If those scans didn’t even recognize me as human?I’d never leave base.I’d be their next experiment.Technically, the corporation would do whatever they wanted with me for the next five years.They owned me.If they wanted to run experiments on their newest alien pet, they would.I had no family to come looking.No allies.No one to call.
Knowing all that made it worse.Impossible.What was I going to do?
"The upper deposits begin forty meters above the valley floor.”Sorik’s voice was a welcome distraction.Work.That’s what I was going to do right now.Solve one problem at a time.One arm tightened around my waist as he pointed with his opposite hand.“The first accessible formation is at fifteen meters on the second face.I will acquire the crystals you need.You should remain here.Rest."
No way.I needed something to do.I needed to move."No.I can climb.”
"I know you can."His response was immediate.Certain.No condescension.He turned me in his arms, looked down into my eyes for a long moment."Very well.You climb first.I will follow."
"So you can catch me if I fall?"That never worked.But we didn’t exactly have climbing gear, either.
"I will always catch you.”No embarrassment.No doubts.
I looked at him sideways.The line of his jaw.The pale lightning scars across his shoulder.The storm nodes running their steady pulse along his spine — the same pulse in my collarbones, the same pulse in the crystal veins above us.I believed him.
We moved to the place he indicated.Stopped.I looked back up the cliff, put my hands on the rock.
It was warm.Of course it was warm.Everything on this planet was warm and alive and had opinions about my life.Also true was the planet was entirely unbothered by my feelings about any of it.
The obsidian pulsed under my palms, slow and deep, and I felt it move up my arms and into the marks that answered with a flare of recognition.Of welcome.As if the stone was part of me and I was part of it.
I started to climb.
Sorik followed.
I felt him before I heard him — his warmth rising at my back, below me, between me and the ground.Exactly where he said he'd be.
I will always catch you.
Romantic?Yes.No need to put it to the test.
The wind raced down the cliff face carrying ozone and cold crystal and the distant metallic sweetness of the building storm.
I climbed toward the crystal deposits and tried not to think about the synchronized heartbeat I'd woken to, the weight of his arm in the cave dark, the marks on my collarbones.Tried not to think about leaving him behind.About the fact that I was no longer, technically, human.Tried not to imagine what life would be like without him.
I failed.
I climbed anyway.
10
Sorik
She climbed.Watching her curvy ass sway above me was a torment I had not anticipated.
She was good at it.That shouldn't have surprised me — Sloane was good at everything she turned her full attention to, with the focused, unhesitating competence of a person who treated every new problem as already half-solved.She read the rock face with the same rapid intelligence she gave her scanner data.Dark eyes tracked holds three moves ahead.Her body adapted to the cliff's geometry with a practical grace that had nothing to do with formal training and everything to do with a mind that processed spatial information faster than most warriors I'd served beside.
She was extraordinary.
She was also twelve meters above me on a forty-meter cliff face on the most electrically active rock formation in Stormfall Valley.The pre-surge atmosphere built charge around us by the minute.Every crystal vein within thirty meters of our climb path held hours of stored storm energy that would discharge into the first conductive surface that disturbed it.That would be me.
The second most conductive surface on this cliff moved twelve meters above me.
Sloane’s jaw was set with determination.Her dark hair lifted at the ends with the static already built in the air.I could see the faint, luminous traces of Skybond marks on the back of her neck, even from here.
My marks.
The thought moved through me like a direct strike — white and immediate and total, lighting every node simultaneously.Possessive.Aware.Something deeper.Something the Skybond had written into my bone marrow overnight.