Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

It took two days for them to escape the caves.

By the end of the first day, they'd left the mycelium behind, and the last Fauna A had sat down and watched them disappear into the gloom. Garin wouldn't admit to how many times he'd looked over his shoulder to see if it was still watching, his heart a tiny bit heavier each time. He'd never had a pet—he'd never seen the appeal of yet another thing to take care of—but the cute little creature cocking its head after them with its sad eyes made him think maybe he understood the appeal of a dog.

They spent the night sharing a sleeping bag as stiffly and awkwardly as they had the first time. More so, even. And with even less conversation. The silence between them wasn't exactly tense, but it wasn't comfortable either.

The second day they spent climbing through the type of cave Garin was more used to. Lots of rocks. No weird fungi. They belly-crawled out into the fresh air as the sun kissed the horizon.

"Oh god, does a sky look good after that." Garin put his hands on his hips and arched his back to stare up at the great, gorgeous expanse of pinks and oranges fading into a deep, dark blue already dusted with stars.

"The presence of a breeze is also welcome." Sazahk wiped the dirt off his forehead and looked around. "Which way to the compound?"

"Southeast." Garin pointed with his chin. "We've already looped past the area with all the geothermal activity, so we should have a relatively safe straight shot back."

"How long?"

"About three days."

"Good."

"But we're not starting in the dark," Garin added when Sazahk made a move to start walking.

Sazahk pouted, though Garin doubted he'd admit that was the expression. "You said it's safe."

"I said relatively safe, and that was with the assumption it would be during daylight hours." Garin led the way to the flat top of a knoll and pretended he didn't hear Sazahk's teeth grinding behind him.

The man was impatient as hell, but at least he didn't fight Garin at every point like he had when they'd set out. He didn't talk to Garin much at all. It was like he'd already moved on. Like he was already back at the compound and their time together was over.

There were no more questions.

That was what hurt, Garin realized as they set up camp. At some point, Sazahk had become curious about him. Asking him why he was body shy, why he didn't have tattoos, hell, even watching silly videos from his family with him. He'd found Garin interesting, and worth being interested in.

And now Sazahk couldn't care less. Garin supposed he'd never been that interesting to begin with. Sazahk had probably exhausted all avenues of Kevin Garin that could hold the attention of a man like him.

They'd be back in the compound in three days, and Sazahk would saunter off to be brilliant and save the galaxy, and Garin would get over his infatuation and maybe buy Beaty a puppy once the boys went off to get real jobs. Real jobs that weren't at the lab that had killed their father. Dammit. He still needed to talk to them about that.

Garin sat on the sleeping bag next to the fire, nibbling on a ration bar and feeling sorry for himself, when Sazahk dropped down in front of him, face serious. "I hurt your feelings."

Garin's eyebrows rose, but he lied quickly. "No, you didn't."

Sazahk sighed and two ribbons of pink and brown curled up his throat. "Yes, I did, Garin. You've had the same crease on your forehead since we left the disruptor rod. You've barely looked at me, you've only told me to be careful twice, and it takes few observational and even fewer social skills to identify the way you're looking into that fire as melancholy."

"I'm fine, Sazahk." Garin couldn't deny anything Sazahk had said, but he didn't want to get into the details about his reasons. No one wanted to be on either side of an unrequited love confession. "Don't worry about it."

"You don't know why I won't let you touch my hair and you're taking it personally."

Garin winced and opened his mouth to deny it, but then Sazahk took a deep breath and turned around fully, sitting with his back to Garin.

"But this is why." Sazahk lifted the mass of his pale hair and revealed the nape of his neck.

Garin gasped and Sazahk twitched at the sound but didn't drop his mane. A long, thick scar, clean-edged and straight as a ruler, carved a path from the base of Sazahk's skull down to the top of his spine. A scar put there with surgical precision.

