Chapter 10
WORK NOW, MAKE QUESTIONABLE DECISIONS WITH HOT ALIENS LATER
MIKAELA
We edge out of the alcove sideways.
It’s somehow worse than coming in. Now I’ve had a full, unobstructed view of the drop, and my brain has zero illusions about how bad it would be to slip.
Three feet of ledge.
Then nothing.
Beyond nothing: darkness and the sound of trickling water, louder now, echoing up from somewhere I do not want to meet in person.
We walk for what feels like twenty minutes, but time is slippery in the dark. The tunnel changes as we go deeper. The air grows heavier, thicker. The chill of the cave begins to recede, replaced by a humid, stifling warmth that makes my scale-tunic stick to my skin.
I wipe sweat from my forehead, frowning. “Is it supposed to get this warm up here? I’m starting to feel… sticky?”
Sarven pauses ahead of me. He lifts his head, testing the air.
“Wh-arm,” he rumbles, before the translator pulses the rest in my ear. “And… smell.”
I sniff the air. At first, it’s just the usual damp stone scent. But then, as we round a sharp bend in the tunnel, it hits me.
Sharp. Metallic.
It smells exactly like a handful of old copper coins held in a sweaty palm. Or… blood.
“I smell it,” I tell him, voice tight. “It’s metallic. Like iron.”
Sarven growls, a low vibration that I feel in the soles of my feet. “Wrong,” he says. “Not stone smell. Alive smell.”
He stops at the edge of a wide tunnel. His glowing arm rises, illuminating the space ahead.
I step up beside him, ducking slightly to peer under the solid shelf of his arm.
My breath stops in my throat.
“Oh…God.”
We aren’t in a tunnel anymore. We’re in a wound.
The cavern ahead is coated in something…red.
Thick, viscous slime covers the walls, oozing from fractures near the ceiling like an infection.
It drips down in slow, heavy strands, pooling in the natural basins of the floor before overflowing into the darkness beyond.
The red muck pulses faintly in the light of Sarven’s glow like a living thing.
“It looks like the mountain…is bleeding,” I murmur, eyes and mouth widening at the sight.
The smell is overpowering here. Hot copper and rotting sweetness.
Sarven moves forward, his feet squelching in the red muck. He dips a claw, pulls it away, and the substance stretches like melted cheese. He brings it to his nose, his lip curling in a snarl that exposes nearly all his teeth.
“Poison,” he rumbles, flicking the substance away with a violent jerk of his claw. “Do not…touch.”
I force my scientist brain to take the wheel, wrestling my panic into the trunk.
“It’s a bloom,” I realize, stepping carefully onto a dry patch of rock. “Algae. Bacteria. Extremophiles. They feed on iron or heat. But... this much?”
I look at the red slime coating everything. This isn’t natural. This is an explosion of growth.
“Ain,” Sarven says, scanning the ceiling. “Too much…here.”
He’s right. The air in this pocket is stifling, humid, and hot like a swamp. But I don’t think this heat is coming from Ain. There’s no way this heat is coming from the sun.
“Something is heating the water deeper inside the mountain,” I murmur. “Cooking the rock. And this red stuff is loving it.”
I look at the red slime oozing from the solid rock wall. The pressure behind that wall must be immense to force this sludge through solid stone.
“Dormant bacteria that woke up because the temperature rose,” I murmur. “This is what’s poisoning us.”
I hover my hand over the weeping rock. Heat radiates off it.
“The main channel of water must be behind this wall,” I say, mind racing. “And it’s hot. By the time it gets down to the clan, the rock cools it off, so we don’t notice the temperature change. But up here? It’s cooking.”
I look at Sarven.
“We can’t fix it here.” I shake my head. “The water is trapped behind the stone. If we want to clean this, we’re going to have to go further. To the spring mouth. We have to catch this gunk at the source before it gets into the tunnel system.”
Sarven growls, looking at the ceiling as if he can see the spring mouth miles above us.
I point to a thick glob of red slime dripping from a crack.
“I need to get to that flow,” I say, eyeing the slick wall.
“Slippery,” Sarven growls, gaze shifting to me. “Dangerous.”
“Yeah, but we can’t go back. If this is what’s poisoning us, I have to find a way to fix it.”
I lean toward the slime only to hear a growl near my ear.
“Noh.”
Of all the English words, why’d he have to learn that one?
I don’t wait for permission. I snatch an empty gourd from the basket on his hip. There’s a handhold that looks relatively dry. A jagged spur of rock jutting out near the hanging algae. I lean to reach it, gourd outstretched, scraping the rim through the thick red slime.
But that jagged spur of rock? It isn’t dry.
My shoes hit a patch of red slime that was hiding in the shadow, and friction exits the chat immediately.
My feet go out from under me.
I don’t even have time to scream. I just have time to think, “This is it; I’m dying in alien snot—"
But I don’t hit the floor. I hit a wall of muscle.
Sarven catches me mid-fall, one arm snapping around my waist, the other grabbing my thigh to haul me up. The momentum slams us both backward against the slimy stone wall.
