Okay. Think.
I’m small, I’m barefoot, I’m three moon cycles postpartum and I have never been fast. He is seven feet of male built by rock, he can see in the dark, and he can smell me.
So I’m not going to win this in a forest.
But I’m notina forest.
I’m in a holosuite.
And I have spent nine years of my life inside systems, and a projected environment is asystem, and a system has architecture, and architecture has seams.
I stop thinking about trees and start reading the room.
There. Twenty paces left and the ground repeats.
It’s subtle and it’s beautiful work but it’s a loop, the same three fern clusters and the same fallen trunk cycling in a band around the edge of the program, which means I’m near the boundary, which means the projection is folding space to make a small room feel like a wilderness.
Which means if I run theseaminstead of the forest, I’m running a circle he thinks is a straight line.
I cut left along it.
He crashes through the trees behind me and he’sfast, gods he’s fast, and I hear him overshoot — hear the footfalls carry on past the point where I turned, because he’s following a scent trail through a wood and I’m following the edge of a machine.
I get maybe forty seconds out of it.
Then I hit water — a stream that isn’t a stream, it’s a texture-and-sound loop, but it’s cold and it’s real enough to break a trail — and I go in and wade upstream, teeth clenched, and haul out onto a flat rock and double back along the bank and press myself into a stand of ferns with both hands over my own mouth.
Silence.
Just water and my own thundering heart.
I’ve done it. I’ve actually done it. I’ve beaten a Margol Xylan in a claiming forest usingload-path analysis—
The ferns explode.
I don’t even get a shriek out.
An arm like a support strut comes around my middle and takes me off my feet, and we go down, and even now — even gone to the fever, even blind with it — he turns us as we fall so that his back hits the ground and mine doesn’t.
I land on him. He rolls me under him in one movement.
And then his mouth comes down on mine.
It’s our first kiss.
Nine months in the same bed. Nine months of lying six inches apart with my mouth full of things I couldn’t say. Nine months of wondering whether Xylan evendothis, whether he’d know how, whether I’d ever find out.
He knows how.
Or he doesn’t and it doesn’t matter, because what he does isdevourme — fangs against my lip, tongue in my mouth, a growl coming up out of his chest that I feel in my teeth and my spine and low in my belly. He tastes like rock dust and something warm. His hand is in my hair, huge and careful even now, cradling the back of my skull off the ground.
I have been kissed before. I want that on the record. I have been kissed by a number of perfectly adequate men across four sectors.
This is not that. This is a male making up for thirty-one years in about nine seconds.
I sink my hands into his braids and I kiss him back like I’m drowning.
And then the last clear sliver of me remembers the rules.
