Her heart began to beat faster. “Warm places? You mean geothermal vents?”
“I do not know this word. Places where heat rises from below. Where minerals gather in patterns like…” He struggled for the word. “Like flowers. Growing from the stone.”
Mineral blooms. He’s describing mineral blooms.
She grabbed her tablet, pulling up her survey maps with trembling fingers. “Here. Can you show me? On this map?”
He leaned forward, studying the display with furrowed brows. She watched him process the information—the contour lines, the depth markers, and the symbols she’d used to indicate potential deposit sites.
“This is the ice above,” he said slowly. “And this—” he traced a finger along a ridge line “—this is the old shore. From before.”
“Before?”
“Before the water left. Before the cold came.” His voice had gone distant, touched with the fragmented grief she’d heard before. “Mars was not always frozen. Once there were seas. Rivers. Growing things.”
She knew this, of course, but hearing him talk about it like a memory rather than a fact made her chest ache.
“The minerals I need are rare-earth elements,” she said, pulling herself back to the practical. “They form under specificconditions such as high heat, high pressure, or particular chemical environments. My surveys suggested there might be deposits at depth, but my equipment couldn’t map the lower strata clearly.”
He studied the tablet a moment longer, then moved his finger to a spot several kilometers from her current drilling area.
“Here,” he said with quiet certainty. “The deep wells. Where—” He stopped, his jaw tightening. “Where the Keepers slept. The heat rises there. Minerals grow thick on the walls.”
Her breath caught. “You’re sure?”
“I am sure.” He met her eyes. “I slept there for… very long. I know the taste of the stone and the feel of the ice. What you seek is there.”
If he’s right…
She ran the numbers in her head, barely daring to hope. If there were accessible deposits at that location and if she could get to them without a full drilling rig. If the concentration was even half what he seemed to be suggesting…
“I could replace the rig,” she breathed. “Hell, I could buy two rigs. I could?—”
She stopped, afraid to say any more and jinx it. But the possibilities cascading through her mind were dizzying. Independence. Security. Everything she’d been working towards for years, suddenly within reach.
And all because an ancient dragon had crashed through her claim and into her life.
She looked at Adjar, and her breath caught.
“Thank you,” she said roughly.
“For what?”
“For this. For—” She gestured helplessly at the tablet and the maps and the possibility he’d just handed her. “You didn’t have to help me. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I owe you my life.”
“That’s not?—”
“It is.” He rose from his chair, moving around the table until he stood before her. This close, she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes—ice-blue and intense and fixed on her with an expression that made her pulse race. “You saved me. You fed me. You held me through the cold. Now I give back. This is… balance.”
Balance.Such a simple word for something so complicated.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she rose onto her toes and kissed him again. His arms came around her immediately, pulling her against the solid wall of his chest. She felt the rumble of that growl that seemed to originate somewhere deep in his core, and then his mouth was moving against hers and she forgot everything else.
Her hands found his shoulders, gripping the hard muscle beneath the warm scales. His wings rustled and spread slightly, creating a cocoon around them, and she felt his tail curl around her calf like an anchor. When they finally broke apart, both breathing hard, his forehead rested against hers and his hands had somehow found their way to her waist, his fingers splayed across the curve of her hips.
“I like this learning,” he murmured. “Very much.”
