Page 30

Her fingers aren’t enough. She needs more. With a low moan of frustration, she throws back the covers, book forgotten as she yanks her favorite vibrator from the drawer and plugs it in. Finally, she falls back into the bed and switches the wand on at its highest setting.

God, she needs to come so bad. She’ll do anything. She imagines a shadowy form above her, pushing inside her with brutal force, calling hermine.Taking her, claiming her, filling her until her brain whites out and she falls apart around him.

Her back arches, poised at the edge of a sudden, shattering orgasm when all the lights go out and the vibrator stills in her hand.

“Fuck!” she screams, the waves of pleasure ebbing as fast as they rolled over her. “Not again. The wiring in this place, I swear to God…”

It’s not the first time she’s thrown a fuse. Once the entire apartment complex had gone dark and didn’t come back on for hours. One neighbor, wondering aloud who’d used enough joules to blow the fuse box, had mentioned they’d heard someone using a power tool, which was…not incorrect.

Flushed, panting, she lies in the dark, her heartbeat thumping in her ears, almost lightheaded. Even cut short, her toy packs a hell of a punch. She can still almost feel its hum in the air, in her body, shaking the windows?—

That’s not the vibrator at all. It comes from outside, a deep rumble that seems to reach all the way to the marrow of her bones.

She tries to roll over, sit up in bed, but her body won’t respond. She can’t even turn her head.

Harsh light flashes over her, bright enough to bring tears to her eyes. It paralyzes her. She can’t speak or scream.

The mind-numbing vibration draws closer, right outside her window now, shaking her apart, squeezing the breath from her lungs. It’s loud enough to wake the dead, let alone her nosy neighbors.

But no one comes to save her, and amid the overwhelming thrum ofwhateveris outside, she realizes: she’s not in bed anymore.

She’s floating on air, body rigid, drenched in light that pulls her inexorably—elsewhere.

Abruptly, the light fades away. In Kat’s last conscious moments, the darkness comes as a relief, until?—

Hello, sweetling.

Held helpless in the dark, she shudders. The voice caresses her, velvety and deep as night unending.

Now you belong to me.

* * *

Taking her is easy.

Her desire flares across the empty reaches, a beacon drawing him into her orbit. This small blue world and its riotous gravity of life isn’t allher,of course, but his mind balks at the concept.

He exists as a collective, a network of individual neural nodes and bodies with separate functions, but allhis, allhimself. Heisthe vessel floating in the void, and its protective shell, and all it contains within. Each experiences its life as linked inextricably with the whole, forming an integral part of a singular entity.

His scans tell him that she is one among billions, like and unlike her, each life autonomous, without the cohesion perfected by his kind. Not just millions of individuals but millions ofspecies, an overwhelming variety, a wild proliferation of biomass. He can hardly picture such a wealth of difference.

It’s everything that he has waited and watched for, this world. But it requires a brand new frame of reference.

How lonely it must be, how strange, how small and separate she must feel, even among billions. That profound difference intoxicates him. It holds an irresistible, terrifying promise. In her truest essence, she’s unknowable, and at the same time, she must be unknowing too:incapableboth of fully knowing him or being known by him.

An encounter with such a unique entity could create something entirely new, unpredictable, unstable,dangerous…and powerful.

Similar alchemy once created this world in its dizzying variety. It’s not entirely unfamiliar to him, and what he does know of it revives something new and old within him: a restless dissonance, alossof wholeness.

He knew what that was like, once. So long ago, now, that he’s forgotten how it works—worked—must work again, if he’s to live as he once did. Worse, he’s forgotten why itdidn’twork, in the end, why it left him echoing and hollow.

Did he try to forget, or did he lose that knowledge, one small part of everything that ending took from him?

The question grips him at his core. It spills from the empty places inside him as he drops into synchronous orbit with her position on the landmass. Heacheswith it, as if the line between him above and her below has pinned him at the balance point.

Already parts of him reach out to her, long arms unfolding from where he hangs suspended at her zenith. Now, hidden in her world’s shadow, he hesitates.

In that pause, the space of one of her short breaths, her pleasure hits its peak.Even at this distance, it electrifies him. A slender thread of exotic energy—herenergy—sparks from the ground upwards, racing along his length toward his center.