I felt her work at it.
I felt the cost she paid in her heart.In her soul.In the dark shadows she carried.She understood the risks we were both taking.
I pressed my forearm more firmly against her waist.
She made a sound that was not quite a breath and not quite anything else.Her hand went to the cliff face.
"Focus," I ordered.Low.Against the crown of her head.Aimed as much at myself as at her.Her hair was against my jaw.I breathed her in.Willed her to hurry.
"Working on it," she said.
She began the extraction.
Her movements were extraordinary to watch from this proximity.Small and precise.She read the crystal matrix the way she read everything — with the full-body intelligence of a person who brought all of herself to whatever she touched.I felt it through every point of contact between us.The micro-shifts of her weight.The slight tension in her forearm before each movement.The controlled steadiness of her breath.
The tip of her finger traced the seam between crystal and obsidian.Found the fracture line with a sensitivity I felt in my fingertips through the Skybond.As though her nerve endings were partly mine now.
They were.I knew this.I was now a man whose nervous system had been rewired around hers in the dark.
The outer crystal came free without a single arc of discharge.
She exhaled.
I felt it move through my arm at her waist like a tide going out — the release of held breath, of held tension, the body's small private celebration of a thing done right.Something in my chest responded with a heat that bordered on pain.
"One," she said quietly.Not to me.To herself.
I heard the determination in her voice.I loved and hated it in equal measure.Loved her competence.Hated that it was aimed at leaving.
She put the first crystal into the bag she carried for that purpose, then reached deeper into the small seam.
The second outer crystal required more — her weight shifted forward off the ledge.Her body leaned into the face.My arm tightened at her waist.My nodes blazed with the shift.
The second crystal released and again she put it in her bag.
The sky above the valley had gone another shade darker.The air carried the sharp metallic sweetness of a storm building real pressure, real mass — something that intended to arrive and wreak havoc on anything in its path.The ledge trembled again beneath our feet.Longer this time.A double pulse sent cracks of light racing through the crystal vein two meters to our right.
Fear tightened my muscles.Made my heart race.Not for me.For her.Every part of my being was focused on her.Confused.Awed.Seduced by the way she gave herself entirely to whatever she touched.The way I wanted —indistinguishable from need — to be something she gave herself to entirely.Not just in the dark of the cave.Not just in the suspended moment on a ledge.But entirely.Permanently.With the same focused, unhesitating completeness she brought to everything that mattered to her.
I needed to matter to her.
She moved one hand to the last barrier between her and the central cluster.I felt her read it — the weight shift, the micro-adjustments of a body calculating approach geometry in real time.
Then she pressed forward.
Forward and left.Further off the ledge than either of us had anticipated.Further than the extraction geometry I'd modeled.My arm gripped tighter.My nodes went white with the shift in her center of gravity.Her fingers found the third outer crystal and?—
It moved.The formation below had shifted.
A sound moved through the cliff face.Not the sharp crack of a full discharge.Something lower.A groan of crystal matrix under pressure — the deep structural complaint of rock that had been stable for centuries suddenly unstable.The central cluster pulsed once with brilliant blue-white light.The air around our hands went electric.
"I can reach it.”
"Sloane—"
"I can reach it."She’d already extended her right arm."The fracture line on the base of the node is here — if I get two fingers under it, I can apply pressure upward from the base and it should?—"
She reached.