Something in my chest shatters.
I force myself to stay exactly where I am. I force myself to leave the wetness in my eyes. I force myself not to fidget. I brace my feet against the floor and hold eye contact with anyone who looks up at me.
My pulse hammers against my ribs, but I lock my jaw and hold my ground. I wait until the panicked, breathless gasps of the women begin to slow into steady weeping. I wait until the tension in the cavern finally breaks.
Only then do I slowly turn around.
I force my feet against the stone in an even rhythm as I walk back toward the tunnel. I refuse to run. I lock my shoulders back and keep my spine rigidly straight until the shadows of the alcove fully swallow me.
The adrenaline crashes the exact second I am out of direct line of sight. My knees hit the cold stone by the drying ledge, my trembling arms wrapping tightly around my waist.
Nobody is watching me now.
I press my forehead hard against the cold stone of the drying ledge and simply hold it there for thirty seconds. My throat burns like I have swallowed hot sand. My eyes are wet, and I let them be wet, just for a moment, because the angle of my body is blocking anyone from actually seeing my face if they enter the alcove.
Thirty seconds. That is all the time I will allow myself.
Then I straighten up, wipe my wet face roughly on my sleeve, take a breath, and plunge my raw hands back into the fiber to keep working. Because if these filters are not clean by noon, we are all going to be drinking sand.
Alex finds me a while later.She moves the way she always does when she is worried. Her arms are tightly crossed, her eyes scanning the shadows like she is running medical triage inside her own head.
I do not ask how the others are coping. The thick, suffocating silence bleeding from the main cavern is answer enough.
“Sit down,” I tell her gently, pushing a thick scrap of discarded hide across the stone so she does not have to sit directly on the rough rock. “You look exhausted.”
“I look like a woman who just realized we are officially dying,” she says flatly. She lowers herself onto the stone beside my workstation, leaning her elbows on her knees.
I pause, my fingers freezing on the rough fibers.
“Someone had to say it out loud.” Alex rubs the heels of her hands hard against her eyes. “Hannah is gone, Erika. She was with us, and she is gone. The dust took her.” Alex drops her hands, throwing a tight, terrified glance toward the main cavern. “And what scares me more is the overall trend. We are failingto thrive. Tina is recovering, but it is painfully slow. Pam threw up her water ration this morning. Lucy slept for twelve hours straight and woke up looking like she went ten rounds with a bear.”
“And the mated women?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
Alex does not respond immediately. She does not need to. We both know. Justine is practically glowing with health. Jacqui has more manic energy now than she did before. Mikaela has not had a single headache in weeks.
“They are thriving,” Alex says quietly, her voice tight. “It is like this planet is actively rewarding them for bonding with the locals.”
The silence between us fills with the terrifying reality neither of us wants to say out loud.
“I tried asking Justine about it,” I tell her, pulling another fiber strip from the basket lining and stretching it. “How the bonding actually works. Whether it is something anyone can initiate.”
“What did she say?”
“That it does not work like that. The dust chooses. It is biological. Instinctive. You cannot just volunteer.” I tie off the fiber with a tight yank. “So even if I wanted to tell Pam that her debilitating migraines would probably stop if she found a mate among them, it would not matter. It is not up to us.”
“And if it were?”
“It is not.”
“But if itwere.”
“Then I still could not look someone in the eye and tell them that submitting to alien sex is their best medical option, Alex. I do not have the right.”
Alex rubs her eyes. The dark circles beneath them are deeply bruised.
“The gap is getting visibly wider,” she says, her voice completely devoid of hope. “Between them and us. You can physically see it.”
I can see it. We are not adapting. We are deteriorating. And the worst part is, the mated women are not doing it on purpose. They did not choose this any more than we did. They just got lucky, and the rest of us got this rock and its slow, grinding hostility. And even if wecouldchoose to bond just to survive...
