The job site was a skeleton. Steel bones against a sky the color of dirty dishwater, and Malik Johnson had spent six hours welding a joint that some other man would get paid to inspect. He killed the torch, flipped up his visor, and felt the cold bite at the sweat on his face. Around him, the colony's first permanent structure rose out of the regolith like a fist closing. Humanity's new address. He'd been on the station four months and still couldn't decide if it felt like a beginning or a dead end.

He rode the lift down with two other men who didn't talk, walked the long clean corridor to the decontamination bay, stood under the blow-off jets until the dust quit coming off him. His boots left gray prints on the white tile. Everything on the station was white — white walls, white light, white noise from the vents — like the whole place had been designed by someone who'd never been anywhere.

He was halfway to his bunk when the message hit his wrist unit. A summons. Deck Seven, Medical Annex, room designator he didn't recognize. No sender listed.

Malik stopped in the corridor. Read it again.

"The hell," he said, to nobody.

He'd learned fast that the station ran on a currency of favors and silences. The human workers kept to the lower decks, ate in their own mess, slept in their own bunks. The aliens — the ones with the lavender skin and the blue hair — kept to the upper rings. He'd seen them in the transit tubes, moving in small tight groups, and they'd always looked at him a beat too long before looking away. He'd assumed it was the usual thing. Race. Species. Whatever it was that made people decide you didn't belong before you opened your mouth.

Deck Seven was quieter than the lower decks. Cleaner. The lighting shifted from the harsh white of the work zones to something softer, almost warm. He passed a window that looked out on the planet — a brown and gold curve, the new colony a scatter of lights on its dark side — and then the corridor narrowed and there was a door with a single glyph on it that his wrist unit translated as: Enter.

He entered.

The room was white. Featureless white walls, no art, no window, nothing on the floor but the reflection of the lights. The air smelled like antiseptic and something underneath it, something faintly sweet, like crushed flowers. In the center of the room was a wide medical bed, and hanging from rails on either side of it were padded restraints. Not the soft kind. The kind with buckles.

Malik stood in the doorway and let the door close behind him.

"Okay," he said, slow. "This ain't a medical exam."

Movement in the corner of his eye. He turned.

She was standing against the wall like she'd been there the whole time, waiting for him to notice her. Lavender skin, the color of the sky just before dark. Blue hair that moved even though there was no wind in the room — long, loose, drifting around her shoulders like it had its own current. Violet eyes, wide-set, fixed on him with a focus that made his hands feel too big for his body. She was small. Slender. The woven tunic she wore left her arms bare and her collarbones looked fragile enough to snap between two fingers.

She was young. He couldn't tell how young, but the way she held herself — one hand against the wall, the other curled at her side — said she hadn't been doing this long. Whatever this was.

"You are Malik Johnson," she said. Her voice was soft. Careful with the words, like she'd practiced them. "The construction worker. Human."

"Yeah." He didn't move from the door. "And you are?"

"Lyra Vess." She pushed off the wall and took a step toward him, then stopped, like she'd remembered something. "I am — I am the one who chose you."

"Chose me." He looked past her at the restraints. "For what."

Her throat worked. The blue of her hair shifted, catching light that wasn't there, and for a second he thought he saw it pulse. "For breeding," she said. "For my clan. For our survival."

The word landed in the white room and sat there. Malik didn't laugh. He didn't do anything for a long moment, just stood with his back to the door and looked at her — the small hands, the violet eyes, the way she was standing with her weight on the balls of her feet like she might run or might not.

"You want to run that by me again," he said. "Slower."

She took another step. Closer. He could see the pulse in her throat, quick and light, and the way her lips parted before she spoke, like the words were heavy. "My people are dying," she said. "The war took our males. All of them. We reproduce now through cloning, but the clones weaken with each generation. We need new blood. New — genetic material. A match."

"And I'm a match."

"You are the match." Her voice caught. "The only one we have found. I scanned — Veth scanned you. Your blood, your tissue, your genetic code. It is compatible. More than compatible. It is — " She stopped. Her hand came up and pressed flat against her own sternum, like she was holding something in. "It is what we need."

Malik looked at the bed again. The restraints. The white walls with no door in them but the one behind him. "So you brought me up here to what. Sign a contract?"

"No." Lyra shook her head, and the motion made her hair drift, slow, like something underwater. "The contract is already signed. The clan has paid your employer. You have been released from your work duties for the duration."

"The duration of what."

She met his eyes. There was something in them he hadn't expected — not the cold calculation he'd braced for, not the arrogance of someone used to getting what they wanted. Something smaller. Scared. And under the scared, something else, something that looked almost like hunger, and that was the one that made him take a breath he didn't need.

"Of the breeding," she said. "The clan needs — we need many children. As many as you can give. It will take time."

"How much time."

"As long as it takes." Her voice dropped, and now it was barely above the hum of the vents. "Weeks. Months. Until I am with child. Until my sisters are with child."

Malik's jaw tightened. "Sisters."

"There are five of us," she said. "I am the youngest. I chose you first. But if I fail — if my body does not take — " She stopped. Swallowed. "Then the others will try."

He should have walked out. The door was behind him. Nothing in this room but a girl half his size and a bed with straps on it, and he was a grown man who'd been in worse rooms in worse cities and walked out of every one of them when he wanted to. But he didn't move. He stood there and looked at her and felt something turn over in his chest, slow and heavy, like a stone rolling downhill.

"You're eighteen," he said. Not a question. He could see it now, in the softness of her face, the way her body was still settling into itself.

"Yes."

"And you've done this before."

"No." The word came out fast, almost defensive, and then her shoulders dropped and she looked at the floor. "No. I have not. None of us have. The males were gone before we were born. We know — we have been taught. The mechanics. The purpose. But we have not — " She stopped. Her hands were trembling, he noticed. Just slightly. "I have not been touched."

The white room was very quiet. Malik could hear his own breathing and hers, and underneath both the steady hum of the station's air recyclers, and somewhere far off a sound like metal settling.

"Then why the straps," he said.

Lyra looked up. Her violet eyes went to the restraints, then back to him. "For me," she said. "Veth said — the clan scientist, she said the first time can be difficult. That the body may resist what the mind wants. She said it would be safer if I was held."

