Vadh
The glands are quiet.
I feel them as I have always felt them, like my lungs or my pulse. They are there. They are full. They are ready. But the signal that has been firing since I was fourteen, the constant command to produce, has gone silent.
The bond is complete.
My body stops doing what it has been doing for twenty years because it does not need to anymore.
I run my fingers along my forearm. The transition line she has watched since her first week here. The line where broad plates narrow into dense grain. Without the venom, the edges are more distinct. The grain of the finer scales visible for the first time.
I am meeting my own body. I have lived twenty years under the venom, and I am meeting my own body.
She stirs against my chest and opens her eyes. She reaches up and puts her fingers on the transition line, running them along it.
“Different,” she says.
“Yes.”
She traces the edge of a plate with her fingertip.
“Good different,” she says.
After breakfast, I go to the collection points.
The two grooves side by side below the pour station. I lower my body into the first groove. The stone takes my weight. The venom that leaves my scales is clear. Clean. The groove fills with it.
I look at the second groove.
She comes down the corridor. She has her charcoal behind her ear. She sees me in the groove. She looks at the empty one beside me.
She lies down in the second groove. Her body fits. The carved edges press against her back, her hips, her calves. The stone was cut for Naga coils, not for a human body. She adjusts her shoulders, settles her weight, and looks at the ceiling.
The teal seeps from her skin into the stone. The venom she has been carrying, the color that has been building since the river, leaves her body and enters the architecture. The groove darkens where her body touches it.
Two keepers. Two grooves. The system running as it was designed.
I close my eyes. I feel the architecture conducting below us. Clean venom through clean channels. The seal deep and steady. The thing beneath sleeping the way things sleep when they are held securely.
She reaches across the stone between the grooves. Her hand finds mine. Her fingers close around my fingers.
I hold her hand. The groove carries the venom. The building hums.