Her fingers touched the central cluster.
I felt the contact in my nodes before I heard the violent spike in the electromagnetic field directly in front of us.The crystal registered warmth and conductivity and responded with everything it had held for sixty-eight hours.
In the half-second before the crystal exploded, I felt her.
Her nervous system.Her electrical signature.The distinct and individual frequency the Skybond had written into my biology as the most recognizable thing in my world.I felt her the way I felt the storm — total and immediate and everywhere at once.
The surge of energy hit us like lightning.Enormous and instant, it channeled through her hand, up her arm and into her nervous system.The light leaped through the Skybond into my body, through arms and legs and spine, back into hers in a circuit that had no off switch.A feedback loop between two systems the planet had wired together.The surge was white and violent and total.
And underneath the violence — underneath the white-hot force of hours of stored electrical energy moving through two bodies not built to carry it — I felt her.All of her.
The wayI had felt her in the cave before she decided she needed to shut me out
Her thoughts brushed against mine.Her body’s frequency threaded through my nodes.But larger now.More.Terror and agony and the most profound recognition I had ever experienced — total, cellular-level confirmation of everything I had known since the storm.
She was mine.
I was hers.
The planet had known it before either of us did.It was simply, finally, making sure we stopped arguing.
She came off the ledge.
I drove my right hand into the cliff face — fingers into obsidian, no holds, raw grip against raw rock — and took the full weight of both of us across my forearm and wrist and palm.
We swung out.
Hit.
I absorbed the impact with my shoulders and the back of my skull.
I ignored the pain.
I focused only on her body swaying in front of me.My arm around her waist the only thing between her and a terrible fall.
Her hands locked onto my forearm.Her back against my chest.Her weight against my arm.Her heart slamming so hard I felt individual beats like fist strikes through every point of contact between us.
A sound escaped her throat — sharp and desperate and alive.She clung to me and I reveled in the way her body pressed against mine.In the freedom I had to hold on as tightly as I wanted.To feel every soft curve.Smell her hair.Feel the pulse of the storm moving through us as our heartbeats became one matching pulse.Her breath became mine.Our bodies merged into one awareness.One perfect fucking moment.
Then the discharge cycled.
And it was no longer purely electrical.
Something else moved through the circuit now.Something the planet did deliberately, intentionally, with the focused patience of a consciousness that had been waiting.The energy moved through our bond not as damage but as deepening.Not as a force tearing through us but as something weaving us together.Something against which we had no defense.
Each cycle moved deeper inside our bond.Each loop rewrote something one of us carried.
I felt Sloane’s fear.Her determination.Her grief at leaving.Her wanting.Underneath all of it — deep and inarguable and vast — her new love for this planet.For the marks on her collarbones.For the heartbeat she'd woken to, that she couldn't separate from her own.
For me.
I felt her deepest emotions the way I felt the storm.
Total.Raw.Undeniable.The kind of knowledge that didn't require repetition or explanation.Truth.
She loved me.
She hadn't named it yet.She would fight it and rationalize it and pack it carefully into the language of biology and bond mechanics and physiological response.But I had felt it moving through my nodes like current.It was love.I knew because I carried the exact same emotion.There was no escape, there was only power.Energy moving through us as if the planet breathed through us now.As if it always had.