When I woke up in the morning, Rekkan had already searched the house for any remaining supplies and was boiling a pot of oats over the fire. His bionic leg leaned against the wall beside the closet. He had taken it off before sleeping the night before, but seeing it in the morning sunlight unsettled me. 

Attached to him, the leg exuded power, intrigue, and allure. Without him, it was a chunk of metal — a manufactured corpse.

“Morning.”

I tore my eyes from the leg to glance at Rekkan. The hand stirring the pot of oatmeal draped over his bent knee, and his other hand propped on the ground beside his stump leg. A posture with such easy grace. He smiled faintly, but something shrouded his eyes.

“The leg will come off every time we need a fire, so you’ll have to get used to seeing me without it.”

I shook my head. “Seeing you without the leg is fine. It’s seeing the leg without you that scares me.”

His brow furrowed. “Why? Pretty sure that microchip is inactive right now.”

I shrugged, struggling to explain. “It’s not about that. It just scares me to think of you being missing… of losing you.”

He cocked his head, brow furrowing further. “Well, I’m not missing, and like it or not, I plan on sticking around.” Then he nodded at the oatmeal. “Now come eat.”

We left the farmhouse as soon as we finished eating. For twenty minutes, we trekked along the highway. Then we turned off the highway onto a wooded road. Slender tree shadows striped the road, and patches of melted snow revealed coarse gravel. Birds chirped, and tree branches rustled with bushy squirrel tails. 

I wanted to enjoy the scenery, but the peacefulness unnerved me. Beside me, Rekkan’s shoulders bunched, jaw ticked, and gaze flicked left and right. When I touched his hand, he squeezed my fingers and shot me a smile, but tension lined his forehead, and I knew the same question rolled through his mind.

Where were all the Infected?

By the time we stopped for lunch, the sun beamed down from directly overhead. We cut into the woods a ways and then perched side-by-side on a log. While Rekkan opened cans and divided food into bowls, I resumed poring over the book from my mother. 

The closer I came to the start of the book, the more vague the allusions to the Infected and to the Noble Forces. I reached the front cover without finding anything of interest. When Rekkan offered me a bowl of beans, veggies, and crackers, I released a sigh and started to close the book… 

And stopped.

I stared at the jotted note on the inside cover. My hands clasped the book hard enough to tear a page, and tears swam over my vision, blurring the words.

Rekkan drew in a breath and withdrew the offered food. “Zaf? What happened?”

“I just never expected she’d —” Unable to speak, I shifted the book to show Rekkan the note.

Dedicated to Zafaru, who shines brighter than Ether. I will never stop until I have secured the future you deserve.

“Oh,” said Rekkan, voice hesitant and stilted. He tapped two fingers over the bowl still in his hands. “So, are those happy tears or sad tears?”

I jerked my shoulders in a shrug. “I used to dream of something like this, but it’s somehow… disappointing. It’s nice to know she was proud of me and cared this much, but I just…” I swallowed and shook my head. “A dedication in a book is nice. More time with her would have been better.”

Rekkan’s shoulders lifted with a breath, his mouth opened and shut, and his chest deflated again. Then he set the bowl on the ground and grabbed my hand, slotting his fingers through mine. “Is there anything I can do?”

I glanced at him, noticing the flecks of gold in his soft brown eyes. So beautiful, and so invested in me… but still in many ways a stranger. 

“Can you tell me about your family?”

His fingers twitched, and his gaze dropped to the ground. When several seconds passed in silence, I almost gave up on getting an answer. Then he started speaking.

“My mother died during childbirth and never told anyone who my father was. Luckily, she had a big, wonderful family all willing to take care of me… at first.” He snorted a humorless laugh, gaze fixed somewhere in the trees beyond. “They were infallibly kind, but they all hated me.”

“How could any kind person hate an orphan child?”

“Well, I was a strange child. I didn’t smile, didn’t listen to rules, didn’t play well with others. They were… scared of me, I think. But they each dutifully accepted the burden as long as they could.” He smiled, the kind of hard, bitter smile I had only ever seen before when he spoke to the redhead while I was imprisoned. “They even hosted a party each year on the first day of Spring — my birthday. Every single one of them showed up bearing an expensive gift and a fake smile. Pity and fear, that’s what I saw. I’m not sure which hurt more.”  

I squeezed his hand. “That sounds hard.”

His eyes dropped to where our skin touched, and he blinked, as though surprised to see we remained connected. When his eyes returned to my face, they softened a little.

“Wouldn’t have been that hard if I just stopped trying… stopped expecting… but I thought I could change the outcome. Each time I moved into a new house, I used to thank them for having me there. And I would thank them again every night before I went to sleep, regardless of what happened during the day. They used to say, ‘There’s no need to thank us, Rekkan. You’re family.’ Took me years to realize they wanted me to stop because it just made them feel guilty. Just made everything harder. Just made me weak.

“And no matter how much I thanked them, it was never more than a few months before they sat me down to deliver some version of the same spiel. ‘It’s not anything you’ve done wrong. It’s just about what’s right for our family right now.’ They’d ship me off with a kiss on the forehead and a truckful of gifts, but I knew the truth — that I was broken somehow, and no one could ever actually want me. So at some point, I stopped thanking them. Stopped thanking anyone.”

When he fell silent, so did the woods around us. The squirrels forgot the chase, the birds forgot their song, and I forgot how to breathe. The only movement was my fingers on his, straightening the joints and brushing every callous, attempting to physically portray the words my voice failed to provide. Despite the physical and verbal abuse I received as a child, I had known my mother loved me, and I had been determined to prove my father wrong. Rekkan had grown up without love — with only unspoken judgments he feared proving right.

But they were wrong. The judgments were all wrong.

When I finally found my voice, I only whispered, “But I want you.”

He huffed a laugh with more bemusement than humor. “I know. I don’t understand how, but I know you —” 

Twigs cracked, and footsteps approached. Rekkan’s left hand clamped over mine almost painfully, and his right darted toward his rifle.

Two figures stepped out from behind a tree, a woman holding the hand of a small child. Filthy rags clung to their haggardly thin frames, and bruises, cuts, and dark marks mottled their skin. The woman raised her free hand above her head in what could have been greeting or surrender.

I bit my lip and side-glanced Rekkan. “Infected?”

Rekkan released my hand and jerked his rifle up to aim at the woman’s forehead. “Let’s hope so.”