Chapter 14
Sloane
We made fast time back to the wreckage.
The ship smelled wrong.
That was the first thing I noticed. I stepped through the hull breach and my body recoiled — small, involuntary. The physical rejection of a body that had spent too many hours breathing something alive and was now asked to accept something that wasn't.
The shuttle's atmosphere was neutral. Filtered. Lifeless.
After Soltharra's charged, mineral-sweet, electrically singing air, the lack of life inside my ship didn’t just feel different. Life felt absent. The sensory equivalent of silence after music.
I stood in the entryway and felt the dead air move across my skin.
No charge. No mineral sweetness. No ozone. No living warmth. No deep bass-note hum of a planet running its consciousness through everything it had claimed. Just — nothing. Filtered nothing. The careful, controlled, Imperium-standard nothing of a life lived in sealed environments and recycled air.
I had lived in this my entire life.
I had never noticed. I had lived in dead air and called it normal.
I had never once known what I was missing. Now I knew.
My collarbones blazed.
In the electromagnetic quiet of the shielded hull, the marks flared — branching lines of light pulsing faster, brighter, casting blue-white across the corridor walls as though they searched for something to reach toward and found nothing.
My palms tingled. My fingertips felt numb in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
The tingling felt like loss. Like amputation. Like the grief of a sense I hadn't known I possessed until it was severed.
I had been feeling the planet's hum since the marks appeared.
In every breath of outdoor air. In the obsidian under my palms on the cliff face.
In the root networks at my feet in the jungle.
In the tree bark when I pressed my palm flat and felt the frequency of an entire world move through my nervous system.
Now it was gone.
I stood in the entryway and constructed explanations. Pressure differential. Oxygen adjustment. Sensory recalibration after prolonged exposure to high-electromagnetic-field environments. I lined them up like instruments.
None of them could explain the sense of loss making my heart heavy and my knees weak. I could not go back to this life. Didn’t want to go back. Not to the dead air, and the filtered silence, the life I'd built in controlled environments that did not breathe. Did not sing.
I knew what if felt like to be truly alive. I could not go back to something that wasn't. Decision made. I was not going back. I would repair the ship for the rest of my crew. Give them a chance to return to their homes, their families, their old lives. But me?
Sorik was mine. This place, the planet, was mine now as well.
The marks on my body dimmed the farther I stepped inside. Sorik came through the breach behind me.
I felt him before I heard him. His warmth hit my back like a storm all its own — immediate, known, the one signal the hull's shielding hadn't managed to block.
He slowed as the interior shielding cut him off from the pulse of his home world.
I heard the sharp catch of his breath — barely audible, controlled immediately — and turned to see the nodes along his spine dim from their outdoor blaze to a muted, suppressed pulse.
Silver light gone grey-white and constrained.
Like something breathing too shallowly. Like something in pain.
His jaw was tight. His eyes found mine in the flat red-white of the emergency lighting, and in them was everything I had been feeling since I stepped through the hull breach —cut off from life. The grief of a frequency suddenly severed.
He felt it, too. Of course he did. He had been feeling this frequency his entire life. We stood in the electromagnetic dead-space of my ship and felt its absence like a missing limb.
"The ship’s shielding must suppress the storm’s energy.” I reached behind me for his hand, sighed in relief when his fingers wrapped around mine and the familiar hum of our bond moved through me.
"It is — disorienting." He squeezed my hand. “I understand the elders’ choice now. If the dark between stars feels like this.”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about but it sounded like his people had experience in space travel. Fascinating. But I didn’t have time for that right now.
"Are you all right?" He stood close behind me. His warmth reached my back even through the dead air. The Skybond current ran warm and continuous between us — a thread that couldn't be cut. The dead air could take the planet's hum from me. It could not take him.
Something inside me was eternally grateful for that.
"Working on it." I made myself move. Down the corridor toward the reactor bay.
Emergency lighting cast everything flat red-white.
The marks blazed at my collar. The ship that had been my home for over five years felt like a stranger's house — familiar in layout, foreign in atmosphere.
The sensory landscape of a life I'd been living before I understood what living could feel like.
When I was in the reactor bay, I pulled the crystals out of their pack and set them down on the work counter.
Used my scanner to run calculations. Collect data.
Even inside the shielded hull, the data coming off the crystals was extraordinary — the unique crystal lattice cycled its stored charge in patterns my scanner failed to characterize. Not standard crystal behavior.
It was like the crystals were alive. They held the same frequency as the root network and the reeds. The stormglass trees that sang to me now. The same frequency as my marks.
I’d brought the planet inside with me.
The reactor bay was intact. Primary housing undamaged. Stabilizer coil housing cracked, but functional enough to accept a replacement component. I set the crystals on the diagnostic platform and ran the compatibility assessment. Found the best match.
Sorik stood at the bay entrance behind me. “What can I do to help you?”
“Just watch my back.”
“Always.”
I felt him without turning. His presence had become something my body registered automatically.
His warmth. The muted pulse of his nodes.
The Skybond current running its steady thread between us — warm and constant and impossibly intimate in the electromagnetic dead-space.
He watched me work. Not hovering. Not directing.
Simply witnessing with the complete, unhurried attention he brought to everything I did.
When I first met him, I had found that level of attentiveness unnerving.
Now it felt like someone holding a light while I worked in the dark. I had stopped being alone in this.
I’d always been alone. Lived with the functional loneliness of a woman competent enough that nobody ever thought to check on her.
Who always seemed to have her shit together.
Who was relied upon, trusted, and never — in longer than she could remember — asked if she needed anything.
Needed help. Needed a fucking hug. And nobody had ever held a light while I worked. Ever.
I felt him, a signal my nervous system had learned and was now incapable of ignoring. I had not known, until I met him, how starved I had been for someone to care. To notice when I hurt. To hold me when I needed to cry. To touch me. Kiss me. Hold me.
I’d never had anyone that was mine, that loved me.
I realized I would rather die than give him up. I’d fallen in love with an alien. Totally. Completely. Fight to the death kind of love.
I snorted as I selected the best crystal, thought of the debrief I’d receive if I ever was forced to return to NFI base.
I could just see the look on the psych-analyzer’s face if I said that out loud.
He was dark teal, seven feet tall and had lightning under his skin.
Oh, and I fell in love with him in a couple days, started to hear the trees talking to each other and the ground hum.
Funny. Although, I wouldn’t be cleared mission ready. They’d ground me. Probably put me in a straight-jacket and petition The Imperium for permission for a complete memory wipe.
Fuck that. I was not going back. Which meant I needed to fix the problem at hand, stabilize the core so the stupid ship didn’t explode and blow up the whole valley.
"The lattice geometry in these crystals is close enough." I talked over my shoulder. Steadier than I felt. "The electromagnetic profile needs manual calibration, but the stored charge will bridge the gap during startup." I looked up at him. "It's going to work."
Something moved through his expression. Not relief — something quieter. Pride? Satisfaction? Something that had nothing to do with the reactor and everything to do with the way he looked at me.
The way he always looked at me. Complete. Unhurried. Like I was the most interesting thing in any room he had ever been in. Like I was worth looking at.
"Good," he said.
"I need about twenty minutes."
"I'll be here."
I'll be here.
Simple. Absolute. The way he said everything true. The way he had taken care of me since the moment I stepped off this ship — steady and present and entirely without agenda.
I turned back to the crystal and got to work.
The most delicate field work I had ever executed, with more at stake than I dared think about. If I failed, Sorik’s village would be destroyed. My crew, wherever they were, would probably die in the blast.
Failure was not an option.
At last, the crystal seated with a sound that was not the standard click of component installation. It resonated.