She wouldn’t let him down.
“As far from GenCon as we can get,” she said. “And I think I know just the place.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sky burned amber and gold, but not the gold of life—the gold of decay.
Rhyx floated in the memory, neither fully present nor entirely absent, watching through eyes that were and weren’t his own. The great flying beasts—his kind, he thought, though the certainty wavered like heat shimmer—wheeled above a dying world. Their scales caught the sickly light of a sun that seemed both too distant and too harsh, filtering through an atmosphere grown thin and hostile.
We were the last, a voice whispered through the fragmented recollections. The final generation to ride the thermals above the canyon lands. The last to sing the wind songs.
He could almost feel it—the rush of air beneath wings he no longer possessed, the exhilaration of diving through cloud banks that had long since vanished into the void of space. But something was wrong with the memory. The details kept shifting, sliding away when he tried to examine them too closely. The landscape below him flickered between red desert andsomething else—metal corridors, sterile white walls, the hum of machines.
Who am I?
The question echoed through the dreamscape, bouncing off surfaces that shouldn’t exist, fragmenting into a thousand smaller questions that had no answers.
He remembered flying.
He remembered falling.
He remembered nothing, and then everything, and then a woman’s face—round and soft, with eyes the color of the soil after rain?—
Alina.
Her name cut through the confusion like a blade through mist. Suddenly the memories didn’t matter. The before-time didn’t matter. Only she mattered, only the ache of her absence, the wrongness of waking without her warmth pressed against his?—
The vibration reached him before the sound did.
Rhyx’s eyes snapped open, his body shifting from dormant contemplation to full alertness in the span of a heartbeat. The cavern around him was unchanged—the same soft bioluminescence from the moss, the same gentle drip of water in the distance, the same air rich with the scent of growing things—but something was different.
Someone was here.
He rose from the nest of soft leaves and moss where he’d been resting, every sense straining towards the tunnel that ledupward. Footsteps. Light, careful footsteps, moving with the hesitant rhythm of someone navigating unfamiliar terrain.
Alina.
He knew her gait. Knew the particular cadence of her breathing, the subtle displacement of air that marked her presence. His heart—or whatever served as his heart in this strange new body—began to race, a deep thrumming that resonated through his chest like the purr of some great beast.
She was coming back. She’d promised she would, and she was keeping that promise, and nothing else mattered—not the gaps in his memory, not the uncertainty of his existence, not the looming threats she’d spoken of before she left.
Rhyx moved towards the base of the cavern wall, positioning himself directly beneath the narrow passage where she would emerge. The climb down was treacherous for her; he’d learned that on her previous departure, watching with his heart in his throat as she struggled up the rocky incline, her small hands finding holds that seemed impossibly precarious to his eyes.
A shower of pebbles announced her descent. Then a muffled curse in her language—a word she’d taught him meant frustration and possibly stubbed toes—followed by the scrape of fabric against stone.
Her legs appeared first, dangling over the edge of the rock shelf that marked the final drop into the cavern. Rhyx was there before she could lower herself further, his hands finding her waist with unerring precision, lifting her from the ledge as if she weighed nothing.
“Rhyx—”
Whatever she’d been about to say dissolved into his mouth as he kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. Wasn’t the careful, exploratory thing their first kisses had been. Three days of separation had carved a hollow in his chest, and the only thing that could fill it was her—the taste of her lips, the softness of her body pressed against his, the small sound she made when his tongue found hers.
She kissed him back with equal desperation, her fingers tangling in the ridge-crest that ran along his skull, pulling him closer even as her breathing grew ragged. He could feel her heartbeat through the thin material of her suit, racing to match his own, and the scent of her—warm skin and something floral from whatever cleaning products she used—filled his senses until there was room for nothing else.
“Missed you,” he growled against her mouth, the words still clumsy on his tongue but the meaning clear. “Too long. You were gone too long.”
“I know.” She pulled back just far enough to look at him, and the sight of her face—flushed and breathless, her brown eyes dark with want—made something primal and possessive coil tight in his belly. “I’m sorry. I came as soon as I could.”
