Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Adjar felt like he was floating. Not the disoriented, fragmented sensation of emerging from the long sleep, but something softer, more profound. The small female in his arms was the source—her warmth, her scent, and the delicate curve of her body against his.
Jaz.
He savored the name in his mind, the way it had felt to say it while she was bringing him to completion.
She had touched him with confidence, with none of the hesitation he had expected, and the sight of her pleasure had been more intoxicating than anything he had experienced in his fractured memory.
He wanted to touch her again, to explore every part of her, to learn what made her gasp and moan and call his name in that breathless tone.
But she was sleeping now, her breathing soft and regular against his chest, and he would not wake her.
The shadows beneath her eyes told him she still needed rest, and he would deny her nothing.
But then the wind stopped. He turned his head towards the sealed door, listening with more than his ears.
The vibrations that had shuddered through the structure for days and the constant howl that had become background noise had vanished.
In its place was a stillness so profound it felt like pressure against his skin.
The storm had passed.
Something fierce and desperate surged through him. He needed to be outside. He needed to feel the sky above him and stretch the muscles that had been cramped and confined for too long. His wings ached with the need to fly.
She stirred against him, making a soft sound of protest as he shifted.
“What—” She blinked up at him, amber eyes clouded with sleep. “Adjar? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.” He kept his voice low, trying to suppress the urgency thrumming through his veins. “The storm. It has stopped.”
That woke her fully. She sat up, shoving her dark hair from her face, and looked out the window.
“You’re right.” Wonder crept into her voice. “I can’t believe—how long has it been quiet?”
“Not long. Minutes.”
She was already moving, swinging her legs off the bunk and reaching for her clothes. “We need to check the damage. The rig debris, the external sensors… God, I hope the solar collectors survived…”
He watched her rush through her preparations, his chest aching. She was so alive and focused, her mind already racing ahead to problems and solutions. He found himself memorizing the quick, efficient movements of her hands, the determined set of her jaw.
My mate.
The word felt more right each time he thought it.
“Are you just going to sit there, or are you coming?”
He rose, stretching carefully in the confined space. His wounds had healed enough that the movement brought only faint twinges rather than stabbing pain, although his left wing still felt stiff.
“I am coming.”
She paused at the inner door, looking up at him with an expression he couldn’t quite read. “Will you be okay out there? The cold—”
“I am made for cold,” he said automatically. “The ice is my home.”
Curiosity flickered in her eyes, but she only nodded and turned to unseal the outer door.
The cold hit him as soon as they stepped through the outer door. Not painful but welcome. It rushed into his lungs like clean water, sharp and pure and achingly familiar. He stepped past her into the pale light of a Martian day, and for a moment he could only stand there, breathing.
Home.
The word echoed through him, hollow and full at once.
This was home. This frozen expanse, this endless white, this sky the color of old rust. He knew it in his bones, in the scales that rippled with pleasure at the touch of frigid air, and the instinct that made him turn his face towards the horizon.
But it was also wrong. The contours of the ice were different—valleys where there should be ridges, smoothness where he remembered jagged peaks. Millennia had carved new patterns into a landscape he’d once known by heart.
“Adjar?”
Her voice pulled him back. She stood beside the habitat, wrapped in her thermal gear, watching him with worried eyes above her breathing mask.
“Sorry.” He hadn’t realized he’d walked several meters from the door. “I am… remembering.”
“Good memories or bad?”
“Both.” He turned to face the open expanse, where the ice stretched towards a horizon hazy with suspended dust. “This place. I knew it. Before.”
“Before you slept?”
“Yes.” His hands curled into fists at his sides. “But it is different now. Changed.”
She moved to stand beside him, her presence small but steady. “A lot can change over millions of years.”
Millions of years.
The scope of it threatened to crush him. He’d known, on some level, that he’d been asleep for a long time. But standing here, seeing the proof of it written in every altered ridge and smoothed crater, the reality almost brought him to his knees.
Everything he’d known was gone. Everyone he’d known—
His wings snapped open. The movement was involuntary, driven by something deeper than thought. She stumbled back with a startled sound as his wings extended, each wing stretching wide to catch air that wasn’t there yet, aching for the freedom of flight.
