I have no defense against that. None.
So I kiss him again, more slowly this time. Softer. Not because the want is less. Because it’s stopped trying to prove itself by burning.
He answers the same way. His mouth moves over mine with a reverence that makes me feel too seen. Too held. Too alive. I let myself have this.
A minute.
Two.
A stolen pocket of impossible life in the belly of Tajss, surrounded by blue glow, old machines, and death waiting somewhere beyond the pool.
It’s not enough.
It’s everything.
Then the cavern trembles.
Not from the pool. From below. Kavor breaks the kiss, head lifting.
I feel the shift in him instantly. Warrior. Tracker. Protector. The door closes but doesn’t lock.
“What?” I whisper.
His hand presses to the stone beside us. The floor pulses. Once. A pause. Again.
No. Not the signal. Deeper than that. He goes cold under my hands.
“The zemlja,” he says.
My heart drops.
“Close?”
His eyes sharpen toward the far end of the cavern, where the old channels disappear beneath blackened epis and stone.
“Closer than before.”
The pool machine shudders again, sparked by our kiss, the sample, the broken anchor, or all three together. Blue light ripples across the cavern ceiling. Then the glow beneath my bandage flares. Pain shoots up my arm, bright and cold. I gasp.
Kavor’s hands steady me. “Sera.”
“I’m fine.”
“No.”
“Fine, I’m lying.”
The glow under the bandage spreads, not outward into my skin, but through the blood-soaked cloth toward the sample pouch still strapped against his chest. The sample answers sharply.
Across the cavern, the epis strands turn toward us again. Kavor’s face goes still.
“What is it?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. He looks past me. Slowly, I turn. At the center of the draining pool, the white-gray machine opens like an eye. Blue light pours into it from every channel we failed to break. And beneath the eye, far under the water, something moves.
Not zemlja. Not plant. Not fully machine. Something old and vast, awake enough to notice us. The system didn’t wake because we broke the anchor.
It woke because the cavern recognized the bond before we had finished choosing it.
