Apex Five: Mech Elite novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: No Pulse, No Key

The doctor let him go at dusk, against her advice, because he threatened to walk.

Hob drove us back to Dock Nine in the van.

Mira sat in the back seat with her hands in her lap and said nothing the whole way.

Hob put her in the crew bunk room and gave her a blanket.

I did not argue.

Ronan went up the stairs to his office, one hand on the rail.

I followed him and shut the door.

The room was small, with a cot against the wall, a desk covered in drawings, and one window over the Ring lights.

He sat down on the cot and let his head hang.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

"I can't feel you. I felt you for two days, and now it's quiet in there."

He touched his temple with two fingers.

"I thought you should hear it from me."

"Hear what?"

"That whatever I had of you in my head, it's gone."

I knelt in front of him.

I took his hands off his knees and held them.

"Good," I said.

He looked up.

"I mean it. Do you know what everyone wanted from me?"

"Wynne."

"Dane, Alder, the League, the board in their tuxedos. Every one of them wanted what runs through me."

I pressed his scarred forearm against my cheek.

"My pulse. My key. Not once in four years has anyone wanted the girl holding it."

His face changed.

"Now it's gone from your head," I said. "So tell me what you want."

He was quiet for a moment.

"You," he said. "You with nothing running through you. You in a scrapyard."

"Go on."

"You burning your palm on a pipe and swearing at it."

My throat closed.

"Say that again."

"I want you," Ronan said, slowly. "And I can't feel a single thing of you except what's in the room."

I got up on the cot and pushed him back onto the blanket.

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