Chapter 27
Tova
My thumb finds the indigo at his wrist and follows it up, tracing the color where it pools deepest, from the bone of his wrist to the soft skin inside his elbow.
The light runs under my fingertip like a current I can feel changing.
He has spent six years covering this. Long sleeves.
A high collar. The slow flattening of a man who decided his own light was a leak to patch.
My hand is on the leak now, and I am not patching it.
I am reading it, and the reading is the most open I have ever seen him with his clothes still on.
“I can read this,” I tell him. Quiet. Sure. And I keep reading.
My right hand leaves his forearm and lands flat on his chest, over the rose-gold, palm to his sternum.
The bond runs his pulse into me through the contact, still fast, still carrying the edge of the hour we came through.
My own heartbeat goes back to him the same road.
My hand is the junction. We meet in my palm and nowhere else, and he lets me keep it there.
“You tried to protect me.” I keep my eyes on the light under my hand.
“That’s the amber. You do it with the crew too.
Amber at your throat when Sedda takes the night watch in bad weather.
Amber when Gritt goes ashore somewhere new.
You hold the danger so nobody else has to carry it, and you call that love. ”
I look up. My face is close enough that the indigo casts blue along his jaw.
“It isn’t. Not for me. Not anymore.”
His jaw works and nothing comes. The amber at his throat thins out, and underneath it the rose-gold rises in its place, a low even pulse, matched to my breathing.
“I know.” It comes out of him rough, short. “I know it isn’t.”
“Do you?”
“My body knows.” He presses his hand over mine, over the rose-gold, holding my palm to the place where it burns hottest. “What I did was wrong. I can feel it sitting here, and it’s the biggest thing I’ve ever carried, and I don’t have the word for it.
I’ve never had the word.” His voice drops under itself.
“But it’s been here since the second week and it gets louder every day, and when you walked off the ship it went—”
The sentence stops. His mouth can’t finish it. The light finishes it for him: indigo flooding dark through the rose-gold, saturated, pulsing under my hand.
I watch the colors shift against my palm. I read every word of what his mouth can’t shape, the same as I read a fracture line opening through stone that looked whole.
“Show me,” I say. “Stop reaching for it. Show me.”
He leans down and puts his forehead to mine.
His hands come up to the sides of my face, the teal at his fingertips meeting my skin, and I draw a sharp breath because I feel the light as a frequency my hands can register.
I told him that the first week. The glow has a buzz to it, low at the wrists, and my tactile sense catches it where it’s sharpest. He is holding my face and his light is speaking against me in a language his mouth never learned, and I can feel every word of it land.
I turn my head and find his mouth with mine, and the kiss is not gentle.
It tastes like chalk dust and salt and the copper of the blood on my split fingertips, and I take it in detail by detail.
His lips. This pressure. This temperature.
This exact angle of his mouth on mine. My hands read him while I kiss him and there is more coming off his skin than I have rows to hold.
I push the fabric off his chest, and where my palms land the rose-gold flares bright enough that I see it through my own closed eyes, pink behind the lids.
My fingertips leave trails of it across his ribs.
I look at his body the way I look at star-iron that is telling me something new, both hands open, reading.
He pulls the shirt over his head because I am pulling at it, his arms moving before the thought finishes.
Cool cave air on his back, my warm hands on his front, and between the two temperatures his whole body lights.
Teal at the wrists. Indigo up the forearms. Amber at the throat.
Rose-gold blooming off the sternum and chasing my handprints across his stomach.
I step back to look.
He stands in the node chamber lit like a spawning reef, every frequency open, and I read the light through the air between us, both hands lifted an inch off his skin. There is no gauge that would catch this. There are only my hands and my eyes and the colors saying what he is.
“Dresh.” My voice cracks on his name. “You’re beautiful.”
I do not mean it as a thing I see. I mean it as the thing the light is doing, the whole of him broadcasting at once, nothing held back, and my hands shaking that half-inch from his skin because I want to touch and I am making myself wait.
I put my hands back on him and the chamber shrinks to the size of my palms.
Fingers on his collarbone, both sides. I trace the bone and the indigo gathers in the hollows of his clavicle, going dark blue under my touch.
Then I lower my head and press my mouth to the indigo at the left of his throat, and the sound out of him is not a word.
It comes from low in his chest, tonal, a reef-tone, the note the Tideborn give when the water pressure drops and the body equalizes against it.
I feel it move through my lips. I stop against his skin.
Then I do it again, mouth to the next point of color, and the note comes again, lower, the pitch a current makes sliding under a keel.
I am mapping his light with my mouth, and he is letting me.
We go down to the floor. The star-iron is warm against his spine, the repaired junctions giving back the signal we fed them over weeks of work.
I am above him, over his hips, my hands on his chest, and everywhere I touch the light follows my fingers like I am drawing it out of him and into my palms.
He reaches for my shirt and I help him lift it off, and when his hands land on my bare skin the teal at his fingertips flares and I gasp.
