“Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t done anything.” But Jeb’s posture had shifted from combat-ready to merely cautious. “For now, you two had better come inside. Before someone spots your friend here, I have to explain why there’s a giant naked gold male standing in my doorway.”
Rhyx tilted his head. “I require covering?”
“For the love of—yes.” Mattie was already moving towards a storage locker. “We’ve got some emergency blankets that might work. Unless you want to traumatize every satellite that passes overhead.”
“I do not understand ‘traumatize.’”
“It means disturb,” Alina muttered, grabbing his arm and steering him through the doorway. “As in, what you did to my blood pressure just now.”
“But you signaled distress. I came.”
“I wasn’t distressed, I was trying to find the right words!”
“You were taking too long. I helped.”
Mattie handed Rhyx a silver emergency blanket, which he examined with deep suspicion before allowing Alina to wrap it around his hips like an oversized sarong.
“This is not comfortable,” he observed.
“Welcome to human society,” Jeb said dryly. “Nothing about it is.”
Despite everything—the danger, the uncertainty, the absolute chaos of the last ten minutes—Alina felt something loosen in her chest. They weren’t alone anymore. They had allies, however tentative.
Now they just had to survive long enough to use them.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The cyborg moved like a warrior, immediately positioning himself in front of the small human female, his body forming a shield between her and the unknown threat. The stance was defensive but controlled, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, and hands positioned to strike or block as needed.
Good, Rhyx thought approvingly. He protects his mate.
It was the correct response. Rhyx would have done the same—had done the same, countless times over the past weeks when any hint of danger approached Alina. The instinct to place himself between his mate and harm ran deeper than thought, deeper than memory. It was written into whatever strange new body he inhabited.
“Rhyx.” Alina’s voice cut through his observation, and then she was at his side, her small hand gripping his arm with surprising strength. “Are you all right? You shouldn’t be out here—the atmosphere?—”
“Is thin.” He covered her hand with his own, feeling the way her pulse raced beneath her skin. “But I can breathe it.”
“You can—what?”
“The air is not comfortable, but it is sufficient. I do not require the mask you wear.”
Her brown eyes went wide behind the clear shield of her breathing apparatus. “That’s impossible. The oxygen levels out here are?—”
“He’s not entirely human anymore,” the cyborg—Jeb—said. His voice had that strange harmonic undertone, metal and flesh producing sound together. “Neither am I. Our systems compensate.”
Rhyx turned his attention fully to the other male for the first time. There was something about him—not recognition, exactly, but a resonance. Like hearing an echo of a song he’d once known. The cyborg’s body was a blend of organic tissue and technology, metal and meat woven together in ways that should have been grotesque but instead felt… familiar.
Part of me came from something like him, Rhyx realized. His kind provided the blood that woke me.
“You are like me,” he said.
Jeb’s enhanced eyes narrowed. “I’m nothing like you.”
“Not the same. But similar.” Rhyx tapped his chest, where he could feel the steady rhythm of his own heartbeat—faster than a human’s, stronger, powered by systems he didn’t fully understand. “The healing. The strength. These things came from your kind.”
“The cyborg nanites,” Alina added, still gripping Rhyx’s arm as though afraid he might vanish if she let go. “I think they merged with whatever was already in that pod. Created something new.”
Mattie had edged out from behind her mate, her initial fear giving way to naked curiosity. Her cheeks were still flushed—Rhyx had noticed the way she’d stared at his body before Alina had wrapped him in the strange silver fabric—but her eyes were sharp and assessing.
