Neither of them spoke.
There was too much to say and not enough language for any of it. That was the Circuli’s private irony: the species that felt more than any other, that processed emotion with a depth and granularity that most species couldn’t match, and still couldn’t manage to put the largest of it into words. Z’fir had the grace to stop trying entirely. V’dim had spent decades crafting the language anyway—sentence by careful sentence, occasion by occasion—because he believed that feeling and expressing were not the same act, and that the people he loved deserved to have the feeling named.
But tonight the words fell short. Fell short of the enormity of this: her warm hands over his, the small heartbeat of new life between them, the darkening sky and Lunkai massive on the horizon and two days left before everything separated.
He pulled her back into his arms instead.
She came without hesitation.
He held her with everything he had—tentacles and arms and the full weight of his devotion pressed against her back—and felt her exhale into it, the last of her own tension bleeding out, both of them suspended in the specific peace that came only from this. From the physical reality of being in the same place at the same time with someone who knew the truth of you and didn’t flinch.
He kissed her again, slower this time. Less desperate. More thorough. She slid her hands into his hair, and she kissed him back the same way—deliberate, unhurried, present—as if neither of them had a reason to be anywhere else.
The bond sang between them.
When they finally separated, the last trace of sunset had dissolved entirely.
The sky above Destima had gone the deep luminous purple-black that came just before the stars emerged. Around them, the observation deck stood quiet—the household below settling into the rhythms of evening, the steady twin threads of Z’fir and Selena’s other mates like embers banked low against the dark.
V’dim felt every one of them.
His whole constellation, whole for tonight. For two more days, intact.
Selena stood at the railing beside him, shoulders touching, both of them looking out over Destima’s darkening terrain toward the horizon where the sky met the moon-plains. He watched her silver hair instead of the stars.
“There.”
He extended one tentacle—gentle, pointing—toward the massive marbled form still dominant on the horizon. Lunkai. Purple and black and silver, its surface catching some last refracted light in patterns that had been forming for millions of years before either of them existed. The empire’s new capital. The place they had been assigned to hold.
“Lunkai,” Selena said quietly.
“We stay in its system.” He kept his tentacle extended—a line between them and the planet’s bulk. “We protect Destima from the outer edge, and we protect Liskta—the origin world, in Lunkai’s orbit—from any approach. We don’t go beyond the system. We stay close.”
She was quiet for a moment. “That’s close. Relatively.”
“Close enough that if the situation here changed—if you needed us back—the transit is measured in hours, not days.” He lowered his tentacle. “I wanted you to know that.”
Selena turned to look at him.
He held her gaze.
“When you need me,” he said, “look at Lunkai. When you return home, all you have to do is look up. I’ll be looking back.”
Something moved across her face. Something that had nothing to do with strategy or logistics or the cold calculus of war.
She stepped into him again—not kissing this time, just pressing her face against his shoulder, her arms around him, holding on with that particular grip. The one that said she wasn’t going anywhere yet.
“I’ll find Lunkai,” she murmured.
His tentacles wrapped her close.
Above them, the first stars emerged—bright and endless and indifferent to everything below. And in Destima’s sky, enormous and close and already watching, Lunkai turned in its orbit.
And tomorrow it would still be there and every day after, no matter what the Fates and Stars had planned for them.
21
Z’fir
