Bree has recovered from surgery, but we’re still scheduling these ahead as we work on a secret project! Mwahahahaha! This serial was originally posted (mostly!) on Patreon, and has been edited and finished to be posted live on our blog over the next few weeks. But for those who just want it NOW, or who hate reading on a blog and would like an epub… Well here is the epub!
Return to the world after the Beyond Series and meet the residents of Sector Three…
When Ashwin asks Six & Bren to take in an emotionally fractured Makhai soldier, there are a thousand things that could go wrong. But they are hard at work building their school and rebuilding their sector, and Sebastian is a genius who can fix anything. Anything. In return for his help, all they have to do is give him a safe place to find out if his emotional wounds can be healed.
Just one traumatized supersoldier in the middle of a school filled with former feral street kids, war refugees from exclusive brothels, and a few dozen kids who barely know what a school is.
What could go wrong?
—
DISCLAIMERS: this is a serial meant for existing readers of the series. it contains full series spoilers for the Beyond Series and may not make sense if you haven’t read it.
It is also NOT erotic. This is the first part of a very very very slow burn romance between a broken Makhai soldier and an artist who escaped Sector Two after the bombings. There may also be a few other romances a brewing… consider this more like a TV show with multiple members of the cast up to hijinks, even if there are two main characters.
—
Sebastian loathed being stared at.
On the Base, it had been an inevitability. Even if Makhai soldiers weren’t rare enough to be instantly recognizable, he was the only one who was permanently stationed there, and thus an object of intense scrutiny and fascination.
People stared at him out of fear and morbid curiosity. They gaped at him and whispered when he passed, they nudged each other and pretended they weren’t watching his every move, because he wasn’t a person to them but a monster left to wander loose. A predator off his leash.
They’d all stared, but no one had seen him.
Bast expected that Callie had noticed more about him in the past thirty minutes than the gawkers on the Base had in a decade, and for the first time he imagined he understood how those terrified fools had felt.
Very little scared him. Being seen did.
“Can you turn your face a little more toward the window?” she asked softly. “And tip your chin up–yes, just like that. Thank you.” Her pencil scratched furiously over the paper.
The men who had tortured him in an attempt to break him would be grimly amused, he imagined. They’d gone to great lengths to attempt to elicit even a fraction of the discomfort Sebastian felt now. All they’d needed was a sweet-faced, dreamy-eyed artist with a pencil and paper.
Of course, that was the crux of it. Callie would be horrified if she knew how uncomfortable he was. And that made him more uncomfortable. If being seen was unnerving, being cared about–even in an abstract way–was outright upsetting. It scraped along nerves he’d thought safely cauterized.
Maybe that was why this whole damn place had him off balance. Even the children were trying to soothe him.
None of it made sense.
“Do you need a break?”
Sebastian blinked, and slanted a look at her. Was his discomfort obvious after all? “I’m fine, if you want to continue.”
She stared at him for a moment longer, then relented with the shrug of one shoulder. She returned to her sketching, then spoke again without looking up. “Do you want to know what I did before I came here?”
Not at all a safe path for the conversation. “You were from Sector Two,” he said carefully.
“Yes.” Callie tilted her head. “Would you like to know or not?”
A fair question. Any story from Sector Two was likely to be tragic, and he wouldn’t be able to hide his anger. Not from her.
But…he wanted to know. “If you would like to tell me.”
The corner of her mouth tipped up. “I was an art forger.”
Sebastian glanced at her before he could stop himself, both eyebrows going up. “Really?”
She laughed softly. “Truly. There was a robust market for it in Eden, and my patron made liberal use of my talents.”
That made sense. Surely, in their hearts, the wealthy citizens of Eden must have understood that any great work of art was likely a fake. Travel across the Mississippi was rare, even now. But he supposed the provenance didn’t matter–only the rarity. Owning something no one else could have. “Do you still do it?”
“No. I was only doing it in the first place because my patron forced me to, and I–” Her voice failed. “He’s dead. When the city bombed Two. So now I teach, and I make my own art. Not other people’s.”
He couldn’t stop his body from tensing. Fire seared his veins, unexpected in its ferocity. He couldn’t tell what hurt more–the obvious pain in her eyes, or the vicious sensory memory of his first round of brutal reconditioning.
The bombs. That had been the beginning of the end. Cruel, unnecessarily brutal weapons dropped on the heads of helpless women and children–all the more galling because the men with power, the corrupt bastards who’d kept Sector Two’s brutal system of sexual exploitation in place–had been given the warning to run.
If Callie’s patron hadn’t escaped, he’d either been useless, greedy, or stupid.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice grating with the force of his agony. “I tried to stop them. The bombs.”
Her gaze softened, some of the pain giving way to gratitude. “Thank you. It means a lot that you tried.”
“I failed.” He curled his fingers toward his palms, hoping the bite of nails would distract him from the pulsing flames beneath his skin. “I should have done more. It was inexcusable, what they did to you.”
“Inexcusable, yes.” Callie frowned and set her sketchpad aside. “But it wasn’t your fault, Sebastian.”
Wasn’t it? Perhaps he hadn’t given the order, or pushed the button. But he’d spent decades fixing the Base. Streamlining their power consumption. Working on drones, and planes. Computers and other tech. There had been a thousand–ten thousand–points of failure that might have stopped a catastrophe like this, but he’d been the glue holding the whole thing together.
“It’s complicated,” he rasped. “I may not be at fault, but I’m certainly complicit.”
She rose–and reached for him. “Sebastian–”
He jerked back hard enough that the stool wobbled. Springing to his feet, he listened to the dull clatter of wood crashing to the floor. Her hand hung there, too forgiving, too close, and if she touched his skin the fire burning him to ash from the inside might consume her too.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for the stool. The top of it came off in his shaking hands, and he dropped the wood and backed toward the door. He couldn’t trust himself with his own strength right now, which meant he couldn’t be trusted.
Not here. Not with these reckless, relentless fools who refused to fear him.
Turning his back on Callie’s stricken face, he fled.