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“Where?”
“Here.” Her fingers dance over her low belly, over the outline of my erection. “And here.” Her fingers travel up between her ribs, over each of her breasts. I take one in my hand and squeeze. She clenches, her toes point, her legs try to pull together, but mine prop hers apart. “But mostly here,” she sighs, and she kills me when she lays her hand over her heart.
ChapterSixteen
Lacchus
We ride out the storm together in her underground bunker. We pile mattresses across the floor of the room with the strange and wonderful walls. She can’t take me again in the night, and I’m not sure I can rally for her, either. The time in the shower about broke my cock in half. And I’m grateful that we’re both too weak to ravage each other. If we’d had more energy, then I might not have asked her about the walls and the beautiful images smeared across them.
“Ipay-en-tedthem.”
I shake my head. “What is that?”
“Topaynt?” She smiles. “So glad you asked. Stay still for me. This might take a while.” And then, she spends the next hours doing something extraordinary. Shepaintsmy likeness in a way I’ve never seen. She studies my body, and then, out over the Barrens landscape she’s already depicted, she paints me exquisitely.
She paints me once, at a distance, and then again just my head and torso. Then she repeats the process all over after asking me to shift into my Mpo form. Her talent is extraordinary.
“You will bring these paints with you when we return to the tribe, yes?” I ask her stormily.
She laughs like there is nothing pressing in this world or any other as she places her paints carefully in her sack and closes it using an unusual contraption she callszip-per.She returns to me in the bed and we dim the lights, using a friend she callsPAMthat speaks to her through the entire ship now that she’s discarded her bangle. I assure her she’ll receive many other bangles in my care. She’ll receive whatever she needs.
“I know,” she tells me as she burrows against my chest, and I pull flimsy blankets over our bodies. “But I already have what I need.”
“As do I. All I’ll ever need.”
She sighs, and in the quiet, so quiet I nearly believe I imagine it, she says, “Is this what love feels like?”
I do not answer her aloud, for I know the answer already in my bones.
Instead, I kiss the top of her head, and we sleep coiled around each other like knotted rope.
ChapterSeventeen
Rhen
The storm rages through the night and halfway through the coming day, which is actually a blessing because it takes me all morning to clean up as much of the mess as I’m willing to clean up for the future of humanity. I reset the protocol to put the Chamber to sleep, make sure the moisture levels look okay and that the water is recirculating.
I toss my uniform after retrieving my mangled green bean seeds from the back pocket. Then I grab a new uniform and a few additional seed sachets, even though Pam tells me not to. But I haven’t been great about listening to Pam so far. Why start now?
I set my Pam watch back in the tray underneath the remaining translator implants. I record a long message for the next generation of humans to wake up to and erase the recording from the human who woke before me and died in agony. I tell the next humans not to take the pills, to try for survival, that other creatures survived the fall of humanity.
It was a fall, but it wasn’t an end. We fell, but we got back up again.
Shaky and feeling strangely tender-hearted in a way I’m not used to, I go back to the pod I fell out of, the one that malfunctioned however many weeks ago that was now closed, and seal it. I write a message in Portuguese on the outside in a black permanent marker I then pack with me.
RHEN AND LACCHUS WERE HERE. STAY STRONG.I surround our names with a heart.
And then I end my message with the same suggestion Lacchus gave me before.
HEAD FOR THE MOUNTAINS.
Lacchus carries my bags to the portal that leads us up, up, up to the world he calls the Barrens. “Are you ready?” he asks.
I don’t know. I am, but I’m scared. After all, I joined the Sucere Project when I was prepared to die. But I’m leaving it now prepared to live.
“What is it, owelay?”
I sigh shakily and meet his soft gaze, finding it incredible that I could find such softness in a male like him. “I’m scared. I can’t believe I’m leaving to make a whole new life with you.”