"I was the youngest ever member of the Qeshian Institute," Sazahk said in his clinical voice and Garin's heart squeezed to hear him use the tone when relaying something so deeply personal. "My father and brother were proud of me. I was engaged in cutting-edge research, and numerous pharmaceutical and agricultural corporations and organizations were already putting many of my discoveries to work. Trillions in economic gains for the Qeshian species state could be attributed almost directly to me."

Garin reached for him and let his hand fall short, landing on the blanket beside his hip.

Sazahk glanced down at it, and the tip of his tongue flickered across his lips. "Touch it. If you like."

‘Like' wasn't the word, but Garin's fingers pulled to the scars as though attached to strings. He brushed the raised edges, and Sazahk shivered.

"But the Qesh have rules. So many arbitrary rules based on ideology and fear and simplistic moral reasoning that don't leave any room for desperate people with horrible problems." Sazahk's clinical tone twisted into bitterness. "As you might have guessed, I broke one."

Garin stroked his thumb down the scar and shuffled closer. "And they did this to you?"

Sazahk nodded, his hands still holding his hair off his neck for Garin to see. "The Senate took my implant. They said I was too dangerous with it and that they wouldn't risk the data from my experiments becoming public."

Garin gently pulled Sazahk's hands down, letting his hair tumble over his shoulders. "Do you have a comb?"

Sazahk's brow furrowed, and he looked back at Garin, gray and red circling his dark eyes. "You still want to brush my hair? You don't even know what I did yet."

Garin smiled softly and pulled some light tangles free with his fingers. "Unless you're about to tell me you killed kids, it's not going to scare me off doing your hair."

Sazahk's shoulders rose to his ears and his whole body grayed. "I did kill kids."

Garin froze with his fingers halfway through a knot in the center of Sazahk's locks. That…didn't compute. "What?"

"If you were aiming for hyperbole, you missed. Children died as a result of things I did to them." Sazahk's chin dropped onto his chest, hiding his face, and pulling his hair through Garin's limp fingers.

"But…" Garin blinked, struggling to fit the concepts into a sensical shape. "You didn't do those things to them on purpose."

"How do you know?" Sazahk looked sharply over his shoulder. "You don't know me, Garin."

Garin shook his head. "I know you enough. You don't hurt people. Not intentionally."

Sazahk looked back down into his lap. "I knew what I was doing."

Conflicting feelings fought for dominance in Garin's chest, and he lowered his shaking hands to his knees.

Revulsion was putting up a fight. Garin's time in the Vanguard had put more than his fair share of blood on his hands. But he'd never hurt kids. The Turners—Dom—they'd made mistakes and doubtless some of those mistakes had hurt children, but Garin had never touched Dom like he'd touched Sazahk, and he never wanted to. For Sazahk to have done those things was…different. His feelings for the man ran up against the buzz saw of horror at the image of children slain at the hands of some heartless monster. He felt sick.

But then a protective instinct battled the revulsion down. Sazahk sat before him, hunched and ashamed and pushing him away, and Garin dug in his emotional heels.

"Comb, Sazahk," he said quietly. "Do you have one?"

Sazahk shoulders lifted to his ears, and for a second Garin feared he might not reply. But then he nodded. "Bar'in packed one. It's in my bag."

Garin eyed the grab bag of chaos. Normally he wouldn't go within two feet of the disorganized heap, but for this, he'd make an exception. He snagged a strap and dragged the bag over, then started unpacking it item by item.

Sazahk didn't say a word, but he peeked at Garin through the curtain of his pale hair, watching him as he dug through his bag until he found the single comb thrown in at the bottom. Garin set it aside, then took twice as long to repack the bag into some semblance of sense. He didn't think Sazahk really liked his own disorganization. The qesh's mind just didn't tend toward order like Garin's did. Garin's lip twitched in a smirk. And pity the man who tried to impose it on him.

Garin settled himself behind Sazahk again. "May I brush your hair?"

Sazahk's shoulders relaxed minutely, and he nodded.

