She closed her eyes for one moment. Just to dip into the Ryvokia consciousness, to feel it once again. It was so strange. It was at once loud and too quiet to hear, all-encompassing and yet just out of her reach. She could feel how it left each individual separate and yet fully part of it. It was fascinating.
She opened her eyes.
A sudden clarity had come to her.
She stood up and activated her helmet.
“Okay,” she repeated. “You can do this.”
CHAPTER14
Afina was the one who approached him, in the end. It took them much, much longer to locate him than he had anticipated, and it worried him, but he didn’t dare let down the barriers to his consciousness to explore why. He had to guard the secret of Sonya’s whereabouts until she was long-gone. And she was still here: that much he could feel.
He was seated on top of the cooling vents that ran to the surface, disgorging the extra thermal energy that they drew upon from the core of the rocky planet. Where he sat, he could look a long way down into the dark tunnel, carved into the rock by a smooth laser a millennium ago. A steady hum, at a very precise and unchanging pitch, pervaded the silence. It helped him block the Ryvokia consciousness.
He felt Afina’s presence but didn’t react to it; he couldn’t read what she thinking or her emotions at all. She moved silently, alone, and stood behind him for several moments without speaking.
When he turned around to face her, she was not glaring down at him as he had anticipated, but looking around at the walls of the cave with an expression of deep interest.
“I’ve never been here before,” she said. “It’s quite a stunning piece of engineering.”
She spoke these words, in their own, most basic language—and she didn’t rely on her consciousness to convey any part of her thoughts. It was a sign that Afina knew he was blocking her.
She looked down at him and then surprised him by approaching and sitting down next to him.
Afina. Sitting down. Next to him. On a heat discharge tube in a cave.
He had been prepared for almost anything, but not that.
“Do you know how long I’ve been the supreme female of this clan?” she asked him, still looking out into the vast, Ryvokia-made cavern in wonder.
Rychor wasn’t sure whether Afina wanted him to answer her or not. It was very difficult, detaching this much, keeping her out of his thoughts, and his own thoughts away from hers.
“Are you trying to trick me, Afina? Into letting down my guard?”
Afina smiled mysteriously. Her demeanor was really very strange. Rychor was unsettled by it.
“On our home planet, it would be forty summers,” she said, and Rychor was certain she was manipulating him, but she was doing a great job of seeming not to be.
He waited.
“In all that time,” Afina said. “I have never seen anything like this. And in all this time… I have never changed.”
Rychor felt his heart plunge through his chest. There was no stopping it, no preventing himself from feeling as he did at just the allusion to Sonya. Oh well. It wasn’t as if he was keeping his feelings a secret. He only needed to keep her location a secret, and that only needed to last a little longer.
“You know the story of my mate,” Afina said. Of course she knew that he did; everyone did. Just as everyone knew a little bit of everything.
“But not everything,” Afina said, in an eerie echo of his own thoughts. “I have kept a part of him locked away, only for myself.”
Rychor turned to look at Afina, who was looking wistfully into the void. He had no idea where she was going with this.
“It has been brought to my attention,” she said, with a small smile—something he had not seen on Afina’s face for ages—“that perhaps times should change somewhat.”
Rychor became defensive, inwardly. Afina was definitely up to no good.
She smiled and turned her head to look at him. “You think I’m trying to distract you,” she said. She tipped her head forward, a nod to his idea. “I would as well, in your position. But…” she stood up, dusting her legs, seemingly years younger in her movements and habits. “My reflection hasn’t come about because of you.”
She offered him her hand, and Rychor looked at it warily.