I can feel it. I named it the first time: a buzzing warmth, a frequency that hits exactly where my hands read sharpest. He presses his fingers to my ribs and the teal gathers under each one and I arch into it, breath catching, my weight shifting on his hips.
I take his hand and draw it to my mouth and press my lips to the webbing between his fingers, and his whole body does something past his control.
The webbing is the thinnest skin he has.
I learned that weeks ago, reading the heat of the light off it.
My mouth on that exact spot sends the rose-gold racing up his arm so fast it reaches his chest in one pulse, and the sound out of him is a full reef-tone, deep and tonal, and I smile against his hand with my eyes shut.
“There,” I say. “That one. What is it?”
“It starts in the webbing.” His voice is wrecked. “It goes straight to my chest. Keep your mouth there.” His hips have come up against me. The light is cycling every color he can make. “Keep going.”
I keep going. My mouth moves from his hand to his wrist to his forearm, kissing along the indigo, the light tracking under my lips.
My other hand works between us, loosing the fastening at his waist, and when I touch him the rose-gold goes incandescent and the cave brightens and the star-iron under his spine answers with a pulse strong enough to shift the chalk maps on the floor.
“Yes,” he manages. “That. Yes.”
“Good,” I say, against his arm, and my voice cracks on the word, and I feel the crack do more to him than the touch.
I pull him with me, skin to skin, the light trapped in the seam where our bodies don’t quite meet, glowing out through it.
His hands map my back, teal flaring under each fingertip, five points down each side of my spine.
I read him the whole time. I check his face.
I check the light. I check the pulse coming up through the star-iron under us, and the slow careful arriving of it, his and mine routed through the stone and back, tells me he is here, he is steady, he is with me.
When we join it is slow, my hands on his shoulders, my eyes on his face, and his light does something I feel before I see it. My breath goes out of me small and undone, and then I move and every other reading drops away.
I feel all of it, the pressure, the heat, the slow deliberate rock of my own hips, the star-iron warm beneath us and carrying the bond both ways so his sensation lands in me alongside mine.
Not two channels. One thing routed through him and through the stone and back, his experience laid over my own until I can’t find the line between them.
I slide my hands from his shoulders to his chest, flat over the rose-gold, and the light under my palms gives back everything he is.
I read it. I find the exact angle and pressure and pace that drives the light brightest, and I answer what I find, the same as my hands answer stone that is telling me where it wants to hold.
He reaches for me by sound, the reef-tones pouring out of him like a language his lungs kept while his mind forgot it.
I answer the sounds. I press closer, forehead to his, his breath in my mouth, the rose-gold between us bright enough that when I open my eyes I can see the chalk dust caught in my own hair and the blood on my fingertips and what his face does when his body is doing what mine is.
“Stay with me,” I say, cracked, close. “Are you—”
“I’m here.” His hands tighten on my hips. “Don’t stop. I’m here.”
The pressure climbs. The teal at his fingertips flares against my skin. I make a sound and my body tightens and the bond runs the sensation into him by skin and by stone at once, and it overruns everything either of us can hold.
His back arches off the floor. The light doesn’t pick a color. It opens. Every frequency at once, teal and indigo and amber and white, and through all of it the rose-gold burns at the center, my frequency, the one his body started making the week I came aboard.
I follow. My hands grip his shoulders and my face goes against his neck and the sound I make travels through his skin and into the light, and the bond carries his pulse and mine and the node’s restored signal and the star-iron singing under us, a combined frequency neither of us makes alone.
Stillness.
The star-iron is warm. My weight is heavy on him. His breath is ragged under my cheek. The teal at his fingertips has gone to a dim glow, five points along each side of my spine. I trace the rose-gold on his chest with one cracked fingertip, following the beat of it.
The node hums around us, carrying more signal than it held an hour ago.
I feel the change in the stone under my palm: the dead zone pulling in at the edges, the network widening, the star-iron pathways lighting one after another as the signal runs outward from the center.
From here. From this floor. From the place where his body and mine and the stone all met.
Something at the far edge of the reading. Almost past where my hands would catch it. A thread of resonance from out past the harbor, faint, a different texture than the network around us, pointed somewhere I can’t see.
I lift my head.
“I felt that,” I say. “Out there. At the edge. Something woke up.”
“Korr.” His voice is barely a voice. “The seabed where my reef was. It’s carrying signal again.” He has to stop. Whatever is rising behind his sternum takes up the room the sentence needed. “It’s the faintest thing I’ve ever read. And I can read it.”
I still my hand over his heart. I don’t tell him what it means. I don’t have to. I read the rest of it off the light an hour ago, and I am reading this off his face now, and for once he isn’t racing to put a word on the thing I already have.
He turns his hand over under mine, the webbing exposed, palm up, nothing pulled down to cover it. I thread my fingers through his, into the spaces, where the skin is thinnest and the light lives. The rose-gold runs up from the contact and holds.
He keeps his hand open. After six years he keeps it open, lit, webbed, mine. The seabed is humming forty miles out in the dark, and he is not covering the part of him that can hear it.