Two bodies lay flat, just a few feet from each other, both along the perimeter of the dig site. Vines curled up and over their bodies, spines on the undersides ripping and tearing at the flesh in a patchwork of scattered pinpricks. One had been there a few hours longer, already losing the soft tissue of his eyes and tongue.
Only one cutter worked at a time at night while the more dangerous of the plants settled into something akin to sleep. It was supposed to be safer than the day when they were more active.
“They got this one first, obviously.” Sallah crouched next to a cutter, dragging a vine off him with the end of his stick. Sallah pulled up the hem of the cutter’s pants to reveal the thick socks and top of the boots underneath. “Right here, got through the fabric and stung him. Wouldn’t have taken him out right away. He probably started getting tired. Sat down for a minute. Passed out. Then they finished the job.”
He wandered to the other cutter.
“She came out here for her shift, then saw him. Tried to render aid. Wasn’t careful enough, and they stung her, too. They would have been stronger with the extra protein, so they could drag her away a little.”
“You’re not qualified to declare pathologies or cause of death, Sallah.” Beni had her hand firmly in Thresh’s, forcing him to stay back with her, away from the perimeter.
“But I am legally qualified to declare a site safe or unsafe due to plant behavior.” He stood up, lost his balance, then caught himself on his prodding stick. “And I say that we need to close the site until a team can get out here.”
Beni flashed a look of surprise that settled into something akin to smugness. Sallah turned earnestly toward Thresh who dropped his shoulders.
“You’d have to stop work until the constabulary got here, anyway,” Sallah said.
“Beni can act as an agent of the constabulary,” Thresh said. “She can clear us.”
“I wouldn’t,” she snapped back. “I’m already going to have to explain why I waited so long to radio it in.”
“Sunny, you can clear us, too, can’t you?” Thresh turned to him quickly.
“I’m only auxiliary. But I’m with Beni. Even if I could, I wouldn’t.” Sunny found himself moving a little behind Lidea, trying to hide from the conversation.
“Well, we can’t close the site. That’s not an option.”
“People are dead, Thresh.” Sallah growled at him.
“And there’s nothing that can be done about that now. Obviously, give them their death rites, but stopping the dig won’t make them less dead.” Thresh said it with such deadpan conviction, arguing with him about it felt illogical. Early magicological research was plagued with studies built on the backs of dead bodies. Modern ones weren’t much better. Both Lidea and Sunny had been in conversations like this before.
“Trying to prevent more people from dying, Thresh.” Sallah’s voice was softer this time. Not pleading, but pressing for de-escalation. “I’d prefer not to pull rank, but I will.”
“No, that’s not…” Thresh raised his hands in supplication. “Make whatever calls you’re going to make. It’ll take a few days for anyone to get out here, and I’m not going to stop working in the meantime. I’m going to check out the void under the site.”
“Thresh, come on.” Beni was pleading, pulling on his arm. “This is fucking ridiculous, and you know it.” Thresh pulled his hand from hers.
“You’re going to have to physically stop me. The instant someone official gets here, they’ll want to do a safety audit, and I’ll have to turn over my findings, so far. I’d like to know what I’m working with before I do that.”
“Then I guess I have to go with you,” Beni sighed. “Make sure you don’t get hurt.”
“Me too,” Sunny said a little too quickly. Lidea tugged the back of his collar in question. He half glanced at em. “Highest risk is a cave-in or trapped gas. I can sense both things before they happen.”
“Then I’ll go to keep you safe,” Lidea decided.
“Well then, that settles it!” Thresh clapped his hands. “Let’s gear up, and-“
“You’re waiting until tomorrow,” Sallah declared. “Practically, we need to move the bodies and truss them so the plants can’t keep eating them. Then we need to go through their personnel files to see what their death rites are. Then we need to give the plants a chance to come down from their excited state. With this much protein, that’s going to take until at least tomorrow morning, if not longer. I just know you won’t hold out that long, so I won’t ask for more.”
