I know it may seem irrational and old-fashioned to you, but I was brought up to be . . . chaste.” The words were taut. “To be naked only with the man I took as my husband. I don’t live in that world anymore”—harsh strain in those words—“but I can’t discard who I am like it’s an old coat.”
“I understand,” Stefan said, having already guessed at Tazia’s value system after so carefully noting every single thing about her in the year they’d worked together. “Your cultural mores are no more or less irrational than the protocol under which my people are conditioned.”
He saw her shoulders relax. Rising, she walked over to sit on a rock nearer the spring, her eyes on the entrance and her body in profile to him. “Have you ever thought of breaking Silence?” she asked. “I . . . broke some of the rules when I left home.”
“Important rules?” he asked quietly.
“Yes. The most important.” Her hand fisted on her thigh, small and so fine boned that he sometimes wondered how she handled the tools necessary to her profession. Even with all the advances in tech, wrenches were still heavy; torque still required muscle.
“I never did think about breaking the rules,” Stefan said. “The rules are safe. It’s why my race chose Silence over a hundred years ago.” Of course, had his conditioning been without flaw, he would’ve had difficulty even talking about the protocol.
Tazia turned a little on the rock, enough that she could look at his face. “I’ve heard rumors about why, but never knew if they were true.”
“Our psychic abilities are powerful, but they predispose us to insanity and violence.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?” Then she half smiled. “Of course not. You’re Silent.”
Stefan thought about how to respond to that. It was something he’d never have considered before Tazia, but her honesty deserved his own. “My Silence is problematic because of the trauma I suffered in childhood.”
What even most Psy didn’t know about Silence was that the conditioning for those like Stefan, people with dangerously strong abilities, was reinforced by pain controls termed dissonance. If Stefan broke Silence on any level, he’d be punished with pain. The worse the breach, the more debilitating the pain, until it was possible it could kill him . . . Or that was how it was meant to work.
Part of the reason Stefan had been shifted from Arrow training to the commercial arm of the Council’s telekinetic arsenal was that his brain was deeply resistant to certain aspects of the conditioning process, including the dissonance controls. His psychic trainers had finally declared it to be a fundamental flaw, one that could not be fixed.
No one had wanted to release such a strong telekinetic into the commercial team, but a soldier without foolproof conditioning couldn’t be trusted in the field. He might fracture and, with his dissonance controls erratic at best, no one could be certain he wouldn’t take his partner or team with him when he lost control of his telekinetic powers.
Tazia’s eyes widened. “So do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” What he did know was that things had begun to change in him the first time he’d spoken to Tazia Nerif, parts of the conditioning just falling away. “I’m not as perfect a Psy as I should be.”