"Held."

"Restrained." She said it plainly, like it was nothing, but her voice had gone thin. "So that I do not — so that I cannot stop it. Once it begins."

Malik was across the room before he'd decided to move. He didn't touch her — he stopped a foot away, close enough that he could smell her now, that faint sweet thing from before, crushed flowers and something warmer underneath — but close enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep looking at him.

"Nobody's strapping you down," he said. "Not for me."

Lyra blinked. Her hair drifted, slow, and one strand of it brushed his forearm. It was warm. Warmer than hair should be. "But the protocol — "

"I don't care about your protocol." He kept his voice low. "You want this, you stay loose. You change your mind, you say so, and I stop. That's how it works. That's the only way it works."

She stared at him. Something moved behind her eyes — confusion, maybe, or the collapse of an expectation she'd been carrying for weeks. And then, without warning, she laughed. A small sound, almost a sob, and she pressed her hand to her mouth like she was embarrassed by it.

"The matriarch said you would be difficult," she said. "She said human males are — stubborn. That they want things their way."

"She's not wrong."

"No." Lyra lowered her hand. Her mouth was still curved, just barely. "She is not wrong." She looked at the bed, then back at him. "Then what do we do."

Malik reached out and took her wrist. Not hard. Just enough to turn her hand over, palm up, and look at it — small, lavender, the fingers fine-boned, the skin smoother than anything he'd touched in his life. Her pulse jumped under his thumb. She didn't pull away.

"We start slow," he said. "And you tell me what you want. Not what the clan wants. What you want."

Lyra's breath caught. He watched her throat move, watched her eyes drop to where his hand held hers, and when she spoke her voice had changed — lower, less careful, like something had come loose inside her.

"I want," she said, and stopped. Started again. "I have thought about you. Since the scan. Veth showed me your file and I — " Her fingers curled around his, small and warm. "I have not been able to stop thinking about you. Your hands. The way you look at things. I do not know the words for it. I have no words for it."

"Try."

"I want to feel you." The words came out in a rush. "All of you. I want to know what it is — what the others talk about, the ones who remember, the old women who had males before the war. They say it is like fire. They say it changes you. I want to know if that is true."

Malik let go of her wrist. He stepped back, just enough to give her room, and pulled his work shirt over his head. The air in the room was cool on his skin. He watched her eyes drop to his chest, to the dark hair and the old scars and the muscle he'd built with his hands and not in any gym, and he watched her lips part.

"Fire," he said. "That's one word for it."

Lyra reached for him. Her hand landed flat on his sternum, over his heart, and she held it there like she was checking for something. Her palm was warm. Her hair drifted forward and brushed his bare shoulder, and he felt it on his skin like a second hand.

"Your heart is fast," she said.

"Yours would be too."

She smiled. Small, real, and it changed her whole face. "Mine is," she said. "It has been since you walked in."

He kissed her.

She tasted like the sweet thing he'd smelled, and something sharper underneath, and her mouth was soft and clumsy and she didn't know what to do with her tongue until he showed her. He kept it slow — one hand on the back of her neck, the other flat on the small of her back, holding her steady while he taught her the rhythm. She made a sound against his mouth, small and surprised, and her free hand came up and gripped his shoulder hard enough to leave marks.

When he pulled back, her eyes were wide and her breath was coming fast and the blue of her hair had gone brighter — actually brighter, glowing faintly at the tips, like something inside her had turned up the light.

"Oh," she said. Just that. Just the one syllable, and it carried more than any sentence he'd ever heard.

"Yeah," Malik said. "Oh."

He walked her backward to the bed. Not fast. He gave her every step to stop, and she didn't take any of them. When the backs of her knees hit the edge of the mattress she sat, and then lay back, and her hair spread out around her head on the white sheets like spilled ink. He stood over her and looked — the slender frame, the bare arms, the tunic riding up her thighs — and let himself want it. Let himself feel the heat building low in his gut, the way his cock was already heavy against his leg.

"Show me," she said. Her voice was shaking. "Show me what it is."

Malik knelt on the bed over her and put his hand on her stomach, flat, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing under his palm. "You want me to take this off," he said, tugging at the hem of her tunic.

"Yes."

"Say it."

"Take it off."

He pulled the tunic up over her head. Underneath she was bare — no underthings, just lavender skin and the small tight buds of her nipples and the soft curve of her belly, and lower down a thatch of blue hair that matched the hair on her head. She was small everywhere. Delicate. He ran one hand down her side, slow, and watched her shiver under his calluses.

"You're soft," he said.

"Is that bad."

"No." He lowered his mouth to her collarbone and kissed it, then bit, gently, and she gasped and arched under him. "It's good." He moved down. Kissed the hollow of her throat, the top of her sternum, the swell of one small breast. When his mouth closed over her nipple she made a sound that wasn't a word at all, a high thin cry, and her hands came up and buried themselves in his hair.

"Malik," she said. "Malik — "

"I've got you." He sucked harder, and she bucked against him, and he slid one hand down her stomach, through the soft blue hair, and found her wet. Soaking. Slicker than he'd expected, and hot, and when his fingers slid through her folds she cried out and clamped her thighs around his wrist.

"Easy," he said, against her breast. "Easy. I'm not going anywhere."

"It is — " Her voice broke. "It is too much. It is too — "

"Look at me."

She looked. Violet eyes, blown wide, the blue of her hair glowing brighter now, and he held her gaze while he pushed one finger into her, slow, feeling her stretch around him. She was tight. So tight it made his cock ache just to feel it on his hand. Her hips lifted off the bed and her mouth fell open and no sound came out at all.

"That's it," he said. "Breathe."

She pulled in a breath. Let it out. Her body relaxed around his finger, just a little, and he started to move — slow, in and out, watching her face the whole time. Watching the way her brows drew together and her lips parted and her eyes kept trying to close and then snapping back open like she was afraid to miss anything.

"More," she said. "Please. More."

He gave her a second finger. She took it with a wet sound that made her flush, deeper lavender across her chest and throat, and her hips started to move with him, small circles, learning the rhythm. "That's right," he said. "Take what you need."