Thresh bristled, plates visibly lifting from his skin to create gaps.
“Okay. Fine. Everyone just do what they have to do! Thiek!” He stormed off back toward his tent.
After the dirty work of the morning, Thresh spent the better part of the afternoon pouring over his notes, so far. Occasionally, his vague mumblings were accompanied by the sound of tearing a page out of his notebook.
Lidea and Sunny watched him through the open tent flap, choosing to perch on a small outcropping just above the campsite. Lidea rested against a tall rock, legs in a gentle V-shape. Sunny sat between eir legs, leaning back against eir chest. Eir arms fell gently around his waist.
“I’m not like that, am I?” Sunny asked quietly. Lidea dragged eir hand through his hair, curling it through eir fingers.
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I can get…intense…when I’m working on something.”
“You’ve never risked your life for a rock as far as I know.” Lidea rocked eir head forward and pressed eir lips to the back of Sunny’s head.
“I’ve considered it a few times, but no. I guess not.”
“I don’t think I could do it if you were like Thresh.”
Sunny pressed a little firmer into eir chest, turning his head slightly to see em out of the corner of his eyes.
“What do you mean? Couldn’t do what?”
“This,” they pressed. “Whatever it is we’re doing. We’re not in the safest jobs, necessarily, but we’re not out here trying to make it worse. If you were at a regular risk of dying, that…that would be it…I’m not even sure I could be your friend.”
“I didn’t realize you felt that way.”
“I couldn’t take it if you died. I don’t know how Beni does it, if Thresh is as reckless as he seems.”
“Do you think the pursuit of scientific knowledge is reckless?” Sunny’s hands drifted over eir knees.
“No, not on its face. But it feels like the pursuit really needs to be something big and life-changing to put your life on the line for it.”
“And you don’t think whatever he found or whatever he’s looking for is worth it.”
“What are you trying to argue, Sunny honey?”
“Feel you’re not giving him enough credit, is all. He clearly knows something we don’t.”
“According to Sallah, this is a pattern, so-“ Lidea froze mid-thought, suddenly jumping to the end of the train. “Come on.” Lidea stood up, dragging Sunny up with em.”
“Where are we going?”
“Thresh hasn’t been forthcoming, but Sallah knows more than he’s volunteering. Let’s ask the right questions.”
“You’re coming up to me with more purpose than I usually prefer.” Sallah looked up from a table that had been dragged out into the sunshine. He was bent over it, doing a haphazard sort of necropsy on one of the vine buds that had been part of the attack on the cutters. The notes he kept to the side were in one of the more symbolic Miraalan languages, a series of circles and squares stacked on top of each other.
“What’s Thresh’s goal here?” Lidea asked plainly. “What is he looking for down there?”
Sallah wrapped his fingers in a wave across the table.
“I’m not going to speak for him, but it’s probably his pet Latolan theory. That’s the only thing I can see him getting this worked up about.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Lidea said. “I grew up on Correlan.”
“Just…your Latolan theory,” Sunny said. “Everyone has one.” His face scrunched up as he struggled to explain it. “I always liked the pocket dimension one, even if it doesn’t make any sense.”
“None of this is explaining anything,” Lidea complained. Sallah huffed in annoyance.
“It’s a world we know nothing about, covered in a jungle that is constantly trying to eat everyone. The only animals are insects, two species of vermin, and sea life. The balloon cameras show nothing but this for as far out as the signal will take them. We have evidence of people coming here for hundreds of years before gate-lock, but no one could ever make it stick. And it was permanently inhabited, at one point. And we have burial plots, but no bones. Because the plants ate them.” He finally set down the blade he was still holding. “It’s an absolute buffet of mystery and conspiracy. Thus, your Latolan theory. Though I think Thresh might be one of the few people willing to die for his.”
