She inhaled, saying “cells,” under her breath, and her mind became so absorbed in her discovery and all of its possibilities that she forgot where she was and what predicament she was in entirely. Her right hand lifted, driven by the explorer and inquisitor inside her, and touched the wall.
She sucked in her breath again and pulled her hand back after touching the wall. It was nothing like what she’d expected. A force, lifelike, almost like a pulse, ran through the material, which felt warm and had the texture of a living organism.
Where her hand had come into contact with the wall, an imprint of red appeared, and seemingly beneath the surface of the wall, millions of tiny points of black swarmed to the hand imprint and formed the characters of a written language, a square of black, and then, to her terror, it began flashing.
She watched the dots consume her handprint, the way macrophages in her bloodstream might attack a bacteria. The skin on her back tingled with fear; she still expected the doors to hiss open any moment.
She stood back from the wall, her mouth open in horror, trying to decide what to do. Jump back on the platform and deny all knowledge of this event? Stay where she was? Or try again, and see what happened—since she was obviously deep in the shit anyway?
She looked back at the platform, and around the room, her heart pounding in her chest. But nothing happened.
She faced the wall again.
“Well,” she said quietly, lifting her hand again. She calculated, roughly, but as she often did, she knew what she going to do no matter what her calculations told her about the risk.
“Fuck it, right?” she whispered, pushing her hand into the wall again. When her imprint appeared, she started moving her hand all over the wall. If she was going down, she might as well go down in style.
Streaks of colors trailed behind her touch, the millions of tiny points of black swarmed like wasps from a tipped over hive, following her fingers, devouring the colorful imprints left by her hand. She even laughed, with a bit of real mirth, as she moved all over the wall, jumping, poking it in places, touching her foot to the material to see what happened.
None of these actions produced anything usable, but it wreaked a colorful and interesting havoc on the wall, which behaved like a computer about to crash. Black rectangles of screens opened and displayed textual messages, sounds erupted—at one point, a chirping bird pierced the air—and the color of the wall faded to pink, then red.
She stood back to admire her handiwork, but also to get a sense of whether or not a pattern was emerging. The wall, whatever it was made of, did not seem to like her. She leaned in close to see the points in action, as they swarmed the places she had touched the wall. They seemed biological, not mechanical. Their movements were chaotic, not linear, and the system behaved like models of biological systems, not computational ones.
She became so absorbed in her investigative efforts that she barely noticed the wall changing back to white. She physically jumped when she heardhisvoice. It was low, robotically calm, and right behind her.
Rychor gave her a chill with his mere presence—and it was more of a thrill than a chill, cool and icy as it forked beneath her skin, wrapping around her spine, sending goosebumps flaring over her shoulder. It converted to a ball of molten lava in her chest, and it seared her heart while her stomach contorted itself to move away from the heat.
“Sonya.”
That was all he said. The shiver washed over her. She could feel the bumps on her skin without seeing them or touching them. They covered her shoulders and her arms, were unfurling down the backs of her legs. She held her hand aloft, a fingertip away from the wall, and a colorful blossom of points shimmered beneath it, ready for her touch, beckoning her to place her palm on the wall.
The pull of the screen was intoxicating. She stared at the moving points of light cells, nanobots, nano-biological components, whatever they were. They were almost… seducing her.
He moved closer to her, and her own cells felt like they were behaving like the wall. Pulled to the surface closest to him, like metal fragments to a magnet. She could actually feel a pull, like the swell of a tide in a large body of water. When his hand clasped her own, his forearm lay over hers and his fingers closed around her small wrist. His skin came into contact with hers, on her buttocks, the small of her back, along her shoulder blades, and the sensation bordered on orgasmic.
“You are cold,” Rychor said. It was a statement with a strange tone to it, but her mind felt shattered into a million pieces. The only thing she could keep in her thoughts for more than an instant was the magnetic pull of his barbaric body. The strength that wrapped around her fingers—evident, inescapably there, but restrained. “You are attempting to adjust the temperature.”
This was also a statement. A strange tone. She started to turn her head. She wasnotcold, she was thinking. That wasnotwhat she was doing. If anything, she was uncomfortably warm, especially now that he was here. His presence had flipped a switch inside her, and the heat poured into her body from her burning core. She could even feel a droplet of sweat forming at her temple. “I—” she began to say.
“You are cold and you are attempting to adjust the temperature,” Rychor repeated, in a very low voice, next to her ear.
He leaned against the wall as he said this, his left arm reaching up higher than she could have touched, casually, like he was a guy at a bar putting the moves on her. His hand made the entire wall go black, instantly, and then a portal appeared in the center of it, with Afina’s tense face framed by blue.
“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded, in English. Her eyes were moving, taking in information from her own screens. “Human? Sonya? Speak.”
Aha,Sonya thought.
Rychor squeezed her hand gently.
“I am cold,” she said, her heart fluttering with the shared secret between her and Rychor. “I was attempting to adjust the temperature.”
“She will be punished,” Rychor added.
Afina did not appear to be buying any of this, Sonya thought. She waited, her breath caught in her throat, her heart erratic, her thoughts frustratingly concentrated on Rychor’s hand around her own, on the feel of his skin against her back. On the promises embedded in his words, the longing that they awakened inside her.
Afina and Rychor exchanged words in their language, and then the wall returned to the clinical white. Sonya’s breath left her in a huff; the transformation of the wall was fascinating enough for her to be momentarily distracted from Rychor. She leaned forward to peer at the material, and Rychor’s left hand moved to cross over her torso, his palm spread out over her sternum, his fingertips grazing her right nipple like an intentional caress.
“I’m not going to touch it again,” she whispered insistently. “It’s just… what is it made o—”
