I laughed, then immediately regretted it as pain shot through my back. “Noted. No more heroic sacrifices.”
“Good.” She settled against my uninjured side, her head on my shoulder. “Because I need you alive and functional for what comes next.”
“What comes next?”
“Saving the world. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of her against me, the steady rhythm of her breathing. “No pressure.”
“None at all.”
We sat like that for a while, drawing strength from each other while the Kythrans and D’tran moved around us, beginning to coordinate, to plan, to work together despite generations of hatred and fear. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t easy. But it was happening.
And maybe that was enough. Maybe hope didn’t need to be certain or guaranteed. Maybe it just needed to be possible.
Through the bond, I felt Zara’s thoughts aligning with mine. Not perfectly synchronized, but close enough that I knew we were thinking the same thing.
Wecoulddo this. Not alone, but together. All of us. Different species with different abilities and different pieces of the solution. Working toward the same goal.
Saving a dying world. Proving that cooperation wasessential to survival. Showing that the marks on our skin were more than just biological phenomena—they were a message from ancient engineers who’d understood something fundamental about survival.
That love and partnership weren’t weaknesses to be overcome. They were the very things that made impossible tasks possible.
The universe had a strange sense of humor. And an even stranger way of solving problems.
But I wasn’t complaining. Not when the solution involved Zara. Not when it meant we had a chance, however slim, to fix what had been broken for so long.
“Ready to save the world?” I asked her quietly.
“With you? Absolutely,” she replied. “I give us a fifty-five percent chance of success.”
And despite the pain, despite the odds, despite everything that had gone wrong and could still go wrong, I believed her.
CHAPTER 20
ZARA
The crawler that returned for us was more crowded than the one that had brought us into the caves. Six Kythrans who could barely walk, four D’tran warriors whose hostility had only partially thawed, one injured Destran who insisted he was fine despite the grimace that crossed his face every time he moved, and one human scientist who was trying very hard not to have a complete nervous breakdown.
The weather outside had deteriorated so rapidly that even the short wait for the crawler’s return had been nerve-wracking. Through the cave entrance, I could see the sky churning in shades of green and purple that I’d never observed in any atmospheric conditions. The electromagnetic readings my broken scanner would have shown were probably off the charts.
“We take crawler to nexus,” Vikkat announced. “Faster. Safer than walking.”
“Can the crawler handle the surface conditions?” I asked,looking at the ancient vehicle with skepticism. It was tough, but it wasn’t designed for the kind of weather I could see building outside.
“Better than they can,” one of the D’tran guards said. “The nexus is threetickstravel by crawler, if coordinates are true. Two days on foot, if we survive.”
Torven settled himself carefully onto one of the benches, his face carefully neutral, but I could feel the pain through our bond. The Kythran medicine had helped, but he was still healing, still weak. The trek through the caves to reach the pickup point had clearly cost him.
“You should have stayed behind,” I muttered, sitting beside him.
“And miss all the fun?” He managed a smile. “Besides, you need me. My marks are part of the solution, remember?”
He was right, but I hated it. Hated that he was injured because of me, hated that we needed him when he should be resting, hated that I had petitioned for this expedition in the first place.
The Kythrans loaded themselves into the crawler with evident relief, clearly exhausted and in pain from the violence in their chamber. The eldest one—whom I’d learned was called Thresk—sat as far from the D’tran as possible, though his large eyes kept darting toward them with a mixture of fear and cautious hope. It was clear they were frightened of their larger, more powerful hosts as their skin changed to match the wall of the crawler behind them. The D’tran didn’t like that, even though everyone, including the Kythrans, were mostly covered by thick cloaks.
The D’tran warriors, for their part, were maintaining atense silence. Dorek, in particular, looked like he was chewing on something bitter. His jaw was tight and his eyes still carried tinges of red. He’d agreed to this plan, but he clearly wasn’t happy about it.
