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  Ava looked to Kondr and nodded tightly. “Doctor, I need to speak with you about the next stage.”

  Dr. Rathos frowned but inclined his head. “Of course. This way.”

  Ava gave Kondr a hand gesture that told him to stay. She followed Rathos to a small office that had been built on a balcony.

  The feeling of fresh air against her skin made her smile and being able to look out over the city caused an ache in her heart.

  “What did you need to speak to me about, Healer?”

  “I know what is required for the next phase in theory, but I don’t know how to describe it without complete mortification.” She dropped into a chair, and the doctor mimicked her, sitting close.

  “Just say it. We have the initial sample to try on our volunteers, so what is the hesitation for what comes next?”

  Ava blurted it out. “The volunteer needs to be male, needs to get injected with a sample from my blood and then I have to…”

  “Yes?”

  “I have to take DNA from that volunteer into my body and thereby create a working serum for your people.”

  “Of course, we can insert a sample under your skin as you mentioned earlier.”

  She winced. “No, I am afraid that my body will feel it as an attack. This is the hard part. I will have to have sex with the volunteer.” She tried to cool her skin by will alone.

  Initially she had assumed that she could create a simple anti-viral but the plague was hardier than it looked. Tricking her biology was her only choice.

  “Oh. That is unacceptable for you?”

  Ava ran her hand across her braid. “No. Yes. It has been over a decade for me, and I don’t want my first time in that long to be under duress.”

  Rathos frowned, “A decade? Are the men of your world dead? You are not Admorik, but you are exceptionally attractive. It is no wonder that Kondr is sniffing after you.”

  “I think that it is a matter of being convenient.” She groaned and rubbed the back of her neck. “Can you please restrict the volunteers to men? I can heal them enough to have sex with them if they happen to be in the ward.”

  “Very well. I will also brief the man as to your state of…practice.”

  She groaned and covered her face with her hands. “That is more due to my being a contact healer. No one can get close to me without my healing them and that is rather distracting when you know that men are seeking you out to remove their wounds or diseases.”

  Rathos winced. “I can understand that. Very well. I will be careful in my selection. So far, there are twenty volunteers and five that are registering as compatible. Help with those in immediate danger, and I will speak with you later in the day.”

  “Fine, but do me a favour and get some rest. Take a nap with your wife and relax. You are no good if you are exhausted.” Avaneer got to her feet and left him alone on the balcony, her next sexual encounter in his hands.

  Kondr took a look at her face and his smug bantering took a blow. “What is wrong?”

  She put her hand on the centre of his chest and pushed. He stumbled back.

  “I. Am. Tired. Of. Not. Being. In. Control. Of. My. Own. Body.” Each word was punctuated with a shove until Kondr was out in the hallway.

  “You are quite strong.” His words were carefully spoken.

  “Yes. My body can take half and again this gravity. I will be in the room where your grandmother was yesterday. Follow me or not, I have come to realise that I don’t have a choice.”

  Switching from happy arousal to anger to depression was horrific, but it came with being a contact healer. Those around them stabilized normal folk. They were comforted by touch, socialization, all the things that were forbidden to the contact healers.

  She entered the room with those in final stages of the disease and spoke to the attendant. “Who is furthest along?”

  The attendant took her to the first patient, a man in his prime whose body was atrophied to the point where he could not move. She washed his blood, and when he returned to mobility, she left the attendant to explain to him that he was not cured, but he had more time.

  It was a pattern that took over the entire afternoon. She had washed the blood of twenty patients, and the room was empty.

  Kondr came to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Rathos has some news.”

  Ava looked at the arms touching her, and while one showed signs of a ruby hardening of the flesh, the other had a long scrape on it. “What is that?”

  “Rathos took a skin sample to test it against your blood.” He wrapped an arm around her and steered her back to the medical lab.

  “What are his results?”

  “You are a hard woman to match. He will fill you in on the rest.” He didn’t say anything else until they were standing in front of the good doctor. “Rathos. She’s here.”

  Dr. Rathos looked up from his screens and smiled. “We have found you a suitable volunteer, Avaneer. Will you accept my findings?”

  Ava hung her head in surrender. “I will. I will abide by your findings.”

  “We had a complete roster of fifty volunteers. Fifteen were removed, because they were female, five males because they prefer other men, twenty-seven of the remaining were unsuitable matches which left us with three. Based on your preferences, I selected a candidate who will be attentive to your more particular needs.”

  Kondr had his arms crossed over his chest, and he was scowling at the screens. “Who did you pick, Rathos?”

  Dr. Rathos turned around in his chair and smiled. “You are the candidate, Kondr. You have had the most exposure to her, and your system is already attuned to hers. Hers is also receptive to you, so go on and work on the cure. You have two days before anyone will expect to see you again.”

  Ava was in shock. “Thank you for your efforts, Dr. Rathos. I will bring you the blood sample as soon as I am sure that it is set for the Admorik.”

