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frowned in such befuddlement that she couldn’t help but laugh just a little. “There,” she said. “You’re back. Now just lie still a moment.”
    He had no intention of it; she saw it in his eyes, and caught him just in time—a firm hand on his shoulder when he would have come upright. “You’ve been hurt,” she told him, a commanding, if understanding, tone. “And you’re not healing properly. Lie still. ”
    For the merest instant, he allowed it. And then alarm—the full awareness of where they were and what had happened—crossed his features. He rolled away from Katie, lightning quick—coming to his knees to search for the intruder, full of fierce and fury.
    “He’s gone, but—”
    Katie bit off her words as another kind of surprise passed over Maks’s face, waiting in both resignation and impatience. His eyes rolled back, his body went limp...he folded back to the ground with a boneless grace.
    She glared down at his unconscious form and finished what she’d started. “ But you’ve lost a lot of blood, so you’d better just...lie... still. ”
    * * *
    Maks opened his eyes to an ultra-blue sky overhead, the upper branches from the wide-spread pines just barely intruding on his peripheral vision. His head rang with a strange and distant ache, his arm hurt like hell and an unfamiliar, comforting presence lingered in his mind, echoing through his body like an intimate touch.
    Katie sat cross-legged beside him, matter-of-factly wiping her hands on a red-blotched towel. A rusty stain brushed one cheek, and her doubled-up ponytail ends had largely escaped to cascade over her shoulder, shiny and straight and in complete disarray. She dropped the bloody towel into a metal mixing bowl and picked up several others to toss in on top of it. Only when she leaned over Maks to reach for some wayward item did he clear his throat.
    She jumped, snatching up yet another soaked towel as she jerked away.
    “What?” he asked, although it didn’t come out very clearly.
    She didn’t have any trouble understanding him. “A Core soldier,” she said. “He had an energy-blast amulet. It hit you pretty hard, but you’re okay now. And when were you going to tell me that you don’t heal like a Sentinel should? I mean, yes, more than human normal, which is why you’re still in my backyard and your bullet is in my mixing bowl.” She lifted a smaller metal bowl, shifting it so the bullet rolled. “But not enough to stop that arterial bleed on its own. Enough to recover from the blood loss, I hope, because getting you a transfusion would be a bitch.”
    Maks closed his eyes, considering the circumstances—remembering what he could of recent moments. A blast of energy, painful and bright, insinuating itself into the very fissures of a damaged soul. The sense of retreat—the despair of familiar wounds.
    And then... breathing.
    Breathing, imposed over his...calm and anchoring...intimate. Healing. Bringing him back.
    Some sense of it still lurked within him. Some sense of her .
    He absorbed it all in silence, and then let out a deep breath to admit, “I didn’t know. Not about the healing.” When she frowned, her elbow on her knee and her gaze steady on his, he added, “No one thought to shoot me and see.”
    She scoffed, flicking a hand out to lightly smack his shoulder—and then, looking a bit startled at herself, said, “Well, the bullet’s out, and I’ve protected you from infection, but...we need to keep an eye on how fast you heal. We need to know what you’re dealing with.”
    Had they known? The Sentinel medics? Had they even suspected?
    Then again, Maks had been well on his way to being perfectly recovered on the day they cut him loose. Only afterward had the fugues crept back in.
    “Maks,” she said, a little too patiently—by which he knew his thoughts were still wandering and unfocused. “It’s important. Tell me you’re going to cooperate on this.”
    He said, “Yes. The healing. I’ll let you