Chapter 9 #2
His outward serenity was both deeply steadying and personally infuriating. I knew I wasn’t being logical.
I wanted him undone. I wanted to be the thing that undid him.
I had maybe three days left on this planet to want anything at all.
"You're quiet," he said.
"I'm thinking."
"What are you thinking about?"
“Nothing. My mind is just wandering.” What a fucking lie. I was thinking about his hands. About the way he said my name when he lost control, when he came inside me. About the fact that I was already grieving him and he was only two feet away.
His silence was far more disarming than anything he could have said.
The marks on my collarbones pulsed with every step, taunting me. Everything was fucked up, broken, and never going to work out between us no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise.
I was so screwed. So, of course, I opened my damn mouth. Words came out.
"The Skybond marks…” Apparently, I was going to talk about all this bullshit whether I was ready or not. I kept my eyes on the path. "Are they reversible?"
"Is that what you want?"
The question hit me in the chest like someone had swung a sledgehammer. "I'm asking a purely scientific question.”
"No." Quiet. Certain. "You are not."
I stopped walking.
No. I was not. I needed to know what would happen if I was forced to leave here. Leave him. What would happen to him. To me.
The second cliff base was twenty meters ahead. Obsidian rising sheer and dark above us, threaded with crystal veins that caught the pale morning light and gave it back cold and electric. The stored charge in the deposits pressed outward against the morning like a held breath.
I turned around.
His eyes were on my face. They were always on my face — thorough and direct, seeing everything without even trying. Silver in the morning light, steadier than last night. The color of cloud cover with the sun directly behind it.
I looked at him, the thoughts in my mind causing physical pain.
I know what you sound like when you sleep.
I know where your pulse runs fastest. I know the exact weight of your arm on my waist and the taste of your kiss.
I know what it feels like to come apart in your arms. And I will be haunted by you for the rest of my life.
There would never be another man like him in my life. No one else would ever make me feel the way he did. I knew that was the truth. I knew almost nothing else about him.
My marks pulsed.
His matched.
A different thought arrived, quieter. More dangerous. I had to leave to protect him. What would that do to a man—an alien—whose planet just wrote my name in lightning across his nervous system?
I had been so busy surviving my own emergency, I hadn't once thought about his.
He found a crashed human on his planet. Carried me through a storm.
Sat with me through the bond forming in the dark of a cave and delivered that information carefully, making sure I didn't panic.
He had asked nothing I wasn't ready to answer.
Let me set every pace. Slept with his arm around me like I was worth protecting.
Never once made it about what was happening to him.
And I had never once asked. What was happening to him?
My chest hurt, knowing I was being selfish. Obtuse. Willfully ignorant. Because caring meant leaving would hurt even more.
I turned back to the cliff and checked my scanner. Looked at the timer in one corner, noted the time I had left to collect the crystals and fix my ship.
"We have forty-eight hours," I said.
"Yes."
I raised the scanner. The data coming back from the crystal veins was extraordinary — conductivity readings off the standard scale, electromagnetic signatures cycling through the matrix in patterns that were almost biological.
"They pulse.” It was as if they were alive.
I knew my awe sounded nothing like a pure technical observation.
"Yes.” Man of few words.
I felt his heat at my back. Constant. Intense. Something on my scans made me frown in confusion. This couldn’t be right. "Like the storm nodes? The exact same frequency?"
"Soltharra’s heartbeat. The storm’s rhythm," he said. "Everything here is part of it."
I turned the scanner on myself, shock running through my veins like liquid ice. “This can’t be right.”
“Sloane.”
I scanned again. Same result. Same fucking result. Oh my god. What the actual fuck was happening to me? “This can’t be right.” I took another reading. Another. “It says I’m an alien.”
My own scanner didn’t recognize my biology. My humanity. Thought I was the alien.
I knew Earth had a certain frequency. They called it the Schumann Resonance after the man who discovered it a couple hundred years ago.
Seven point eight three hertz. The whole planet.
Was Earth alive like Soltharra? Were humans just too ignorant to realize it?
Too detached from nature? Why wasn’t I this alive back home?
This aware? Was our planet dead? Had we somehow killed the Earth itself?
I couldn’t breathe. I was an alien.
How could I go back now? What would I tell them? Would they lock me in a cage and experiment on me until I died? But if I didn’t go back, what would happen to Sorik and his people?
Was I going to have to fake my own death? Destroy the shuttle somehow? What were my options? Because if I couldn’t go back…. Wait. What about the others? My crew? Would the planet start changing their biology even if they weren’t having hot sex with one of the aliens?
