Sirath
Three days.
Her tolerance is building faster than I expected, faster than she expected too, though she won’t say it. I know by the way she adjusts the schedule each evening, crossing out numbers and writing new ones, moving the timeline up by increments she thinks are conservative but aren’t.
She’s settled into the cave the way a professional settles into a workspace. Vials behind the lip, not organized in any system I can identify but apparently functional. Notebook open, always open.
The shelf is full. I dragged a flat stone in from the ledge and set it at the right height for the workbench and didn’t say anything; she sat on it the next morning without comment.
The space doesn’t look like mine anymore, and it looks better for it. My cave has a workbench now, and a seat, and a glow-stone, and a woman.
My cave has a purpose beyond being a place to die.
She takes the bite every morning, same time. She moved the delivery site from her forearm to her neck on the second day, better absorption, she said.
She didn’t mention the other reasons, and I didn’t ask. I was too happy to oblige. The scent of her, the tease of her skin in my mouth, was exhilarating.
She tilts her head before I reach for her, baring her neck, and I bite, and she breathes out, a sound she doesn’t try to catch.
My venom surges after it, all of it, the full flood that would bind her to me in a single morning.
I give her the dose I measured instead. Two seconds.
Then I take the rest back behind my teeth, and it costs me more than it did the day before.
This morning, after the bite, she sets the pen down. She doesn’t write. She just sits on the stone ledge and looks at me.
“I’m attracted to you.”
She says it flat, no preamble, and the professional voice arrives about a half-second behind, catching up.
“That wasn’t how I meant to open. I was going to lead with the protocol frame and work up to the content.
Apparently, my mouth got there first. The physical orientation response has a non-clinical component.
It’s affecting my baseline readings, which means it’s relevant to the titration design, which means I’m obligated to report it as a variable. ”
She says it the way she’d report a contaminated sample.
I don’t move.
“I’m not telling you this because I expect you to do anything about it,” she continues.
“I’m telling you because honest data requires honest baselines.
If I’m pretending the orientation response is purely venom-mediated when it’s partly sexual attraction, then the titration schedule is built on false inputs.
And I don’t build protocols on false inputs. ”
As if she just told me the water source needs filtering and not that she wants me.
Nobody has ever said that to me. Nobody has looked at this body and said those words in any language. She said it in the language of data, and it doesn’t matter that she framed it as a disclosure.
I’ve known since the first bite. My species reads biochemistry through heat pits and chemical receptors, and her arousal has been arriving in my senses every day, building. I’ve been holding it behind my teeth because she had the right to her own body’s privacy.
My glands are full. They have been full since she bared her throat this morning, and they push harder now, the venom climbing to the front of my jaw, toward her, and I hold it where I hold everything.
Behind the teeth. She thinks she is reporting a variable.
She does not feel what it costs me to sit still while she does.
Now she’s named it herself, and I can’t match her honesty, because matching it means examining why I’ve been holding back. The reason is older than this cave. Older than the sickness. Planted in me when I was eleven.
Thassren.
The memory surfaces hard. The male was old, bonded, dying, and he let me stay a night in his cave. Before I left, he told me what bonding really was.
“I am rewriting her, a little more every day,” he said. “Every bite takes a piece of what she was and replaces it with what I need her to be.”
My venom surges when she’s near, and every Ophidian knows what that is. The bonding response.
“What?” she says.
I realize I’ve been staring, and not at the notebook. At her neck, the pulse running under her jaw, the venom in my glands responding to the sight of it.
“Nothing.”
My hand moves toward the space between us, and I stop it before it arrives anywhere and set it back on my thigh. She’s already seen it when I look up.
“You’re a terrible liar for a creature with a face that doesn’t move.” She sets the pen down again. “You look like you’ve been arguing with yourself for the last five minutes. Who’s winning?”
“Nobody.”
“That tracks. You don’t seem like someone who wins arguments with himself.” She turns back to the workbench, picks up a vial, holds it to the light. “Your dried meat, by the way. Is it supposed to taste like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like someone dried it out of spite.”
“It’s preserved mountain goat.”
“It’s preserved something. I’m not convinced it’s goat. I’ve had goat. Goat has a flavor. That has an absence of flavor so aggressive it circles back around to being a statement.”
I stare at her. She’s looking at the vial, not at me, and the corner of her mouth is doing something I haven’t seen before, not quite a smile and not quite not a smile.
She’s making a joke. About my food. While holding a sample of my venom up to the light.
“I’ll find something else,” I say.
“Don’t trouble yourself. I’ve been eating worse. At least your spite jerky is consistent.”
I make a noise, the shape of a laugh without the practice, something that gets halfway there and stops because the muscles don’t remember the rest.
She glances at me, and the expression stays a second longer, the unguarded thing her face does when she forgets to hold it still. I want to see it again. Then she turns back to the vial and her voice sharpens.
The afternoon routine: she runs tests, and I sit across the cave and watch her work. Her voice carries when she talks to herself, low fragments of analysis she’s not directing at me but that I hear anyway. Flush response sluggish in the deteriorated zones.
The same inflection she used this morning to tell me she’s attracted to me.
Later, I walk to the cave mouth. The air is cold and clean, and below, on the approach road, something moves.
I go still. The heat pits along my jaw register a warm body against the cold mountain, moving fast. A runner, one person, along the lower switchback.
The gait is human, even pace, uniform stride, the disciplined movement of someone trained to cover ground.
Lean, smaller than the stride made them sound.
Something hangs on a cord at their throat and catches the light when they turn their head.
Not a traveler. Nobody uses this road, because nobody comes here.
The runner reaches the second switchback and pauses, looking up toward the cave entrance, and glass in their hand catches the light. A distance lens. They’re scanning the upper mountain.
Thirty seconds. Then they stow the lens, turn, and head back down, southwest toward the lowland road, toward the nearest walled city. I memorize the gait, the stride length, the direction.
Behind me, Ruelle says, “The fourth sample is ready. I need a resting concentration draw before you eat.”
I turn from the cave mouth. She’s holding a vial, her dark eyes focused on the work. “Runner on the lower switchback,” I say. “Distance lens. Uniform stride. Headed back toward the lowland road.”
She looks up. Her expression doesn’t change, but something behind her eyes sharpens. “How long were they looking?”
“Thirty seconds. Then back down.”
“One person?”
“One person.”
She nods, goes back to the vial, files it.
I walk toward her. I don’t tell her about Thassren, and I don’t tell her that every chemical signal she’s producing arrives through my heat pits like a declaration.
The number of things I’m not telling her is smaller than it would have been if I’d held the runner back. But it’s still growing, and every one of them matters.
“Coming,” I say.
I sit down, and she hands me the vial. Our fingers touch, and her temperature spikes by half a degree. I know it before she does.
She told me she’s attracted to me, and I’m sitting here with a dead male’s voice in my head, and the words are wrong.
He didn’t say rewriting. I changed the word. I’ve been changing it for thirty years.
I eat her a little more every day.