"Hey." Mine comes out rougher. She pulled sounds from me last night that stripped something from my vocal cords, and the rawness is evidence I can't disguise.
She pushes up on one elbow. Hair tangled. Eyes bright. The claiming mark visible on her throat, and the sight of it stirs something deep in my chest that the bond amplifies and returns to her.
"You're doing it again," she says. "The color thing. It's glowing."
"The claiming color responds to emotional state. Specifically to proximity and contact with my bonded mate. It's going to do this whenever you're near."
"So you're basically a mood ring that's permanently set to 'thinking about Krilly.'"
"That is a reductive but not inaccurate characterisation."
Her grin breaks across her face, and the warmth of it reaches me through the bond like sunlight through a viewport. Devastating. I could survive anything on the memory of that warmth alone.
"How do you feel?" she asks. "The bond. Is it— what does it feel like from your side?"
"Your heartbeat under mine. A constant awareness of your location and emotional state." I search for precision, because she's an engineer and she'll want specifics. "Right now I can feel that you're happy, slightly sore, and thinking about something that's making your heart rate increase."
"That's because you're looking at me like that while shirtless."
"Noted. Looking at you while shirtless increases your heart rate."
"Put it in the file with Bebo's biometric dataset."
"Krilly's heart rate elevates seventeen percent when Horgox removes his shirt," Bebo announces from the belt unit on the cave floor. "I've been tracking this correlation since Day Three. It also elevates twenty-three percent when he speaks in the lower harmonic register, and a remarkable forty-one percent during the thigh-contact incident of Day Five."
"Bebo," Krilly says, "I'm going to reprogram you to only report weather data."
"Current weather: acidic precipitation in the lowlands, clear in the canyon system. Horgox's shirt status: still off. Your heart rate: still elevated."
The morning settles into something I don't have a framework for. Not the tactical routine of the last nine days, where every action was calibrated for survival. This is softer, unhurried, shot through with small moments that the bond amplifies into significance. Krilly washing at the spring, humming something tuneless, and the vibration of her contentment reaching me across ten feet of cave like a warm hand on my chest. My hands checking weapon edges while her heartbeat provides a steady counterpoint that I'm beginning to suspect I'll hear for the rest of my life.
We eat rations. She recalibrates the beacon's passive monitoring. I check the perimeter, and even across a hundred metres the bond provides a constant readout: her location (cave, southeast corner), her emotional state (focused, calm, that low hum of residual pleasure making the jade in my forearms warm despite the distance), her heartbeat (steady, strong,mine).
The arenas taught me what it feels like to have my body belong to someone else.
This is different. This is having someone else's body live inside my awareness. Not ownership. Partnership encoded at the neurological level. Her safety is my safety. Her pain is my pain. And her contentment, currently seeping through the connection while she works on circuitry, is the most distracting sensation I have ever experienced in combat-readiness mode.
I'm cataloguing the third tunnel entrance when the bond spikes.
Not gradually. A sharp jolt, Krilly's calm shattered by something immediate and concrete. Alarm, not fear. The distinction matters; alarm isI've detected a problem, fear isthe problem is going to kill me. She's still in the cave. Still alive. But something has changed.
I'm already moving.
"Horgox." Her voice carries from the cave mouth, tight and controlled. "Bebo's picking up something."
"Multiple biosignatures approaching the canyon from the southwest," Bebo reports when I reach her. "Three signatures match ApexCorp drone configurations. One signature is significantly larger. Thermal profile consistent with—"
"Stompy." Krilly's jaw sets. The anger rolling through the connection is specific and personal, the fury of a woman who has run out of patience for things that want to kill her. "The drones are driving it toward us."
"Or hunting it and pushing it in our direction," I correct, but the distinction is academic. The result is the same. Six metres of armoured predator heading for the canyon system that has kept us alive for nine days.
"The canyon passages are too narrow," Krilly says. "You said it can't fit."
"Through the standard entrances. But the damage we found in the northeast passage suggests it's been testing the walls." I'm already gathering weapons, checking blade edges, calculatingfallback positions. "If it hits the weakened section hard enough, it could breach into the secondary tunnel system."
The ground trembles. Faint at first, then stronger. The distinctive rhythm of something massive moving at speed, transmitted through bedrock like a seismic event.
Krilly's alarm sharpens into focused determination. I feel it the way I feel a change in wind direction, instinctive and immediate. Not fear.Neverfear with this woman. Determination with an edge of absolute indignation, the emotional signature of someone who survived nine days of murder jungle and refuses to die on the morning after the best night of her life.
