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She looked at the small, heavy box in his hands and her cheeks heated. “That’s a mattress. It inflates.”

He turned it over slowly, frowning. “It is very small.”

“It’s rated for one human,” she admitted. “I’ll have to get a bigger one.”

He looked at the box, and then he looked at her, and something slow and hot moved in his eyes. He set the box down carefully on the floor.

“Yes,” he said. “You will.”

They put up the first wall the next morning. It was only a frame, a long rectangle of pale structural alloy with the insulated fabric stretched across it. But it was heavy and awkward, and it had to be anchored into the rock along the top and the bottom. On any other job site she would have needed a crew of three and a lift to raise it. He easily picked it up by himself and held it against the back wall of the chamber while she scrambled around underneath it with her drill.

“Left a little,” she said. “No, your left. Up. Down a tiny bit. Stop. Stop! Perfect. Don’t move.”

He didn’t move. He stood there with his arms braced and his tail curled patiently around his feet, looking deeply amused, while she marked the holes and drilled them and tapped in the first anchor bolt.

Then she stopped. She knelt there with the hammer in her hand and looked at the bolt. It was a good bolt, new and bright and properly seated. She had drilled the hole to the right depth and cleared the dust out of it and set the anchor exactly the way she had been trained to. There was no reason to think anything was wrong with it.

She thought about the ledge in the survey tube, and the pale orange line running along the ceiling from anchor to anchor. She thought about honeycombed stone around a bolt, and water creeping up from below where nobody could see it. And she thought about Lucas, not even looking up from his tablet, telling her they had already checked.

She lifted the hammer, struck the rock beside the bolt, and listened. It rang clean. She moved over a hand’s width and struck it again, and then again, working her way carefully along the line of marks. Every time, the stone rang clear and bright under the hammer. She could feel him watching her, but he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t ask her to hurry.

When she had finished, she sat back on her heels, and he tilted his head at her.

“Good?” he asked.

“I think so.” She hesitated. “Can you check?”

He shifted the frame so that he could hold it with one arm. Then he rested his other hand against the rock and hummed, very low, the way he did in the channels. She felt it under her knees, the faint answering shiver in the stone. He listened to it for a long moment with his eyes half closed.

“Good,” he said. “Strong. It will hold.”

She let out a long breath. It was ridiculous to get emotional over an anchor bolt. But nobody had ever done that before. In eight years of job sites, nobody had ever stood and waited while she checked her work. Nobody had ever asked her if it was good, and then checked it again with her because she wanted them to, and not because they thought she was wrong.

She blinked quickly and looked down at her hammer.

“Frrankie?”

“I’m fine,” she said, and cleared her throat. “It’s the dust. Hold that still for me, okay? We’ve got a lot more to go.”

He held it. He held it all morning while she drilled and tapped and tested every anchor, and he checked every one of them after her without being asked. By the time the moss was at its brightest, the first wall of the habitat was standing solid against the rock. She walked slowly all the way along it with her hand on the fabric, and she didn’t find a single flaw.

She was sitting on the shelf that evening with the tablet on her knees, adding the last details to the sleeping alcove, when she realized what she was doing.

She had drawn the alcove twice as wide as any sleeping space she had ever seen. She had built the frame out of the heaviest-gauge structural alloy in the catalog. She had reinforced the floor beneath it. She had added a long, low ledge along one side, the right height for a tail to rest on. She had put the heater vents on the far wall, not near the bed, because he ran warm and so did she when she was pressed up against him. And she had angled the bed so that the first sight on waking would be the view out of the opening. It looked out over the gardens and the pools and the glow of the moss.

She had designed it for him, every wall and vent and careful, stubborn line of it. For the first time in her life, she was building for someone she loved. She sat quietly on the shelf with the tablet in her lap, and let the word sit there in her chest, warm and heavy and certain. She had never really said it to anyone before, not like this. She hadn’t said it to him yet, but she was going to.

“Frrankie?”

She looked up quickly. He was coming up from the pools with his hair wet and his scales gleaming, carrying a double handful of the dark fruit. He stopped when he saw her face and tilted his head.

“You are thinking again,” he said. “Very loud.”

She laughed, and wiped her eyes quickly, and held out the tablet to him.

“Look,” she said. “I finished the bed.”

He sat down beside her and looked at the screen. He studied it the way he studied everything, with his head tilted and his eyes intent.