I looked at her hand against the tree.At the faint luminescence where her palm met the bark — the same blue-white frequency as the root network, the same pulse as the valley's own electromagnetic language.Her nervous system reaching out, connecting with the stormglass trees, the ground, eavesdropping on the planet's conversation.
The planet speaking to her.
The elders had documented the effects of the Skybond.The slow, patient work of the bond integrating two nervous systems into one shared electrical relationship with the planet.With the storm.But everything I’d been taught said it could take months or years.
"Sorik."Her eyes on mine were enormous.Wonder and terror and the raw undefended look of a person standing at the edge of knowing something that could not be unknown."Has this ever happened to another human?”
"I don’t know."
"But somethingishappening to me."She bit her lower lip.Took a deep breath.“I’m not going crazy.Right?You hear the trees, too?”
"Yes."Simple.Absolute.I could not lie to my mate.Would not.“I believe you are becoming what I am.Your body is changing.”
She stared at her hand against the bark.At the luminescence where her palm met the tree.Her eyes closed.She held still.“Is it safe?How does it happen?Am I infected with a pathogen?A symbiotic life form?Nanotechnology?How is this happening?”
“I don’t know the mechanism.I only know you will feel the storm, as I do.You will be able to read the energy all around you.The heartbeat of Soltharra.The storms building.You will feel the connection to your mate.To me."I knew what she was feeling.Had felt it my entire life.
"Yes."One word.Barely sound.The admission of a woman who had spent two days naming everything as mechanism and stimulus and response, finally standing in front of something she could not hide from.The storm was inside her now.Part of her.
"Is this happening to me because of the Skybond?Or because I am here, on your planet?”She looked at me, head tilted at an angle I found irresistible.I wanted to kiss her again.Didn’t dare.“Is this happening to the rest of my crew?”
"I do not know.I suspect, if it happens to them, the process will be slower.But you are my mate."
Three seconds of silence.Each second contained a different kind of reckoning.I watched them move across her face — the scientist, the engineer, the woman who had been carrying herself alone for a very long time.Finally, the mate who had cried out as she came riding my cock.Each version of her arrived at the same conclusion.
She was mine.Our bond was permanent.Something that could not be undone.
Then she took her hand from the tree.Chin up.Eyes on the direction of the crash site.She set her face toward it with an expression I recognized.Strength.Raw determination.
She was not running from our bond.She was, however, filing it away, ignoring the storm building between us until her ship was repaired and her people, and mine, were safe.
14
Sloane
We madefast time back to the wreckage.
The ship smelled wrong.
That was the first thing I noticed.I stepped through the hull breach and my body recoiled — small, involuntary.The physical rejection of a body that had spent too many hours breathing something alive and was now asked to accept something that wasn't.
The shuttle's atmosphere was neutral.Filtered.Lifeless.
After Soltharra's charged, mineral-sweet, electrically singing air, the lack of life inside my ship didn’t just feel different.Life feltabsent.The sensory equivalent of silence after music.
I stood in the entryway and felt the dead air move across my skin.
No charge.No mineral sweetness.No ozone.No living warmth.No deep bass-note hum of a planet running its consciousness through everything it had claimed.Just — nothing.Filtered nothing.The careful, controlled, Imperium-standard nothing of a life lived in sealed environments and recycled air.
I had lived in this my entire life.
I had never noticed.I had lived in dead air and called it normal.
I had never once known what I was missing.Now I knew.
My collarbones blazed.
In the electromagnetic quiet of the shielded hull, the marks flared — branching lines of light pulsing faster, brighter, casting blue-white across the corridor walls as though they searched for something to reach toward and found nothing.My palms tingled.My fingertips felt numb in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.