Aberrant

Chapter 40

A gut-wrenching scream.

Jinx plummeted into darkness, nightmares cascading.

A hand reaching out, bright with gore. A fist—her father's—hammering against a hospital observation wall. His face, contorted. His scream ... a sea of whispers. Behind him, the abyss, no longer silent, now a seething storm—rage that arced lightning through her blood.

Blue-white electricity blazing at her fingertips.

A howl in the darkness: a demand for her to surrender—burn. A scream of fury—hers.

Power tore her open: brilliant agony. Madness rushed in: shrieking voices; a twisting kaleidoscope of horrors. Gaunt bodies, four lying side by side, repeated as if in a house of mirrors. Her father's screaming face morphing into the andropod's tortured mask—

"Jinx, breathe." A distant voice. Dull pain: the bite of fingers at her jaw.

The world surged back. Bright light. Grey, human eyes in front of her; not black, alien optical tech. Kaplan. His hands on her face. His cabin's kitchen counter under her thighs.

Her fingers gripped its edge as if she perched a thousand metres up.

Over that shrieking void in her mind.

She hauled in air. She'd been okay. Then between one heartbeat and the next...

Insanity.

After days of freedom, the screams had returned, but with a different nightmare. Not suffocation; a violent immolation. Destruction she'd called down on herself as she gave in to rage, that howling storm of horrors.

She could still feel it reaching for her.

As she had for days.

Nausea rolled through her. That urge to run back into the void ... it'd never been rational.

"Jinx." Kaplan's grip on her jaw tightened, jerking her back to the glare of his cabin. "Stay with me. I'll call Channing."

Visions of bodies—emaciated, hooked up to tubes. She grabbed Kaplan's wrist blindly. "No doctors."

"Jinx, your respiration is depressed, your heart rate elevated, your psionics—"

"It's just a stupid glitch, nothing to do with any drugs." Real—not imagined—fury abruptly cleared her vision. She'd resigned herself to giving Kaplan answers, but providing a demonstration had not been on the agenda.

She shoved him back from her. "You wanted to know what happened on the Bullhead. Here's your damn answer."

A heightening whine in her skull.

The truth about Kaplan hit her again. Her already punchy pulse quickened.

Fear, but nothing simple.

That taut look in those all too human eyes aimed at her...

She fought to pull in a steadying breath, found she couldn't. Shit. Kaplan might be some kind of mind-reading freak, but it was becoming clear he was still the same man who'd hauled her arse out of the fire on Tirus 7. The same one who'd fixed her damn buttons then messed the rest of her up.

She tore her gaze away to stare at the far bulkhead. God damn it. This was not what she needed.

"Your heart rate's still too high." Those quiet words, spoken too close for comfort, only amped her pulse further. "But you seem to be recovering."