BONDED ENEMIES

Chapter 11: First Digit

Ward arrived at seven with his med kit and two circles under his eyes that looked painted on.

Hollis told Silas at the thirty-minute mark that Dr. Ward was in the sitting room. Silas had set himself eight kilometers that morning and had four hundred meters left, and he did not stop in the middle of a distance for anything, so he kept running. Ward had known that about him for years.

The morning was cold and clean and empty, and the wind came off the windbreak in long flat pushes.

Then the garden door opened.

Kestrel came out onto the gravel in a jacket thrown over the shirt he had slept in, no boots, hair flat on one side, moving fast and moving away from the house. Hands in his pockets. Shoulders up around his ears. He angled for the track, and Silas understood the whole of it before the man had taken ten steps.

An Alpha had come into the house. Ward was dosed to the back teeth on suppressants and scent-blocker and was still, at the end of it, a first-level account walking into a raid — and Kestrel had smelled him through a closed door, out of a dead sleep, three floors up. And instead of coming down for him, he had walked out the garden door.

Silas filed it and kept running.

The footsteps caught up on the back straight and fell in beside him, matching his pace.

"You sick?" Kestrel said.

"No."

"Then why is your doctor in your house at seven in the morning."

"Drawing blood. Matching coefficient."

Four strides. Five.

"Say it comes back high," Kestrel said. "Say it comes back low. Say it comes back a number that explains every single thing that's happened to you since the wormhole, and you finally get to stop lying to your own paperwork." Then, lighter, a card set face down on a table: "Does a number change anything between us?"

Silas did not answer that one.

"That's a no," Kestrel said. "When it's a no, you go quiet."

Silas came off the bend and let his stride open on the straight. "We're a contract. The contract ends, you leave Federation space, and we never see each other again. The number doesn't enter into it."

"There it is." Kestrel's stride lengthened, then shortened, restless. "You put the whole answer in one sentence and then you wait for the other person to get tired. Fine. Then tell me why we're doing it. Not the matching — the test. Why does the number matter so much to the man who says the number doesn't matter."

Silas reached the marker post and stopped, and turned, breathing hard.

"I was an Alpha," he said. "Now I'm an Omega. I want to know why that happened to me."

Kestrel's stride broke — half a step, no more — and then caught and held. Whatever had crossed his face was gone by the time Silas looked over. He was standing on cold gravel in his jacket and bare feet, not out of breath at all, because he had run forty meters and Silas had run eight kilometers.

"If you'd rather not," Silas said, "we don't have to."

"Who said I'd rather not."

Silas looked at him a moment longer. Then he turned and started back toward the house, and Kestrel followed, and neither of them said anything else the whole way.

---

Silas came in through the side door with sweat cooling on his neck, and Ward was on his feet before it shut.

"Admiral—" He had half a strawberry in one hand and a plate on the table with two more on it, and he pointed the strawberry at the plate the way other men pointed at evidence. "Do you know these are a byproduct?"

Silas stopped. "A what?"

"That's the word." Ward gestured at the ceiling, at the small grille where the house kept its voice. "The best fruit I have eaten in my life, and the machine calls it housekeeping waste."

"The fruit is a byproduct of grounds maintenance, Dr. Ward," Hollis said.

"See." Ward ate the other half. "This is the best thing about this assignment. I say that to people. Out loud. If anyone ever asks you what I do out here, tell them the strawberries are outstanding and the rest is paperwork."

Then his eyes went past Silas, and his face closed like a fist.

Kestrel came through the door behind him and stopped in the middle of the room, chin up, hands in his pockets.

"I'm what, Doctor?"

"Nothing." Ward had found the sofa and sat down on it, which had not been a decision. He picked up the cushion beside him and held it against his chest. "Nothing at all. You must have misheard."

"My hearing's bad, then."

"No — that isn't—" Ward looked at Silas. The look said everything a look could say, and none of it was help.

Silas took the room in. The med kit open at Ward's feet. The fruit plate. The black rings under the man's eyes, and the reason for them, which Silas knew without either of them ever having said it out loud: Ward had spent his whole career as the second name on somebody else's file, and this week somebody had handed him a case that had never been written up anywhere in the Federation. Silas could read the want on him from across the room.