"I need — " She gasped as he curled his fingers inside her, found a spot that made her whole body jerk. "I need you. Inside me. Please. I need it now."

"You sure."

"Yes." Her hands fisted in the sheets. "Yes, Malik, please — "

He pulled his fingers out and she whined at the loss, a small animal sound, and he used that same wet hand to open his jeans and free his cock. He was hard enough it hurt. Leaking. He knelt between her legs and looked down at her — spread out on the white bed, lavender and blue and violet, her chest heaving, her thighs already trembling — and gave her one more chance.

"Tell me to stop and I stop," he said.

"Do not stop."

He pushed into her.

The first inch was almost too much. She was tight — tighter than any woman he'd been with, her body gripping him like a fist, and her face contorted and her nails dug into his forearms and she made a sound halfway between a gasp and a sob. He held still. Let her adjust. Sweat was already breaking out on his back.

"Breathe," he said again. "Breathe through it."

She breathed. Her body loosened, incrementally, and he pushed deeper. Another inch. Another. Her cunt was slick and hot and it kept clenching around him in waves, like it was trying to pull him in, and by the time he was fully seated inside her his arms were shaking and his jaw was clenched so hard his teeth ached.

"Fuck," he said. "Lyra."

"Yes." Her voice was thin and wrecked. "Yes. That is — that is what the old women meant. The fire. I feel it. I feel it everywhere."

He started to move. Slow at first — long pulls, almost all the way out, then back in, watching her face for pain. There was none. Just that dazed wonder, that open mouth, that glowing hair spreading across the pillow. Her hips came up to meet him and her legs wrapped around his waist and she pulled him deeper with every stroke.

"Harder," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Harder. Please. I want to feel all of it."

He gave it to her. Drove into her hard enough that the bed frame creaked, and she cried out — not pain, not quite, something bigger — and her nails raked down his back. He fucked her like that, deep and rough, his balls slapping against her ass with every thrust, and she took all of it. Every inch. Every stroke. Her cunt clenching around him, her breath coming in sobs, her voice breaking on his name over and over.

"Malik — Malik — " Her back arched off the bed and her whole body locked up around him, cunt squeezing his cock so hard he saw white, and she came with a sound that filled the whole white room — long, high, shuddering. Her hair flared bright, all of it at once, glowing like something electric, and then went dim again.

He kept going. He was close, and he wanted to finish inside her — that was the point, wasn't it, that was the whole reason he was here — and he drove into her through her aftershocks while she whimpered and clung to him, oversensitive and shaking.

"Inside," she gasped. "Please. Inside me."

"You want it."

"I want it. I want all of it. Give it to me."

He buried himself to the hilt and came. His cock jerked and emptied into her, pulse after pulse, and he felt her cunt flutter around him, milking him, drawing it out. His forehead dropped to her shoulder. His breath was ragged. He could feel her heart hammering under his chest, fast and light, and her hand came up and stroked the back of his neck, slow and clumsy.

For a while neither of them moved.

When he finally pulled out, the wet sound was loud in the quiet room, and a thin trail of cum followed his cock and smeared on her thigh. Lyra made a small sound and pressed her hand to her stomach, low, right over her womb, like she was holding something in.

"Did it work," she whispered. "Do you think it worked."

Malik sat back on his heels and looked at her. Sweat cooling on his skin. His jeans still open. The restraints hanging on the rails, unused, and her hair spread out on the white sheets, dim now, just blue.

"I don't know," he said. "That's not how it works. You don't know for weeks."

"Weeks." She said it like a prison sentence. Her hand stayed pressed to her stomach. "Then we will have to do it again. Many times. Until we are sure."

The door opened.

Malik turned. A Xylari woman stood in the doorway — tall, lean, blue hair cropped short and severe, pale green eyes fixed on him with a calculation that made his skin prickle. Scars crossed her lavender arms, pale and jagged, and she wore leather armor like she'd come straight from a war that had ended years ago. Behind her, half-hidden in the corridor, was another one — younger, blue-haired, green-eyed, staring at Malik with a mixture of disgust and something she was trying hard to hide.

The tall one looked at the bed. At Lyra, naked and flushed and marked. At Malik, still kneeling between her legs with his cock out and his jeans around his thighs. Her expression didn't change.

"You are finished," she said. Not a question.

"For now," Malik said.

"Good." She stepped into the room and let the door close behind her. The younger one stayed in the corridor, arms folded, watching. "I am Zara Vess. Matriarch of this clan. Lyra is my niece." She looked at Lyra, and something softened in her face for half a second before it went hard again. "You did well, child."

Lyra sat up. She didn't reach for her tunic. She sat there naked and let her aunt look at her, and her chin came up. "It did not hurt," she said. "He did not — he was not rough with me. Not unless I asked."

"I told you it would not be like the records." Zara's eyes came back to Malik. "The bed is not necessary. I see that now. But you will not be going back to your bunk."

Malik stood. He pulled his jeans up and fastened them, slow, taking his time, and met her stare. "Where am I going."

"There is a room in the clan quarters. It has been prepared for you." She reached into a pocket and pulled out a small device, a wrist unit like his own but sleeker, and tossed it onto the bed. "Your old unit has been deactivated. This one is keyed to the clan. You eat with us. You sleep with us. You do not leave the upper ring without my permission."

"That's a leash."

"It is a contract." Zara's voice didn't rise. "You have been paid. You will be fed, housed, and used for the purpose you were brought here for. In return you will not speak of this to any human. You will not attempt to contact your former employer. And you will service whichever of my girls requires you, whenever she requires it."

Behind her, in the corridor, the younger one made a sound. Something between a scoff and a laugh.

Malik looked at Lyra. She was watching him with those wide violet eyes, and her hand was still pressed to her stomach, and there was something in her face — hope, or fear, or both — that he couldn't look at for long.

"And if I say no," he said.

"Then you are returned to the lower decks and the contract is void," Zara said. "But you will not be returned whole. You have seen the clan's inner quarter. You know our need. We cannot let you walk away with that knowledge and a loose mouth." She let the silence sit. "You will not say no."

