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Surprised, he freezes behind her, a little to her right. “Are you sure?”

“That’s not what I meant.” She wheels on him. Her skin is flushed, deep pink and deeply becoming. Heat rolls off her in a wave. “While I was innocently, uh, enjoying myself,youwere listening in. Getting off on some free earth girl porn.”

“I didn’t intend to! I couldn’t help it. I don’t make a habit of listening in on, hm,earth girls.Just you.”

“Just me,” she repeats, uncertainly.

“The call is a rare thing for my species.”

She folds her arms over her chest, jaw set. “How rare?”

“We…I was locked,” he says, “in distant orbit in this system, quiescent, for five hundred million of your planet’s years.”

A heavy silence falls. They face each other on the dais he made for her, the fate of his world hanging in the balance between them.

“You were out here, alone, all that time.”

“Yes.”

“That means you’re older than humanity. Older thansharks.”

“…Sharks?”

“Never mind.” She waves the question away, impatient now. “It’s not possible. No species can survive that long without…reproducing.”

“NoEarthspecies. We…my people are travelers. Explorers. Builders, when the time is right. But we’re spacefarers first, and space takes a very long time to cross. Longer still, to find what we’re looking for.”

“What does that mean?”

It means I need you.“Your pleasure awakened me. It brought me to you. It made all this—for you.”It made me what I am. While the greater organism he serves is as old as he said, this body made in the image of her desire has only known an ambulatory existence for a few rotations of her world.

“You still haven’t told mewhy.”

“This vessel’s power source, its light, its warmth…it’s you.”

“Come again?”

“Unionfuels my people’s journeys between stars. If you let me in, let me taste you…” He swallows, his mouth watering. “It would mean everything. It would mean we could go anywhere. We could know home, again.”

He emerged from the greater whole for one purpose. That purpose now stands before him, ready to scream, or run, or maybe hit him, or all three at once. He can’t read the complicated emotions storming across her face without far more data and time to study.

We don’t have all the time in the worlds. Not anymore.

But she doesn’t do any of those things. “Union,” she repeats, thoughtfully. “You’re saying you abducted me because you want me for sex. Formating.”

“That’s not?—”

“And then you’d take me home? Back to Earth?”

She’sbrave, his mate. Brave, unexpected, and oh, so beautiful. In the distant stretches of the colony’s awareness, the individual who now calls himself Cassiel feels a sea change, a sensation of something essential, breaking. She’s shaken him. He can feel the utter ebb of grief, the way it will inevitably come crashing down on him. Like the sea after a tremor, echoes of yet another primordial dream.

In this moment, he doesn’t care about that. He's lost sight of the mission. All he can see now is her.

“My heart,” he says, naming the wild beat inside him. His adopted physiology seems to be developing a mind of its own. Wanting inexplicable things.Individuating.“It’s the only way Ican.”

* * *

“You’ll really take me home?”Kat asks the alien. “Promise?”