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The lines of data from his experiments. The papers he’d written on cell functioning and mutation. The questions he’d had and the evidence he’d gathered to answer them.
“And another one. Just one more.”
Memories. The subtle quirk of his parents’ lips as he’d graduated with every academic honor available. The look on a little girl’s face when he’d told her she had three more weeks to live than she’d thought. The look on her father’s face when she’d died, right on time. His brother’s scowl. The sneer on the face of the captain sent by the Senate to arrest him.
“And done.”
Power.
Sazahk exploded out the flex metal tentacles at the base of the operating table. He reached them out in every direction, knocking away the surgeon and his assistant, the nurse with his asinine tablet, the anesthetist with her needles and tubes.
“What the fuck?”
“How—”
“Sir! Calm down, please!”
Screams at various levels of alarm echoed in the small, glass operating theater as Sazahk threw everyone away from him. Apparently, no one had bothered to revisit the permissions granted to his implant. After his fall from grace, they’d taken his implant, locked it up, and never worried about the fact that it was a key to every system on every major Qeshian station.
Sazahk wrapped a tendril around the tube pumping the paralytic into his system and yanked it out. Immediately, life leeched back into the tips of his fingers.
“Sir, please calm down. The surgeon needs to stitch you up.” The nurse recovered first, closing in on Sazahk despite the maelstrom of tentacles he whipped up around himself. He felt the nurse fighting to take back control of the flex metal tools of the operating room, but Sazahk’s access overrode his.
Sazahk flicked his gaze through the surrounding cameras, seeing the world again in a way he hadn’t in so long.
He saw himself, sitting up from the operating table, blood dripping down his spine and soaking into his robes.
Expanding outwards, he saw Patrick pacing out in the hall, oblivious to the chaos Sazahk wreaked within. But if he was oblivious to Sazahk’s mayhem, why the concern in his face? Concern that on anyone else’s face, Sazahk would read as panic except that Patrick didn’t panic.
But the anxiety in his eyes was close, and something deep in Sazahk’s gut hardened into the cold weight of fear.
He stumbled to his feet, catching himself with thick tentacles as he swayed and tripped, still weak from the paralytic they’d pumped through his veins.
Patrick hadn’t been concerned about anything when Sazahk left him. And the only things he was supposed to have learned about in the brief time Sazahk had been out of commission were the whereabouts of Dom and Garin.
And now he was concerned.
Sazahk ordered the sliding glass gate of the operating room to open, then shoved through the door into the hall and staggered out.
“Sazahk!” Patrick spun around, his blue eyes wide and his jaw dropping. “Are you okay? What are doing? What happened?”
Sazahk shook his head and fended off Patrick’s advance with a tentacle to his chest. “You have news.”
“What are you talking about?” Patrick swept his gaze over him, over the blood smeared across the side of his neck, his hair pinned in disarray, the thick tentacle holding his shaking frame up, and the three thinner ones he kept poised around himself like guard dogs. “You don’t look done?—”
“About Garin and Dom, you have news. I know you do. What is it?”
Patrick opened his mouth, visibly debated with himself, then closed it. He swallowed and that display of nerves from Patrick snapped the last thread of Sazahk’s hope. “It’s not good.”
Chapter Fifteen
Sazahk forced open the door to the Qeshian diplomatic chambers, the power of his implant surging through him but doing nothing to allay the helpless, panicked tightness in his chest. The cluster of robed dignitaries spun around, but Sazahk ignored them.
He focused on his brother standing at the head of the table with the blue of shock sweeping across his nose. “I need your help.”
Serihk wiped the colors from his skin and nodded. “Give us the room.”
“Emissary.” One of the older diplomats balked. “He doesn’t have clearan?—”