"Thank you." Garin gathered the bottom of Sazahk's hair in one hand and began to brush out the ends. The qesh's hair wasn't soft—how could it be when they hadn't had a proper shower in almost two weeks—but its fineness and weight still felt good against Garin's palm. "Why don't you tell me what actually happened?"

Sazahk's shoulders shot up again. "You don't believe me."

Garin's smooth combing didn't falter. "I do believe you. I just want you to start at the beginning."

Sazahk fell quiet. Garin heard him open his mouth a few times, but each time he closed it without a word. Speechless wasn't a state Garin had ever expected to see Sazahk in for long, but he supposed it was a good thing. The man tended to bury others in words, to obscure and to challenge until the threat passed. Garin hoped as he drew the comb through Sazahk's ends, then worked his way up higher, that Sazahk might actually consider that Garin wasn't a threat at all.

Finally, Sazahk spoke in a small voice Garin had never heard from him. "I'm a biologist, but I've always been most interested in genetics. The genes we pass down, the genes that get mutated as we live our lives, and the genes that express themselves in one person and not in another, despite being present in both."

Garin kept his pace steady and waited for Sazahk to continue.

"But genes are what make up an individual and individuals are what make up a society, so there are a lot of rules and regulations and lines that aren't allowed to be crossed when you start to experiment with the fabric of an individual and thus, according to the Senate, the fabric of society." Sazahk twisted his hands together in his lap. "It's not that I don't think those things matter, but I don't think those things matter more than a person's life."

Garin drew the comb through the untangled lower half of Sazahk's hair.

"I think an individual can decide what risks they're willing to take for themselves." Sazahk clenched his fists. "Other people don't get to tell them it's too dangerous, or that some amorphous greater good is more important than their lives."

Now this computed. These words from Sazahk's lips fit into a shape in Garin's head that made sense.

"There's a town that borders the southern end of the Dead Zone. The water to its newer neighborhoods comes from a river fed by a spring inside it."

Garin bit his lip as he picked at an especially large tangle. He didn't need to be a biologist to know that wasn't good.

"The children born within that neighborhood have a mortality rate over one hundred times higher than the Qeshian average."

"Shit," Garin breathed, breaking his promise to himself to be as calm and neutral as possible as Sazahk told his story.

Sazahk's shoulders lowered from his ears as his voice grew more confident and determined. "For the children who present the typical symptoms, the pain is excruciating, and their lives are short, hard, and hopeless."

Garin shook his head. "But why doesn't the government do anything? They're not the Humans for god's sake." One expected that sort of negligence from the Human species state after all.

"The government does do something." Sazahk's disdain dripped from his tongue. "They provide hospice care and financial support for the family while they tend to their dying child, and they help the grieving parents with fertility treatments in order for them to have another child that might have better luck in the genetic lottery. What they don't try to do is save them."

"And you did." Garin jumped ahead in the story as he conquered the biggest tangle. He'd known Sazahk wasn't the villain.

Sazahk sighed. "I tried, yes."

Garin frowned as he ran his fingers through Sazahk's smooth, disentangled hair. "Why did you tell me you killed them?"

"Because I did."

"No, they were already dying."

"And I killed some of them faster." Sazahk looked back and met Garin's eyes. "Some of them died years before they would have. Some of them died in greater pain. Some of them held out hope until the last minute and died still thinking they might get better. I did that, Garin. I can't deny that."

Garin shook his head. "You were trying to help."

"Was I?" Sazahk snorted and looked away, up at the stars stretching out above them. "When they arrested me, they said I was a monster. That I was a sick psychopath experimenting on children to satisfy my own deranged curiosity."

Garin bared his teeth as rage lanced through him. "That's not true." None of that was fucking true, and he dared anyone to look at the way bright green like the first grass of spring in the Turner gardens lit up Sazahk's face as he studied a funny-colored rock and say that the qesh was a monstrous psychopath.

