“Fascinating,” she was saying to herself. “The chlorophyll analog is unlike anything in Earth’s biosphere. The light-harvesting pigments appear to?—”
He pressed his lips to the back of her neck.
She yelped and spun around, her tablet clattering to the ground. “Rhyx! You scared me!”
“You were distracted.”
“I was working.”
“You are always working.” He stepped closer, backing her against the moss-covered wall. “Perhaps you should take a break.”
“I don’t need?—”
He kissed her before she could finish the sentence.
This time there was nothing gentle about it. Two days of waiting had built a pressure in his chest that demanded release, and when she gasped against his mouth, when her hands fisted on his shoulders, when she arched into him with a pleading sound, something snapped loose inside him.
He lifted her into his arms until her legs wrapped around his hips. She was so small against him, so fragile, and yet the way she kissed him back—fierce and hungry and utterly without reservation—made him feel like he was the one in danger of being consumed.
Her breathing mask caught between them, the strap tangling with his fingers as he tried to pull her closer. He growled in frustration and yanked at it, and the device came free with a snap of breaking clasps, tumbling to the ground.
She gasped, then froze.
He pulled back, confused by her sudden stillness. Her eyes were wide, not with fear or desire, but with something else entirely. Shock. Disbelief.
“Alina? What?—”
“I’m breathing.”
He didn’t understand. “Yes. You are breathing.”
“No, you don’t—” She pushed against his chest and he reluctantly set her down, watching as she pressed a hand to her throat, taking deep, deliberate breaths. “I’m breathing. Without the mask. The oxygen levels—” She grabbed her tablet from the ground and started tapping furiously. “This shouldn’t be possible. Even with all the terraforming work we’ve done, Mars’s atmosphere is still more than ninety percent carbon dioxide. I know these plants are producing oxygen, but there’s no way the concentration should be high enough to?—”
She stopped, staring at the readout on her screen.
“What?” he asked, unease prickling at the back of his neck.
“Nineteen percent.The oxygen concentration in this cavern is almost nineteen percent.” She looked up at him, her expression caught between wonder and disbelief. “That’s… that’s almost Earth-normal. How is that possible?”
He considered the question. The knowledge came slowly, rising from some deep well of inherited memory. “The plants are… engineered. Designed to sustain life.”
“Engineered by who?”
By my people. By the ones who came before. By the architects of a dying world, desperate to preserve something of themselves.
The memories were fragmented. He couldn’t give her the full picture because he didn’t have it himself. But he knew, with a certainty that went beyond conscious thought, that this cavern had been created for a purpose. That the plants, the water collectors, the carefully balanced ecosystem—all of it had been designed to sustain life long after the surface became uninhabitable.
“By my people,” he said quietly. “Long ago. Before the death.”
Her eyes widened. “The death?”
“The death of my world.” The words came out raw and wounded. “The skies burned. The water froze. The surface became… hostile. Those who could, fled underground. To places like this. After the death they went dormant, but they were just waiting.”
“Refuges,” she breathed. “They built refuges. Sustainable ecosystems that could survive independently of the surface.” Her mind was racing—he could see the rapid calculations in that beautiful, busy brain. “Do you understand what this means? If these plants can survive for millions of years and awaken now, the applications for terraforming are?—”
She stopped.
The excitement drained from her face, replaced by something colder. Something that made his chest ache.
