The tingling felt like loss.Like amputation.Like the grief of a sense I hadn't known I possessed until it was severed.
I had been feeling the planet's hum since the marks appeared.In every breath of outdoor air.In the obsidian under my palms on the cliff face.In the root networks at my feet in the jungle.In the tree bark when I pressed my palm flat and felt the frequency of an entire world move through my nervous system.
Now it was gone.
I stood in the entryway and constructed explanations.Pressure differential.Oxygen adjustment.Sensory recalibration after prolonged exposure to high-electromagnetic-field environments.I lined them up like instruments.
None of them could explain the sense of loss making my heart heavy and my knees weak.I could not go back to this life.Didn’t want to go back.Not to the dead air, and the filtered silence, the life I'd built in controlled environments that did not breathe.Did not sing.
I knew what if felt like to be truly alive.I could not go back to something that wasn't.Decision made.I was not going back.I would repair the ship for the rest of my crew.Give them a chance to return to their homes, their families, their old lives.But me?
Sorik was mine.This place, the planet, was mine now as well.
The marks on my body dimmed the farther I stepped inside.Sorik came through the breach behind me.
I felt him before I heard him.His warmth hit my back like a storm all its own — immediate, known, the one signal the hull's shielding hadn't managed to block.He slowed as the interior shielding cut him off from the pulse of his home world.I heard the sharp catch of his breath — barely audible, controlled immediately — and turned to see the nodes along his spine dim from their outdoor blaze to a muted, suppressed pulse.Silver light gone grey-white and constrained.
Like something breathing too shallowly.Like something in pain.
His jaw was tight.His eyes found mine in the flat red-white of the emergency lighting, and in them was everything I had been feeling since I stepped through the hull breach —cut off from life.The grief of a frequency suddenly severed.
He felt it, too.Of course he did.He had been feeling this frequency his entire life.We stood in the electromagnetic dead-space of my ship and felt its absence like a missing limb.
"The ship’s shielding must suppress the storm’s energy.”I reached behind me for his hand, sighed in relief when his fingers wrapped around mine and the familiar hum of our bond moved through me.
"It is — disorienting."He squeezed my hand.“I understand the elders’ choice now.If the dark between stars feels like this.”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about but it sounded like his people had experience in space travel.Fascinating.But I didn’t have time for that right now.
"Are you all right?"He stood close behind me.His warmth reached my back even through the dead air.The Skybond current ran warm and continuous between us — a thread that couldn't be cut.The dead air could take the planet's hum from me.It could not take him.
Something inside me was eternally grateful for that.
"Working on it."I made myself move.Down the corridor toward the reactor bay.Emergency lighting cast everything flat red-white.The marks blazed at my collar.The ship that had been my home for over five years felt like a stranger's house — familiar in layout, foreign in atmosphere.The sensory landscape of a life I'd been living before I understood what living could feel like.
When I was in the reactor bay, I pulled the crystals out of their pack and set them down on the work counter.Used my scanner to run calculations.Collect data.Even inside the shielded hull, the data coming off the crystals was extraordinary — the unique crystal lattice cycled its stored charge in patterns my scanner failed to characterize.Not standard crystal behavior.
It was like the crystals werealive.They held the same frequency as the root network and the reeds.The stormglass trees that sang to me now.The same frequency as my marks.
I’d brought the planet inside with me.
The reactor bay was intact.Primary housing undamaged.Stabilizer coil housing cracked, but functional enough to accept a replacement component.I set the crystals on the diagnostic platform and ran the compatibility assessment.Found the best match.
Sorik stood at the bay entrance behind me.“What can I do to help you?”
“Just watch my back.”
“Always.”
I felt him without turning.His presence had become something my body registered automatically.His warmth.The muted pulse of his nodes.The Skybond current running its steady thread between us — warm and constant and impossibly intimate in the electromagnetic dead-space.He watched me work.Not hovering.Not directing.Simply witnessing with the complete, unhurried attention he brought to everything I did.
When I first met him, I had found that level of attentiveness unnerving.
Now it felt like someone holding a light while I worked in the dark.I had stopped being alone in this.
I’d always been alone.Lived with the functional loneliness of a woman competent enough that nobody ever thought to check on her.Who always seemed to have her shit together.Who was relied upon, trusted, and never — in longer than she could remember — asked if she needed anything.Needed help.Needed a fucking hug.And nobody had ever held a light while I worked.Ever.
I felthim, a signal my nervous system had learned and was now incapable of ignoring.I had not known, until I met him, how starved I had been for someone to care.To notice when I hurt.To hold me when I needed to cry.To touch me.Kiss me.Hold me.