He grunts as he takes the impact, his claws digging into the rock to anchor us.
For a second, the world is just spinning red shadows and heavy breathing.
I’m dangling against his chest, my feet inches off the floor. His arm is a steel band under my butt.
He looks down at me, and if looks could incinerate, I would be a pile of ash.
“You,” he growls, his face inches from mine, red eyes blazing, “are... bad.”
“I slipped!”
“You jump,” he corrects, furious. “Into rot.”
“I was doing science!”
“Sai-ens?” He growls the English word like it tastes bad.
He gives me a little shake, which is both terrifying and weirdly hot.
The adrenaline is crashing through my system now, mixing with the weird fumes and the fever I’ve been ignoring. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
I should pull away. He’s mad. And we’re covered in red slime.
But I don’t pull away.
I look at him.
Really look at him.
The way his fangs are bared. The way his pupils have gone supernova, swallowing the red iris. The way his chest heaves against mine.
He smells like sunshine and fury, cutting right through the stench of the rot.
“You caught me,” I whisper.
His growl tapers off. He doesn’t let go. If anything, his grip tightens, pulling my hips flush against his.
“You…safe,” he rumbles. “Always.” The vibration goes straight through my chest.
The air between us suddenly feels heavier than the humidity.
My fever spikes. Or maybe it’s not the fever.
“Sarven,” I breathe.
I lift a shaking hand and touch his jaw. His skin is scalding hot.
He freezes.
Then he leans into my touch. Just a fraction.
His gaze drops to my mouth, and I see the thought form in his eyes. I see the exact moment he stops thinking about the poison and starts thinking about this.
“Mih-kay-lah,” he groans.
It’s a broken sound. A desperate sound.
I make a questionable decision.
I lean up.
He leans down.
His breath washes over my lips, hot and tasting of spices.
Do it, my brain screams. Kiss the alien. Who cares about the slime. Do it.
His nose brushes mine. His grip on my thigh shifts, fingers digging in enough that I realize he’s sheathed his claws.
But then the ground lurches.
Not a vibration this time. A heave.
A cracking sound splits the air like a gunshot, echoing from deep inside the wall behind the red flow.
Sarven rips himself away from the moment, spinning us around, shielding me with his body as a chunk of red-coated rock breaks loose from the ceiling and smashes into the spot where I had been standing three seconds ago.
“Go!” His roar vibrates through me and pulses in my head at the same time.
The moment is gone. Shattered.
He doesn’t let me walk this time. He scoops me up, gourd and all, tucking me against his chest like a football.
“We leave!” he bellows, and takes off running back toward the tunnel.
I cling to his neck, heart breaking for two very different reasons: the terrifying realization that the mountain is falling apart, and the devastating realization that I…didn’t get to kiss him.
Priorities, Mikaela.
But as I look back over his shoulder, I see the red slime pulsing.
It’s moving. Not just flowing.
Growing.
“Faster, Sarven!” I yell. “Go faster!”
SARVEN
I run.
My feet know the stone, even where it is slick with the fake-blood.
Mih-kay-lah is a warm, solid weight in my arms. She does not fight me this time. She buries her face in my shoulder, her hands gripping my neck.
My dra-kir hammers a rhythm that has nothing to do with the run.
She touched me.
On her own. She wanted to.
I saw it in her eyes. The dark, hazy heat. The way her breath hitched. She looked at my mouth as if it were water and she were dying of thirst.
I almost pressed my lips to hers in that way I have seen Tharn do to Jah-kee and ached to experience myself.
Right there. In the middle of the rot. In the middle of the danger.
My beast roared to claim her, to taste her, to lick the red slime from her skin and replace it with my own scent.
Focus, I snarl at myself.
The tunnel groans around us. The heat-pressure is building.
Whatever is bleeding that red poison into the water is also breaking the mountain. Ain’s heat has reached this place? The thought bothers, because some deep part of me knows this is not the dry, clean heat of Ain. It is wet. Heavy. It clogs the lungs instead of filling them.
I reach a wider shelf and skid to a halt, setting Mih-kay-lah on her feet but keeping my claws on her shoulders.
“Stay,” I command.
I turn back to the dark tunnel.
The scent is still there. The “fresh lifeblood.”
But now I know what it is.
It is not blood.
It is a mimic. A lure.
Something is growing in the dark. Something that smells like life but tastes like death.
And it is feeding on the heat.
I look at the red smear on my claws. It tingles. Burns slightly.
“Poison,” I project. “Alive.”
My gaze shifts back to Mih-kay-lah.
“We go back,” I project again out of habit. I force my throat to move instead. “We tell…Kol. The water…not sick.”
Her throat moves, shoulders still heaving from my desperate run.
I check the basket still attached to my hip, then the gourd she clutches in her grip. She managed to snag a sample of the red ooze even while falling.
Stubborn female.
Brave female.
My female.
“Come,” I say, offering my claw.
She takes it. Her fingers lace through mine.