Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The landscape stretched before them in waves of rust and shadow—broken terrain that shifted between sharp ridges and shallow valleys carved by ancient water long since vanished.
Rhyx walked beside Jeb, matching the cyborg’s steady pace, his bare feet finding purchase on the rocky ground with an ease that still surprised him.
He could feel the planet beneath him.
Not just the texture of stone and dust, but something deeper—a thrumming presence that pulsed through the bedrock like a slow heartbeat. It had been growing stronger since he’d left the cavern, this awareness, as if the act of walking on Mars’s surface had awakened something dormant in his blood.
Or in whoever’s blood runs through me now.
“You’re quiet.” Jeb’s voice was low, barely audible over the whisper of wind through the rocks. The cyborg moved with the particular grace of his kind—efficient, economical, every motion serving a purpose.
“Thinking.”
“About Alina?”
Rhyx’s chest tightened at her name. She’d been gone for hours now, and the distance between them felt like a physical ache—a cord stretched too thin, threatening to snap.
“Always.”
Jeb made a sound that might have been acknowledgment.
They walked in silence for another few minutes, following a narrow path that wound between two massive boulders.
Rhyx noted the way Jeb’s enhanced eyes scanned the terrain constantly—checking shadows, noting disturbances in the dust, cataloging every potential threat.
He’s done this many times, Rhyx realized. Guarding his territory. Protecting what’s his.
“What are you looking for?” Rhyx asked.
“Signs of intrusion. Tracks, equipment traces, anything that doesn’t belong.
” Jeb paused at the top of a small rise, his gaze sweeping the valley below.
“GenCon has been getting bolder. They used to stay near the cities and let the colonial authorities do their dirty work. Now they’re sending their own teams into the territories. ”
“Like the ones who attacked you?”
“Yeah.” Something dark flickered in Jeb’s steel-gray eyes. “Like those.”
They descended into the valley, Jeb leading them towards a narrow canyon that cut through the rock like a scar. The walls rose on either side, casting deep shadows that even the thin Martian sunlight couldn’t penetrate.
“This is the eastern boundary of our claim,” Jeb said. “The canyon opens up on the other side—a good approach vector for anyone trying to come in undetected. I check it every few days.”
Rhyx studied the terrain with new eyes, noting the strategic value of the position. The knowledge felt borrowed—military training bleeding through from whoever had donated their blood to his resurrection. He didn’t fight it. The instincts had kept him alive this long.
“You were a soldier,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
Jeb glanced at him, something flickering across his features. “How did you know?”
“The way you move. The way you see the land.”
A long pause. “I was. Before.”
“Before you became…” Rhyx gestured at Jeb’s body, uncertain of the proper term.
“A cyborg. You can say it.” Jeb’s voice was flat, carefully neutral. “It’s what I am.”
“What does it mean? To become that?”
Jeb didn’t answer immediately. He continued walking, his enhanced eyes scanning the canyon walls with mechanical precision. Rhyx waited, sensing that the question had touched something deep.
“It means…” Jeb stopped, his broad shoulders tensing. “It means they take you apart and put you back together. Replace the pieces that don’t work—or don’t work well enough—with something better. Faster. Stronger.”
“Does it hurt?”
“The procedure? Yes. But that’s not the worst part.
” Jeb turned to face him, and for the first time, Rhyx saw something vulnerable in the cyborg’s expression.
“The worst part is waking up and not knowing if you’re still you.
Looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger.
Feeling your heart beat and wondering if it’s really yours, or just a machine programmed to simulate life. ”
Rhyx felt the words resonate in his chest like a struck bell.
Yes, he thought. I understand that.
“I have memories,” he said slowly. “But I don’t know if they’re mine.”
Jeb’s eyes sharpened with interest. “What kind of memories?”
“Of Mars. But not this Mars.” Rhyx looked out over the barren landscape—the rust-colored rocks, the thin atmosphere, the empty sky. “I remember green. Growing things. Cities that touched the clouds. A people who…” His voice caught. “Who are gone now.”
“The original Martians.”
“Yes. And I remember other things too. Combat training. Tactical awareness. Things that feel like they belong to someone else.”
“The cyborg whose blood was used.”
Rhyx nodded. “I am made of pieces. Fragments of different lives, different beings. Sometimes I don’t know where they end and I begin.”
They stood in silence for a long moment, two creatures caught between worlds—one human transformed into a machine, one ancient being resurrected through technology neither fully understood.
“I know that feeling,” Jeb said finally. “After the conversion, I spent months trying to figure out who I was. What parts of me were real and what parts were just programming.” His jaw tightened. “I started to think maybe there was no difference. Maybe I was just a machine pretending to be a man.”
“What changed?”
The question hung in the air between them.
Jeb’s expression softened—just slightly, but enough for Rhyx to notice.
“Mattie.”
The name carried weight. Meaning. Rhyx recognized the tone—it was the same way he spoke about Alina.
“I had decided it was easier to just be the machine they’d made me.” His lips curved in something that was almost a smile. “But she changed that.”
“How?”
“She saw me. Not the metal, not the programming, but me.” Jeb shook his head, wonder in his voice even after all this time.
