“Then choose me.”
The words fell into silence. Alina stared at him, her expression a complicated mix of longing and fear and something that looked almost like grief.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is.” He stepped towards her, and she didn’t retreat. “It’s the simplest thing in any world. You choose me, I choose you. We face what comes together. Everything else is just… obstacles.”
“Obstacles that can kill you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, I do!” Her voice rose, sharp with frustration. “I care if you die, Rhyx. I care if they capture you, and experiment on you, and?—”
“And what about what I care about?” He grabbed her arms, not roughly but firmly, making her look at him. “Do you think it doesn’t hurt me when you leave? Do you think I don’t feel like I’m being torn apart every time you walk away? You are everything, Alina. You are the only thing I have in this world that makes sense. And you keep leaving me, and I’m supposed to just—accept that? Wait here in the dark like a good little?—”
The frustration crested, overwhelming his ability to form words. With a snarl of pure, inarticulate rage, Rhyx spun and drove his fist into the cavern wall.
Stone cracked under the impact. The sound echoed through the chamber like thunder, bouncing off the distant walls and fading into silence. Pain lanced up his arm—bright, sharp, real—and when he pulled his hand back, golden blood was dripping from his knuckles where the skin had split against the rock.
“Rhyx!” Alina was at his side instantly, grabbing his wrist and pulling his hand towards the light. “What did you—oh, God, let me see?—”
“I’m fine.” He tried to pull away, but she held fast with surprising strength.
“You’re bleeding. That’s not fine, that’s—” She stopped. Blinked. Leaned closer to examine his knuckles. “That’s… not possible.”
He looked down at his hand, expecting to see the damage from his foolish outburst. The pain was already fading, dulling to a distant ache, and as he watched—as they watched—the torn skin began to knit itself back together.
It happened faster than he could track. The golden blood, still wet and gleaming, seemed to absorb back into the wounds as the edges of torn flesh reached for each other, fusing seamlessly. Within seconds, the only evidence of the injury was the smear of gold on his knuckles and the crack in the stone wall.
“That’s not possible,” Alina repeated, her voice barely a whisper. She turned his hand over, examining it from every angle. “Tissue regeneration at this rate—the cellular division alone would require—” She looked up at him, her expression shifting from shock to something more focused, more analytical. “Rhyx, has this happened before? Have you healed like this before?”
He searched his fragmented memories, looking for anything that matched what he’d just witnessed. The before-time was hazy, uncertain, but he could recall injuries—falls from great heights, battles with rival males for territory, the normal wounds of a life lived in the wild.
“I don’t… think so. In the before, wounds healed. But not like this. Not so fast.”
“But you remember healing?”
“Slowly. Over time. The way…” He struggled to find the comparison. “The way plants grow. Not the way water falls.”
Alina’s grip on his wrist tightened. Her eyes had gone distant, her mind clearly working through implications he couldn’t follow.
“Regeneration at this speed,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Self-repairing tissue, rapid cellular division without apparent scarring or dysfunction… the only organisms I know of that can do this are—” Her breath caught.
“What?”
“Cyborgs.” She looked up at him, and there was something new in her expression—not fear, exactly, but something close to it. “The nanite integration in their systems gives them enhanced healing. Not this fast, not quite, but close. Their blood carries microscopic machines that repair damage almost as quickly as it occurs.”
Rhyx felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cavern’s temperature. “You think I have machines in my blood?”
“I think…” Alina released his wrist and began to pace, her movements quick and agitated. “When I first found you, I assumed you were something ancient. Something that had been dormant, waiting to be awakened. But the readings I was following—they weren’t just organic. There was a technological signature too, buried under everything else. I dismissed it as interference, but what if…”
She spun to face him. “Rhyx, what if you’re not just something that was sleeping under the surface? What if you were made?”
The word hit him like a physical blow. “Made?”
“Created. Engineered. Some combination of ancient Martian biology and modern technology.” Her words came faster now, tumbling over each other in her excitement. “The cyborgs were designed using genetic samples from extinct species combined with nanite integration. What if something similar happened here? What if someone—or something—foundpreserved biological material from your species and used cyborg technology to bring it back?”
Rhyx stared at her, trying to process what she was suggesting. The memories that had been haunting him—the flying, the dying world, the desperate hope for a future—suddenly took on a different meaning.
