That should concern me. I let it concern me and I keep working.
At midday I bring food to her corridor. She sits back against the wall and eats. I coil near the junction.
She hands me the water jug when she’s finished. Our fingers touch on the clay. I do not pull back.
She holds, too. A beat. Another. Then she lets go of the jug.
“Your hands are warm,” she says, as though commenting on the weather. She goes back to the channel.
I look at my hands for a long time after she is gone.
“The channels in this corridor are carrying something,” she says. Her voice is steady. Her fingers go to her pants pocket. She pulls out a small chip and holds it up. “There’s residue inside. Chalky, yellowish. Old.”
I know what it is. What happens when weak venom sits too long inside stone. The flow poisons the channel it was meant to feed, hardens, chokes the passage shut. Decades of decay built up inside the walls, narrowing the groove to nothing.
“The channels haven’t carried clean flow in a long time,” I say.
“How long?”
The answer is: since I was small. Since my father died and the whole system started to rot.
“A long time,” I say.
She knows I am holding back. She tucks the chip into her pocket and finishes eating.
I almost tell her. The channels are poisoned. The seal is failing. The venom I pour each morning is keeping a cage shut, badly, and the cage is all that stands between the jungle and something that eats worlds.
The sentence forms, and I have to swallow it.
Later.
Not until I know what the color means. The pink I expected. The teal I did not.
In the afternoon, she is in the west corridor near the sealed doorway, and I come to check the section she has cleared. The corridor is narrow. I settle against the wall across from her, mycoils folded tight, the corridor holding both of us the way it was built to hold two.
She is sitting back on her heels. Dust on her knees. Charcoal behind her ear. She is looking at my hands.
She has been looking at my hands for days. I have been pretending not to notice.
She reaches across the corridor and takes my hand.
Not the accidental contact we’ve been pretending to not notice.
Deliberately.
Her fingers close on my wrist. She holds my hand against her arm for a moment. Then she turns it over. My palm faces up. She studies it.
Her thumb traces the center of my palm. Along the line where the larger scales at the outer edge give way to the finer grain at the center. She presses into the crease.
My venom spikes.
The glands under every scales on my hand fire at once as the secretion rate jumps. The pressure under her thumb goes from gentle to sharp and the dampness on my scales goes from faint to wet.
She feels it. Her thumb pauses on the crease. Her eyes trace the surface of my palm, the sheen where the compound is pooling, and then find mine.
I am very still. Every part of my attention is on the place where her thumb rests. My pulse is in my palm. Hers through her thumb. Mine is faster.
She presses harder. The compound spikes again. The compound wells up around the edge of her thumb where it meets my scales. Her skin is flushed where the venom has been soaking in, deeper than pink now. Teal. My color in her skin.
