Wild Embrace (4 page)

They changed in
the private cubicles on board the jet, getting into clothing suitable for the quake-hit region. She wore her own work boots, scuffed and comfortable, but Stefan had sourced a search and rescue uniform for her that was similar to his own. The color of sand, the thin, breathable, but tough material covered her arms and legs, providing protection from the rubble and the sun both. The lightweight jacket, worn over a T-shirt, sealed up the front, which meant she could tear it open should it get too hot.

What on her looked merely serviceable looked like a pressed military uniform on Stefan, his bearing was so erect. “Ready?” he said as soon as they'd landed and been processed through to the hot, desert land not so very far from her own.

Blowing out a breath, she nodded. “I haven't done this before.”

“You might feel some disorientation.” He stepped close, her heart slammed into her rib cage . . . and a second later, she was being teleported for the first time in her life, the world spinning before it settled.

In the space of three heartbeats, they'd gone from a modern, gleaming airport to a village deep in the interior, where a massive quake had buried ancient and lovingly handcrafted homes the color of sunbaked mud, cracking and buckling the land in every direction.

There were no screams, no cries. Only an eerie silence as people worked with frantic hands to unearth the buried. Many had nothing but those hands, fingers bloodied and nails broken. Stefan began to lift huge chunks of material within a minute of arriving. The relief on the townspeople's haggard faces was so visceral, it tore a hole inside of Tazia.

“Right,” she said and, dumping her gear in the same spot where Stefan had dropped his duffel, headed out to talk to the person who seemed to be coordinating the rescue efforts. The grateful local woman soon had her out fixing everything from broken pipes to checking wiring for danger, to jerry-rigging communications equipment that kept breaking down.

Only a small rescue team had made it to the village so far, the rest still en route. As a result, the available able-bodied volunteers—trained and untrained—were stretched to the limit.

Tazia fell exhausted on her sleeping bag hours after full dark, some kind person having rolled it out after putting up a tent for her and Stefan. When Stefan came in bare minutes later, his face drawn, and, digging into his duffel, threw her a Psy nutrition bar, she gulped down the tasteless thing. It was only then that she realized she hadn't eaten since the plane. “Will you be okay?”

“I'll need at least six hours of sleep to recover to a level where I can continue to shift material.” With that, he threw her another bar, ate four more himself, and went to sleep.

Or she thought he must have. Because she woke with the nutrition bar still in her hand. A glance at the clock showed only five hours had passed. Moving about quietly so as not to wake Stefan, she stuck her feet into her boots and ducked out to use the facilities. Afterward, she rinsed out her mouth with careful use of water, then took a long drink as she finished off the bar. Shower facilities were nonexistent, the well having been crushed in the quake, but the
locals had repeatedly cautioned her to make sure she drank enough water to stay strong and hydrated.

Tazia had forgotten how easily the desert sun could sap a person's strength.

Tankers were on the way and those villagers not involved in attempting to rescue buried survivors were trying to resurrect the well, but until then, personal hygiene had to take a backseat to survival. It was better not to ask Stefan to 'port in more water—he was already being pushed to the edge of his endurance lifting the debris.

Stepping back inside the tent, she found the box of wet wipes she'd grabbed from the little shop next to the Alaris offices and glanced over at Stefan. He hadn't moved, his breathing steady. Six hours he'd said, and six hours it would be. Turning her back to him, she stripped off the clothing on her upper half, her skin burning at the idea of being near-naked with a man who wasn't her husband, then quickly wiped herself down as much as possible, before getting into a fresh bra and T-shirt.

Her clean clothing wasn't going to last, since she'd brought only three changes, but that was a nonissue given the devastation. Tazia had been dirty before, would be again. Putting the used wipes in a plastic bag for later disposal, she placed the box of wipes by Stefan's duffel so he'd see them when he woke. That done, she grabbed her jacket—dusty and grease streaked from the day before—and went to see what she could do about a damaged generator that was the backup power source for the village's small medical clinic should its primary generator malfunction.

•   •   •

Stefan
woke after exactly six hours of sleep. Like any trained soldier, he'd been aware of Tazia coming and going, but his mind knew she was no threat, and so he'd continued to sleep. Had it been
otherwise, she'd have been immobilized before she realized he'd moved. He might've been deemed too psychologically flawed to be an Arrow, an elite black ops soldier, but the training had stuck.