“Then can you share it, please? Before he puts me in the position where I’m asked to do the same?” Lidea leaned on the table. If this turned into pulling molars, ey was going to lose it and start tearing down tents. Sallah made one of those rolling clicks in the back of his throat.
“Thresh thinks this is not what Latolan naturally looks like. That someone genetically engineered the plants to be this way. Then they overran everything.”
“Is that…is that not the main explanation?” The more romanticized version of the theory was a cautionary tale on the dark side of playing with magic and science combined.
Sallah waved em off.
“Yes, sure, fine. Thresh thinks that someone off-world did it. That they came here specifically to turn this world into a jungle.”
“Why?” Sunny asked.
“Prison planet.” Sallah bent back down over the plant. Thresh may or may not be willing to fill in all the holes that suggested, but at least they had a lead to follow.
Sunny pulled Lidea away from Sallah.
“I’m still going down there in the cave.” Sunny said. “I don’t want him to get hurt. And, frankly, I’m curious.”
“And I don’t want you to get hurt, so…” Lidea shrugged. “Guess we’re on team prison planet.”
“You should reconsider going down with us tomorrow.” Beni sidled up to Sunny as he did the dishes. Lidea’s rotor assignment tonight was campfire management. The chore didn’t require eir full attention, so ey managed the drip line for the mesh-bagged plates, keeping an eye on the flame from a short distance.
“Is there something specific you’re not telling us?” Lidea asked. “Because we’ve already talked it out. We’re cool with the prison planet theory. Actually, it sounds interesting the more I sit on it.”
Beni started at the mention, then looked around to make sure no one else had heard. Thresh was still off mumbling in a tent, Sallah was filling in for one of the evening cutter shifts, and everyone else was busy with their various camp tasks.
“Sallah shouldn’t have told you,” Beni said.
“Well he did…so…” Sunny felt distant from this conversation, unwilling to engage in even more back and forth and changing of minds. They had made their decision. They were going down into the space beneath the ruins. He had his own morbid curiosities to satisfy.
“What’s going on, Beni?” Lidea angled emself closer to the fire and peeked over the edge of the stone ring at it. A log had fallen sideways, making it flicker, but it was still in good shape.
“Just…” Beni rolled her head back and closed her eyes, calculating the algebra of her words. “My first job with Thresh, before we were together, was a place like this. He found something…dangerous…And Sallah and I helped him hide it. And that stuck us together. But he does the same thing at a smaller scale over and over and over, I keep helping him out, and that just gets me stucker and stucker. Luckily, I love him, so I don’t mind. But he’s a death spiral. The gravity at the bottom of a funnel pulling everything toward him.”
Beni took a deep breath and resorted her thoughts.
“This is your time to get out before he drags you down into it, too. You should take it.”
Thresh had clearly been up for hours already when they all stirred the next morning. He was muttering to himself over a quick hand-drawn map, the ground-penetrating radar set off to the side.
“I marked out the shape of the cave with flags above ground,” Thresh said as Sunny moved up to look at the map. “But we can also use magic pulses for communication.”
“So you’ve got it all figured out, then?” Beni said dryly.
“I don’t want to fight with you right now, kurah.” The Karket term of endearment had the sludge of low-level malice behind it. Thresh folded the map neatly and set it aside. He checked his watch. “I’m going down in twenty minutes. Whoever is with me, is with me.” Then he stalked into the supply tent.
Rappelling down into the cavity was too easy. Too comfortable. The drop wasn’t very far, and Thresh found every foothold, calling them out as they came down after him.
“A day’s rations he came down here once already,” Lidea whispered to Sunny as they landed at the bottom softly.
“Yeah, I got that impression as well,” he replied.
Thresh was already several yards ahead of them, moving into a narrower area of the cave. Beni kept her eyes on him, body ready to dark after him, but stayed back to wait for Sunny and Lidea. Above them, some graduate students and Sallah used guide wires to lower a couple more crates of equipment.