  Numbly, she turned and walked out of the room, toward the stairs. Kondr joined her, silent and sombre.

  He reached out and grabbed her hand. “Wait. Let’s not go there. I have a place within the city that will be more private.”

  She looked down at his hand. “I know it is a lot to ask, but is there a place where I can get something else to wear? If I have to do this, I want it to feel rather more like a date and less like a medical procedure.”

  “That can be arranged. Do you have a preference for colour?” He put an arm around her, and together, they walked down to the main floor.

  Persons in the first waves of infection were milling around, some weeping, others giving comfort. Everyone was very calm and that frightened Ava more than anything she had seen.

  She waited until they were outside the building and on the skimmer. “How can they all just accept their impending demise?”

  “We live for a very long time. When we are dying, we know it.” He flew the skimmer through the streets, along a wide pathway bordering a body of water.

  “Where are we going?”

  “My home. It is within the city limits but on the edge of the ocean. It will afford us privacy while keeping us within the quarantine zone.”

  “I am still having a hard time with the fact that your population calmly accepted this situation.”

  “There was a wave of dissent, but our councillors and the prefects calmed the population by telling them that my little ship was on the way to pick up a healer. They then frantically called me, and we redirected to the station where I found you. It was most peculiar, as if they were waiting for my request for a high-grav healer.”

  She snorted. “I was kidnapped from my last assignment and stuffed into my transport pod after I was gassed. At this point, I was supposed to be on the Rhetek base waiting for my next dispatch to a planet with someone who needs my attention, someone who has been waiting for a healer for a while.”

  Kondr looked at her as he drove. “Should I feel guilty? I think not. There is far more than coincidence at work here. That meteor was a biolog
ical weapon. They wanted us infected and you here.”

  That brought something to mind. “What is so special about the Admorik?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone has handed you a contact healer that can create not only a cure for your race but also the most violent toxin known to your people. Don’t you feel that that is dangerous?”

  The skimmer swerved as he jerked his head toward her. “What do you mean?”

  Ava admitted to surprise. “You honestly don’t know? They call me living bane. Once I heal a race, I can generate a toxin to destroy them at will. I thought that the fellow who handed me over would have mentioned it.”

  Kondr’s hands clenched on the controls. “He did not.”

  She sighed, “Don’t worry. It is not in my plans for any future I can imagine, but whoever stole me did it for that reason. It is the only thing that makes me different from other contact healers. I can save the patterns of any species I have ever touched, and I can craft a substance to either heal them or kill them.”

  “This would have been important to know before you touched your first patient.”

  “I wasn’t really given an option. The pathogen struck me the moment the pod opened.”

  Kondr smashed his fist against the control panel. “No wonder he told me not to open the pod before we landed.”

  The skimmer wobbled dangerously. “I understand your outrage, but can we finish this conversation when we get to our location? It seems to be getting you riled up.”

  He nodded tightly and set the skimmer down. “We are here.”

  She looked around at the gleaming white building perched on the edge of the rocky shore. “Well, then. I think it is time you began asking the questions you should have asked before you tried to save your people.”

  Chapter Six

  “Is this the prefect’s home?” She looked around and listened to her voice echo.

  “No, it is the Lytan family home. My grandmother lives here, and my sister and her husband visit often. It is my sister’s clothing that I am offering to you.” He gestured and directed her down a long hall to the side of the home facing the ocean. The tour was brief. He took her directly to a large bedroom central to the house. “I will return in a moment. Feel free to open the shutters.”

  With the brusque suggestion hanging in the air, Avaneer walked to the floor-to-ceiling panels, and she yanked open the shutters. The blast of air off the ocean greeted her and ruffled her robes. Ava walked to the edge of the balcony and stared out at the rocks being beaten by the surf. The violence of the scene managed to be the most peaceful thing she had seen on the surface of Nafki. The population was handling the plague well, but the very act of infecting an entire world was one of the most vicious and violent acts she had ever witnessed.

  Ava closed her eyes and drank in the sunlight, let the wind tug at her robes, and she wished with all her heart that she were home. Tears started to flow the moment she heard Kondr return and his footsteps brought her crashing back to reality.

  She wiped at her cheeks, trying to remove the traces of her crying.

  “I have brought you a few gowns to choose from. Once you have changed, we will have a meal and I will ask the questions I should have asked earlier.” Kondr’s voice was quiet.

  She nodded. “Of course. I will join you in a moment.”

  “I will heat up some food and bring it up in a few minutes.”

  She nodded again, and the moment that she heard him leave, she turned and examined the dresses that he had brought. The yellow one-shoulder gown immediately got her attention.

  She shucked out of her layers and slipped the gown over bare skin. Her toes wiggled on the floor, and she let out a giggle. A short exploration showed her the master bath, and she used the mirror to let her watch the length of her hair tumble to mid-waist. The gown left her left shoulder bare, and when she returned to the balcony, she spun around and around, loving the flare of the gown around her legs and the feel of it settling against her ankles when she stopped.

