“I want to be the link,” she said. “Between worlds. Between Earth and… all of this.” She gestured with one hand, encompassing the mist, the Bastion, the stars beyond. “It’s obvious this will happen again.”
A faint tension tightened inside him. “Humans taken from your world.”
“Yes.” Her gaze was steady, voice firm. “There has to be a better way than what happened to me. No more… selective abductions based on overheard wishes. No matter how ‘accurate’ your tech is.”
Guilt pricked—a thin, unfamiliar sting he still resented and yet, perversely, valued. Her humanity had done that: opened angles of self-examination he had never needed before.
He shifted, and she caught it immediately.
“Don’t,” she said gently, glancing up at him. “Don’t look like that. It’s done. You know I would not undo it, not now. But in return, you have to leave this part to me. You and the Marak both.”
Kyrax’s eyes narrowed faintly. “Leave what to you?”
She met his gaze without hesitation. “If your kind need humans—and clearly, in some rare cases, you do—then we create a system. Not raids. A structure. Knowledge. Informed choice. I want a meeting, Kyrax. All the humans who have left Earth and survived it. The Marak’s human—now that I know she exists… and I get the feeling he probably didn’t tell her aboutme.”
Kyrax snorted. Knowing Karian, that much was true.
Morgan continued. “Her and whoever else is out there. We can design something together. A path. Guidance. So the next person it happens to doesn’t wake up alone in a strange bed and think they’re losing their mind.”
He nodded, considering it, letting the idea settle into deeper layers of thought. A network of attuned humans and their counterparts. Bridges between species. Voluntaryselection instead of opportunistic snatching. It was ambitious, disruptive… and strategically elegant.
Karian—fierce and protective and mysterious as he was—would be difficult to deal with, but he would have to agree. Kyrax would hold him to it.
“And how,” he asked, “do you propose we find those who are truly willing?”
She smiled, small and sharp-edged. “Trust me. When they know what’s out there, there will be plenty. Not everyone is thrilled with life on Earth. And some of us,” she tapped her temple lightly, “are a little crazy.”
He looked at her for a long, quiet moment.
“You question your own sanity for ending up with me?” he asked.
“Obviously,” she said again, deadpan. “Have you met you?”
No Saelori would have dared. No Vykan either. He found it… intoxicating.
She sobered, reaching for his hand and threading her fingers between his. Her much smaller palm fit neatly against his, skin warm against his—the only living being in the universe for whom his touch carried no threat.
“Promise me,” she said.
The bond pulsed, her intent pressing against him not as compulsion but as a request with teeth.
He sighed, a slow exhale that carried reluctant amusement. “You are persistent.”
“I am,” she agreed. “And I’m not letting this go.”
“Very well,” he said. “We will speak with the Marak. We will find the others. We will build… something better.”
Relief and fierce satisfaction surged through her and along the bond, bright and sharp. He soaked in it, letting it color his own mood.
His hand slid lower along the line of her spine, fingers splaying at the narrow curve of her waist. She shivered, scent shifting in a way that curled heat in his gut.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “You said the others were old,” she said. “How old areyou, exactly?”
He did the conversion in his head, fitting Vyranth’s long orbital cycle into the smaller pattern of her world. “Approximately three hundred of your planet’s full revolutions around its star,” he replied. “Give or take.”
Her mouth fell open. They had bonded, and she knew him better now, but she clearly didn’t know everything. “You’re that old?”
Amusement brushed through him. He had learned enough of human biology to understand the reaction.Short-lived, fragile creatures,he had thought once. How far from that simple assessment he had traveled.