“Don’t let him get himself killed,” Sallah, said. “He’s an asshole, but he’s my best friend.”
Lidea gave a mock salute. Sallah was going to keep monitoring the activity of the plants topside. Their roots ran deep, some of them skimming along the rock ceiling above them. The dendric tendrils shuddered, reacting to the minor changes in carbon dioxide their breath introduced to the cavern. Sunny loaded up a few more of the supplies onto his belt: another flashlight, a gas detector, a pack of flares. Then he signaled he’d take the lead, moving farther into the cave.
Sunny had taken Lidea on some light spelunking only once, and ey hadn’t found the adventure to eir taste. Sunny, however, was in his element, running his fingers along the walls, prodding out streams of magic to find interesting mineral deposits beyond the first layer of rock.
There was a density change, maybe a couple of into the rock. There were unexpected basalt deposits all over the explored parts of the planet, remnants of an ancient ocean that came with even more mysteries and unusual fractions in the fossil record. He leaned on the wall, sinking himself into and through the stone.
“There’s another void,” he whispered. Lidea leaned down next to him to talk in a softer voice.
“A cavern? Like this one?”
“Smaller,” Sunny hummed at the wall, thinking, trying to peer into the abyss beyond as though his magic gave him special sight. “Probably nothing. A normal sort of gap.”
“Don’t tell Thresh, I think,” Lidea said.
“Yeah.” He dropped his hands down. “We should keep going.”
As they moved deeper, they flashed their lights around the inside walls of the cave. Most of it looked to be of natural formation, but there were areas where it had been carved away in sharp angles. Thresh stopped occasionally, pulling out his instant film camera to document something that only he was noticing. When Lidea flashed eir light on the things he stopped at, ey almost thought ey could see what he was seeing. When ey examined a wall that he took a picture of, ey could maybe make out the shape of a permanent soot stain on the wall and ceiling. Maybe remnants of rock spearheads.
“But why would anyone camp out down here to begin with?” Lidea said to emself. “Unless it wasn’t a cave at the time. Is that possible, Sunny?”
“Hm?” He was crouched low, tracing his fingers along cracks in the wall. Something wasn’t right. He pushed a thread of magic into the cracked spaces. “This rock isn’t from here,” he realized aloud.
“Spontaneous inter-world transference?” Lidea offered. It was one way the earliest populations accidentally colonized new worlds.
“Yeah. A whole chunk of rock. Just picked it up and-” Sunny made a lifting and dropping motion with his hands.
“And people came with it, maybe,” Lidea mused.
“Maybe…” Sunny kept poking into the rock. Certain magic densities over time affected the development of certain mineral crystal structures. Someone with the right experience and knowledge could pinpoint where a random rock was from down to continental regions. Sunny was one of the best at what did, and he couldn’t geographically place the bulk of this transported rock. He could read some patterns of increasing instability, though, so they needed to work faster than they had estimated.
“Thresh-” Sunny began, but the trenglate had found something and was chirping loudly about it.
“What did you find?” Lidea asked.
“Lights! Lights. Give me all your lights. Here.” He had his notebook out and pointed along the bottom of the wall.
In a relatively smoother part of the wall, a mysterious someone had manually chiseled out a set of line drawings, tapped in with a chalky red earth paint to create greater relief against the tan wall. On the left was a bipedal figure, boxy torso and head with arms and legs made of single lines. Deeper gouges formed large points of connection where the lines met at the “joints” of the figure. To the right, another figure, but this one upside down. Below, a third figure of a pentagon with line-legs coming off the points of the central shape. Above them all, an upside-down cross. There were other boxy shapes and polygons around them, light catching new figures as they shifted the lamps around. A large scene of people and creatures positioned around a central point emerged as they stood back from the wall.
“Star map,” said Beni immediately, while Thresh was still hemming and hawing.
“I…that feels like an odd choice,” Thresh said. “Star map to what?”
“Where they’re from,” Sunny added. Thresh started taking photos, tucking them into his folio as they spat out of the camera.
