Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sky burned amber and gold, but not the gold of life—the gold of decay.
Rhyx floated in the memory, neither fully present nor entirely absent, watching through eyes that were and weren’t his own.
The great flying beasts—his kind, he thought, though the certainty wavered like heat shimmer—wheeled above a dying world.
Their scales caught the sickly light of a sun that seemed both too distant and too harsh, filtering through an atmosphere grown thin and hostile.
We were the last, a voice whispered through the fragmented recollections. The final generation to ride the thermals above the canyon lands. The last to sing the wind songs.
He could almost feel it—the rush of air beneath wings he no longer possessed, the exhilaration of diving through cloud banks that had long since vanished into the void of space.
But something was wrong with the memory.
The details kept shifting, sliding away when he tried to examine them too closely.
The landscape below him flickered between red desert and something else—metal corridors, sterile white walls, the hum of machines.
Who am I?
The question echoed through the dreamscape, bouncing off surfaces that shouldn’t exist, fragmenting into a thousand smaller questions that had no answers.
He remembered flying.
He remembered falling.
He remembered nothing, and then everything, and then a woman’s face—round and soft, with eyes the color of the soil after rain—
Alina.
Her name cut through the confusion like a blade through mist. Suddenly the memories didn’t matter. The before-time didn’t matter. Only she mattered, only the ache of her absence, the wrongness of waking without her warmth pressed against his—
The vibration reached him before the sound did.
Rhyx’s eyes snapped open, his body shifting from dormant contemplation to full alertness in the span of a heartbeat.
The cavern around him was unchanged—the same soft bioluminescence from the moss, the same gentle drip of water in the distance, the same air rich with the scent of growing things—but something was different.
Someone was here.
He rose from the nest of soft leaves and moss where he’d been resting, every sense straining towards the tunnel that led upward. Footsteps. Light, careful footsteps, moving with the hesitant rhythm of someone navigating unfamiliar terrain.
Alina.
He knew her gait. Knew the particular cadence of her breathing, the subtle displacement of air that marked her presence. His heart—or whatever served as his heart in this strange new body—began to race, a deep thrumming that resonated through his chest like the purr of some great beast.
She was coming back. She’d promised she would, and she was keeping that promise, and nothing else mattered—not the gaps in his memory, not the uncertainty of his existence, not the looming threats she’d spoken of before she left.
Rhyx moved towards the base of the cavern wall, positioning himself directly beneath the narrow passage where she would emerge.
The climb down was treacherous for her; he’d learned that on her previous departure, watching with his heart in his throat as she struggled up the rocky incline, her small hands finding holds that seemed impossibly precarious to his eyes.
A shower of pebbles announced her descent. Then a muffled curse in her language—a word she’d taught him meant frustration and possibly stubbed toes—followed by the scrape of fabric against stone.
Her legs appeared first, dangling over the edge of the rock shelf that marked the final drop into the cavern. Rhyx was there before she could lower herself further, his hands finding her waist with unerring precision, lifting her from the ledge as if she weighed nothing.
“Rhyx—”
Whatever she’d been about to say dissolved into his mouth as he kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. Wasn’t the careful, exploratory thing their first kisses had been.
Three days of separation had carved a hollow in his chest, and the only thing that could fill it was her—the taste of her lips, the softness of her body pressed against his, the small sound she made when his tongue found hers.
She kissed him back with equal desperation, her fingers tangling in the ridge-crest that ran along his skull, pulling him closer even as her breathing grew ragged.
He could feel her heartbeat through the thin material of her suit, racing to match his own, and the scent of her—warm skin and something floral from whatever cleaning products she used—filled his senses until there was room for nothing else.
“Missed you,” he growled against her mouth, the words still clumsy on his tongue but the meaning clear. “Too long. You were gone too long.”
“I know.” She pulled back just far enough to look at him, and the sight of her face—flushed and breathless, her brown eyes dark with want—made something primal and possessive coil tight in his belly. “I’m sorry. I came as soon as I could.”
“Not soon enough.”
He kissed her again, walking her backward until her spine met one of the great support vines that arched across the cavern ceiling.
