CHAPTER NINETEEN
Alina’s scent reached him before she did—warm and alive and unmistakably her—and Rhyx was already moving towards the chamber entrance when she appeared at the top of the rockfall.
“Rhyx?”
He caught her as she descended, lifting her the final few feet and pulling her against his chest in a single fluid motion. She laughed, the sound bright and startled, her hands coming up to grip his shoulders.
“I wasn’t gone that long.”
“Too long.” He pressed his face into the curve of her neck, breathing her in. Underneath the artificial smell of her suit and the metallic tang of processed air, there it was—the scent that meant mate, that meant home, that quieted the restless thing inside him that stirred every moment she was away.
“Rhyx.” Her voice softened, and her fingers threaded through his hair, stroking along the ridges of his scalp. “I’m here. I’m fine.”
He knew that. He could see it, smell it, feel it in the steady rhythm of her heartbeat against his chest. But knowing wasn’t the same as having, and having her back in his arms after days apart made something in his chest loosen that he hadn’t realized was tight.
Eventually, reluctantly, he lifted his head.
“You brought supplies.”
“I did.” Alina stepped back, gesturing towards the pack she’d dropped near the chamber entrance. “Sample containers, preservation equipment, a portable analyzer. Everything I need to document the plant life down here.”
Rhyx watched as she moved to retrieve the pack, his gaze tracking the familiar lines of her body beneath the bulky suit. She moved differently than she had when he’d first awakened—more confident, more certain. The timid scientist who had stumbled into his cavern seemed like a distant memory now.
Mine, something primal whispered inside him. She became this because of me. For me.
“What are you planning to do with the samples?”
Alina straightened, the pack slung over one shoulder.
“Distribute them. To scientists I trust—people who will study them properly, share their findings openly.” Her jaw tightened, and he could see the determination in her brown eyes. “GenCon would lock this away. Use it for profit, control who has access, keep the benefits for themselves and the people who can afford to pay. But these plants—Rhyx, do you understand what they could mean for Mars?”
He turned to look at the cavern spread out below them, the impossible garden of golden vines and silver moss that had somehow survived the death of his world. The air here was different from the thin, cold atmosphere above—warm and rich and alive in ways that made his lungs expand with something close to joy.
“They could change everything,” he said quietly.
“Yes.” Alina came to stand beside him, her shoulder brushing against his arm. “The atmospheric processing alone—if we could cultivate these on a larger scale, introduce them to other underground systems—it could accelerate the colonization effort by decades. Maybe more.”
“You want to give this away.”
“I want to share it.” She looked up at him, her expression fierce. “There’s a difference. GenCon would take it and hoard it, parcel it out to whoever serves their interests. But this—” She gestured at the cavern, at the living miracle that had preserved itself through millennia of planetary death. “This belongs to everyone. To the colonists trying to build lives here, to the scientists working to understand Mars, to the future generations who will inherit whatever we leave behind.”
Rhyx considered her words, turning them over in his mind the way he might examine an unfamiliar weapon.
His people had been different. In the before-times, knowledge had been guarded, power concentrated in the claws of those strong enough to hold it. He remembered that now—fragments of memory surfacing like bubbles through dark water. The ruling caste had controlled the sky-ships, the weapons, the technologythat kept their civilization alive even as the planet withered beneath them.
And in the end, it hadn’t saved them.
Perhaps, he thought, her way is better.
“The planet is stirring,” he said.
Alina looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”
Rhyx pressed his palm flat against the cavern floor, feeling the ancient stone beneath his scales. There was something there—something he’d sensed increasingly over the past days. A pulse, deep and slow, like the heartbeat of some vast sleeping creature.
“I don’t know how to explain it. But I can feel… movement. Growth. Things waking that have been dormant for a very long time.”
“Rhyx, that’s…” She trailed off, her scientific mind clearly wrestling with the implications. “That would mean the planet isn’t dead. That there’s still active geological or biological processes happening beneath the surface.”
