Her head was going to explode, she was sure of it, and tried to tell them as much, but she couldn’t get her teeth to unclench long enough to get a word out.
“Hurry it up,” Ruckus growled. He was kneeling in front of her, one hand on her arm, the other on her bare thigh. When he wasn’t yelling at Gibus, he was whispering words of encouragement to her that she couldn’t process in her current state.
Because her brain wasn’t used to having a foreign piece of machinery attached to it, her synapses were firing at random, trying to relay information that the rest of her brain couldn’t yet comprehend. One of the men had said something about that being the telepathic connection they were attempting to form, but she’d stopped listening when Gibus had pulled out a flat piece of glass similar to what Ruckus had used to show her the picture of Olena.
He’d tapped a few buttons, and the next thing she knew: agony.
“Why’s this taking so long?” Ruckus snapped for what felt like the hundredth time when she started to writhe. “Can you make the connection or not?!”
“Almost,” Gibus assured him, though he was sweating and his voice shook a little at the end of the word. “Her human brain is rebelling. It’s going to take another minute.”
“She can’t withstand this another minute!”
Delaney would have agreed if her tongue hadn’t swollen in her mouth. Positive she was about to break a tooth with how tightly she was grinding her jaws, she was already plotting both of their murders when Gibus let out a cry of success and slammed his finger down on the screen a final time.
“Her head’s going to explode,” a voice filtered through, panicked and rambling. “First I kidnap her; now I’m going to kill her! This was a bad idea. None of the other humans reacted this way. I’m going to end up—”
“Driving me absolutely crazy if you keep up the yelling,” Delaney hissed through thin lips. She pressed her palms over her eyes and focused on evening out her breathing. The pounding in her head was still there, but it no longer felt like there was a vice squeezing it, which was something.
Ruckus’s eyes widened. “Were you just—”
“Hearing your thoughts?” she said, cutting him off again, and risked slitting her eyes open to glare at him. “And just because I thought the same thing about my head going boom, doesn’t mean I needed to hear you thinking it, too.”
“I’m sorry.” He looked like the uncomfortable one now. “I hadn’t realized the connection had opened up.”
“Does that mean it can be controlled?” Because that would be a plus. Already the thought of always being able to hear what he was thinking, and vice versa, gave her the creeps. It was hard enough being around him on an alien planet without his being able to read her mind.
Right now it was easier for her to keep up a strong front because she knew he believed she was feeling strong. If he knew just how terrified she really was by all this … She didn’t need to know his opinion of her when that happened.
“It won’t take long to adjust. For the next few hours you’ll feel warmth where the chip is right before I lock on to your frequency. The sensation will fade,” Ruckus explained. “You can prevent your thoughts from filtering into my head if you want, but anything I want to say to you, you can’t stop. I control my side of the connection; therefore, I’m the only one who can cut it. The same way you control your end of it.
“If you don’t want me to hear you”—obviously he’d been paying attention—“erect a barrier. It’s different for everyone, but for me, picturing a glass box around my mind works. After a few times it’ll come naturally to you; the chip will learn your cues and adjust accordingly.”
“It’s sort of like my iPhone,” she said in a poor attempt to mask how freaked out she still was. “Only instead of learning the word LOL, it’s learning how to mentally tell someone to fuck off.”
He grunted, but the humor glimmering in his eyes gave him away. “Focus. You connected with me before because Gibus activated the chip and sent it my frequency. You’re not tapped into me anymore. To get it back, think of a thought, and imagine pushing it toward me. You’ll feel the burn again, signaling the chip activating; once it does, anything you think you can send directly to me. Understand?”
“Not in the least.” She adjusted herself on the seat, getting more comfortable, and then clasped her hands in her lap. “All right, let’s do this.”
She didn’t know what to think about, so she just let a jumbled mess fill her head as she concentrated on the hot alien across from her. Shaking those thoughts from her mind until she could dissect them during a more private moment, she imagined a slew of words filling the air, trailing from her head to his. It would have been quite comical even, if it hadn’t felt like someone was putting out a cigarette on the back of her neck.
She was glad that sensation wouldn’t last, at least.
Ruckus scrunched up his face at her.
“What?” she asked, worried she hadn’t covered up her trailing thoughts about his attractiveness fast enough.
“What is a tamale?”
She laughed, glancing between him and Gibus to see that the other Vakar was just as clueless.
Meeting his gaze, she beamed. “My favorite food.”
*
“STOP.” SHE GRINNED over at him when he froze for the third time since leaving the lab. “Can you hear me now?”
“Seriously, Delaney,” he said, and ground his teeth so hard, she heard the sound.
“What?” She shrugged innocently. “I think it’s funny.”
“That’s a phone commercial?” He started walking again, leading them through the castle. They’d already passed through the white portion of the place, clearly the science wing, and he’d brought them back to the fake wooden rooms. So far she had yet to see a guard, so they must not be in a popular area.
Gibus had stayed behind to continue working on … whatever it was he was working on.
“It was,” she told Ruckus out loud. Then, telepathically: “It’s not anymore.”
“This isn’t a toy,” he scolded. “I didn’t get you fitted so you could play around.”
“Oh, relax.” They turned another corner, and the flooring changed from hardwood to carpeting the color of cream. “I’m practicing. You said the chip had to be conditioned to pick up on my cues, right? Well, this is me conditioning. The last thing I want is you getting in my head and overhearing something you shouldn’t all because I didn’t know what I was doing.”
His pace slowed down, and it took her a moment to realize. He was a few steps back when she finally turned to him, a questioning look in her eye.