The moss beneath their feet was soft, cushioning, and he pressed her into the yielding surface of the vine with his entire body, pinning her there with his greater size and strength.
She didn’t resist. If anything, she arched into him, her legs wrapping around his hips in a way that made rational thought impossible.
Mine, the word pulsed through him with every heartbeat. My mate. My Alina.
“I can’t—” she gasped, turning her head to break the kiss even as her body betrayed her words by grinding against him. “Rhyx, we need to talk. There are things I have to tell you—”
“Later.”
“It’s important—”
He silenced her with another kiss, gentler this time, coaxing rather than demanding. When he felt her resistance soften, he pulled back to rest his forehead against hers.
“Tell me,” he said quietly. “But first let me hold you. Just… let me hold you.”
The fight went out of her. Her arms came up to wrap around his neck, and she tucked her face into the junction of his shoulder, breathing deep as if trying to memorize his scent the way he’d memorized hers.
They stood like that for a long moment, wrapped around each other in the dim golden glow of the cavern. Rhyx focused on the simple miracle of her presence—the rise and fall of her breathing, the warmth of her skin where it touched his, the steady rhythm of her heart.
But underneath his relief, a cold kernel of dread was forming.
She’d come back. She’d promised to come back, and she had. But she was still in her traveling clothes, still dusty from the journey through the lava tubes. She hadn’t brought supplies, hadn’t settled into the cavern the way she had during the storm.
She wasn’t staying.
“How long?” he asked, and felt her stiffen in his arms.
“Rhyx…”
“How long do you have?”
She pulled back, and the expression on her face—guilty, frustrated, torn—confirmed what he’d already suspected.
“I have to go back before morning,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to stay longer, but there’s a man—Martin—who’s been watching me, and if he realizes I’ve been coming out here—”
“Then don’t go back.”
“I have to. If I disappear, he’ll send people looking for me. They’ll find this place, find you—”
“I don’t care.” The words came out rougher than he intended, edged with a desperation he couldn’t quite control. “Let them come. I can protect us. I can—”
“No.” Alina’s hands came up to frame his face, forcing him to meet her eyes.
“You don’t understand. These aren’t people you can fight, Rhyx.
They have weapons, technology, resources that would—they would take you apart.
Study you. Try to figure out how you exist, and they wouldn’t care if they destroyed you in the process. ”
“Then we leave. You said there are other places on this world. Distant places. We could go there, hide—”
“Mars is small.” Her voice cracked on the words. “Smaller than it seems. There’s nowhere we could go that they wouldn’t eventually find. The only way to keep you safe is to find allies, find people who can help us figure out how to protect you legally, diplomatically—”
“I don’t want diplomacy!” Rhyx pulled away from her, his frustration boiling over into something hot and painful. “I want you. Here. With me. Is that so impossible? Is it so much to ask that my mate—”
He stopped, the word hanging between them.
Alina’s eyes had gone wide. “Rhyx…”
“You are.” He couldn’t take it back now, couldn’t pretend he hadn’t said it. “You’re my mate. I knew it the moment I woke. The moment I scented you, touched you—you’re mine, Alina. And I’m yours. That’s not something I can change, even if I wanted to.”
“I’m not—” She swallowed hard. “Rhyx, I’m human. We don’t—it doesn’t work like that for us. There aren’t mates, there’s just… people who choose to be together, or don’t.”
“Then choose me.”
The words fell into silence. Alina stared at him, her expression a complicated mix of longing and fear and something that looked almost like grief.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is.” He stepped towards her, and she didn’t retreat. “It’s the simplest thing in any world. You choose me, I choose you. We face what comes together. Everything else is just… obstacles.”
“Obstacles that can kill you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, I do!” Her voice rose, sharp with frustration. “I care if you die, Rhyx. I care if they capture you, and experiment on you, and—”
“And what about what I care about?” He grabbed her arms, not roughly but firmly, making her look at him.
“Do you think it doesn’t hurt me when you leave?
Do you think I don’t feel like I’m being torn apart every time you walk away?
You are everything, Alina. You are the only thing I have in this world that makes sense.
And you keep leaving me, and I’m supposed to just—accept that?
Wait here in the dark like a good little—”