Vadh
On the seventh morning, my venom in the bowl looks different.
I coil over it in the lower hall, my palms held above the rim, feeling the effort of drawing the compound through my glands, the slow drip into the vessel. The liquid pools. Cloudy. Amber at the edges.
But the amber is lighter than it was yesterday. I think.
I have imagined this before. Wanting a thing to be true can make your eyes lie. I pour the venom into the channel entry, and I put the color out of my head.
I go back to the upper levels.
She is already working in the west corridor, and I find her by the rasp of her work three corridors away.
I have been able to place her for two days now.
Which section she is in by the sound, when she leaves a room by the shift in the corridor air.
A change so small it should not register, but now my body is tracking it.
This is new.
That should concern me. I let it concern me and I keep working.
At midday I bring food to her corridor. She sits back against the wall and eats. I coil near the junction.
She hands me the water jug when she’s finished. Our fingers touch on the clay. I do not pull back.
She holds, too. A beat. Another. Then she lets go of the jug.
“Your hands are warm,” she says, as though commenting on the weather. She goes back to the channel.
I look at my hands for a long time after she is gone.
“The channels in this corridor are carrying something,” she says. Her voice is steady. Her fingers go to her pants pocket. She pulls out a small chip and holds it up. “There’s residue inside. Chalky, yellowish. Old.”
I know what it is. What happens when weak venom sits too long inside stone. The flow poisons the channel it was meant to feed, hardens, chokes the passage shut. Decades of decay built up inside the walls, narrowing the groove to nothing.
“The channels haven’t carried clean flow in a long time,” I say.
“How long?”
The answer is: since I was small. Since my father died and the whole system started to rot.
“A long time,” I say.
She knows I am holding back. She tucks the chip into her pocket and finishes eating.
I almost tell her. The channels are poisoned. The seal is failing. The venom I pour each morning is keeping a cage shut, badly, and the cage is all that stands between the jungle and something that eats worlds.
The sentence forms, and I have to swallow it.
Later.
Not until I know what the color means. The pink I expected. The teal I did not.
In the afternoon, she is in the west corridor near the sealed doorway, and I come to check the section she has cleared. The corridor is narrow. I settle against the wall across from her, my coils folded tight, the corridor holding both of us the way it was built to hold two.
She is sitting back on her heels. Dust on her knees. Charcoal behind her ear. She is looking at my hands.
She has been looking at my hands for days. I have been pretending not to notice.
She reaches across the corridor and takes my hand.
Not the accidental contact we’ve been pretending to not notice.
Deliberately.
Her fingers close on my wrist. She holds my hand against her arm for a moment. Then she turns it over. My palm faces up. She studies it.
Her thumb traces the center of my palm. Along the line where the larger scales at the outer edge give way to the finer grain at the center. She presses into the crease.
My venom spikes.
The glands under every scales on my hand fire at once as the secretion rate jumps. The pressure under her thumb goes from gentle to sharp and the dampness on my scales goes from faint to wet.
She feels it. Her thumb pauses on the crease. Her eyes trace the surface of my palm, the sheen where the compound is pooling, and then find mine.
I am very still. Every part of my attention is on the place where her thumb rests. My pulse is in my palm. Hers through her thumb. Mine is faster.
She presses harder. The compound spikes again. The compound wells up around the edge of her thumb where it meets my scales. Her skin is flushed where the venom has been soaking in, deeper than pink now. Teal. My color in her skin.
She holds.
Then she lets go, stands, wipes her thumb on her pants, and walks down the corridor without a word.
I stay on the stone floor, my hand open on the nearest coil, the scales where she touched me flushed dark, two shades deeper than the rest. The secretion is still pooling in my palm.
My body is still producing, the glands firing on what her touch started.
The compound drips from the edge of my hand onto the stone.
The stone does not go gray.
I stare at the droplet on the flagstone. Every morning for five years I have poured venom into stone and watched it powder and pale and die. What her touch pulled from my body sits on the surface. Clear. Faintly teal in the corridor light. The stone beneath it is unchanged.
The production takes a long time to slow. I stay in the corridor and wait for my own body to stop responding to a woman who touched my palm and walked away.
I want to put my hand on her back. Between her shoulder blades, where the fabric pulls when she reaches into the channels.
I want to feel the line of her back under my palm.
I want to know if the sound she would make is the same sound she makes when she stretches after a long section of wall work, the small exhale through her teeth.
I have not wanted to touch a person in twenty years. I have wanted to not harm them. That is different.
There is one want I do not let finish forming. Her mouth.
Everything else on my body, her skin has met and answered. My tongue carries the venom at its strongest, drawn from the glands behind my jaw. Skin can shed what touches it. A mouth swallows.
I put the want away with the rest of them. It does not stay where I put it.