“Elaborate,” he said.
Beni huffed.
“Well, before the Fracian symbol system, if you got spontaneously transported, you’d want to come up with something to describe where you’re from. Stars don’t move. Seems like a simple solution.”
“Or they just missed home,” Lidea intoned. Lidea found eir hands twitching as ey imagined carving into stone. In theory ey knew the Fracian code, but ey suspected it would all spill out of eir head if ey ever found emself actually exploring an unstable gate or getting lifted to a new world.
“There’s no literature for that,” Thresh objected. “No precedent.” Beni gestured to the wall in irritation.
“There’s your fucking precedent, babe.”
“You can’t immediately draw conclusions!” Thresh’s growly voice echoed loudly in the cavern’s culvert as he turned on Beni. “You have to take data and compare it to older findings.” He turned helplessly back to the wall. “I don’t recognize these patterns.”
“Like he’s got every constellation memorized,” Lidea murmured.
“Well, do any of you recognize them?” Thresh snapped.
But they didn’t. Lidea couldn’t say ey knew every single constellation map of every culture, but even trying to rearrange these dots into other shapes drew up nothing. Not that ey necessarily knew stars and their shapes. Ey didn’t really need them for navigation outside the one that pointed north. These could be pictorials from the southern hemisphere of Correlan, and they’d be as unfamiliar to em as any other planet.
Sunny only tried for a moment before realizing he was more inclined to look down than up while traveling. The rock was still bothering him, too, a distraction that drew his attention away from the mystery at the back of the cave.
“Thresh,” he said. “I recommend taking your pictures and your notes, then us getting out of here.” Thresh made a noncommittal noise and started clicking pictures. Beni sauntered toward them to give Thresh room.
“I’m not crazy thinking it looks like a star chart, right?” Beni said.
“No,” Lidea replied. “It’s the first thing I see, too. That one there —“ ey pointed to a particularly large and deep circle with spikes emerging from it— “looks like some kind of directional star. And they kind of look like people around a campfire.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Beni nodded. “He’s just being churlish.” Beni scratched her chin then glanced vaguely around the cavern, flashing her light over the interior. “Something feels…wrong down here. Do you feel it?”
“I don’t know what caverns are supposed to feel like, so I don’t know.” Lidea flashed eir light around as well. The roots above them were still moving in small, deft curls through the rocky soil above them. “Maybe-“
A piece of the ceiling fell, cracking loudly on the floor. A root emerged, reaching down, searching for something.
“Go!” Sunny’s voice echoed around the cavern. “You two. Back out.”
“But-“ Beni tried to object, but Lidea grabbed her around the wrist, yanking her back toward the entrance. That was a tone that Sunny took only under very dire circumstances. The kind that would kill them all if they didn’t listen. Behind em, Sunny half tackled Thresh around the waist and shouldered him toward the entrance as he desperately clicked pictures.
Sallah met them at the opening, hands making grabby motions at them. Lidea swung eir staff around, whipping up a thread of magic. Without asking permission, ey braced it around Beni’s hips, thighs, and waist, then tossed her upward. Beni flailed, but she grabbed the top of the ledge. A few sets of hands came around her shoulders and arms and dragged her topside.
“If you could do that, why did we need gear?” she gasped, lying on her side, draped down into the opening. Lidea was already strapping emself into the harness.
“It takes a lot of me,” Lidea grunted. Ey yanked on the line, and it started wheeling em up as ey scaled the rock wall. Ey was a mediocre climber, at best, but a little magic tied up in eir fingers latched into the wall and kept eir stable. Ey too, clamored over the lip of the opening, and rolled onto eir side. The next rumble was half the cavern ceiling hinging down into a tumult of rock and pieces of ancient ruin.
“Shit,” Lidea muttered. “Sunny!” Ey leaned over the edge and called out, loud as a eir voice would take it. “Sunny, you answer me right this fucking second.”
