The tonic didn't care about my survival. It only cared about reproduction.
Jonah had never cared about my survival either. Just about what I could provide.
Funny how the monster hunting me through a bone maze was already proving more honest than my own brother.
The wind shifted while I walked. I paused, tilting my head. The dust moved differently now, swirling in patterns I didn't recognize. The air tasted strange. Drier, if that was possible. Something was changing in the atmosphere, though I couldn't identify what.
I filed the observation away and kept moving.
By late afternoon, I'd covered three miles at best. It should have been an hour's walk on flat terrain. Took me four times that long because of the uneven ground, the constant detours around impassable bone formations, and the waves of arousal that kept forcing me to stop and wait them out.
My body was a disaster. My pants were soaked through at the crotch, the fabric dark with moisture that had nothing to do with sweat. My nipples were chafed raw by my bra. Between my legs, everything was swollen, tender, aching with an emptiness that had become its own kind of pain.
I needed water. I needed rest. I needed to stop thinking about the thing on the ridge and what it would feel like to have something that big between my thighs.
That last thought made me stumble. I caught myself on a protruding vertebra, breathing hard, furious at my own brain for betraying me as thoroughly as my body had.
I didn't want it. I didn't.
But my pussy clenched anyway, and I had to press my hand against myself through my pants just to ease the pressure enough to keep walking.
I foundshelter as the light began to fade. A hollow vertebra, the opening narrow enough that I could wedge myself into a defensive position if something tried to come in. The interior was maybe eight feet in diameter, curved ceiling peaking at about six feet. Protected from wind. Hidden from sight.
Before I settled in, I carved my mark into the entrance. Three horizontal lines. Proof I'd chosen this shelter through assessment rather than desperation.
Then I stripped off my pants.
They were unwearable. The fabric was soaked through with arousal, stiff in places where it had started to dry, still wet in others. The seam had been torture all day, dragging across my clit with every step, keeping me in a constant state of low-grade stimulation that I couldn't escape.
My underwear was worse. Translucent with wetness, clinging to flesh that had changed shape over the course of a single day. I peeled it off and looked at what the tonic had done to me.
I was disgusting. I was desperate. I was so empty it hurt.
I lay back on the curved bone floor and slid my hand between my legs.
The first touch made me gasp. My clit was so sensitive that even gentle pressure sent sparks through my entire body. I circled it carefully, the way I knew I liked, building sensation that climbed toward something.
My other hand found my breast through my shirt. My nipple was a hard point against my palm, and when I pinched it, the sting traveled straight to my cunt. I pinched harder. Rolled it between my fingers while my other hand worked my clit.
The pleasure built. Climbing. Spiraling upward toward release.
I pushed two fingers inside myself. The walls clenched around them immediately, desperate for something to grip. Iwas so wet my fingers slid in without resistance, and I curled them, searching for the spot that usually made me shatter. Found it. Pressed. Rubbed.
Yes. There. Right there.
Build. Build. Build.
Peak.
Nothing.
The orgasm stalled. Right at the edge, right where I should have tumbled over, my body just... stopped. The pleasure crested and then receded like a wave that couldn't quite reach the shore. I was left gasping, shaking, more desperate than before.
I tried again. Faster this time, more pressure on my clit, fingers pumping inside me. I could hear the wet sounds, obscene in the quiet of the bone chamber, the slick evidence of how badly I needed this. Could feel how close I was, how desperate, how much my body wanted to come.
Build. Peak. Stall. Nothing.
"Come on," I whispered to myself. "Come on, come on, come on."
