Must get all of us out, said a thought that wasn’t Tennal’s. The unit too. Do what we have to. And behind it, Surit’s rock-solid, unending determination. Tennal saw with sudden, unnatural clarity how the military kept knocking down everything Surit had built and how Surit was used to pulling himself back up and putting one foot in front of the other. A defensive flare from Surit’s mind. Tennal shut his eyes and reached to the wall for balance. He felt Surit wince and put his hand over his face.

“Are you all right, sir?” the aide said, in a tone with more than a touch of suspicion. “The governor said to meet her at the docking bay.”

Tennal breathed deep. Two bodies opened two sets of eyes. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 24

They were in the elevator to the reception bay before Tennal got the faintest semblance of stability back.

They were alone: the aide hustled him and Surit through the closing door, then once he was certain they were heading down, hurried to the next task. Tennal had a sudden, horrible moment when he couldn’t remember which appendage was his left leg. He had to catch the rail for balance. The doors closed him and Surit into sudden, deafening silence.

This can’t be how it’s supposed to work.

That thought hadn’t been Tennal. He didn’t even need to look at Surit to know the terror wasn’t just his; it bounced and refracted between the two of them. If Tennal didn’t concentrate, he had four hands, two throats, two sets of arteries pumping blood to an upsetting multitude of alveoli. He could feel Surit’s spleen. He’d never consciously felt his own, but his mind knew now there were two. Both felt like Tennal’s. That wasn’t good.

Surit was right; surely a normal sync couldn’t be like this. The conscripted readers might not have a choice, but the military’s architects would never have agreed to being stretched across two bodies for the rest of their life. Of course, a normal sync wasn’t supposed to have both sides throw themselves at each other with everything they had. Surit and Tennal must have done it wrong. It was supposed to be a measured process where the architect took control.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t one of them taking control.

Tennal couldn’t get rid of the feeling that this wasn’t two minds in a bond but two fragments of one thing—severed, alien—coming back together. Tennal had always thought of his reader abilities as part of himself. Now, for the first time, he thought about them as a genetic echo of the experiments their parents had gone through. An inherited passenger that Tennal would never really understand. He shoved the thought aside as unhelpful.

Surit slumped in the other corner. As the first stab of fear faded, Tennal felt … something else.