Malik looked at the device on the bed. Sleek, dark, waiting. Then he looked at Lyra's hand on her stomach, and at the restraints still hanging on the rails, unused, and at the matriarch's scarred arms, and he thought about the last four months of his life — the white corridors, the empty bunk, the mess hall where nobody knew his name — and he thought about how nobody had ever needed him for anything but his labor.

He picked up the unit. Strapped it to his wrist. The screen lit up green.

"Which one of your girls is next," he said.

Zara's mouth moved. It was almost a smile. "You will be told," she said. "When the time comes." She turned and walked out. The younger one in the corridor held his gaze a second longer — green eyes, flat and angry — and then she followed, and the door slid shut, and Malik was alone with Lyra in the white room.

She had pulled the tunic back on. She stood by the bed, small and rumpled, her blue hair drifting around her shoulders. The bruises on her collarbone were already starting to show — faint, lavender-dark, the shape of his mouth.

"Korena," she said. "The one in the corridor. That is her name. She does not like humans."

"I noticed."

"She will come around." Lyra stepped closer. She put her hand flat on his chest again, over his heart, and held it there. "You will be good for her. You are good." She looked up at him. "I am glad it was you."

Malik didn't answer. He put his hand over hers, on his chest, and stood there in the white room with the new unit warming on his wrist and the taste of her still in his mouth, and listened to the station hum around them — a sound like the whole world turning over in its sleep.

"Come on," he said finally. "Show me where I'm supposed to sleep."

She led him out. The corridor was empty. The lights were soft. Somewhere above them, through layers of steel and glass, the new colony turned on the dark side of the planet, and the station kept its orbit, and Malik Johnson — construction worker, drifter, no one's anything — walked into the clan's inner ring with a girl's hand in his and a contract on his wrist, and didn't look back.

The corridor curved, and the station's clean white gave way to something older. The walls here were darker — a deep slate gray with veins of faint bioluminescence running through them like the roots of a plant under skin. Malik ran his palm along one as they walked. It was warm. Warmer than the walls on the lower decks. The light overhead shifted from the hard white of the medical annex to something softer, amber-tinted, and the air changed with it — the antiseptic smell thinning out, replaced by that crushed-flower sweetness that came off Lyra's hair.

"This is the clan ring," she said. Her voice had settled since the medical room. Quieter now. Like the corridor itself had taught her to speak softer. "The upper decks were given to us after the war. As a — " she paused, searching for the human word, " — a place to keep us. To keep us separate."

"Separate," Malik said.

"The other species do not trust us. They remember what we did." She didn't look at him when she said it. Her hand stayed in his, small and warm, and her thumb moved against his knuckles in a slow rhythm she probably didn't know she was doing. "The Xylari started the war. We lost. The price was our males. And now we are — " she lifted one shoulder, " — tolerated."

Malik didn't say anything. He'd been tolerated his whole life. He knew the shape of it.

They passed doorways. Some were open, and through them he caught glimpses of rooms that looked lived in — low beds, woven hangings, the same bioluminescent veins pulsing faintly along the walls. In one, an older Xylari woman sat cross-legged on a cushion, working something with her hands, and she looked up as they passed. Her eyes tracked Malik with a flat curiosity, the way you'd watch a dog walk through your kitchen. She didn't speak. Lyra didn't either.

"That's Sera," Lyra said, when they were past. "She lost three brothers in the war. She does not — she has not been kind to the idea of bringing a human into the ring."

"Can't blame her."

Lyra glanced up at him. "You are not angry."

"I've had people look at me worse for less."

She was quiet for a few steps. Then her hand tightened in his. "It will not be like that forever. When there are children — when the clan has young again — they will see. They will understand what you are."

"And what am I."

She didn't answer. They had come to a junction, and she turned left, and the corridor narrowed into something more like a tunnel — the ceiling dipping low enough that Malik had to duck his head. The bioluminescent veins were thicker here. They pulsed in a slow heartbeat rhythm, on and off, on and off, and the light they gave was the color of deep water.

"Where are we going," he said.

"I want to show you something." Her voice had gone careful again. The same carefulness from the medical room, when she'd said I am the one who chose you. "Before you sleep. Before — before the others."

Malik didn't push. He let her lead.

The tunnel opened into a wide room, and he stopped in the doorway.

It was a nursery. Not the kind he'd seen in the colony's human quarters — no bright mobiles, no plastic bins, no cheerful cartoon animals on the walls. This was older. Stranger. The walls curved up into a dome, and the bioluminescence ran in long vertical lines from floor to ceiling, pulsing slow, so the whole room breathed with a soft blue-green light. The floor was covered in something soft, a woven mat that gave under his boots. And along the far wall, in a row, were the cribs.

Twelve of them. Maybe more. Malik counted without meaning to, his eyes moving down the line. They were carved from a pale wood he didn't recognize, each one shaped like a shallow bowl on legs, with a curved rail along the top. Small. Made for something that would fit in two hands. Every one of them was empty.

The cribs were dusted. Not heavily — someone had been in here, kept the room clean — but there was a thin gray film on the rails, and the blankets folded inside each crib had gone soft and faded, their colors leached out by time. The room smelled like the inside of an old trunk. Cedar and dust and something underneath it, something that had once been warm and had gone cold a long time ago.

Malik stood in the doorway. He didn't step in. He didn't say anything.

Lyra let go of his hand and walked into the room alone. Her bare feet made no sound on the woven mat. She moved down the row of cribs slowly, trailing her fingers along each rail as she passed, and the bioluminescent light caught in her hair and made it glow brighter, then dimmer, then brighter again, like something breathing in its sleep.

She stopped at the third crib from the end. Her hand came to rest on the rail, and she stood there, small and still, and didn't look back at him.

"My mother slept here," she said. "When she was small. Before the war. Before the males were gone." Her fingers moved on the rail, slow, tracing something carved into the wood that Malik couldn't see from the doorway. "This was her crib. She showed it to me once, when I was young. She said she remembered being lifted out of it. She said the weight of a hand under her back was the first thing she ever knew."

Malik stayed where he was.

