Unspoken Debts

​POV: Malia

​The air in the sub-basement smelled like copper, scorched insulation, and the sour tang of old sweat.

​I dumped a fresh roll of sterile gauze, two bottles of antiseptic, and a curved suture needle onto the stainless-steel tray. The metal clattered against the surface, a harsh, jagged sound that vibrated straight through my teeth.

​Jarrah didn't flinch. He sat on the edge of the examination cot, his back turned to me, his chest heaving in shallow, deliberate cycles. His jacket was shredded, tossed in a bloody heap on the concrete floor. His shirt was torn down the seam and discarded somewhere in the hallway three floors up.

​From his shoulder down to his lower ribs, his skin was an ugly, mottled map of violent purples, deep blues, and angry, split red tissue where the blast shockwave had thrown him into the reinforced doorframe.

​"You're bleeding through the inner layer," I said. My voice sounded thin, raspy from the smoke we’d inhaled on the climb down. "Lie down, Jarrah."

​"No." His voice was a flat, low gravel. "If I lie down, the lungs fill up. Leave it."

​"It’s not a request." I picked up the shears, cutting away the lingering scraps of cloth caught in the torn flesh around his shoulder blade. "You took the brunt of that charge to keep the vault door from crushing me. The least you can do is let me clean out the concrete dust before it infects."

​He braced his elbows against his knees. The muscle across his spine locked, tight as steel cables under tension. Every breath was a fight he was barely winning, but his jaw remained clamped tight, refusing to give the pain a voice.

​I poured the iodine over a fresh pad. "This is going to sting."

​"Just do it, Malia."

​I pressed the pad against the open tear near his collarbone.

​A sharp, violent hitch caught in his throat. His knuckles went white where he gripped the frame of the cot, the metal groaning under the sheer pressure of his hands. A single bead of sweat rolled from his hairline, down the curve of his sharp cheekbone, and dripped onto the dusty floor. But he didn't pull away. He didn't move an inch.

​That was the terrifying thing about Jarrah. He bore violence the way a mountain bore a storm silently, absorbing every blow until you forgot he was made of flesh that could bleed out just like anyone else's.

​"You should have let the breach team take the hit," I muttered, dabbing away the thick, dark blood pooling at the base of his neck. "You're the boss of Sector Four. You don't play shield."

​"I play whatever I need to play to keep you breathing," he rasped, his eyes fixed on the blank concrete wall ahead. "The team is replaceable. You aren't."

​My hand stalled for a fraction of a second. The gauze soaked through, staining my fingertips crimson.

​Before I could answer, the hum of the overhead fluorescents spiked into a high-pitched whine. The light vibrated wildly, sputtering once, twice and then died completely.

​Pitch blackness slammed down on the room like a heavy iron lid.

​The secondary air scrubbers shuddered to a halt, their low thrum dying into an eerie, suffocating silence. The faint green emergency strips along the baseboards flickered once and went cold. Total power failure across the sector grid.

​"Jarrah," I whispered, reaching blindly into the dark.

​"Don't move," he commanded. His voice wasn't weak anymore; it was hard, instinct taking over before his body even had time to process the agony in his ribs.

​I heard the dry clack of his sidearm clearing his holster, a sound he could make in his sleep.

​"The main grid didn't fail," I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Alastair cut the substation line. The security seals on the upper doors run on dead-man relays. If the power drops..."

​"They open," Jarrah finished.

​In the pitch black, I felt his hand find mine. His fingers were cold, wet with sweat, but his grip was iron. He didn't pull me behind him this time. He pulled me close, so close I could feel the ragged heat radiating off his bare, bruised chest.

​"Listen to me," he breathed, his mouth inches from my ear. His breath was ragged, smelling faintly of blood. "The emergency doors will take ninety seconds to reset on the local battery. That gives Alastair's sweepers ninety seconds to hit this floor without tripping the acoustic sensors."

​"You can't fight like this, Jarrah. Your ribs are broken."

​"They're cracked," he corrected, though the tremor in his grip betrayed him. He let out a low, shaky exhale, and for the first time since I had met him, his posture sagged. The towering, indestructible figure vanished into the dark, leaving only a man holding on by a thread. He pressed his forehead against my shoulder, his weight heavy and unyielding against me.

​"Malia," he rasped into the dark. It wasn't a command. It was a plea. "My left eye is blind in the dark. The blast took the focus out of it. I can't see the threshold."

​A chill ran down my spine, colder than the concrete beneath our feet. Jarrah, the sharpest shot in the city, the man who calculated kill zones in his sleep, was partially blind in the dark.

​"I've got the threshold," I whispered, sliding my hand down his arm until my fingers wrapped around the grip of the pistol.

​Above us, through the silence of the dead facility, came the heavy, syncopated thud of combat boots hitting the stairwell.