Free Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) by Rosa Montero

service, she’d been treated by physios a few times. They were hired by the company and tried to mend the frequent injuries sustained by combat reps. But from what she’d heard, tactiles were nothing like that. The ceiling lit up with a 3-D projection of a beach at dusk. The sea was lapping above her head, and the sound of the waves was now more audible.
    “This is like going for physiotherapy,” she said stupidly out of sheer unease as she got settled on the couch.
    “You’re not too far off. I’m a sort of physio of the soul.”
    “I don’t believe in souls,” she muttered.
    “Well, call it what you like. Would you rather call it kuammil ? It’s a concept that appeals to me.”
    Kuammil , yes. A word used by the Omaás, one of the three alien species humans had come into contact with through teleportation. Kuammil was the indefinable and elusive principle of identity, intertwined with the most complete and diaphanous intimacy, the ability to have a profound effect on one another through a marvelous invisible nothingness.
    Bruna didn’t say a word. The sea was murmuring its liquid song above her. Deuil had gotten up from his chair and must have moved behind her, because she couldn’t see him. The seconds passed lazily and soon became minutes. The peaceful waves on the ceiling had a hypnotic effect. Bruna, drowsy, closed her eyes but opened them quickly with some anxiety, because unexpectedly she became conscious of a feeling of warmth on her ears, which she had been sensing for a while. Heat which was increasing.
    “Don’t worry,” whispered the tactile from close by as Bruna noticed that the throbbing had increased astronomically.
    The rep now realized that the man had placed his hands on either side of her head, about five centimeters away from it, with his palms facing inward. The warmth seemed to be coming from them. It was spreading down her neck and along her spine. A pleasant heat were it not so disconcerting. But why were they called tactiles if they didn’t actually touch you? Bruna gradually started to relax again. She closed her eyes and noted how the heat was working its way down her arms like a shivering flood of warmth. And that was when the tactile touched her. He grasped her hands and turned them palm up; the rep, eyes closed and half-drowsy, half-awake, allowed him to do so. She felt his hands covering hers. Warm and dry. Soft yet hard. Palm against palm, leaving a faint imprint. A strengthening touch fusing skin to skin, until Bruna didn’t know where she ended and he began. The rep floated on the couch, her head full of swirling images. Merlín’s lips kissing her on the lips. Her mother’s lips kissing her on the forehead. Her father carrying her on his shoulders, Bruna feeling secure and so happy up there. Her mother at night, outlined by light, telling her the story of the giant and the dwarf. Mainly fictitious memories, reminiscences embedded in her brain on an artificial memory chip. Yet nothing distinguished their substance and their evocative power from the real memory of Merlín, from the pain of his absence. But in that very moment the images started to vibrate in a strange way and then began to warp; the figures tore and the scenes were erased like drawings in the sand washed away by a wave. Suddenly, there was only darkness in her head, a black abyss into which she began to fall. She cried out and opened her eyes and came face-to-face with the eyes of the tactile, who was leaning over the couch, still touching her hands. Deuil’s eyes were black now, as black as the abyss from which Bruna was emerging, and the rep immersed herself in them and felt a rare sense of refuge in that losing of oneself in the other.
    “Keep calm,” said the tactile, releasing her and standing upright. “It’s over. Are you all right?”
    The lights came back on. Bruna was flustered, frightened, and irritated with herself for having lost control.
    “Yes. I’m just fine. Although it was