Chapter 10 #3
I felt her work at it.
I felt the cost she paid in her heart. In her soul. In the dark shadows she carried. She understood the risks we were both taking.
I pressed my forearm more firmly against her waist.
She made a sound that was not quite a breath and not quite anything else. Her hand went to the cliff face.
"Focus," I ordered. Low. Against the crown of her head. Aimed as much at myself as at her. Her hair was against my jaw. I breathed her in. Willed her to hurry.
"Working on it," she said.
She began the extraction.
Her movements were extraordinary to watch from this proximity.
Small and precise. She read the crystal matrix the way she read everything — with the full-body intelligence of a person who brought all of herself to whatever she touched.
I felt it through every point of contact between us.
The micro-shifts of her weight. The slight tension in her forearm before each movement.
The controlled steadiness of her breath.
The tip of her finger traced the seam between crystal and obsidian. Found the fracture line with a sensitivity I felt in my fingertips through the Skybond. As though her nerve endings were partly mine now.
They were. I knew this. I was now a man whose nervous system had been rewired around hers in the dark.
The outer crystal came free without a single arc of discharge.
She exhaled.
I felt it move through my arm at her waist like a tide going out — the release of held breath, of held tension, the body's small private celebration of a thing done right. Something in my chest responded with a heat that bordered on pain.
"One," she said quietly. Not to me. To herself.
I heard the determination in her voice. I loved and hated it in equal measure. Loved her competence. Hated that it was aimed at leaving.
She put the first crystal into the bag she carried for that purpose, then reached deeper into the small seam.
The second outer crystal required more — her weight shifted forward off the ledge. Her body leaned into the face. My arm tightened at her waist. My nodes blazed with the shift.
The second crystal released and again she put it in her bag.
The sky above the valley had gone another shade darker.
The air carried the sharp metallic sweetness of a storm building real pressure, real mass — something that intended to arrive and wreak havoc on anything in its path.
The ledge trembled again beneath our feet.
Longer this time. A double pulse sent cracks of light racing through the crystal vein two meters to our right.
Fear tightened my muscles. Made my heart race.
Not for me. For her. Every part of my being was focused on her.
Confused. Awed. Seduced by the way she gave herself entirely to whatever she touched.
The way I wanted —indistinguishable from need — to be something she gave herself to entirely.
Not just in the dark of the cave. Not just in the suspended moment on a ledge.
But entirely. Permanently. With the same focused, unhesitating completeness she brought to everything that mattered to her.
I needed to matter to her.
She moved one hand to the last barrier between her and the central cluster. I felt her read it — the weight shift, the micro-adjustments of a body calculating approach geometry in real time.
Then she pressed forward.
Forward and left. Further off the ledge than either of us had anticipated. Further than the extraction geometry I'd modeled. My arm gripped tighter. My nodes went white with the shift in her center of gravity. Her fingers found the third outer crystal and—
It moved. The formation below had shifted.
A sound moved through the cliff face. Not the sharp crack of a full discharge.
Something lower. A groan of crystal matrix under pressure — the deep structural complaint of rock that had been stable for centuries suddenly unstable.
The central cluster pulsed once with brilliant blue-white light. The air around our hands went electric.
"I can reach it.”
"Sloane—"
"I can reach it." She’d already extended her right arm. "The fracture line on the base of the node is here — if I get two fingers under it, I can apply pressure upward from the base and it should—"
She reached.
Her fingers touched the central cluster.
I felt the contact in my nodes before I heard the violent spike in the electromagnetic field directly in front of us. The crystal registered warmth and conductivity and responded with everything it had held for sixty-eight hours.
In the half-second before the crystal exploded, I felt her.
Her nervous system. Her electrical signature. The distinct and individual frequency the Skybond had written into my biology as the most recognizable thing in my world. I felt her the way I felt the storm — total and immediate and everywhere at once.
The surge of energy hit us like lightning.
Enormous and instant, it channeled through her hand, up her arm and into her nervous system.
The light leaped through the Skybond into my body, through arms and legs and spine, back into hers in a circuit that had no off switch.
A feedback loop between two systems the planet had wired together.
The surge was white and violent and total.
And underneath the violence — underneath the white-hot force of hours of stored electrical energy moving through two bodies not built to carry it — I felt her. All of her.
The way I had felt her in the cave before she decided she needed to shut me out
Her thoughts brushed against mine. Her body’s frequency threaded through my nodes. But larger now. More. Terror and agony and the most profound recognition I had ever experienced — total, cellular-level confirmation of everything I had known since the storm.