I couldn’t breathe. My chest froze like a giant was squeezing me, crushing my ribs. My vision blurred. The ground spun. I reached for the rock wall, leaned against it so I wouldn’t fall. Fuck, I was losing it.
"Sloane." His voice was full of tenderness. Caution. As if he was afraid he was about to break me.
He's being careful with me, I thought. The man who caught me on a cliff face without flinching is handling me like I'm already in pieces.
"I’m fine. I just need a minute.” My voice had changed into something complicated. Lies layered on top of lies like frosting in a three tier cake. "I’m fine. I’ll be fine."
He wrapped his arms around me from behind, covered me with his body like a security blanket. Pulled me back against his chest. The cliff face blurred before me as tears gathered in my eyes. “There’s something wrong with me.”
“There is not. You belong to the storm now. To me.” His heat penetrated my panic and I felt my heart struggle to slow, to match the steady rhythm of his. He was calm.
How the hell was he so calm?
I was a fucking alien now. With weird marks in my skin and a heart that no longer knew how to beat on its own.
“Mate, there is nothing wrong with you. The Skybond flows between us. Your body has taken the marks. Your heart beats with mine. We are one, as we should be.” He rubbed his cheek over the top of my head. Didn’t let go. “I’ve got you. You are not alone. You are mine. You will never be alone again.”
How was I supposed to deal with turning into another species? Or at least, something so different our scanners no longer recognized me as human?
I let him hold me. I didn’t have a choice. My shaking legs weren’t going to hold me up at the moment. Falling apart wasn’t an option. Not yet. Not until we had the crystals back to the ship and made sure the whole thing wasn’t going to go boom and kill everyone he cared about.
The marks on my collarbones pulsed steadily — matching the planet, matching him, matching my heartbeat.
Slowly, my body caught up to my brain and stopped panicking.
While he held me, I thought about leaving.
About what leaving would do to him. About the fact that I needed to leave to protect him — to keep salvage crews from stripping this living electric world down to dead rock.
The most loving thing I could do for this man was let him go.
But now, even that option was flawed. I couldn’t return to base and submit to a medical exam.
We were always required to do a full medical evaluation after a mission.
Without exception. We were poked, prodded, scanned, tested and put in quarantine for several days to weeks, depending on where we’d been.
If those scans didn’t even recognize me as human?
I’d never leave base. I’d be their next experiment.
Technically, the corporation would do whatever they wanted with me for the next five years.
They owned me. If they wanted to run experiments on their newest alien pet, they would.
I had no family to come looking. No allies. No one to call.
Knowing all that made it worse. Impossible. What was I going to do?
"The upper deposits begin forty meters above the valley floor.” Sorik’s voice was a welcome distraction.
Work. That’s what I was going to do right now.
Solve one problem at a time. One arm tightened around my waist as he pointed with his opposite hand.
“The first accessible formation is at fifteen meters on the second face.
I will acquire the crystals you need. You should remain here. Rest."
No way. I needed something to do. I needed to move. "No. I can climb.”
"I know you can." His response was immediate. Certain. No condescension. He turned me in his arms, looked down into my eyes for a long moment. "Very well. You climb first. I will follow."
"So you can catch me if I fall?" That never worked. But we didn’t exactly have climbing gear, either.
"I will always catch you.” No embarrassment. No doubts.
I looked at him sideways. The line of his jaw. The pale lightning scars across his shoulder. The storm nodes running their steady pulse along his spine — the same pulse in my collarbones, the same pulse in the crystal veins above us. I believed him.
We moved to the place he indicated. Stopped. I looked back up the cliff, put my hands on the rock.
It was warm. Of course it was warm. Everything on this planet was warm and alive and had opinions about my life. Also true was the planet was entirely unbothered by my feelings about any of it.
The obsidian pulsed under my palms, slow and deep, and I felt it move up my arms and into the marks that answered with a flare of recognition. Of welcome. As if the stone was part of me and I was part of it.
I started to climb.
Sorik followed.
I felt him before I heard him — his warmth rising at my back, below me, between me and the ground. Exactly where he said he'd be.
I will always catch you.
Romantic? Yes. No need to put it to the test.
The wind raced down the cliff face carrying ozone and cold crystal and the distant metallic sweetness of the building storm.
I climbed toward the crystal deposits and tried not to think about the synchronized heartbeat I'd woken to, the weight of his arm in the cave dark, the marks on my collarbones.
Tried not to think about leaving him behind.
About the fact that I was no longer, technically, human.
Tried not to imagine what life would be like without him.
I failed.
I climbed anyway.