"Kestrel," he said. "Go to your room."

"Why should I."

"Fine. Ward, come upstairs with me."

Kestrel was in front of him before the sentence ended. "Upstairs where."

"To wash and change. He waits in the hall."

"He's an Alpha."

"He's my doctor."

Kestrel stood there a moment, jaw working, and lost the calculation. He stepped aside — not far — and looked at Ward with great precision. "Your room," he said, to Silas, without looking away from Ward. "He doesn't go into your room."

"Understood," Ward said, to nobody, very fast. "Absolutely. I'll wait in the hall."

Silas went up.

He showered and changed, and on the way back down he took out his terminal and wrote, for the first time since he had given the number away the night before: We're starting. The doctor's here.

The reply came a few seconds later — a small cartoon figure flat on its back with one arm over its eyes, one finger lifting, very slowly, into the air.

---

Ward had the analyzer out on the table and was setting his equipment down with exaggerated care, the way a man handles things when his hands are the only part of himself he still trusts. The analyzer was the size of a closed fist: gray, a clear lid over a sample well, a dark little screen behind it. One drop of blood, and never more than half an hour.

"Which arm?" Ward said.

"Left."

Ward found the vein and took his sample. His hands, Silas noted, were steady. They had been shaking a few minutes ago on the sofa, and half an hour before that Silas had watched a needle slip out of this same man's grip and get caught out of the air one-handed, and both of those things were true of the same pair of hands. On the needle, Ward did not shake. Silas had known him long enough to rely on that and had never once said so.

The bead of red went into the well. Ward closed the lid.

Footsteps on the stairs.

Kestrel came down dressed now — full shirt, jacket, boots, hair pushed back. Ward did not hear him until he was at the bottom step, because the man could cross a room you were standing in and leave no trace on your skin, and then say one word beside your ear and you would come out of it.

Ward came out of it.

The syringe left his hand, turned once in the air, and made for the floor. He caught it with his off hand, one-handed, a clean snatch that looked like luck and was not. He held it up at eye level. His face had gone the color of skimmed milk.

Kestrel looked at him, eyebrows up. "What are you, an actual mouse?" And then, to Silas, in the same voice, as if it were one sentence: "And he's the Alpha."

Silas did not look up.

"Arm," Ward said. It came out thin.

He did not come closer. Kestrel did not offer his arm. He stood with both of them at his sides and watched Ward the way a man watches somebody who has just announced to a room that he is afraid of him. He said nothing, which was the worst of it — he just stood there and waited to see which Ward would reach for first, the needle or something else.

"Admiral," Ward said, very small.

Silas looked at the two of them for a moment. He was tired. He had a bruise coming up on his own arm from the first draw, and it was not nine yet, and he had spent most of his working life putting himself between men who would not move.

He reached out and took Kestrel's bare wrist.

Kestrel made a small, outraged sound and pulled. Silas's grip did not change.

"Doctor," Silas said. "Stick."

Ward stuck.

A jet of blood came up around the needle and went sideways, a fine spray that landed across the right lens of Ward's glasses in a small constellation of dots. Ward looked at it. He looked at Kestrel. He did not wipe it off. He turned, held the vial level over the well, and let a second bead fall, and then he walked around to the far side of the table and sat with his back to the wall.

"How long," Kestrel said.

"Under half an hour. It's usually faster the higher the—" Ward stopped himself. Whatever he had been about to say, he put it back where it had come from.

"Higher the what."

"The faster the reading," Ward said.

Kestrel stayed where he was, standing, which was its own kind of statement. Silas sat at the head of the table with his sleeve rolled up and watched the analyzer, and for a while nobody said anything at all.

Then the machine made a small, round sound, and the clear lid lit from underneath.

Kestrel got there first. Three strides and he was over it, shoulder to shoulder with a machine the size of a fist, his back to the room.

"What is it?"

Ward came around him, glasses first, and got as far as the man's elbow. "Move — I can't see—"

"Then move."

Silas stayed where he sat. From the head of the table the digits on the little screen were small, and they were still arriving, one settling into place ahead of the rest. The first one that stopped was a nine.