And I had never once asked.Whatwashappening to him?
My chest hurt, knowing I was being selfish.Obtuse.Willfully ignorant.Because caring meant leaving would hurt even more.
I turned back to the cliff and checked my scanner.Looked at the timer in one corner, noted the time I had left to collect the crystals and fix my ship.
"We have forty-eight hours," I said.
"Yes."
I raised the scanner.The data coming back from the crystal veins was extraordinary — conductivity readings off the standard scale, electromagnetic signatures cycling through the matrix in patterns that were almost biological."They pulse.”It was as if they were alive.I knew my awe sounded nothing like a pure technical observation.
"Yes.”Man of few words.
I felt his heat at my back.Constant.Intense.Something on my scans made me frown in confusion.This couldn’t be right."Like the storm nodes?The exact same frequency?"
"Soltharra’s heartbeat.The storm’s rhythm," he said."Everything here is part of it."
I turned the scanner on myself, shock running through my veins like liquid ice.“This can’t be right.”
“Sloane.”
I scanned again.Same result.Same fucking result.Oh my god.What the actual fuck was happening to me?“This can’t be right.”I took another reading.Another.“It says I’m analien.”
My own scanner didn’t recognize my biology.My humanity.ThoughtI was the alien.
I knew Earth had a certain frequency.They called it the Schumann Resonance after the man who discovered it a couple hundred years ago.Seven point eight three hertz.The whole planet.Was Earth alive like Soltharra?Were humans just too ignorant to realize it?Too detached from nature?Why wasn’t I this alive back home?This aware?Was our planet dead?Had we somehow killed the Earth itself?
I couldn’t breathe.I was an alien.
How could I go back now?What would I tell them?Would they lock me in a cage and experiment on me until I died?But if I didn’t go back, what would happen to Sorik and his people?
Was I going to have to fake my own death?Destroy the shuttle somehow?What were my options?Because if I couldn’t go back….Wait.What about the others?My crew?Would the planet start changing their biology even if they weren’t having hot sex with one of the aliens?
I couldn’t breathe.My chest froze like a giant was squeezing me, crushing my ribs.My vision blurred.The ground spun.I reached for the rock wall, leaned against it so I wouldn’t fall.Fuck, I was losing it.
"Sloane."His voice was full of tenderness.Caution.As if he was afraid he was about to break me.
He's being careful with me,I thought.The man who caught me on a cliff face without flinching is handling me like I'm already in pieces.
"I’m fine.I just need a minute.”My voice had changed into something complicated.Lies layered on top of lies like frosting in a three tier cake."I’m fine.I’ll be fine."
He wrapped his arms around me from behind, covered me with his body like a security blanket.Pulled me back against his chest.The cliff face blurred before me as tears gathered in my eyes.“There’s something wrong with me.”
“There is not.You belong to the storm now.To me.”His heat penetrated my panic and I felt my heart struggle to slow, to match the steady rhythm of his.He was calm.
How the hell was he so calm?
I was a fucking alien now.With weird marks in my skin and a heart that no longer knew how to beat on its own.
“Mate, there is nothing wrong with you.The Skybond flows between us.Your body has taken the marks.Your heart beats with mine.We are one, as we should be.”He rubbed his cheek over the top of my head.Didn’t let go.“I’ve got you.You are not alone.You are mine.You will never be alone again.”
How was I supposed to deal with turning into another species?Or at least, something so different our scanners no longer recognized me as human?
I let him hold me.I didn’t have a choice.My shaking legs weren’t going to hold me up at the moment.Falling apart wasn’t an option.Not yet.Not until we had the crystals back to the ship and made sure the whole thing wasn’t going to go boom and kill everyone he cared about.
The marks on my collarbones pulsed steadily — matching the planet, matching him, matching my heartbeat.Slowly, my body caught up to my brain and stopped panicking.While he held me, I thought about leaving.About what leaving would do to him.About the fact that I needed to leave to protect him — to keep salvage crews from stripping this living electric world down to dead rock.
The most loving thing I could do for this man was let him go.But now, even that option was flawed.I couldn’t return to base and submit to a medical exam.We were always required to do a full medical evaluation after a mission.Without exception.We were poked, prodded, scanned, tested and put in quarantine for several days to weeks, depending on where we’d been.