"The clan has not heard a baby cry in a generation," Lyra said. Her voice was steady. Too steady. "Not since the last of the males died. The last child born to us was born from a clone, and the clone was — " she stopped. Started again. "The clone did not live. The matriarchs decided after that. No more clones. No more slow dying. They would find a way, or they would let the clan end."

She turned. Her violet eyes were wet, but she wasn't crying — not quite. Her chin was up. Her hand stayed on the crib rail.

"Veth found you," she said. "Four months ago. She was running compatibility scans on every human on the station. Most of them were — " she made a small dismissive gesture, " — nothing. Noise. And then she ran yours, and the machine — " She stopped. Looked at the cribs. Looked back at him. "The machine sang. That is what Veth said. She said it sang."

Malik's throat was dry. He swallowed, and the sound was loud in the quiet room.

"Why are you showing me this," he said.

"Because you should know what you are." Lyra's hand tightened on the rail. "Not a contract. Not a — a stud, not a — " she fumbled for the human word and didn't find it, " — not a thing the clan paid for. You are the reason this room will not stay empty. You are the reason my mother's crib will be used again. Do you understand what that means?"

He understood. That was the problem. He understood it so clearly it sat in his chest like a swallowed stone.

"I'm a construction worker," he said. "I weld joints. I don't — " he gestured at the room, at the cribs, at her, " — I don't do this. I don't get chosen. I don't get told I'm the reason for anything."

"You are now."

"Yeah." He looked at the row of empty cribs. Twelve of them. Twelve small bowls of faded wood, waiting. "That's what scares me."

Lyra crossed the room. She stopped in front of him, close enough that he could smell the crushed-flower sweetness of her hair, and she put both hands flat on his chest, one over the other, the way she'd done in the medical room. Her palms were warm. Her fingers spread wide, like she was trying to cover as much of him as she could.

"I do not know what I am doing," she said. "I have never done this. I do not know how to make a child, not really — not the way the old women remember. I do not know if my body will take. I do not know if the clan will accept you, or if Korena will ever look at you without hate, or if the others will be kind." She looked up at him. Her eyes were bright and wet and steady. "But I know this room. I have come here since I was small. I used to sit on the floor and imagine the cribs full. I used to imagine the sound of it — the crying, the laughing, the — the noise of children." Her voice cracked, just on the last word, and she pressed her hands harder against his chest. "I have never heard that sound. Not once in my whole life. And now you are here, and it is — it is possible. For the first time. It is possible."

Malik looked down at her hands on his chest. Small lavender fingers, spread wide over his heart, the faint glow of the bioluminescent walls catching in the fine hair on his forearms. He thought about the empty bunk on the lower deck. The mess hall where nobody knew his name. The four months of white corridors and white noise and the feeling — always, under everything — that he was a tool that the station had picked up and would put down when it was done with him.

He was still a tool. He knew that. Zara had made it plain. The contract was a leash and the leash was real.

But Lyra's hands were on his chest, and the cribs were behind her, and somewhere in this ring the matriarch was deciding which of her nieces would come to his bed next, and all of it — every piece of it — was built on the fact that he was the only one who could make this room stop being a museum.

"Twelve," he said.

Lyra blinked. "What?"

"The cribs. I counted twelve." He looked past her at the row. "That's a lot of kids."

"There are more in storage." She said it like it was nothing. "The clan was large, before the war. The ring had four hundred families. The cribs were made for all of them." She paused. "Only twelve are kept out. The matriarchs decided — if we ever filled twelve, we would have hope. If we filled twelve, the clan would survive."

"And you've filled none."

"None." Her hands stayed on his chest. "Not one."

The room was very quiet. The bioluminescence pulsed — on, off, on, off — and the light moved across the empty cribs in a slow wave, catching the dust on the rails, the faded blankets, the small carved shapes in the wood that Malik still couldn't quite make out. The air was warm and still and it smelled like the inside of something that had been waiting a long time.

Malik reached up and closed his hands over Lyra's, on his chest. He didn't move them. He just held them there, the two of them standing in the doorway of the nursery, and he looked at the row of empty cribs and let himself feel the weight of what she'd just told him. Twelve. Hope. A generation of silence, and now — maybe — a sound.

"Okay," he said.

Lyra looked up at him. "Okay?"

"Okay. I'll do it. All of it. Whatever your aunt wants, whatever your sisters need — " he stopped. Swallowed. "I'll do it."

Lyra's face did something complicated. Relief, and fear, and something else — something that looked almost like grief, like she'd been holding a breath for so long she didn't know how to let it out. Her hands turned under his, lacing her fingers through his, and she leaned forward and pressed her forehead against his sternum.

"Thank you," she said. Her voice was muffled against his chest. "Thank you."

Malik put one hand on the back of her head. Her hair was warm and it moved against his palm like it was alive. He held her there for a moment, in the doorway of the nursery, with the empty cribs behind her and the station humming around them and the new unit on his wrist ticking faintly, counting time he'd already spent.

Then he looked past her, at the third crib from the end — the one she'd touched, the one that had been her mother's — and he thought about the weight of a hand under a back. The first thing a person ever knows.

"Show me where I sleep," he said.

Lyra pulled back. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, quick, like she was embarrassed, and she nodded. She didn't let go of his hand. She led him out of the nursery and back into the corridor, and the bioluminescent veins pulsed behind them, and the cribs stayed empty, and the door slid shut on the quiet room like it had been waiting to close for a generation.

The corridor curved and kept curving, and Malik followed Lyra's hand through it. The bioluminescent veins ran overhead in long, slow pulses, and every twenty steps or so a doorway broke the wall — some sealed, some open, some with the faint amber spill of a lamp inside. The air got warmer the deeper they went. Less like a station. More like something with a body of its own.

"So," he said. "Five of you."

"Yes."

"You're the youngest."

"The youngest." Lyra's thumb moved against his knuckles, that same slow rhythm she didn't seem to know she was doing. "Korena is next. She is a year older than me. Then Sefa, then Mira, and then Talla, who is the eldest."

Malik ducked under a low run of pipe — the ceiling dipped here, and the metal was warm against his shoulder when he brushed it. "Korena's the one who looked at me like I was something she stepped in."

