“Not you specifically.” Alina’s hand found his under the table, her fingers intertwining with his. “They probably didn’t know what they were looking for. Just that something was there. Some kind of anomaly worth investigating.”
“And now they’re getting closer.” Mattie’s voice was grim. “You said there’s a man at your station—Martin? He’s working with them?”
“He’s meeting with them right now.” Alina’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know how much he knows, but he’s suspicious. Of me, of my research, of everything. He’s been pushing for access to my data for weeks.”
“Then we’re on a clock.” Jeb leaned forward, his enhanced eyes catching the light. “Whatever we’re going to do, we need to do it before he comes back with GenCon backing.”
“What are we going to do?” Mattie asked. “I mean—this is incredible, all of it, but what’s the actual plan here? We can’t just hide him forever.”
All eyes turned to Alina. She sat very still, her expression the one Rhyx had learned meant she was thinking furiously, sorting through possibilities and discarding them one by one.
“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “I came here because I thought—if Rhyx’s condition is connected to cyborg technology, maybe other cyborgs could help. Maybe they’d have resources, knowledge, something we could use.”
“The cyborg networks are complicated,” Jeb said carefully. “Most of us just want to live our lives, stay out of trouble. But there are some… let’s call them community leaders. People who’ve been working to establish cyborg rights, to push back against the corporations that created us.”
“You think they’d help?”
“I think they’d be very interested in meeting your friend here.” Jeb’s gaze fixed on Rhyx, assessing. “A being that combines cyborg nanite technology with something else—something ancient, something Martian—that’s not just scientifically significant. It’s politically significant. It proves that Mars had intelligent life before humans arrived. It proves that cyborg technology can do things no one ever imagined.”
“It proves that we’re not alone,” Mattie said softly. “That we never were.”
Rhyx felt a strange sensation in his chest at her words. He had been alone for so long—longer than he could truly comprehend, locked in dormant sleep while his world died around him. And now he sat in this small dwelling, surrounded by beings who were not his kind, who should have been utterly foreign to him, and yet…
He did not feel alone.
“I will meet these leaders,” he said. “If it helps protect Alina. If it helps us find a place in this new world.”
“It’s not that simple,” Jeb warned. “I’ll need to reach out through careful channels. If GenCon has eyes on cyborg communications?—”
“Do what you must.” Rhyx met the other male’s gaze steadily. “I have waited centuries. I can wait a little longer.”
Something shifted in Jeb’s expression—a crack in the wariness, a hint of grudging respect.
“You’re not what I expected,” he admitted. “When Mattie first described the cavern, the things she saw there… I thought if anything came out of it, it would be some kind of mindless creature. A monster.”
“I wondered that myself,” Rhyx said quietly. “When I first woke. I did not know if I was still myself, or something else wearing my memories.”
“And what did you decide?”
Rhyx looked at Alina—at her warm brown eyes, her messy hair escaping its binding, the small smile she was trying to hide. His mate. His anchor. The reason he had found his way back from the endless dark.
“I decided it does not matter,” he said. “What I was is gone. What matters is what I choose to be now.”
Mattie made a soft sound that might have been emotion. Even Jeb’s stern expression softened slightly.
“Well,” Mattie said, clearing her throat. “I think that calls for something stronger than water. Jeb, break out the good stuff.”
“It’s nine in the morning.”
“I just found out Mars had its own civilization and I helped bring one of them back to life. I think that justifies a drink.”
Jeb sighed, but Rhyx caught the faint curve of his lips as he rose to retrieve a bottle from a high shelf. The cyborg’s movements were smooth, efficient—the kind of grace that came from a body optimized for performance.
We are alike,Rhyx thought again.Not the same, but alike. Both of us remade from what we were. Both of us finding our way in a world that was not made for us.
Perhaps that was what the familiarity meant. Not a recognition of blood or lineage, but a recognition of experience. The sense of kinship that came from survival.
Jeb returned with the bottle and four small glasses, pouring measures of amber liquid for each of them. Rhyx sniffed his curiously—it smelled sharp and somehow alive, nothing like the water and strange packaged foods Alina had shared with him.
