I breathed.In.Out.Decided I needed to get the crystals, find my crew and get off this fucking planet before I made a huge mistake.Huge.AnI-let-him-touch-meandI-fell-in-love-with-an-alienhuge.
The air between us ran hot in a way that had nothing to do with the climate.I noticed every inch of the space that separated us — two feet of jungle air that felt like a chasm.A space we both observed by mutual agreement that grew more difficult to justify with every step.The heat that radiated off him reached me despite the fact that we didn’t touch.His energy was constant.A lure.Bait.His presence something my skin had already filed under a category my brain refused to name.
His arm was two feet from my arm.His hand two feet from my hand.My body had made its preferences very clear since the moment he'd put me behind him and I'd learned what it felt like to press against him — the solidity of his back, the way his heat had soaked into me at every contact point, the dark-metal smell of him that still hadn't left my memory or my nervous system.All the scanner data in the world couldn’t address my central problem.My body had decided what it wanted and now ran a very determined campaign to talk me into doing something I shouldn’t do.
This is just the Skybond,I thought.This is a biological mechanism.This is electrochemical.This is?—
"Sloane."
My name on his lips stopped everything.My name.Low and direct.I heard it with both my ears and my mind.He’d spoken the sounds deliberately.
I looked at him.
He was already looking at me.Had been looking at me, I suspected, for longer than I realized.His silver eyes held steady.Blazed as if he had read my mind and perceived entirely too much.The storm nodes along his spine pulsed with a long, slow wave of light that moved from his shoulders to the small of his back like a tide responding to something.I felt the energy.In my chest.An answering pull that crested and held and did not recede.The light of his desire, silver-white and rhythmic, caught the corner of my vision.I didn't look away from his face.Didn’t dare watch the desire pulsing through his flesh.
"Yes?"My voice came out lower than I intended, sounded like an invitation, even to me.
He stayed quiet for a moment.The jungle breathed around us.Something distant cracked — pre-storm lightning, miles away.The sound moved through the charged air and through my body.I felt it in my teeth, in my sternum, in the palms of my hands — the same palms that still remembered the exact texture of his sides, the exact geography of him under my hands in the moment before he'd stepped away.
"We are on dangerous ground."His jaw tightened.Was he talking about my animalistic lust or the actual plants and creatures around us?"Pay attention.Watch the path."
I tried to watch the path.The best I could do was watch him.He walked ahead of me.My gaze devoured every curve and hollow, every shadow, every muscle movement as if my life depended on it.I argued that it did, even as my pulse ran wild with want.
The cliffs rose ahead of us, dark and immense.The crystal formations caught the morning light in cold fire.The sky above the valley had begun to change — the violet cloud systems thickened at the edges, the light went strange and heavy with the weight of what built overhead.I smelled the storm.Metallic and clean and enormous, the smell of electricity in a quantity that dwarfed anything my nervous system had a baseline for.
And underneath that smell, constant and distinctive and refusing to be categorized as anything other than what it was, I smelledhim.
The path became steep.Perilous.Rocks shifting under my feet.Twice I reached for him to steady me.Both times, he was already there.Holding on.Ready to catch me.
The moment I could, I let go.Stepped back.Tried to put some distance between myself and ultimate temptation.The smell of him had been doing things to me since last night.Proximity hadn't helped.Hours of walking the jungle path hadn't helped.My body conducted its campaign to be closer to him.My skin won the argument with my brain by attrition, inch by slow, inevitable inch the space between us disappeared.
Significant, undeniable trouble,I'd told myself this morning.
I hadn't known the half of it.
I kept walking.Moving closer.Almost—almost—touching.Why?I guess I just fucking loved torture.I was a masochist.Who knew?
Guess we both were.Neither of us moved away.
6
Sorik
I smelledthe storm before it hit.
Not the main storm — that was still hours away, its electrical signature a deep bass note at the outermost edge of my awareness, patient and vast and inexorable as the tide.This was something smaller and meaner.A discharge cell that formed in the upper atmosphere where two charge fronts had collided ahead of the primary system, spun up fast, dense and without warning.
I had seen them kill warriors who knew better.They gave no other warning — no gradual darkening, no slow accumulation of power in the air.Just the smell, sharp and metallic and sudden.A crackle of fiery pain, then the sky split open and anything caught beneath it faced a planet that didn't give second chances.
Soltharra was our mother, but she showed no mercy to her children.Only the strong survived.The aware.Those most connected to her.
I tracked the storm through my nodes, ran the calculations, and looked at Sloane.
No longer behind me, she’d moved to my left, scanner raised, jaw set.Her dark hair had begun to lift at the ends with the first whisper of static charge.She focused entirely on the cliff face ahead — a deliberate, professional concentration I recognized as her emotional walls going back up, brick by careful brick.She ignored me.
I noted everything about her anyway.The angle of her jaw when she concentrated.The way she held the scanner with both hands, grip sure and steady.The fact that she hadn't looked at me directly in forty minutes.
Despite my determination not to obsess over an alien female's affections, my body processed every silent minute as a loss.A rejection.I tried to rationalize.She was alien.Unused to our ways.Perhaps she found me repulsive — my skin and body nothing like hers, different texture and color.