HALLIE
The Consortium rep slid the tablet across the desk. "Sign here. And here. And here."
Seventeen waivers. I read none of them and signed them all because what choice did I have? 180,000 credits to clear my mother's medical debt, deposited the moment I stepped through the portal. She'd died four months ago—lungs destroyed by thirty years in the factories—leaving me with bills I'd never pay working transport logistics. This or bankruptcy.
"Varyn," the rep said, already pulling up the next form. "Vertical world, winged species. Survival rate forty-seven percent among those who complete the thirty days. We've had fifteen prior attempts on this world. Seven dead, five rescued before completion, three unaccounted for." She looked up at me like she was reading a weather report. "If you bond, the transformation becomes permanent. You'll grow functional wings. You won't be able to return to Earth. The atmospheric pressure differential would kill you within hours."
I thought about Sector 23, where I'd grown up in factory housing three levels underground. I thought about my mother's destroyed lungs, ruined by thirty years of breathing recycled air and industrial particulates. I thought about how the surgery wasalready paid for, how her name was already on the list, how she'd live because I was doing this.
I signed the last page.
Processing took twenty minutes. They injected the neural translator at the base of my skull, and the burn spread through my head before going numb. The tech who did it wouldn't meet my eyes. Then she handed me a glass vial filled with clear liquid that moved wrong when I tilted it. Too slow, too thick, like it had a mind of its own.
"Preparation tonic," she said quietly. "I'm required to tell you that it's going to make you feel things you didn't consent to feeling. I'm sorry."
I uncapped it, and the scent alone made my hindbrain scream. Cinnamon and hot copper and something underneath that I couldn't name but recognized anyway. Something that said danger, that said prey, that said run.
I drank it anyway.
The fire started in my stomach and spread outward in waves. Not actual heat but pure sensation, like every nerve in my body woke up screaming at once. My nipples went hard so fast it hurt. The thin bodysuit they'd given me turned to sandpaper against my skin. Between my legs there was sudden, horrifying wetness, and my pulse started throbbing there like a second heartbeat, demanding attention I couldn't give it.
"Ninety seconds to portal closure."
I walked toward the portal on legs that felt hypersensitive to every movement. The suit's seam dragged between my thighs and I wanted to rip the whole thing off right there, wanted to touch myself in front of everyone, wanted to press into the friction until something broke. I didn't. I kept walking because the alternative was my mother dying.
The portal shimmered in front of me. Through it I could see black rock, orange sky, and an eighteen-inch ledge with void on either side.
I stepped through.
The transition threw me hard into alien heat. I caught myself against the cliff face, palms finding warm obsidian that was almost hot enough to burn. The warmth soaked through my suit instantly and the tonic surged in response. More wetness flooded between my legs. My skin felt like it was on fire.
Behind me, the portal snapped shut with a sound like breaking glass.
I was alone on an alien world with a body that didn't belong to me anymore.
The rock under my hands was alive, or at least it looked that way. Black obsidian shot through with veins of copper-green that pulsed in a steady rhythm like a heartbeat. When I touched one of the veins directly, it warmed even further and the sensation traveled straight between my legs like an electric current. I jerked my hand back and pressed my thighs together, which did absolutely nothing except make it worse.
Great. Geology makes me horny now. My mother would be so proud.
I forced myself to look around and assess the situation like a rational person instead of an animal in heat. The sky overhead was orange-red, alien and wrong, with three moons visible even though it seemed to be midday. The cliff face radiated heat that my suit's temperature regulation couldn't handle. I was already soaked with sweat, fabric clinging everywhere, and the need between my legs wasn't fading. If anything it was getting worse. Constant throbbing, empty aching, like my body knew exactly what it wanted and was demanding I hunt it down.
I made myself focus. Gear check first. I had a water bottle that was half-full, three protein bars, climbing shoes, a chalkbag, and an emergency beacon that was completely dead. No signal, no rescue, no way out except to survive thirty days.
The cliff face itself showed signs of regular use. The obsidian was smooth but not naturally so. Something had worn handholds into the rock, and the pattern was too regular to be accidental. Something climbed here often. Something big enough and strong enough to carve grooves into volcanic glass. There was a path leading upward to a dark opening about fifty feet above me. A cave, maybe. Shelter.
Then I heard wings.
Not feathered wings like a bird but something else. Membrane stretched over bone, leathery and thick. The sound was deep, resonant, like wind moving through a canyon. I looked up and saw him circling high above me. Massive wings, maybe fifteen feet across, silhouetted black against the orange sky. The body between the wings was humanoid enough that I could tell it was a person and not just some animal. Too far away to see details but my body knew anyway.
The tonic recognized him instantly, and my pulse spiked so hard I saw stars. Wetness flooded down my thighs. I clenched around nothing and had to grip the rock just to stay upright because my knees wanted to give out.
He circled lazily, riding thermals I couldn't see. Watching me. Then he folded those massive wings tight against his body and dropped straight down in a controlled dive that should have terrified me but instead made the ache between my legs get so much worse.
Ten feet away from me he opened his wings again. The wind from the sudden stop slammed into me like a wall, hot and carrying his scent. Smoke and heated stone and something else, something that made the tonic spike so hard I actually whimpered. My body recognized what he was before my brain could catch up. Compatible. Viable. Mine.
He flew past in a blur. I got an impression of size, of dark wings and darker body, of power and control. Then he was gone, disappeared around the curve of the cliff face, and I was alone again.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the narrow ledge. My hands were shaking. That scent had gone straight between my legs and stayed there, and the tonic was still responding to it, still flooding my system with chemicals that made me want to chase after him. My body was screaming at me to find him, to offer myself, to let him breed me because that was what the tonic had restructured me to want.