"But I was curious." Sazahk hung his head. "I did want to know more about what was hurting them. I wanted to know how it worked. I wanted to know how to fix it and I wanted to know why other things didn't. I was fascinated."

Garin shuffled to Sazahk's side to look into his face. "Curiosity isn't a fucking crime."

Sazahk snapped his head up to glare at him. "Actually, in this case, it was. It was illegal to conduct the sorts of experiments I was conducting and to ask the sorts of questions I was asking about the Dead Zone and the qeshian genome."

Garin lifted his chin. "Well, I don't think you did anything wrong."

They glared at each other for a few moments, Sazahk's skin still tinged with purple and blue. Then the bruised colors faded into a muted brown, touched with yellow, and Sazahk's eyes softened into uncertainty. "You don't?"

"No, Sazahk." Garin gave in to the desire to touch and brushed his thumb over Sazahk's sharp cheekbone and tucked his hair behind his ear. "I don't."

Sazahk released a shuddering exhale and looked away. "Will you braid my hair, please?"

Garin's heart squeezed, and it took everything in him to resist the urge to wrap the man in his arms. Instead, he shuffled back behind him and parted his hair into three sections. "With pleasure, Sazahk."

Sazahk slumped before Garin, as though the confession had taken everything out of him. "I really did want to help them."

Garin arranged the locks of hair, muscle memory kicking in from the hours he'd spent with Beaty. "I know you did."

"And their parents." Sazahk's voice eased, the tension that had pulled it taut since the disruptor rod finally abating. Had this secret been eating him alive? Had he really thought Garin would reject him when he discovered it? "Given my poor relationship with my own progenitors, I found the extreme care and love displayed by the parents of those sick children oddly compelling."

"That makes sense." Garin wound Sazahk's long hair into thirteen-year-old Beaty's favorite style, the functional but elegant inverted braid.

"I never found out the results of the last round of experimental treatments." Sazahk picked up a twig from the ground and studied it. "They took my implant and cut me off from all Qeshian-controlled scientific databases, which is almost all of them, as well as the Qeshian National Archives, which is everything our species has ever developed or discovered."

"That must be frustrating." Garin slid the tip of his tongue between his teeth as he focused on not making the very end of Sazahk's braid uneven.

Sazahk's chin drooped, and he nodded as he peeled off a strip of bark from his stick. "It's isolating and crippling. It feels like they cut out part of my brain. They essentially did."

"I'm so sorry, Sazahk." Garin tied off the end of Sazahk's braid and squeezed his shoulder. If Sazahk were anyone else, he'd pull him into his arms and hold him, but as it was, Garin thought grabbing his shoulder might already be pushing it. "I can't imagine what that's like."

"Don't try." Sazahk turned and pulled his braid over his shoulder to examine it. "The Senate said they'd give me back my implant and clear my record if I proved instrumental in nullifying the Insect threat."

Garin's lips parted as Sazahk's stubbornness, defensiveness, and drive finally slotted together, but Sazahk powered on before he spoke.

"Which was the only reason I returned to sanctioned organizations, but of course, as usual, I'm curious, as well." Sazahk spat the word ‘curious' as though it were his own original sin and unzipped the sleeping bag roughly. "I want to believe that I'm motivated by the millions of lives hanging in the balance, but the evidence doesn't support that conclusion."

"You can have more than one reason for wanting to do something." Garin gently pulled Sazahk's hands away from yanking on the zipper when it got stuck. "It doesn't make any of them invalid."

Sazahk watched Garin open the sleeping bag, then climbed into it when Garin motioned for him to. He rolled onto his side and turned toward Garin so that when Garin slid in beside him, they lay face to face. Sazahk stared into his eyes, gray darkening his cheeks. "Garin, do you believe I care about anything other than myself?"

Garin's heart ached, and he cupped Sazahk's cheek and pushed the few hairs he'd missed behind the man's ear. "Yes. I have no doubt, Sazahk."