And officially an Arrow or not, the men and women of the squad considered him one of theirs. He'd been given off-the-books training, and still sparred with active-duty Arrows whenever possible, considered them his brethren. No one could sneak up on him even when he slept—but with Tazia, the risk profile was nil.

Violence was simply not part of her nature.

Getting up, he did what needed to be done, then returned to the location of the worst collapse. If he could have, he'd have worked through the night; he knew there were people trapped under that rubble. He'd had to force himself to be logical, to remind himself that he'd be useless to everyone for far longer than six hours if he burned out his psychic abilities.

Now, recharged, he focused on the most unstable section and got to work. He was conscious of Tazia moving around the village, picked up her voice speaking a language that was close enough to the one spoken in this land that she was understood. When she said, “Stefan,” he glanced down.

Her head only just reached his breastbone but he'd never thought of Tazia as small. She had too much inside her to be small—like a storm gathering up its power before it struck.

“Is there a problem?”

“You haven't had a drink of water in three hours.” Frowning, she passed him a reusable bottle filled to the brim. “You know you can't do that, not in this heat, especially with the amount of rubble you're shifting.”

As he took the water, he catalogued his body and realized he'd come perilously close to dehydration. “Thank you.” No one had been
concerned about his welfare, except as it impacted their own needs and wants, since he was a child.

“No thanks needed.” Her eyes took in the area in front of him as he drank the water in slow, measured swallows so as not to overload his parched body. “This is bad enough, but I keep waiting for the aftershocks.”

He nodded, lowering the bottle after emptying half of it. “They're apt to be severe, given the magnitude of the quake. That's why I have to get the trapped out now—the rubble is too unstable to hold in a major tremor.”

Working without a break for the next four hours—not stopping even when Tazia passed him water and he gulped it down—he got half the trapped out before the world shook again. Screams pierced the air as things crashed and people bled, but his first thought was for Tazia. Reaching out with his mind as he crouched down to ride out the aftershock, he searched for the brilliance that was hers. He didn't invade her mind to find her—he didn't have to. Tazia's mental signature was as unique as a fingerprint to him . . . and there she was.

Safe.

When the shaking finally stopped, he could no longer sense living minds below the closest section of rubble. As, long ago, he'd no longer been able to find his mother or brother, though he'd searched for hours. Until rescue services had arrived and found him wandering barefoot over the debris, his skin cut and bleeding and blood pouring from his nose and ears as he continued to try to shift the entire landslide on his own.

“They're dead,” a Psy-Med specialist had told him, cold and no-nonsense, the words like stones smashing into his face. “You aren't strong enough to assist. Sit here and don't be a nuisance.”

No longer was he a child, but he couldn't help the dead here, either.

Leaving them, he moved to a section that still held the living, and when Tazia came by again with water, he saw the tear tracks in the dust on her face. His instincts zeroed in on her. “You're hurt?” He scanned her body to check for injuries.

She shook her head. “There was this little girl—she followed me around all day yesterday, said she wanted to learn what I did. The aftershock . . . She was . . .” Sobs shook her small frame, her face crumpling.

When she would've turned away, he stepped close, protecting her from the gaze of others. He knew she needed contact, needed touch, but he hadn't touched anyone except out of necessity since before the landslide that had ended his childhood, for the Silent did not touch. So he simply stood close, and when her tears ended, he made her drink some of the water she'd brought him.

“I'd better go,” she said, her voice husky. “Don't forget to eat a nutrition bar.”

The clock had just ticked past midnight when he was forced to stop. Mental muscles strained to the last degree, his uniform hanging on a frame that was burning energy faster than he could replenish it, he made himself walk away from the rubble. Tazia was inside the tent, working on a small component by the light of the solar-powered emergency lantern she'd bought in the same little shop where she'd bought the box of cleansing wipes she'd shared with him.

“There's not enough electricity to do computronic work after dark,” she murmured absently, then looked up. “Stefan, sit before you fall down.” The words were sharp.

“I'm fine, just low on energy.” But he sat, his body feeling as if it was held together by strings that could snap at any moment.

Digging into his duffel, Tazia pulled out a pack of the high-
density nutrition bars he'd brought. She peeled one open and pushed it at him. “Eat.” Watching him to make sure he obeyed the order, she found some water and gave that to him after dosing it with a vitamin and mineral powder. “There's enough drinking water that we don't have to ration it. Tankers will be here tomorrow.”

He drank the water, ate another bar when she gave it to him. “Have you eaten?”

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 CO
2
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.