Was he better than what had come before? Better than the ancient beings whose memories haunted his dreams? Better than the cyborg whose blood had given him life?
He didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter.
Maybe all that mattered was what he did next.
“The planet is changing,” he said again, but this time the words didn’t feel like a warning. They felt like a promise. “And we are part of that change.”
“Yeah.” Jeb started walking again, and Rhyx fell into step beside him. “I guess we are.”
They completed the patrol in thoughtful silence, checking the remainder of the claim’s boundaries without finding any signs of intrusion. By the time they returned to the habitat, the sun was sinking towards the horizon, painting the sky in shades of pink and orange that Rhyx had never seen in his fragmented memories of ancient Mars.
This is new, he thought.This sky. This world. This life.
All of it new.
All of it mine to shape.
The ache in his chest—the constant awareness of Alina’s absence—hadn’t faded. If anything, it had grown stronger as the hours passed. But beneath it, something else had settled into place. A clarity he hadn’t possessed before.
He was Rhyx.
Not the remnant of a dead civilization. Not the echo of a cyborg soldier. Not a collection of fragments held together by alien technology and borrowed blood.
Just Rhyx.
Mate of Alina. Friend of Jeb and Mattie. Part of a changing world that was reaching towards a future none of them could predict.
And for the first time since waking in that cavern, surrounded by impossible plants and wrapped in golden leaves, that felt like enough.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The data transfer crawled across the screen at an agonizing pace—forty-seven percent, forty-eight, forty-nine.
Alina kept her eyes fixed on the progress bar while her fingers tapped an irregular rhythm against the edge of her workstation. The backup device was small enough to fit in her palm, unremarkable enough that no one would give it a second glance. Just another piece of equipment in a lab full of equipment.
Come on. Come on.
Fifty-three percent.
She’d already scrubbed the main servers of anything that could lead to Rhyx’s cavern. The original anomalous readings, the trajectory calculations, the atmospheric analysis that had first caught her attention—all of it either deleted or buried so deep in falsified data that it would take months to untangle. But she needed a copy. A real copy, one that she could take with her when she left.
When, not if. She’d made her decision. Whatever came next, whatever future waited for her and Rhyx beyond Mars’s rustyhorizons, she wouldn’t face it without the research that had brought them together.
Sixty-one percent.
The lab was quiet at this hour, most of the other researchers having finished their shifts and retreated to the common areas or their quarters. Alina had waited deliberately, timing her work for the gap between the evening meal and the late-night skeleton crew.
She should have known better.
“Working late, Dr. Falkner?”
The voice came from the doorway—smooth, familiar, carrying that particular edge of smug satisfaction that made her stomach clench.
Martin.
Alina didn’t turn around immediately. She needed three seconds—just three seconds—to school her expression into something neutral before facing him.
One. Two. Three.
