He was injured from that jolt he’d gotten in the pod. That was clear. Pain didn’t linger otherwise.
Yet, apathy could be his alter ego because he couldn’t find the effort to care.
He could forget about the pain.
Pain was negligible. It was inconsequential to him at the moment.
He’d experienced worse.
His only thought was her.
The human.
The human with the dark hair and the dark eyes. The one who called herself Song.
When no sign of her pod turned up in the sky above, Kyris turned his gaze once more to his surroundings. Visibility on the ground was improving as the sand settled, allowing him to see further, and his eyes caught something in the distance.
A little way off behind some dunes, a thin plume of smoke was making its way toward the sky.
His twin hearts gave anxious thumps at the sight.
The plume of smoke in the distance only meant one thing. It had to be coming from her pod. The vessel must have been damaged when it landed.
Muk was notorious for its thin atmosphere and chaotic weather. There was hardly any atmospheric resistance to slow the pods but that had been expected. He’d experienced falling through the planet’s atmosphere too many times to count. At least they hadn’t landed in a sandstorm or a sand twist. Now that would have been undesirable.
Despite the bad landing, even if her pod was damaged, he knew it was sturdy. She would be safe. After all, it had belonged to the Elysium and the Elysium was one strong aircraft. Yce had made sure of that.
At the thought of his brother, his eyes moved to the sky again.
Yce loved the Elysium. It was his ship, after all. Kyris only hoped his brother had decided to abandon vessel at the last moment. The last time he had seen him, just before he’d rushed to the escape pods, Yce had been heading to the Elysium’s bridge.
He trusted his brothers to survive, all four of them, but it would be days to confirm their status so he would just have to wait till he saw them again.
Turning back to his escape pod, Kyris reached in and grabbed the escape pack from underneath the seat, briefly taking note that his pod had landed mostly in one piece. That was a good sign. Despite the plume of smoke, hers should have too.
Searching the escape pack to ensure it was fully stocked, he turned toward the plume of smoke, his steps sure.
With each step, his boots sunk a few centimeters in the loose sand. The sand seemed looser than he remembered and the only time he’d noted the looseness of the sand was when he and his brothers had been training on the eastern side of Muk.
Such loose sand usually meant nesters lived in the area and he’d rather not encounter any of those. Their poison was highly toxic.
As a soft wind floated around him and played underneath his wings, Kyris walked forward.
She was just over there, probably waiting outside her pod for him to show up, and his hearts beat with anticipation as he grew close, a certain obsession slowly filling him, slowly overriding his consciousness.
He didn’t have much experience with humans. Heck, he didn’t have any experience with them. She was the first human he’d been in such close contact with—the very first human he’d seen—and the similarities between her and the women from his world were uncanny.
The physiology was the same except for two things.
The human, Song, had impossibly dark hair. And she was wingless.
Everything about her, from her straight dark hair, her dark eyes, and her rosy lips, to her pale skin—it was all burned in his memory.
Taking a deep breath, he tried to put her image behind him as he rolled his shoulders, ignoring the ache that was there.
This…this fascination with her…
He had a lot to think about, but not now.
Now, the goal was to get to the outpost and send a message to the Restitution for pickup.
He was almost on top of the dune now and he knew that over the ridge, he would see her pod nestled somewhere in the sand. He’d retrieve her, find somewhere to spend the rest of the day, and then they could travel when it was nighttime.
But as he planned their next steps, somewhere ahead of him, a single screech pierced the air.
Kyris froze.
He knew that sound.
He’d heard it before on many occasions when he and his brothers had visited the planet.
The screech only meant one thing.
Nesters.
Taking off at a run, he was on top of the dune in a few seconds.
Down below, the scene that greeted him made a shiver run over his shoulders and through the blades of his wings, causing his edge feathers to stand on end.
Sand nesters.
Many of them, their scaly curved tails pointed upward, ready to strike at any moment as they screeched and hissed.
They were swarming over something, their large bodies covering the surface so much he almost couldn’t see what it was.
The escape pod.
Her escape pod.
He could hear their bug-like legs hitting the pod’s outer surface as they crawled all over it, trying to find a way in.
The human.
One bite from one of the creatures was enough to put a male his size out of commission for days.
A bite on a person of her stature...
It could be fatal.
Qrak.
Hand already reaching for his blade before he even had the conscious thought to do so, Kyris felt his hearts move within him once more.
Anxiety. Stress. Fear. A surging need to protect.
Emotions he wasn’t used to feeling with such frequency. But even as he looked at the swarm of nesters crawling over the pod, he knew.
It wasn’t because of the danger they posed why he was feeling those emotions.
No.
The reason was far more interesting…far more supple…far more alien…far more female…
The reason was her.
3
Rage vibrating through him, fueled by some foreign emotion, Kyris unfurled his wings and launched into the
