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“I can…make adjustments, if you’d like me to suppress that reflex.” It’s an easy enough biochemical fix, at least temporarily.

Eyes wide, she nods again, and he pushes deep once more, experimenting with minute hormonal changes in the fluids she’s so greedily suckling from him. Returning his tendrils to her pussy, he makes another involuntary, guttural sound when he finds her soaking with even more moisture than before. He works into her everywhere, just like she asked for, strumming her clit, invading her holes, and she cries out around his cock, helpless and impaled on him.

Three ways hecanhave her, and she surrenders all of them to him.

Her climax cuts through him with a sharp sweetness close to agony. He roars, spending himself in her, coating the back of her throat with his seed. Her throat squeezes him, vise-tight, as she swallows, and he almost comes a second time, his cock over-sensitized and throbbing, buried in her.

He wants more. He wants everything. But this will have to be enough.

He takes her again, rides her mercilessly from peak to gasping peak, and with everything she gives him, he carries her home.

* * *

A dim,pale blue glow seeps into the room, cold and diffuse as dawn. Roused by a new chill in the air, Kat opens her eyes to find herself alone.

She stirs, her muscles sore, but deliciously so, each ache an exquisite memory of the pleasure Cassiel wrung from her. Nothing binds her here anymore. Her green satin jumpsuit lies crumpled beneath her, torn and shed like a skin. She pulls a sheet from the bed and wraps it around her instead.

“Hello?” she calls softly. “Cassiel? Where did you go?”

No answer. Her bare feet meet a chilly, quiescent surface, no longer humming with electric warmth. Shivering, she tilts her head up, trying to gauge the dimensions of the ship’s hull.

A fathomless dark expanse stretches above her, its dizzying depths pierced here and there by a faint point of light.Stars.

She stands beneath a translucent dome, a shell of sorts, its curvature visible only in the refraction of light. Seeking the source of that faint illumination, she turns in place, then stops with a soft gasp.

For a moment she doesn’t understand what she’s looking at, as a sliver at the meridian grows to a wide, shallow crescent of white light. Then it expands into a curving slice marbled with blue and speckled white, here and there broken by greenish-brown?—

Earth.

“Holy shit,” she breathes, and the bright half-circle blurs, her eyes wet with sudden tears.

“Your world is beautiful.”

She jumps at the voice. The transparent dome brightens with the bluish glow of Earthrise, but Cassiel is nowhere in sight. And this voice isn’t quite the same: more resonant, lesshuman.It echoes from everywhere and nowhere, leaving whispers trailing through the air behind it.

“Where are you?” she says. “Where did you go?”

“If you mean the one who brought you here,” the voice says calmly, “he is gone. He served his purpose. Not well, in the end, but he did the best he could.”

The words have an edge to them, and her skin prickles. “Who the hell are you, and what have you done with Cassiel?”

The hissing response might almost be laughter. “WeareCassiel, just as much as he was. That name is merely a collection of sounds he gave you to call upon.”

“You’renothim. No way. He was…”Kind.“Different.”

“Wemadehim for that, so you would believe as much. The truth is more complicated.” Then, in a contemplative tone, “There is much about us that a human would find difficult to understand.”

Kat huffs. “On second thought, maybe you’re just the same. He didn’t answer my questions either.”

“He answered more than enough,” the voice rumbles. “Now, time grows short. We are bound to do as he agreed. We will send you home.”

“No,” she says, breathless. “I want to see him.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“Why not?” she demands, and then a terrible thought occurs to her. “Did youkillhim? You creepy greatfuck.You bring me out to the edge of the solar system, have him rail me senseless forreasons, then bring me back here, and for what? What was thepoint?”

“That doesn’t matter now.” It seems to grow distant, as if withdrawing from her fury. “You seem…distressed. Perhaps we shouldn’t have woken you.” Then, on a whisper, almost another voice entirely: “We wouldn’t have, buthesaid you might like to see your world from another perspective.”