"She does not like humans." Lyra said it plainly, no cushion on it. "None of the older generation do. But Korena — " she stopped, hunted for the word, " — she is angry about it. More than the others. She says we should not have to do this. She says the clan should have found another way."

"She's not wrong."

"No." Lyra's voice went small. "She is not wrong. But there is no other way. Veth has looked. She has run the numbers a hundred times. There is no other way."

They passed a doorway that stood open, and Malik caught the room beyond in a glance: a low bed, a woven hanging on the wall, and a girl sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back to them, blue hair tied up off her neck, working at something in her lap he couldn't see. She didn't turn. Lyra slowed, just slightly, and then kept walking, and Malik kept his eyes forward and didn't ask. The moment passed the way a car passes a house with its lights on — you notice, and then the road takes it.

"Sefa's the quiet one," Lyra said, when they were past. "She does not speak much. When she does, it is — " Lyra tipped her head, considering, " — very precise. She is the one who reads. She has read everything the clan kept from before the war. Histories. Medical texts. Poetry. She will probably ask you questions. Many questions. Do not be surprised."

"Questions about what."

"Everything." A small breath of a laugh. "What it is like to be human. What you eat. Whether you dream. Whether your family is large. She will want to know all of it."

Malik grunted. "Ain't much to tell."

Lyra looked up at him. The bioluminescence overhead caught the edge of her face and turned her violet eyes almost silver for a second, and then the light moved on and they were violet again. "You say that like it is true."

"It is true."

"You are the only match on a station of two thousand humans," she said. "That is not nothing."

He didn't have an answer for that, so he let it sit, and they walked.

The corridor opened into a wider passage — a sort of spine, with doors branching off both sides and a low bench against one wall where an old Xylari woman sat mending something with a needle and thread. She looked up as they came through, and her eyes — pale, clouded with age — tracked Malik from boots to jaw and back down. She said nothing. Lyra said nothing. The needle went back to work, and they passed her like water around a stone.

"Mira is the one you should watch for," Lyra said, once the bench was behind them. Her voice had dropped without her seeming to notice. "Not because she is cruel. She is not. She is — " Lyra's hand tightened in his. "She is eager. More than the rest of us. She has been waiting for this since Veth found you. She talks about it. All the time. She asks the matriarch when it will be her turn."

"That a problem?"

"No." Lyra shook her head, slow. "But she is — she has a hunger in her that the rest of us keep quiet. She does not keep it quiet. It makes the others uncomfortable. It makes Korena furious." She glanced up at him, quick. "It might make you uncomfortable."

Malik let that land. He'd known women like that. He'd known men like that, too, and the thing about hunger that doesn't hide is that it either matches yours or it doesn't, and there's no middle ground. "I'll deal with it."

"I know." Lyra said it like a fact, not a comfort. "That is why I chose you. You do not flinch."

They came to a stretch where the walls were different — older, he thought, or at least made to look it. The bioluminescent veins here ran in tight parallel lines, like the grain of wood, and between them the slate had been carved with shallow figures: tall silhouettes with long hair, standing in rows, some holding tools, some holding what looked like weapons, some with smaller figures beside them. Children. Malik slowed to look.

"The clan histories," Lyra said. "Carved before the war. Before the males were taken. The matriarchs keep them so we do not forget what we were."

Malik ran his eyes down the row of figures. They were worn — the carving soft with age, the edges rounded — but he could make out the shape of a family: two tall ones, three small ones between them, a fourth small one held against a chest. He didn't say anything. Lyra didn't either. They walked past the carvings and the corridor narrowed again, and the warmth in the air thickened, and somewhere ahead he heard the low murmur of voices — several of them, women's voices, talking over one another in that clipped Xylari cadence he was starting to recognize.

"That's the common room," Lyra said. "Where we eat. Where we sit. Do not — " she hesitated, " — do not go in tonight. Not yet. Let the matriarch introduce you. If you walk in now, Korena will say something, and it will be bad before it is good."

"Fair enough."

She turned down a side passage, narrower than the rest, and the voices fell behind them. This corridor was quiet. The doors here were all closed — six of them, three to a side, evenly spaced, each with a small glyph carved into the wall beside it. Lyra slowed as they passed the first, then the second, and Malik noticed the way her hand tightened again, the way her shoulders came up a fraction, the way she kept her eyes on the floor ahead of them instead of the doors.

"Those are the sleep rooms," he said.

"Yes."

"Whose?"

She didn't answer right away. They passed the third door, and the fourth, and at the fifth she stopped — not at the door, but in front of it, her body angled so she was between Malik and the carved glyph beside it. Her hand was still in his. Her other hand came up and pressed flat against the wall, palm over the glyph, like she was covering a word he could read.

"This one is Korena's," she said. Her voice had gone very quiet. Barely above the hum of the veins in the wall.

Malik looked at the door. It was the same slate as the others, the same faint glow in the veins, the same carved glyph — but the glyph was different from the ones on the other doors. He couldn't read it. His unit would have translated it, but he didn't lift his wrist. He just looked at the door, and at Lyra's hand flat against the wall over the mark, and waited.

"She has not spoken to me since Veth found you," Lyra said. "Not one word. We grew up together — we shared a room when we were small — and now she walks past me like I am a stranger." She swallowed. "She thinks I betrayed her. She thinks I should have refused. She thinks — " Lyra's voice caught, and she pressed her palm harder against the wall, like she could push the words back into the stone. "She thinks I am a coward. That I chose you because I was afraid to let the clan die, and she would rather have died than — than this."

Malik looked down at the top of her head. Blue hair, drifting, catching the light. Small shoulders. The hand flat on the wall, fingers spread, holding something in or holding something out, he couldn't tell which.

"She say that to you?" he asked.

"No." Lyra's voice was steady and very small. "She would not give me that much. She just — she looks at me. And I know."

The door was closed. Behind it, nothing. No light under the seam, no sound. But Malik could feel it anyway — the way you feel a room you've been told not to enter, the way you feel a person on the other side of a wall who is awake and listening and pretending not to be. He didn't know if Korena was in there. He had no way of knowing. But the corridor was quiet, and the door was closed, and Lyra's hand was covering the glyph, and that was enough.

"She's scared," Malik said.

Lyra looked up at him. "What?"