Rhyx thought of Alina in the cavern, her small hand pressed against his chest, her eyes full of wonder rather than fear.
She sees me too, he realized. Not the strangeness, not the uncertainty—me.
“She helped me learn to feel again,” Jeb said. “Reminded me that there’s more to being alive than just processing input and generating output. That the ache in your chest when someone’s in danger, the warmth when they smile at you—those things are real. Those things matter.”
“Even if you don’t know what you are?”
“Especially then.” Jeb met his gaze steadily. “You’re more than the sum of your parts, Rhyx. More than borrowed memories and foreign blood. The fact that you love Alina, that you’d die to protect her—that’s you. Not some fragment of a dead civilization or a cyborg’s combat programming. You.”
The words settled into Rhyx’s chest like stones dropping into still water.
He’d been so afraid—afraid that he was just an echo, a collection of ghosts wearing borrowed flesh. Afraid that the feelings he had for Alina weren’t real, just chemical reactions in a body that didn’t truly belong to him.
But hearing Jeb speak—another being caught between worlds, another creature remade by forces beyond his control—he began to believe that maybe the fragments didn’t matter. Maybe what mattered was what he chose to do with them.
“She is my mate,” Rhyx said, and the certainty in his own voice surprised him. “Whatever else I am, whatever pieces made me—that is mine. That choice. That love.”
Jeb nodded slowly. “Hold onto that. It’s the most real thing you’ve got.”
They continued through the canyon in comfortable silence, checking for signs of intrusion. Rhyx found himself paying closer attention to the terrain now—not just the tactical assessment that came automatically, but the deeper sense of the land itself.
The thrumming was stronger here.
He stopped, pressing one hand against the canyon wall. The rock was warm beneath his palm, warmer than it should have been under the thin Martian sunlight.
“What is it?” Jeb asked, alert.
“The planet.” Rhyx closed his eyes, focusing on the sensation. “I can feel it. Like a heartbeat.”
“A heartbeat?”
“Not exactly. More like…” He struggled for words to describe something that had no equivalent in any language he knew. “Like something waking up. Stretching. Reaching towards the surface.”
Jeb was quiet for a long moment. When Rhyx opened his eyes, the cyborg was watching him with an expression he couldn’t quite read.
“Alina said something similar. Before the storm, before she found you—she was tracking unusual readings. Biochemical signatures that shouldn’t exist.”
“The cavern,” Rhyx said. “The plants there. They’re growing without sunlight, without water from above. They’re connected to something deep.”
“To Mars itself?”
“I think so. I think…” He paused, uncertain how to explain a feeling that was more instinct than knowledge. “I think the planet is changing. Has been changing for a long time, but slowly. So slowly that no one noticed.”
Jeb’s eyes narrowed. “Until now.”
“Until now.”
They stood in the shadow of the canyon walls, two hybrid beings contemplating forces older and vaster than either of them could fully comprehend.
“Change is coming,” Rhyx said finally. “I can feel it in the rock. In the air. In my own blood.”
“Change can be dangerous.”
“Yes. But it’s also…” Rhyx searched for the right word, pulling from memories that might have been his or might have belonged to someone long dead. “Necessary. Without change, there is only stagnation. Only slow death.”
Jeb was quiet for a moment. Then something shifted in his expression—a softening, an acceptance.
“That’s true,” he said. “I learned that the hard way.” He touched his own chest, where metal and flesh met beneath his clothing. “I spent years fighting what I’d become. Trying to hold onto what I’d lost. It nearly destroyed me.”
“What made you stop fighting?”
“I realized that change isn’t the same as destruction. Losing parts of yourself doesn’t mean losing yourself entirely. It means becoming something new.” Jeb’s voice was steady now, certain. “Something that might be better.”
Better. Rhyx turned the concept over in his mind.
Was he better than what had come before? Better than the ancient beings whose memories haunted his dreams? Better than the cyborg whose blood had given him life?
He didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter.
Maybe all that mattered was what he did next.
“The planet is changing,” he said again, but this time the words didn’t feel like a warning. They felt like a promise. “And we are part of that change.”
“Yeah.” Jeb started walking again, and Rhyx fell into step beside him. “I guess we are.”
They completed the patrol in thoughtful silence, checking the remainder of the claim’s boundaries without finding any signs of intrusion.
By the time they returned to the habitat, the sun was sinking towards the horizon, painting the sky in shades of pink and orange that Rhyx had never seen in his fragmented memories of ancient Mars.
This is new, he thought. This sky. This world. This life.
All of it new.
All of it mine to shape.
The ache in his chest—the constant awareness of Alina’s absence—hadn’t faded. If anything, it had grown stronger as the hours passed. But beneath it, something else had settled into place. A clarity he hadn’t possessed before.
He was Rhyx.
Not the remnant of a dead civilization. Not the echo of a cyborg soldier. Not a collection of fragments held together by alien technology and borrowed blood.
Just Rhyx.
Mate of Alina. Friend of Jeb and Mattie. Part of a changing world that was reaching towards a future none of them could predict.
And for the first time since waking in that cavern, surrounded by impossible plants and wrapped in golden leaves, that felt like enough.