A drone. Consortium technology, sleek and efficient. Hovering at our boundary, scanning the territory.
Then it spoke in a female voice, automated and emotionless. "Hallie Reeves. Your thirty-day contract period ends in three days. Portal opens Day 30 at dawn. You may return to Earth. Your debt has been cleared. Your mother has completed recovery successfully."
My heart stopped completely.
The drone continued without emotion. "Video message attached. Accessing now."
A hologram projected into the air before me. My mother. Healthy. Smiling. Color in her face I hadn't seen in years, brightness I'd almost forgotten existed.
"Hallie, baby. I don't know if you're still alive. I don't know if you'll hear this message." Her voice broke. "But they said to record it just in case. You saved my life. The surgery worked. I can breathe again without pain. I'm healthy. I'm working again. Everything's okay here." Tears streamed down her face. "Please come home. Please tell me you survived. I need you. I love you. Come home."
The hologram ended. The drone departed. Silence.
I stood frozen, completely unable to move or think or process what I'd just seen.
My mother. Alive. Healthy. Begging me to come home.
Three days. I had three days to decide.
Drav's emotions through the bond tasted like copper—his fear, his certainty that I'd choose to stay warring with terror that I wouldn't. That I'd leave him to die.
"Hallie," he said carefully, not touching me. "The bond?—"
"I know." My voice sounded distant to my own ears. "If I leave, you die. If I leave, the eggs die. I know."
"That's not why—" He stopped. Started again more carefully. "I won't influence this decision. Can't. You have to choose freely or the transformation fails completely. But you need to know—if you want to go, if you need to go home, I'll accept it."
Lies. The bond told me they were lies. He'd never accept it. Would never survive it. But he'd say anything to make sure my choice was genuine, was real.
"Three days," I said, still staring at where the hologram had been. Where my mother's face had smiled and cried and begged.
"Three days," he agreed quietly.
He left me alone at the entrance after that. Gave me space to think. To process. To decide between two worlds, two lives, two versions of myself.
I stood there until the sun set completely, watching the orange sky darken to rust. Watching the three moons rise in sequence. Watching the copper-green veins pulse in the cliff faces surrounding our home.
My hand rested on my pregnant belly. Three eggs inside me. Two more weeks until I laid them. Until they hatched. Until I became a mother to something not-human.
My body already changing in visible ways. Teeth sharper. Hearing expanded. Metallic tracery claiming my back. Adapting. Transforming. Becoming something else entirely.
My mother's voice echoed in my head endlessly. "Come home. I need you. I love you."
But this was home now. The Eyrie. The vertical world. The brutal beauty of survival here.
And Drav was?—
Everything.
I pressed my hand harder to my belly, feeling the eggs shift slightly. Felt the bond humming constant between us even with distance. Felt the copper patterns warm against my skin.
Three days to choose between the life I'd left and the life I'd built here.
Between the mother who raised me and the mate who claimed me.
Between Earth and Varyn.
Between human and whatever I was becoming.