"Korena." He nodded at the door. "She's not angry because you chose me. She's angry because she's scared and she doesn't get to say it. Anger's easier. I've watched men do it my whole life. You take a man who's terrified and you give him something to hate, and he'll hate it all the way to the grave, because it's better than being the one who's afraid."

Lyra stared at him. Her hand came off the wall, slow, and she looked at the door the way you look at something you've been walking past for years without ever really seeing it.

"She is seventeen," she said. "She has never — she has never been touched either. None of us have. And the matriarch has not told her when it will be her turn. She does not know if it is next week or next month or — " Lyra stopped. "She does not know if you will be kind."

"I'll be kind."

"I know." Lyra's eyes came back to his, and there was something in them — not hope, exactly. Something harder. "But she does not. And I cannot tell her. She will not listen to me."

Malik looked at the closed door one more time. Then he looked at Lyra, and at the corridor ahead of them, and at the carved glyphs on the doors he hadn't reached yet — the rooms of the other sisters, Sefa and Mira and Talla, all of them waiting somewhere in this ring for a turn they hadn't been promised a date for.

"What about the others," he said. "Sefa. Mira. Talla. They scared too?"

Lyra started walking again, and he fell in beside her, and her hand found his without her looking. "Sefa is not scared," she said. "Sefa is — curious. She has been asking Veth for your file since the day the scan came back. She wants to know what makes you different. She thinks there is a reason the machine sang for you and not for the others, and she will not rest until she has found it."

"And Mira?"

"Mira is not scared either." Lyra's voice flattened, just slightly. "Mira is hungry. I told you. She has been hungry her whole life. The war took the males before she was born, but she grew up hearing the old women talk, and she has been — " Lyra searched for the word again, and found it, " — waiting. Her whole life. Waiting for a man to walk into this ring. And now you have, and she has not stopped talking about it."

"Talking about it how."

"About what she will do." Lyra's thumb moved on his knuckles, faster now. "About how she will make you want her more than the rest. About how she will be the one who — " she stopped. Swallowed. "She wants to be first. She is angry that I was first. She has said so, in front of everyone."

Malik didn't say anything. They were coming to the end of the corridor now, where the doors stopped and the passage widened into a small junction with a single lamp burning low in a bracket on the wall. The light was the color of weak tea. Beneath it, the slate floor had been worn smooth by generations of feet.

"And Talla?" he said.

Lyra was quiet for three steps. Four. Then: "Talla is the eldest. She is twenty-four. She was born the year the males died — the last child born before the war ended. The matriarchs raised her together. She is — " Lyra's voice went careful, the way it did when she was about to say something true, " — she is the one who should have been matriarch. But Zara took it instead, after the war, because Talla was too young. And Talla has never — " she stopped. "They do not agree. About many things. About the clan. About the cloning. About you."

"She against it?"

"No." Lyra shook her head. "She is not against it. She is against the way it is being done. She says the clan should have approached the humans openly. Should have asked. Should have offered something in return instead of — " she gestured at the unit on Malik's wrist, " — this. She says the contract is a cage and we are the ones inside it, not you."

Malik looked down at the unit. The green light pulsed, slow, in time with the veins in the wall. He hadn't thought of it that way. He'd thought of it as his leash. Talla, whoever she was, thought it was theirs.

"She sounds like the smart one," he said.

"She is." Lyra stopped walking. They had come to a door at the end of the passage — the last one, set into the wall at the junction where the corridor ended. It was plain, no glyph beside it, just the faint glow of the veins running down either side like a frame. "Talla is the smart one. And she is kind. She will be kind to you. But she will also — " Lyra hesitated, and her hand tightened on his, and she looked up at him with those wide violet eyes, and for a second he saw the eighteen-year-old she was, small and scared and carrying something heavier than she should have to. "She will also ask you questions you do not want to answer. About what you want. About whether you would have chosen this, if you had been asked. And you will have to answer her, because she will know if you lie."

Malik looked at the door. Plain slate. No glyph. The veins framing it pulsed slow and even, on and off, on and off, and somewhere behind it a room waited that he hadn't seen yet.

"That my room?" he said.

Lyra didn't answer right away. She looked at the door, and then at him, and her hand stayed in his, and the lamp above them flickered once and steadied.

"Yes," she said.

She let go of his hand. She stepped to the door and put her palm flat against it, and the slate warmed under her touch — the veins brightening where her skin met the stone — and the door slid open without a sound.

Inside, it was dark. The light from the corridor spilled in across the floor and caught the edge of a low bed, a woven mat, a small table with a single cup on it. Beyond that, nothing he could make out. The room smelled like the corridor — warm slate, crushed flowers, the faint mineral tang of the bioluminescent veins — but older, somehow. Lived in. Like the walls had been holding their breath for a long time and only just let it out.

Lyra stood in the doorway with her hand still on the frame. She didn't step in. She looked back at him over her shoulder, and the light from the corridor caught her face and turned her violet eyes almost silver again, and her blue hair drifted slow around her shoulders like it was deciding something.

"This is your room," she said. "I will leave you now. The matriarch will send for you in the morning."

She waited. Her hand stayed on the frame. The door held itself open, and the dark room breathed its warm air out into the corridor, and Malik stood there in the junction with the lamp above him and the unit on his wrist ticking, and the five closed doors of five sisters behind him in the dark.

Lyra didn't leave.

She stood with her palm flat on the door frame, and the slate warmed under her hand — the veins brightening where her skin touched stone, then dimming, then brightening again, slow, like something breathing. Her hair drifted in the corridor's dead air. Malik watched her decide something. He'd seen that face on men at the site — the ones about to step off a beam they shouldn't be standing on. Not fear. The other thing. The thing that comes right before.

"Something else?" he said.

"Yes." She didn't move her hand. "I — " She stopped. Started again, quieter. "The matriarch did not say I had to leave."

Malik kept his face still. He'd learned a long time ago not to flinch at a door somebody was working up the nerve to open. He leaned one shoulder against the frame opposite her, and the unit on his wrist pulsed green against the dark of the room behind him, and he waited.

