“I guess the literature doesn’t know much about my species.”
I pick up the notebook and write it all down. The numbers, the timeline, the coagulant factor, the orientation response I underline twice.
I underlineinvoluntary. Twice. In the margin I writethis is bad, and under italso interesting, and I don’t cross either out, because both are true.
The woman who lost her job for pushing past the point where she should have stopped should probably notice when she’s doing it again. I keep writing anyway.
I reach for the assay stone, prick my thumb with the pipette tip, and press the blood to the pale crystal. The color blooms at the contact point.
Red, the neurotoxin signature, exactly what I expected from an Ophidian his size. And underneath the red, spreading slower, a second color I’ve never seen on a stone before: gold, faint, warm, layered beneath the killing chemistry.
At the very edge of the reaction, a third trace, dark, almost invisible. Not his venom. Something foreign sitting in the gland tissue, contaminating the sample.
I stare at the stone. The gold keeps spreading; the dark trace doesn’t.
I don’t know what any of it means yet. I will.
The warmth is still in my body, settling into my muscles, my joints, the deep tissue of my chest and abdomen. It doesn’t feel like a drug, and it doesn’t feel like the others; those older venoms fought my body.
His is cooperating with it, finding the places where I’m tense and releasing them, finding the places where I’m damaged and settling into them, warm, patient, doing something I can’t measure yet but can feel.
He’s close enough that the heat of his body reaches my back.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “Same time. Higher concentration.”
“You want to do it again?”
“Yes.”
I don’t dress it up. I don’t call it science. He’s quiet for a long time, his breath on the top of my head.
That night, lying on the stone floor with a bedroll between me and the cold, I hear his heartbeat from across the cave.
It shouldn’t be possible. The cave is thirty feet wide, my hearing is average, human, unremarkable, and I can’t hear a heartbeat through thirty feet of air and stone under normal conditions.
These aren’t normal conditions. His venom is still in my blood, and the micro-dose is doing something to my hearing, amplifying some frequencies and filtering others, so that I hear his heart and nothing else. Not the wind at the cave mouth, not the water down the back wall, not the crackle of the dying fire.
His heart, slow and steady and deep, the same rhythm my own heart is now running at.
I’m oriented toward the sound, and I don’t sleep for a long time. Not because I’m afraid. Because my left hand is still, completely still.
It hasn’t been still in five years. The tremor that has been my companion through eleven rejected settlements and months of walking and one auction block is gone. Quiet.
I flex my fingers in the dark. Steady. Both of them. Both hands.
I open the notebook and write one more line by feel, no light, the pen moving from muscle memory.
Gold on the stone. What else does this venom do that the literature doesn’t cover?
I underline it and set the pen down, then press my steady left hand flat against the stone. I’m curious. I’m warm. My hand is still, and the curiosity isn’t a research question; it’s appetite.
I close the notebook and lie back and listen to his heart beat across the cave.
Mine keeps pace.
SIRATH
Three days.
