“Don’t be such a worrywart. I know exactly how wide this is. Nine inches.” I carefully made my way back to him and stopped a couple feet away. I looked down, unable to see the width of the ledge or the shape of my boots. “The ledge is like my field of vision. Well, except the edges here are straight and not like a wonky circle where things are sometimes clear and sometimes blurry. Everything else is...” I lifted my arms. “Shadows. It’s weird, because sometimes it’s not even black. It’s like gray. I don’t know. That might be the cataracts.”

“Do you think it’s possible to get them removed?”

“My eyes?”

“The cataracts.” He sighed.

I grinned again. “The last doctor I saw said they were actually protecting my retinas in a way, and until they’re causing a real problem, they wanted to hold off on talking about surgery. There are a lot more risks involved with operating on people who have RP, and more possible side effects.”

“I hate to think what might classify as a real problem.”

I snorted, thinking that while I’d adapted the best I could to the restricted vision, the cataracts often annoyed the Hell out of me. “If they cause a lot of pain or fully obstruct my central vision, I guess.”

“But you said your eyes hurt before.”

“Yeah, but it’s manageable. More of an achy feeling and that probably has nothing to do with the cataracts. I mean, not directly. I do think I need to have my eyes checked, though.” Tipping my head back, I looked up at the sky. It took me a moment to see the distant, faint glow of one star and then another. “I had edemas once before. They could come back.”

“Macular edemas? The swelling behind the retinas?” he asked, surprising me once more with his own independent research. “That could be what’s causing your eyes to ache. We need to make an appointment. Call Thierry and see if the doctor they took you to could hook you up with someone closer, like the Wilmer Eye Institute over in Baltimore. They’re a part of Johns Hopkins.”

He really had done his research.

“We’ll just have to be careful,” he continued. “As long as there’s no genetic testing—”

“They’ll have no idea I’m not completely human.” I lowered my arms, inching closer to Zayne. “Though, can you imagine if they did test? The look on the geneticists’ faces when they got an eyeful of my DNA?”

He laughed. “They’d probably think you’re an alien.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in aliens.”

“I never said that. I just said it wasn’t likely those spikes belonged to aliens.”

“And I said that those spikes could belong to angels,” I pointed out. “Just to remind you, I was right.”