In Iraq, when the IED went off, he hadn’t felt any pain. That was one of the things that had always struck him as odd: he hadn’t felt his body break. Instead, he’d felt the rush of heat, and he’d felt the force of the blast, a surge of energy. He imagined that was what it felt like to be hit by a truck: that tremendous shove moving through his skin and bones.
When the girl touched his arm, he first felt the heat, and then theforce. A whip-crack of electricity that shot up his arm, burst like ordnance in the depths of his shoulder, and showered through his nervous system, bright chasing sparks.
He knew that he pitched forward, that he gasped, but these were helpless physical reactions, and nothing conscious. The sparks bloomed inside his head, in his eyes, clouding all thought and vision and fear. It must have been only moments, but it seemed to take hours for the starbursts to unfold. In their wake, a pleasant heat stole through him; filled him head to toe, even all the numb parts of him where doctors had harvested tissue and left him disfigured.
For the first time since the explosion, he feltpresentin the left side of his body. Like a whole man, and not a partial one dragging around a dead half.
The acute sensations faded, leaving him warm and in less pain than he could remember. His vision cleared, and when he blinked away the last flashes, he saw that the girl stood in front of him, her hand still on his arm, her pupils wide black pools, no sign of the bright green irises he’d seen before. Her skin shone, pale like the moon.
Rooster shuddered. “Hey.” He reached to cover her small hand with his own.
She gasped and jerked away from him, staggering back, swaying like she might fall.
Rooster stood up and caught her by the elbows. “You okay? Hey, don’t pass out.”
And then it hit him: he’d stood up from the floor without any of his usual grunting, swearing, and grabbing for handholds. His bum knee had held; his muscles had worked; his re-stitched tendons and ligaments hadn’t brought tears to his eyes.
A different kind of panic flooded his system. “What was that?” he asked. “What did you do?”
She tipped her head back, exposing her throat, the movement slow, almost like she was drugged. She blinked, and her pupils began to recede. “I…I…” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp in his arms.
Rooster caught her, and marveled that he had the strength to do so.
~*~
Ashley stood in her pajamas and silk robe, one hand propped on her hip, the fingertips of the other massaging a spot of tension between her brows. She breathed a sigh that Rooster knew well. “Explain it to me again, but make it make sense this time. Why is there a little girl on my couch?”
Rooster could deliver a sitrep that would make any gunny proud, so he knew Ashley – like him – wasn’t so much misunderstanding him as she was dumbfounded. The whole thing sounded ludicrous.
“She knocked on the window,” he said. “Woke me up. Said she ran away from the Institute – you know, where I went today? And that she didn’t want to go back. She touched my arm…” He curled his left hand into a fist and felt it flex almost normally, the pain a faint echo in the joints. His breath hitched in his chest, and for once it had nothing to do with discomfort. “Something happened.”
For the first time since he’d carried the girl up here – he’dcarriedher, holy shit – Ashley looked away from her unconscious form and turned a sharp look on Rooster. “What do you mean ‘something happened’?” Her gaze moved down his body, sharp and assessing, down to where his weight was distributed evenly between both feet. Her eyes widened. “Shit. You’re–”
“Yeah. Something happened.”
She cocked a single brow. “Did this chick pop you with a steroid shot or something?”
“What? No. Come on, she’s just a kid.” A very small one, who breathed shallowly, like a little unconscious rabbit. She was probably cold. Ashely kept extra blankets in the closet down the hall–
“Roger.” Oh, she’d been trying to get his attention.
“What?”
“We need to call the police.”
“Yeah.”
But she’d touched him, and the pain had gone away. She had run away from that awful, brightly-lit place with the smiling staff who’d been too cowardly to outright reject him to his face when they had no intention of helping him.
The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood up on end because something waswrong. Just as he had the day of the IED, he felt the low vibrations of danger.
“Ash, something’s not right.”
“No shit,” she said with a snort, but then sighed. Shook her head. “Yeah. Okay. I know what you mean.” She contemplated the girl, lips pursed, arms folded. “Who is she?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Well.” She squared her shoulders, and again Rooster felt like the Corps has missed out on the perfect recruit when she’d decided to go for her law degree instead of joining her then-boyfriend, now-husband in the Marines. “Let’s find out.”
