Into a dark cave, on an alien planet, for a long distance.
Rychor was pressing his neck. “It is approximately two thousand of your unit of measurement, the meter.”
“Two kilometers…”
“Can you do it?”
She looked frantically around. “I… no, yeah, yes, I canswimthat far, but—”
“You will swim underwater for six hundred meters until you reach another cave system. Inside the cave there are no structures. The ceiling of the cave is… many of your meters above. The ground is thin there. Your signal will permeate the surface and can be received in that cave, if you activate it with this amplifier.” He grasped her hand, turned it over, and placed an object in her hand.
She stared back at him. “What? What? Rychor, what are you—”
He seized her shoulder. “They will be coming in only a few… minutes. I do not have time to explain. You must go now. Escape.”
She stood with the object in one hand and her other arm held out similarly, utterly confused.
“You indicated that you would trust me.”
“Yeah, I do… but what is…what are youdoing?”
“I do not have time to explain.”
She stared back at him. “Well… then I’m not going.”
But she sounded unsure. To their left, the Ryvokia were making an ear-splitting noise, and a sulfuric smell was seeping from behind the rock, along with smoke.
Rychor looked at her. “The rock is difficult to penetrate, but they will be here in minutes, Sonya.” He put a hand to her face. “My mate, please.”
“But what will happen to you?” she whined. “And… why… I don’t understand…”
“It is irrelevant what will happen to me.”
She looked back at him. “No,” she sobbed. “Not to me. I can’t… don’t you understand that I love you? I thought…”
Rychor had taken her by the shoulders and seemed, for a second, like he was about to shake her. Her words dribbled away, and she waited, hoping he would say something to change everything.
Instead, he moved his hands to her neck, and after a swell of fear rose to her throat, closing it, she felt a sensation that seemed magnetic at the very back of her neck, just below the base of her skull. Her own hand went instinctively to feel what he was touching, because it didn’t feel like her own flesh.
“Don’t interfere,” Rychor told her. The sounds coming from behind the boulder were growing louder and more high-pitched. Sonya’s breathing was accelerating, and her thoughts were moving so fast they made no sense. She knew she had decisions to make, but the pressure was unbearable—
Suddenly, though, her mind seemed to split into two parts. Her own consciousness, though running wild with panic and the pressure of decision-making, was still intact, still running along like a program in a computer, executing functions and thinking ahead to the dreaded water escape, the confusing abandonment of Rychor, and her torn loyalties.
The other, mysterious presence in her mind was much larger, and it was a tidal wave of thoughts, impressions, and feelings. She felt a flash of nausea, it was so overwhelming.
She reached up and touched the back of her neck when Rychor released his own finger from the new place in her flesh. When she touched it with her fingertips, it felt like her own skin, and yet nothing like her own skin at all. Her own touch was too intense on that patch of skin.
But in the few minutes that Rychor had touched her there, she not only knew what it was—a nanobiological construction that Rychor had delivered to her through her sleeping pod—but also everything, everything else there was to know about him, the Ryvokia, their civilization.
His love for her.
She felt it, she knew, the way he felt it. Like the thoughts transmitted to her, she felt the feeling, but it didn’t overwhelm her own feelings.
“Itisthe same,” she said, looking up at Rychor. Love was the same as what he called mating. She could feel the deep and intense feeling that he had for her.
And she also understood why she had to go now. Why Rychor needed to let her escape.
“The connection will fade,” he explained, moving his fingers to her lips. “And with it, the pain that you feel. All will be well once you escape.”