She was mine.
I was hers.
The planet had known it before either of us did. It was simply, finally, making sure we stopped arguing.
She came off the ledge.
I drove my right hand into the cliff face — fingers into obsidian, no holds, raw grip against raw rock — and took the full weight of both of us across my forearm and wrist and palm.
We swung out.
Hit.
I absorbed the impact with my shoulders and the back of my skull.
I ignored the pain.
I focused only on her body swaying in front of me. My arm around her waist the only thing between her and a terrible fall.
Her hands locked onto my forearm. Her back against my chest. Her weight against my arm. Her heart slamming so hard I felt individual beats like fist strikes through every point of contact between us.
A sound escaped her throat — sharp and desperate and alive.
She clung to me and I reveled in the way her body pressed against mine.
In the freedom I had to hold on as tightly as I wanted.
To feel every soft curve. Smell her hair.
Feel the pulse of the storm moving through us as our heartbeats became one matching pulse.
Her breath became mine. Our bodies merged into one awareness. One perfect fucking moment.
Then the discharge cycled.
And it was no longer purely electrical.
Something else moved through the circuit now.
Something the planet did deliberately, intentionally, with the focused patience of a consciousness that had been waiting.
The energy moved through our bond not as damage but as deepening.
Not as a force tearing through us but as something weaving us together.
Something against which we had no defense.
Each cycle moved deeper inside our bond. Each loop rewrote something one of us carried.
I felt Sloane’s fear. Her determination. Her grief at leaving. Her wanting. Underneath all of it — deep and inarguable and vast — her new love for this planet. For the marks on her collarbones. For the heartbeat she'd woken to, that she couldn't separate from her own.
For me.
I felt her deepest emotions the way I felt the storm.
Total. Raw. Undeniable. The kind of knowledge that didn't require repetition or explanation. Truth.
She loved me.
She hadn't named it yet. She would fight it and rationalize it and pack it carefully into the language of biology and bond mechanics and physiological response.
But I had felt it moving through my nodes like current.
It was love. I knew because I carried the exact same emotion.
There was no escape, there was only power.
Energy moving through us as if the planet breathed through us now. As if it always had.
Hold on, I sent the thought to her. Through the circuit. Through the bond. Through every channel the Skybond had built between us in the dark of the cave. I have you. Hold on.
Seconds passed. They felt like hours. Like eternity. A moment frozen in time.
The surge finished.
The cliff face went quiet. The arced light died.
The air lost its taste of ozone. Found instead the cold mineral dark of the rock and the warm scent of Sloane.
She hung in the air, still pressed to my chest. Her hands still locked on my forearm.
Her heartbeat fast and ragged. “Hold on. I’ve got you. ”
I pulled her up to me and settled us both on the ledge. Breathed her in. Held the knowledge the storm had left behind in my entire system like sediment. What my mate felt. What she wanted. What she hid behind her walls and her professional voice. What she needed and what she feared.
She knew me now, as well. She had to. The circuit had run both ways.
Tremors ran through her in small continuous waves. I held her closer, my arm locked at her waist. My face in her hair. My nodes still blazed. My chest was so full of impossible emotions that breathing around them was almost impossible.
"Sloane." I whispered her name against her hair. Low and rough and not entirely steady. All the things I could not say were in my voice.
She took a deep breathe. Sighed. Opened her hand.
The last crystal sat in her palm. Jagged and pale.
Precisely the size she had specified. Exactly what the stabilizer coil required.
She had held onto it through the storm surge and being thrown off the cliff.
Through long moments of current moving through her body.
Through mine. While the storm rewrote the bond between us in light, in electricity, in truth.
She had held on.
She hadn’t let go.
"We need to descend before the next discharge cycle."
"Yes." I did not move my arm.
She looked down at it. At the arm still around her waist. At my face, still close to hers. At whatever was in my expression that I made no effort to conceal.
Her throat moved.
I pressed my lips to her forehead. Slowly. Deliberately. No pretense. Not protective instinct. Not reflex.
A choice. To love her. To accept her. To be whatever she needed. The promise that I needed her more than I needed anything else.
She went completely still. "Sorik—"
"I know." I spoke against her hair. Into it. Her scent filled every breath. The warm, stark reality of her soaked into my lips. The bond settled into its new depth the way the valley settled after a storm — quiet, clean, irrevocably altered. "I know. We are running out of time."