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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?”