  “My sister used to do that when she first began to wear women’s clothing.”

  His voice startled her out of her girlish fun. She froze, suddenly aware of how the gown outlined her body from shoulder to hip before flowing out in soft yellow folds.

  He smiled. “You look lovely.”

  Her blush should have burst her gown into flames. It started on her cheeks and crept down her belly.

  He slid the tray he was holding onto a small table with two chairs. “Dinner is served.”

  She nodded and inhaled. “It smells good.”

  “Thank you. My grandmother has made sure that frozen meals are always available for me.” He placed a napkin across his lap, and she had to smile.

  “It is a good thing that she has. I am not sure I could manage cooking with your ingredients.” She mimicked him by placing the napkin across her lap, and she carefully explored the tastes of the dish. It was sort of a beef stew, if the beef was turkey and the vegetables were seaweed. Ava muscled through it, chanting to herself that it was better than nothing and she needed the protein if the next phase of this was to work.

  It took three small glasses of water to stop the meal from trying to return from whence it came.

  “So, how will you generate the cure for the plague?”

  She cleared her throat. “Do you want all the details?”

  “As much as you can manage, yes. Let’s start with, why does it have to be sex?”

  She blushed and sipped more water. “Well, that is a matter of rejected matter. Pardon the phrasing. If something enters my body and stays there, I have to find a way to convince my tissues that it is a good thing. Pleasure is the easiest way to fool my body into accepting foreign DNA.”

  “Why?”

  “My body, like many female bodies, wants nothing more than to propel my own genes, in order to do that, I need to have sex and get some DNA that is not my own into the picture. My body will be all for it.” She was grim.

  His lips twisted in amusement. “That actually makes sense but why did you initially say that you needed a sample of tissue beneath your skin?”

  “I was trying to push the true nature of the exposure out of my mind as long as I could.” She nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Why were you in a pod?”

  Ava winced. “Because I am dangerous, I am normally transported under guard and in the pod to keep me from being exposed to other species. I am capable of self-defence, and it tends to make folks very cautious when using my services.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ava sighed and leaned back. “Most contact healers touch a person and transfer the injuries or illness to their own bodies. Our bodies heal much more quickly than most. My body takes the injury and catalogues it. It finds the cure for the pathogen but keeps the original. In the case of a new species, I find what makes it live and can create what would make it die.”

  “Do you do that a lot?”

  She shook her head. “Once was enough.”

  “Once? You have done that before?”

  She sighed and buried her hands in her hair. “Yes. Until that day, it had been a theory and a leak at the Alliance must have shared that idea. I was kidnapped and hauled onto a ship where a giant fairy tried to force me to use my talent to kill one of their prisoners, a strange man with black eyes.”

  “What did you do?”

  She held up her hand staring at her fingers. “I touched the man with the wings, and he started screaming. First, I copied everything that he was, and then, I burned it in his own bloodstream. The man with the black eyes got to his feet and hauled the fairy to an airlock. He dropped me off at the nearest Alliance base and disappeared.”

  “So you know who or what took you?”

  She smiled grimly. “No, but if I am ever near one of his kind again, the slightest breath of air, and they will be going down.”

  “It sounds like self-defence.”

  “It is, but it is also the
basis for a weapon of mass destruction, similar to the one that struck Nafki.” She sighed. “I don’t know. All I know is if they were asking you to return me, then they want the destruct genome for the Admorik.”

  Kondr’s features were grim. “That is now abundantly clear to me. What should I do?”

  This was the moment when Avaneer had to be blunt. “You either kill me or give me a home here once the cure is complete.”

  Shock wiped over his features. “Do you know what you are saying?”

  She chuckled grimly. “Oh yes. There is only one way to assure your world’s safety and that is by either granting me sanctuary here, a small place out of the way where no one can find me or by killing me before I can be used to destroy not only you but all of those species related to yours.”

  “What?” His question was a shout.

  “Well, it can easily be turned into something that can take out anyone related to the Admorik and that means the Admaryn and any of its offspring species.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” The horror in his expression was obvious.

  Ava winced. “I am going to guess that it has to do with the Admaryn transport network. Anywhere there is an ancient colony site, there is usually a transport tunnel.”

  “Nafki has no such tunnel.”

  “Of course not. It is a high-gravity issue. You can’t go from high gravity to low in an instant, you would fly apart.”

  He frowned, “Then why Nafki?”

  Guilt ran through her even though she knew she was not to blame. “I was altered to work on heavy-gravity worlds, and I can’t go back. To create a method of killing Admaryn descendants, they had to find a planet to put me on.”

  Kondr groaned, “This is a lot of information. Are you sure?”

  “No. It is conjecture. I am guessing. Can I go for a walk along the shore? It has been a while since I felt the wind on my skin.”

  “Fine. Take a walk but don’t go too far. I will speak with what is left of our government and join you when I am done.” Kondr nodded and left the room.

  Sighing, Avaneer walked through the house until she found a door that led outside. The sun was lowering but there was still plenty of light.