Sazahk's gray shifted into brown and Garin traced the swirl of rich color across the qesh's temple with his thumb. What did it mean? Garin was both desperate and afraid to know. He wanted it to be about him, and he didn't want to ask and have the fantasy shattered. He'd rather hold on to the hope.

Sazahk closed his eyes and turned into Garin's palm, making Garin's heart beat faster. He hoped the other man couldn't feel it through his hands. They'd never done this. They'd never touched for the pure comfort and intimacy of it.

Garin fought away his nervous shake and prayed his palm didn't turn clammy as he pet over Sazahk's hair, careful not to mess up his braid. He stroked along the back of Sazahk's head and down to the nape of his neck.

Sazahk shivered when Garin's fingertips brushed his scar tissue. "You have to be awake, you know. When they cut your implant out."

Garin's gorge rose. "Awake?"

Sazahk nodded without opening his eyes and shuffled closer, pressing their fronts together and tucking his head under Garin's chin. "May I have some of your body heat?"

"Of course." Garin wrapped an arm loosely around Sazahk's shoulders, his head spinning. "What do you mean, you have to be awake?"

"To ensure neural tissue remains undamaged and the majority of neural connections are maintained." Sazahk's voice had that faux detachment as he wrapped his arms around Garin's waist and slipped his hands under Garin's shirt. "You must be awake to answer a continuous stream of questions testing your cognitive and perceptive functions."

Garin knew better than to tighten his arms around Sazahk, so he nosed into the hair on the top of Sazahk's head and hoped that conveyed the comfort he desperately wanted to give.

"I didn't undergo the surgery willingly, and I fought against the orderlies assigned to restrain me." Sazahk held on to Garin's middle tight enough for the both of them, his blunt nails digging into Garin's skin and belying his calm tone. "Until I felt the scalpel and realized the danger I was in. Then I let them administer the paralytic." Sazahk's throat clicked as he swallowed. "And then they didn't need to hold me down, because I couldn't move."

And that's why Sazahk panicked when he was grabbed.

He'd said it wasn't about touch, it was about being held down, but Garin hadn't grasped the nuance.

Now it fucking made sense and Garin wanted to take Sazahk far away, back to Earth, back to the home with his family, where no one would ever hurt the sweet man again. No one would ever hold him down and cut him open, rip out a piece of him, and call him the monster.

Garin's hand shook where it stroked Sazahk's biceps. "That should have never happened to you."

Sazahk shrugged, but the shiver that accompanied it told Garin his words had struck a chord in the mysterious man. "Lots of things happen to people that never should have."

"That doesn't make what happened to you any less terrible."

Sazahk shuddered again, and this time Garin heard the wet sound of a muffled sob. "Do you believe me now? That my reluctance to allow you to braid my hair was never because I found you wanting?"

"I believe you." Garin grimaced, guilty for having forced Sazahk to share this trauma with him to save the feelings he'd hurt with his own self-absorption. "I'm sorry for not believing you before."

"I wasn't honest with you." Sazahk settled against Garin's body, limbs heavy. "Your distrust was a natural side effect."

"Thank you for sharing this part of your past with me." Garin kissed the top of Sazahk's head and Sazahk stiffened and Garin grimaced again. He just couldn't keep his damn feelings in, could he? They kept leaking out of him, as chaotic and un-contained as Sazahk's pack.

But then Sazahk loosened again and burrowed even farther into the warmth of Garin's body. "You're welcome. Can we go to sleep now?"

"Yeah." Garin let out a relieved chuckle. "Yeah, I think that's a good idea."

He shifted into a more comfortable position while still keeping Sazahk's slim body tucked tight to his, right where it should be. Right where it should be every night. Garin pressed his lips together as he closed his eyes. That was a fantasy. But in the warm space of this sleeping bag, before sleep took him, Garin let himself indulge in it.