Chapter 16
ISAAC NEWTON CAN BITE ME
MIKAELA
Iforce my eyes away from the crack in the ceiling.
Just the light playing tricks on my fever brain that’s been running on adrenaline fumes and not enough water.
Focus, I command my hands. Just get an idea of what we’re working with here, then we leave.
I look down at my feet. The stone shelf is wide here, but it glistens constantly with the warm steam rising from the pool. A thin, red-black film of algae coats the rock right where I need to place my knees.
“Okay,” I breathe. “You can do this.”
Sarven stands at my elbow, a steady wall of strength. He reaches his hand toward mine. “Mih-kay-lah. Step.”
I lift my own hand to meet his.
But before our fingers touch, a prickle crawls down my spine.
I freeze again.
It’s not the fever. It’s that sixth sense.
The sense of being watched. Hunted.
I shouldn’t look. I told myself I wouldn’t look.
My head snaps up anyway.
Back to the shaft of light.
And there it is.
It wasn’t a trick of the angle. It wasn’t a smudge in my vision.
It’s back.
A face. Staring right at me.
“What the—”
The air leaves my lungs in a rush.
I jerk back, a full-body flinch away from the thing peering down from the crack. The light washes it in glare and shadow, but it’s a face all the same. Not one I know. Not any of our clan.
Something else.
I twist away from the face in the ceiling, trying to grab Sarven, to point, to get the word ‘look’ out of my mouth—
But I turn too fast. The sudden movement tears me out of Sarven’s reach just as my feet betray me.
The planet-sickness seizes its chance. Vertigo slams into me, a hot wave that flips the cavern sideways. For a heartbeat, I lose all sense of up and down.
“Sarven!”
The scream rips out of my throat before I even know I’m making it.
I flail, fingers clawing at empty air. In the spinning blur, I see Sarven’s face, eyes going huge with horror. His hand flashes out, claws extending, reaching—
My fingertips brush his forearm.
Just a brush.
And slide away.
Gravity takes hold.
There’s one thin, horrible instant of weightlessness where I hang above the steaming water, staring up at his terrified face—
Then I hit.
The water is not soft. It hits like stone.
Impact slams into my back hard enough to knock the breath out of me. I punch through the surface layer instantly.
It’s hot. Suffocatingly, cloyingly hot. And it wraps around me like a heavy, wet blanket, thick with slime and rot.
I go under.
The light disappears. Everything goes dark and red. The soft sound of the spring turns into a muffled, all-encompassing thunder that vibrates in my teeth.
I open my mouth to scream, and the spring rushes in.
It tastes foul. Metallic, rotten, warm. Like swallowing blood.
I choke. Panic claws at my chest as the heavy fluid floods my nose, my throat.
I thrash, trying to orient myself, but the calm surface was lying; under here, the current is a raging beast. It grabs me and spins me, hauling me toward the black mouth of the outflow, turning me end over end.
Swim, my brain yells. Swim!
My body doesn’t listen.
The shock of the impact has turned my limbs to stone, and the heat presses in on all sides, disorienting me.
I kick, but I don’t know which way is up anymore.
The world narrows to choking and burning and red.
And the last, ridiculous thought that flickers through my drowning brain is that Sarven—poor, unyielding, endlessly patient Sarven—is going to have to watch me die.
SARVEN
One moment, she is here.
She is reaching for me. Her scent fills my lungs: dust, water-sweat, and the lingering, sweet musk of her release. She is warm. She is breathing. She is mine.
The next beat of my dra-kir, she is gone.
It happens in a nightmare silence.
The slip. The way her eyes widen in shock as the rock betrays her.
The whisper of her digits brushing my arm.
Then nothing.
She hits the water with a crack that sounds like broken stone.
White spray rises, mixed with the red froth of the fake blood. Then the pool swallows her, the surface smoothing over as if she was never there.
She does not come back up.
The current grabs her at once, a hungry pull under the surface. I see the brief ghost of her form twist beneath the red haze, then vanish toward the black throat of the outflow.
My dra-kir seizes.
No.
The word rips through me, louder than the roar of the water.
NO.
I launch myself from the ledge, a lunge into the empty air where she used to be. And in that split second of suspension, between the rock and the water, something inside me snaps.
I don’t choose to let go.
It takes me.
Light explodes out of me mid-air.
Not a flare. Not the little surges I have been wrestling down.
An eruption.
Golden fire tears through my veins, blinding and merciless. It scorches outward from my center, pouring from my eyes, my mouth, the pores of my skin.
And with the light comes the pain.
It slams into my pelvis, a hot, cleaving blow that almost folds me in half. Like being pierced by a blade made of molten stone carving me open.
The thick skin that has sealed and hidden my member all my life splits without warning. Tears. Rends.
The pressure that has been building for sols, the ache that has gnawed at me since we entered these tunnels, finally has somewhere to go.
Something heavy and throbbing drops inside me, forcing its way down and out through newly opened flesh.
It is agony.
It is ecstasy.
It is my body reshaping itself at last to match what my spirit chose sols ago.
The bond slams into place at the same moment I feel her fading.
The same moment I feel her silence.
No!
The roar that tears from my throat is not human and not Drakav. It is older. Wilder. It shakes my own bones.
The water smashes into me like a wall.
It is hot, slick with the rot, choking and heavy.
I do not care.
I am burning hotter. The wildfire inside me consumes the heat of the spring.
I kick hard, driving down. My vision is nothing but gold and shadow, my glow turning the storm of bubbles into a boiling halo.
The water roars in my ears, blending with the pain.
My body is still changing as I swim. I feel skin split further, stretching, making room. The new shaft forcing its way clear, swelling heavy and thick, pulsing against the warm water. Ridges rise and harden along its length.
