Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

“There’s a rough suture in the membrane that protects the brain,” he told her. “I’m using the lowest setting on the laser to cut through it.”

Relief punched through him as soon as he opened the suture. “I can see it. It’s as if they literally just shoved it in.”

“Wrong part of brain,” Zaira managed to say as he replaced the blood-soaked bandage he’d thrust below her skull.

“Yes. So it must somehow be able to send signals to the right sections.” There hadn’t been enough time for filaments to weave their way through the neural matter.

Using the penlight to examine the implant, he said, “It has six very thin arms that are clasped around a part of the cerebellum.” Like a spider gripping its prey. “I think the arms are meant to hold it in place until the final biological connections are made.”

A crackle of blue-white light in the implant, powered either by Zaira’s body or by a tiny battery within the implant itself. “It looks like it might work via electrical impulses.”

Zaira took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “Is that good?”

“Yes. It lowers the risk of dangerous neural connections.” He tried to look very carefully under the implant to confirm, but he didn’t have the right tools.

“If I’m wrong, I’ll kill you.” One more death on his conscience. And this time, it would be this woman he’d known almost as long as he’d known Vasic. Tortured and bruised black-and-blue, skinny and suspicious, she’d glared at him during that first meeting, then lied to his face, and he’d known he had to make sure she survived.

The squad needed her fire, her relentless spirit.

He wasn’t sure he’d succeeded—Zaira lived, but that fire of the soul had gone into deep hibernation. The disobedient, wild, dangerous girl he’d met had become the perfect Arrow . . . who continued to argue with his decisions fifty percent of the time and who’d once shot him in order to make a point about a threat assessment.

What were you saying about the angle being impossible?

It had been a measured, glancing hit to his upper right arm that had barely taken off a layer of skin, but the memory gave him hope that the fire wasn’t hidden so deep that there was no hope of its return.

Because it wasn’t just the squad that needed it. Aden needed it most of all.

He’d been trying to provoke her since the fall of Silence in an effort to reawaken that part of her nature. Now he might be the one to end it all, to forever stifle the flame. “The risk of death is significant.”

“I’m dying anyway,” she said as rain hit his back, the canopy above not enough to totally shield them, though he angled his body to give Zaira as much protection as possible. “I’d rather go honestly, trying to fight this thing, than have my brain explode because I did nothing.” A shuddering breath. “You’d make the same choice.”

It was still the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

Holding the penlight clamped between his teeth again, he used the laser at the lowest possible setting to burn the “legs” off the implant. When the tiny metallic square didn’t fall away after all the legs were gone, he used the tip of the scalpel to lift it off. It stuck for a stubborn second and he held his breath at what could be a sign of further connections beneath, but then it was falling into his hand.

And Zaira was bleeding again.

Dropping the implant in the medkit, he said, “Disinfectant.” It was the only warning he could give her before he washed the blood out with the burning liquid—the brain might not technically feel pain, but the skin and muscle at the incision site would. He would’ve never done this had he been in an infirmary, but out here, the risk of a fatal infection through the open wound was too high.

He had to take the chance the disinfectant wouldn’t do further damage.

Her spine went stiff before her body slumped. Catching her, he leaned her against the chestnut tree on her side and, repairing the membrane, lasered the piece of bone back into her skull, hoping to hell he hadn’t done permanent harm. The wound finally closed, if raggedly so, he put a small bandage over it, then got rid of the blood-soaked bandage below her neck by placing it, his gloves, and any other detritus in a small disposal bag and putting that in an unused pocket of the daypack.

If their pursuers brought in tracking dogs, he wouldn’t leave such a rich blood supply for them to scent. At least he and Zaira had the rain on their side—it would wipe away any tracks, wash away scents. The rising wind might also ground the chopper, which would take any heat-sensing technology out of the running; even if the chopper stayed up, the presence of bears in the area would bring up false hits their pursuers would have to investigate.

He didn’t immediately have to move Zaira.

Decision made, he slid the implant into a small plas bag that had held pain relief pills before he emptied the pills into the medkit. He placed the bag in the bottom of the medkit to protect it from the elements, weighing the bag down with the burned-out laser and putting all the remaining supplies on top before he shut the kit. That done, he used fallen leaves to line the floor of another small hide under the thickest part of the canopy and carried Zaira’s unconscious body to lie on it, building a tent around her using low-hanging branches he snapped off from the trees around them. It would make them invisible from the air and provide protection from the elements.

By the time he finished, the rain was hard pellets whipped into a harsh slant by the wind, but the canopy was holding off most of it. He checked the hide, gathered three more heavily leafed branches to cover the spots where water might get in, then slid inside himself. He’d stay awake, maintain a watch, but he needed to be close to Zaira.