Lidea’s voice carried surprisingly sharp through the rocks, and he leaned against them, thinking. Thresh sprawled on the ground behind him, shell-shocked from the sudden impact. He needed Lidea to stay where ey was. If ey tried to come down here, it would just make things more complicated. He could get out of this, but not if he had to rescue all of them.
“Liddy, can you hear me?” He shouted back in the gap ey left him to respond. The next panicked callout suggested that, no, Lidea couldn’t hear him.
“Easy solution. Easy. I can do this.” He placed his hands on the pile of rocks and tried to think.
“What do we do here?” Thresh said. He had regained himself and was now kneeling next to the rock pile. To his credit, he wasn’t panicking. For all his experience, this was still clearly out of his depth.
“Just have to send a message to Lidea, first.” He reached out through the rock, looking for a mineral lattice current to jump through. It sketched out before him, a sharp path woven through the air in his mind’s eye. Lidea always described it as various colors. For him, it was just…something. A Something in the void of Nothing around it. A Something flashed up as he found where Lidea had set the tip of eir staff to the ground, a pinprick of density.
“This part sucks,” he muttered to himself but pushed through it. He only knew one frequency that would make this work and only had the option of turning it off and on.
Lidea felt the vibration come up the staff and settle around the gemstone inlaid at the top. It rattled in the setting. Ey gasped and kneeled, making sure eir staff stayed connected to the ground.
“What is that?” Beni asked, dropping next to em.
“Sunny sending up a magic pulse. He knows the ambient frequency of my staff. He can make the focus move.”
“That’s wild,” Beni said with an awed coo. “How the hell did you figure that one out?”
“I don’t know,” Lidea said. “Just got bored one day while we were traveling. Happens when you spend a lot of time together, I guess.” Lidea was talking, but ey wasn’t sure what ey was saying. The words were there just to take up part of eir brain so the rest was free to think.
“Sunny, one yes, two no. Can you hear me?” Lidea dropped eir voice down through the rocks.
“Well, I’m not going to pulse if I can’t hear you, Liddy,” Sunny sighed, pulsing through a vibration.
“Are you pulsing the focus on eir staff?” Thresh asked with a hiss of confusion.
“Yeah, and it’s difficult, so let me concentrate.”
“That’s remarkable,” Thresh decided quietly.
“Are you in immediate danger?” Lidea asked. Playing the “yes or no” game was difficult, trying to piece together the right questions in the right order to solve the problem.
No Sunny pulsed back. That was the hidden fortune in all of this. He had done multiple flame tests before coming down here, and there had been no immediate additional indicators of bad air or threat of water-based danger. They were trying to beat the clock on additional cave-ins, though.
“Do you need some time to think?” Lidea said. It was the perfect question. He couldn’t think if he had to keep answering eir questions.
Yes, Sunny replied, then pulled his hands from the collapsed walls.
“You might as well keep taking pictures,” Sunny said to Thresh. Thresh shrugged and started taking some shots of the landslide. Sunny wandered toward the back of the cave again, thinking. His little flicks of magic didn’t find anything, and he stopped a moment to work through his troubleshooting list.
Airflow. Airflow meant a breach to the surface. It might not be useful, but it was data.
“Thresh,” Sunny said, and Thresh snapped around to look at him. “We need an airflow source. Give me an anthropological guess to narrow it down.” Thresh stared at him, beady eyes calculating.
“The campfire,” he said, standing. “They would have needed a ventilation shaft.” He moved to the spot where they had found the carbon staining. He was tall enough that he could run the back of his fingers along the low-slung overhang. “Here. Somewhere through here.”
“Sunny!” Lidea’s voice called down, murmuring out from a divot in the wall.
“Lidea! Can you hear me?” Sunny called up through the divot.
“Yes! Awesome! Fire ventilation tube or whatever.”
“Have I told you I love you yet?” Sunny said.