“Adjar—”
“I need—” he said roughly, his voice almost desperate. “Please. I need to fly.”
“Then go.” She gave him an understanding smile. “I’ll be fine. I need to check the equipment anyway.”
He shouldn’t leave her. Every protective instinct screamed against it. But with the pressure building in his chest and the fragments of memory clawing at the edges of his mind, if he didn’t move he felt like he might shatter.
“I will return quickly,” he said. “Stay near the habitat.”
“I’m a grown woman, Adjar. I can—”
But he was already moving. Three running steps, a powerful leap, and his wings caught the cold thin air with a sound like cracking ice.
Flight.
For a single, crystalline moment, everything else fell away.
There was only the wind beneath his wings, the strain of muscle against membrane, and the glorious rightness of being airborne.
He climbed in a tight spiral, wings beating in powerful strokes that carried him higher and higher, until the habitat below was just a dark speck against the endless white.
The sky embraced him. Thin and cold and achingly clear, the Martian atmosphere offered less resistance than his body expected—another change, another reminder of time’s passage—but his wings adjusted instinctively, finding new patterns in the different air.
He banked hard, reveling in the sensation, and the landscape wheeled beneath him.
So much had changed.
From this height, he could see patterns invisible from the ground. The ancient seabed that had once been his territory stretched towards the horizon, its contours softened by ice but still recognizable if he squinted through the veil of millennia. To the north, he could make out the ridge where—
The memory slammed into him without warning.
—voices in the dark, arguing about necessity.
“We cannot save them all.”
“We can try.”
“It’s already too late. The atmosphere—”
His wings folded against his sides as he descended into the darkness. Others leaving to find their places, their eyes reflecting his own grief.
“Remember,” someone said. “That is our purpose now. Remember everything, so that if anyone survives—”
He faltered mid-flight. His wings locked, and for a terrifying moment he hung suspended between sky and ice, caught in the grip of a past he couldn’t quite see.
Fragmented images cascaded through his mind—faces he should know but couldn’t name, voices speaking words he almost understood, and a sense of duty so profound it had driven him into centuries of frozen sleep.
Remember, the voice echoed. Remember everything.
But he couldn’t. He could feel the memories, as massive and heavy as glaciers, but they remained locked behind walls of ice in his own mind.
A tremor suddenly ran through him, not from the cold, but from something else. Something he sensed rather than felt, a shift in the world around him that screamed a warning.
His head snapped towards the horizon. The sky had changed. What had been clear rust-orange was darkening rapidly to the north, a wall of churning dust and ice crystals building with terrifying speed. Even from this distance, he could feel the pressure drop, taste the electricity on the air.
The storm was returning.
For one heartbeat, he was paralyzed by the beauty of it—the way the light fractured through the ice particles and the massive scale of the atmospheric violence approaching like a living thing.
He had seen such storms before, long ago.
He had weathered them in caves and vaults and watched them reshape the face of his world.
Then thought caught up with instinct, and ice flooded his veins.
Jaz.
She was down there. Outside. Vulnerable. The storm was moving faster than any he remembered—some consequence of the changed atmosphere, perhaps, or simply the accumulated weight of his distraction. Either way, she had minutes at most before it hit.
He folded his wings and dove.
The world became a blur of white and rust, wind screaming past his ears as he plummeted towards the ground. His body remembered the controlled fall and the last-second wing flare to bleed off speed even as his mind repeated a single desperate thought:
Please. Please let me be in time.
He spotted her from a hundred meters up, a small figure in dark thermal gear moving between pieces of wreckage. She was examining what looked like the remains of her destroyed rig, completely oblivious to the death bearing down from the north.
The ground rushed up to meet him. He flared his wings at the last possible moment, absorbing the impact through bent knees and a stumbling run that ate up the distance between them in seconds.
“Adjar? What—”
He didn’t stop to explain. There was no time.
His arms closed around her, one beneath her knees and one around her back, and then he was moving, half-running, half-flying in desperate bounds towards the habitat. She cried out, struggling against his grip.