It hurts. Dust above, it hurts.
But the pain is just another noise.
My mind is fixed on one thing.
There.
A darker shadow in the turmoil. Spinning slowly, being pulled toward that black mouth.
Her.
She is limp. No kicking. No struggle.
Mih-kay-lahhh…
I scream her name into the mindspace, pouring it down the bond like a rope.
I kick harder, muscles tearing and protesting. My claws carve at the water.
I am a son of the Dust. My body was built for rock and sand, not this. I am heavy. Dense.
I do not care.
I will not let her go.
By some mercy, my claw closes around her arm.
I grab tight.
The current tries to steal her from me, but I snarl in the dark and yank her in, wrenching her out of its grip.
She is deadweight. Her head hangs back, her eyes closed.
I wrap my arm around her waist, hauling her flush against me.
I can feel the emptiness in her chest. The faint, stuttering echo of her dra-kir against mine—then nothing.
For a heartbeat, fear almost paralyzes me.
No, you do not leave now. I have only just found you.
I turn and kick for the surface.
The water fights me all the way. The current claws at my legs. My new weight drags at me. The pain in my groin pulses with every stroke.
I roar bubbles into the water and let my glow blaze brighter.
I pour it into her.
I push the light out of my skin and into hers, willing my fire to leap the small gap between our bodies and catch in her blood.
Live, I order. Live.
My head breaks the surface in a spray of water and light.
I suck in air that tastes like steam and rot.
I don’t stop. I keep kicking, hauling us toward the lowest slope near Ain’s beam, the only place where stone meets water gently enough to climb.
My knees scrape rock.
I claw at the ledge, dragging us out, my claws slipping on the slime-slick surface until they finally catch enough for me to haul her onto the stone with me and roll her onto her back.
“Mih-kay-lah!”
Her face is gray and slack. Her chest is still.
I press my ear to her ribs.
Nothing.
No beat. No rhythm. Only a terrible, yawning quiet.
“No,” my voice trembles in the mindspace. “No.”
I do not know human healer tricks. I have not learned how to coax breath into still lungs.
But I know that air cannot enter while the water remains.
I grab her shoulder and hip and roll her onto her side, almost all the way over. I strike between her shoulder blades with the heel of my claw.
Hard.
Nothing.
I hit her again, harder, a blow that would stagger a trained fighter. “Out,” I snarl. “Get it out.”
Water spills from her mouth, a thin stream onto the stone. Her body twitches once, then goes limp again.
She is so still. The lack of air has stolen the life-color from her rich skin.
I turn her back and drag her up against my chest, pulling her into my lap. I wrap my arms around her, crushing her to me.
Burn, I order my blood.
My glow surges white-hot, skin almost too bright to look at. I shove every scrap of energy I have into her, trying to jumpstart the fire in her veins.
Her dra-kir stays silent.
I press my lips to her wet temple, then open my mouth and let the sound rise. A deep, shaking vibration that starts low and builds, rising through my ribs.
I press my sternum against hers and force that sound into her body. A shock. A demand.
Beat, I snarl into the bond, ramming the command down the new, thick connection between us. I am beating. You beat.
I do it again. The roar turns into sound and vibration, pounding through both our chests, rattling her lungs, jarring her heart.
“COME BACK!”
I crush her in my arms, squeezing her ribs, then releasing. Squeeze. Release. A crude, desperate mimicry of breath.
“Mih-kay-lah!”
The sound when it comes is awful.
She gasps.
It’s a tearing, wet drag of air.
Her whole body bows in my hold. She chokes, heaving, and I flip her quickly, supporting her as more water gushes from her mouth onto the stone.
She coughs. Hard. Her lungs fight, dragging in and expelling air with harsh, painful-sounding hacks.
It is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.
But she does not wake. She does not come back. Her body is limp against mine.
I pull her back against me, into my lap, wrapping around her shivering body as I rock her, burying my face in her wet woven strands, my own body shaking with the aftershocks of fear and fire.
My glow doesn’t fade.
It wraps around us, turning to steam where it meets the water on our skin, drying her scale-tunic as quickly as it can. It feels like building a cocoon of light around both of us. I push harder, sending her all of my light. All these sols consuming Ain’s gift, I send to her now.
But underneath, something is wrong.
The pain in my body is not easing.
It is growing.
It feels like my bones are cracking and knitting into new shapes. Like my skin is shrinking, trying to contain something that has outgrown it.
I look down at my claw where it clutches her shoulder.
It is not gold.
The golden skin is darkening, deepening, turning the color of charred stone. And within the darkness, points of light are blooming. Little pinpricks of brilliance.
Stars.
My skin is turning into the dark sky.
A groan tears out of me. The pain is in my chest, my groin, my spine, and it is blinding.
I cannot stay here. The water, the open space, it is not safe.
I have to hide her. I have to get her into stone. Into shadow.
“Move.” But my body does not obey. “Move!”
My entire being protests as I gather her up. It takes every shred of strength I have to move. Muscles tear. My vision swims, the world dissolving into washes of heat and color I have never seen before.
I stagger toward the tunnel mouth.
Every step is agony. My knees buckle, but I force them straight.
Keep her safe.
Must…keep her safe.
I stumble into the tunnel. The darkness welcomes me, but it does not stop the burning.
I make it ten paces. Twenty.
A side tunnel. One leading back to the clan. I lurch toward it, and my vision goes white. The pain in my groin spikes, a pulse so intense I nearly drop her.
I crash into the wall of a small alcove, sliding down the stone, my legs finally giving out.
I curl around her, shielding her with my changing body, pressing her face into my chest even as my body splits and reforms.
“Safe,” I project. “I keep... safe.”
The darkness rises to meet me, filled with stars that match the ones blooming on my skin.
And then I know no more.