out here, Tazia had no reason to care for him. He was doing nothing for her, and it wasn’t as if she was trapped. Emergency transports were going in and out now on a relatively regular basis, so she didn’t even need him to get her out of here. Her ticket back to the Alaris offices was also prepaid and in her possession.
There was no reason for her to care for him enough to find the liniment and smooth it on his chest; no reason to care enough to make sure he ate. It was as if she cared . . . for him. For Stefan, the man aside from his gift. He hadn’t known that was possible.
“Sir.” One of the villagers came to stand near him.
“Yes?” he said, having stopped telling them to use his name. They were in awe of his ability and refused to treat him any other way.
“Thank you.” The man’s eyes burned with wetness before he blinked the tears away, his throat moving as he swallowed. “My daughter,” he said in what was clearly an unfamiliar language. “You save.” He waved at the rubble where the tunnel had been. “Thank you.”
Stefan went to say it had been a group effort, then recalled Tazia’s words about being gracious. “Is she well?”
“Yes.” The man beamed. “Happy.”
Stefan nodded, and that seemed to be enough.
Later that night, as they lay in their tent, he told Tazia what had happened.
She said, “They see you as a god. If you moved here, you could have your own fiefdom, complete with the requisite nubile virgins to attend to your every need.”
Having witnessed such interaction between other members of the Alaris crew, including between Tazia and her friend Andres, he thought perhaps he was being teased. It was . . . welcome. No longer was he standing outside looking into Tazia’s complex, multihued world; she had invited him in.
“I wouldn’t wish to rule,” he said seriously. “There is no privacy for those who rule.”
“And you like yours.” Rustling sounds, as if she was shifting in her sleeping bag to face him. “How’s your chest, your shoulder?”
“Fine.”
A sigh before she got up and flicked on a flashlight. “Let me see.”
A week ago, he wouldn’t have cooperated, but tonight, he made no protest as she pointed the light at his bare skin. He’d peeled off his T-shirt before lying down on his sleeping bag to rest; he’d first asked Tazia if it was all right. She’d blushed under the warm dark honey of her skin but nodded. Now, however, there was no blush, just clear-eyed concern as she touched him gently after glancing at him to check if he objected.
He didn’t.
He watched her as she examined him, and his hand rose as if of its own volition to tuck a tendril of her hair behind her ear. Fingers stilling, she glanced at him for an endless heartbeat, then continued her examination. “It looks all right, but let me put on some more of the liniment. It helped earlier, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” He could’ve easily put the liniment on himself, but he didn’t offer to do so. And as she ministered to him, he bore the psychic stabs of pain generated by his mind, without flinching.
The dissonance was nothing, less painful than when the debris had fallen on him. It should’ve been much sharper and brighter—had been a year ago, when he’d first seen Tazia’s eyes light up as she smiled, and felt something strange happen inside him. He’d thought his inexorable compulsion toward the station engineer would fade once he knew her, but it had grown with each word they’d spoken to one another, each time he’d seen her or heard her laugh or even read a report she’d turned in.
At this rate, his already erratic dissonance would degrade into nothing soon. If he wanted to keep his mind free of psychic coercion and not attract any unwanted Psy-Med attention, he’d have to be very, very careful not to give any indication of the disintegration in public.
In private, however . . .
He lay quietly as Tazia spread the liniment gently over his bruises, her delicate touch rippling sensation over every inch of his skin. “There,” she murmured, not mentioning the fact that one of his hands was brushing her knee. “Sleep now.”
Stefan didn’t want her to move away, but he remembered what she’d said about her cultural mores and kept his silence. He would not do anything to cause her distress. Listening to her settling in,