“Not recently.” Ey paused, sticky on the words. “One problem solved, but what now?”
The plant roots above them were antsy and squirming, a few more clods of dirt flumping to the ground. Whatever it was, it needed to be fast.
“According to the radar data,” said Beni’s voice, “one meter behind you the ground is thin enough to manually dig a hole. We can make a vent and pull you up on a rope.”
Sunny stamped the ground with his heel.
“I can spiral stair us up. Dig from both sides.”
“Okay,” Beni replied. “I can envision that. I think that’ll work.”
“Wait!” Thresh objected. “We can’t disturb the integrity of the site!”
“Well then, fucking die, I guess, kurah,” Beni bit down through the piping. Thresh’s scales lifted in a bristle.
“Sunny can precision cut,” Lidea called down over the rising tension. “If you got back to the collapse, he can drill a bore hole up.”
“Liddy, I,” he leaned closer to the ventilation pipe, “I’m good, but not that good. I can’t maintain the integrity of a borehole that long without fusing along the way.”
“Which takes time we might not have, I know.” Lidea’s sigh traveled through the wall. “But you’ve got me. I can force hold it while you dig.”
Sunny ran through the logistics of it. It might not be the best option but it was certainly an option.
“Meet me over there. I’ll give you a pulse when I’m ready.” Sunny moved away from the wall and toward the collapse.
Boring straight through rock took a tremendous amount of energy, but magic let him convert it quickly. Thresh kneeled next to him, scraping out the crushed rock from the hole as it grew deeper and deeper. The magic pulse came down from the other side, tendrils waiting to hold the rock into place. He broke through to light, arms reaching up through the tunnel as he widened it enough for Thresh’s larger frame. Lidea’s face appeared in the circle of daylight, smudged with dirt and grit.
“Never been so happy to see you in my life, Sunny honey,” ey said. Something cracked above them, loud and deep in the walls and ceiling of the cave.
“Thresh, go.” Sunny yanked him over and pushed him up through the tunnel. He crawled in behind, nudging the back of Thresh’s thighs with his head to go faster. Behind them, the stability of the tunnel started to falter without Sunny actively holding everything together. Beni’s arms came around Thresh’s and pulled him free.
Lidea circled Sunny’s waist, only residual magic keeping the tunnel open as ey pulled him free. The rocks collapsed into the borehole just as Sunny’s legs cleared the entrance. He lay on top of Lidea, panting. Ey kissed him on the forehead. That wasn’t enough, and he shifted to kiss em on the mouth, deep, slow, before pulling away again.
“You can pick the next contract,” he muttered.
#####
Night was coming on, and Sunny didn’t want to move, body curled up in the space of Lidea’s outstretched arm. Eir fingers kept running up and down his side, raising goosebumps on his skin under his clothes. In the palate nearby, Thresh and Beni were similarly entwined. They kept falling into whispered arguments, though, debating with hissing breaths in a language neither of them understood. Whatever they settled between them, it led to an eventual tense silence.
“Yes, I’ll marry you,” Lidea said gently. Sunny tensed with confusion. “I’ve never given you a solid ‘yes.’ In that cave, though, I thought I lost you. And I realized I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t live without you. And if that’s not worthy of marriage, what is?”
He wanted to scream. His heart was excited, overjoyed, and overflowing. But a weight still sat on his brain. He had had a moment down there, digging the tunnel, when all his past sins flashed harsh and high-contrast in front of him. They were bearable, all of them, except for one. The one Lidea didn’t know about. The one ey may stop loving him for, so he needed to know.
“Constabulary’s here.” Sallah was at the tent flap, depleted as the rest of them. They all rolled out of their beds, trudging into the dim evening to meet the constabulary forces.
Sunny froze as he emerged from the tent.
Among the faces of the field officers was Echo, an elven man who also recognized Sunny immediately. He wouldn’t have been smiling in surprise if he had known Sunny had killed his college boyfriend.
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