He has wings.
The thought circled through her mind like a ship caught in orbit, unable to break free. Wings. Massive golden wings that had burst from his back at the exact moment she’d needed them most, carrying them both away from the ledge and Martin’s knife and the death that had been reaching for her throat.
She was shaking. She couldn’t seem to stop. The adrenaline that had carried her through the confrontation was draining away, leaving behind a trembling wreck of a woman who’d almost died, who’d watched a man fall screaming to his death, who was now suspended hundreds of meters above the Martian surfacewith nothing between her and oblivion except the arms of an alien she’d known for barely two weeks.
He has wings and I love him and I almost died.
“Alina.” Rhyx’s voice rumbled through his chest, vibrating against her cheek. “Look at me.”
She didn’t want to. Looking at him meant lifting her head, meant acknowledging the vast emptiness below them, meant accepting that this was really happening.
“Alina.” Gentler this time. “You’re safe. I have you.”
I know. That was the strange part. Even with her body shaking, even with her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat, she knew she was safe. His arms were steady around her, his wings beating in a slow, powerful rhythm that felt as natural as breathing. He wouldn’t drop her. He would never drop her.
She forced herself to look up.
Rhyx’s face was calm. Not the frozen calm of shock or the forced calm of someone pretending everything was fine—genuine, settled calm, as if flying through the Martian sky with his mate in his arms was the most natural thing in the world.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“No.” His lips curved slightly, almost a smile. “I am not.”
“You have wings.” She knew she was repeating herself, but the words kept wanting to come out. “Wings, Rhyx. You didn’t have wings before.”
“I did.” He adjusted his grip on her, shifting her weight to a more comfortable position against his chest. “Once. Long ago. I had forgotten, but my body remembered.”
The wind caught them, lifting them higher, and despite herself Alina glanced down at the landscape spreading out below. Her breath caught in her throat.
Beautiful.
The canyon stretched towards the horizon like a wound in the planet’s flesh, its layered cliffs catching the pale sunlight and throwing back shades of rust and copper and deep, iron-rich brown. Dust devils spun across the valley floor, tiny from this height, leaving spiral trails in the red sand. In the distance, the mountains rose like broken teeth against the pink sky, their peaks touched with the white glint of carbon dioxide frost.
She’d spent years studying Mars from the safety of labs and rovers and orbital surveys. She’d analyzed its soil composition, mapped its mineral deposits, theorized about its ancient oceans and the life that might have existed before the atmosphere bled away into space. But she’d never truly seen it before. Not like this. Not as a living, breathing world stretched out beneath her like a gift.
“It’s beautiful.” Her voice came out hushed, awed. “I never realized…”
“This is how my ancestors saw it.” Rhyx’s wings tilted, catching a thermal, and they rose higher still. “Before the dying. Before we forgot how to fly.”
“What happened to them? Your people?”
“The same thing that happened to this world.” His voice carried an ancient grief, older than memory. “They faded. Slowly, then all at once. The air grew thin, the water disappeared, and one by one, they stopped waking from the long sleep.”
“Except you.”
“Except me.” He looked down at her, his blue eyes soft with an emotion she couldn’t quite name. “I was waiting for you.”
The words settled into her chest like a warm stone, chasing away some of the lingering chill of fear. She wanted to stay here forever, suspended between earth and sky, wrapped in his arms with the wind singing past them and the whole of Mars laid out below like a painting.
But she couldn’t.
No one can see him.
The thought crashed through her reverie like a stone through glass. Martin was dead—fallen, screaming, to the canyon floor below. The guards were dead too, left unconscious on the ledge when Rhyx had carried her away. And somewhere out there, GenCon’s vehicles were still approaching, their sensors sweeping the mountains, their crews searching for the readings that had led them here in the first place.
If anyone saw Rhyx—flying, with his massive golden wings catching the sunlight—everything would be over. GenCon would hunt him. Her own people would hunt him. He’d be captured, studied, dissected in the name of science and profit, and she would lose him forever.
“We have to go back.”