"Korena's door is ten steps back," Lyra said. "Sefa's is across from it. Mira's is the far one, past the junction, and Talla's is — " she tipped her head, " — Talla's is the one nearest the common room. She keeps it that way. So she hears everything."

"That a warning?"

"It is a fact." Lyra's thumb moved against the door frame, small and slow, the same rhythm she'd kept on his knuckles the whole walk down. "I am telling you so you are not surprised. In the morning they will all know you came in last night. They will all have decided something about you before you sit down to eat."

"People always do."

"Yes." She looked at him then — really looked, the way she had in the medical room when she'd said the machine sang — and something in her face let go of an argument she'd been having with herself. "I do not want to go back to my room."

The corridor hummed. Somewhere behind the walls a pump turned over, and the bioluminescent veins ran their slow pulse down the slate, and Malik stood in the doorway of a room he'd been given by a woman who owned him and looked at the eighteen-year-old who'd bought him, and he felt the whole ring settle around the four words she'd just said.

"Your room's down there," he said. "With the rest of them."

"Yes."

"And if you stay here."

"Then they will know." Lyra said it without flinching, which surprised him. "Korena will know by morning. She will be angrier. She will say I am — " she hunted the word and found it, " — greedy. That I took more than my turn." She lifted one shoulder. "She will say it either way. She has been saying it since the scan."

Malik pushed off the frame. He stepped back into the room, into the dark, and the light from the corridor fell short of the far wall and left the corners to themselves. The bed was low, the mat under his boots was soft, and the single cup on the small table caught a thin crescent of green from his unit and held it.

"Door's open," he said. "You know how to close it."

Lyra stood in the doorway a moment longer. He could see her outline against the corridor light — small, blue-haired, the woven tunic hanging off one shoulder where it had come loose on the walk. Then she stepped in. She put her palm on the inside of the frame, and the slate warmed under her touch, and the door slid shut without a sound and took the corridor light with it.

The dark was total for three breaths.

Then the veins in the walls came up — not the corridor's slow amber, something softer, a low blue-green that rose out of the slate like heat coming off a road at dusk. It wasn't enough light to see by. It was enough to find the shape of things. The bed. The table. Her, standing three feet from him with her hands at her sides.

"It does that when there are two people in the room," she said. "Veth says the walls sense — " she made a small gesture he couldn't see, " — warmth. Life. They were built to keep a family lit."

"Family."

"Yes." Her voice had gone careful again. The medical-room careful. "That is what these rooms were for. Before the war. A room for a pair and their children. The walls know what they are for."

Malik sat down on the edge of the bed. The frame creaked under him, low and organic, and the mat gave a little under his boots. He didn't reach for her. He put his hands on his knees and let his eyes adjust to the blue-green dark, and he watched her stand there in the middle of the room like she was waiting for a cue she'd never been given.

"You want to tell me what this is," he said. "Or you want to just stand there."

Lyra's breath came out — not a laugh, close. "I do not know what this is." She took one step toward the bed. Stopped. "I have never done this. I told you that. I do not mean the — the breeding. I mean this. Standing in a room with a man. Deciding whether to sit down." She pressed her hands together in front of her, palm to palm, and held them there like she was keeping something from spilling. "The old women talk about it like it is simple. They say the body knows. They say you will feel it and you will not have to decide anything. But I am standing here and I do not feel simple at all."

"That's usually how it goes," Malik said. "The body don't know shit. You decide, or somebody decides for you. That's the whole difference."

Lyra looked at him. In the low light her violet eyes had gone the color of deep water, and the blue of her hair had brightened at the tips again, faint, the way it had in the medical room when he'd kissed her. She crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed, a foot away from him, and the mat dipped under her weight and pulled them a little closer together than either of them had planned.

"I chose you," she said. "Out of two thousand humans. I sat in Veth's lab for six days and looked at files. What they eat. What they do. Where they come from. Most of them were — " she made that small dismissive gesture again, " — noise. And then yours came up, and Veth played the scan, and I — " She stopped. Her hands were still pressed together in her lap, and she looked down at them like they belonged to someone else. "I did not choose you for the clan. That is what I told the matriarch. That is what I will keep telling her. I chose you because I could not stop looking at your file. Because you were the only one who looked back."

Malik turned his head. The file. A scan. Six days of a girl he'd never met staring at his blood work and his work history and whatever else Veth's machine had pulled out of him. It should have made his skin crawl. It did, a little. It also did something else he didn't have a name for, sitting low under his ribs, and he let it sit.

"You know what I do for a living," he said. "You know what I eat. You know my blood type. That ain't looking back. That's a microscope."

"No." Lyra shook her head, and her hair moved with it, slow, drifting against the blue-green light. "The file is numbers. I know the numbers. But the numbers are not you." She turned on the bed to face him, one knee drawn up on the mat, and she reached out and put her hand flat on his chest — over his heart, the same place she'd put it twice already, and he was starting to think it was the only way she knew how to say a thing. "You are the man who told the matriarch no. You are the man who would not let them strap me down. The file does not say that. The file says you weld. The file says you have no family. The file does not say that you are — " she stopped, and her hand pressed harder against his sternum, and her voice dropped into something he had to lean in to hear. " — kind. The file does not say kind."

The room was very quiet. The veins pulsed in the walls, on and off, on and off, and the blue-green light moved across her face in slow waves and turned her lavender skin almost gray, then almost silver, then lavender again.

"I'm not kind," Malik said.

"You are."

"I'm a man who took a contract because he didn't have anywhere else to be." He said it flat, no cushion on it, because it was true and because she needed to hear it before she built anything on top of him that wouldn't hold weight. "I came up here because your aunt put a leash on my wrist and I didn't have the money to say no. That's it. That's the whole man. Don't make it into something it ain't."

Lyra looked at him for a long moment.

Then she did something he didn't expect. She laughed — a real one, small and rough, the first honest sound he'd heard out of her all night — and she let her forehead tip forward until it rested against his shoulder, and her hand stayed flat on his chest, and her whole body shook with the laugh for two seconds and then went still.

"You are doing it now," she said into his shirt.

"Doing what."

"Telling me the truth when a lie would be easier." Her voice was muffled. "The matriarch said human males are stubborn. She did not say they are honest. She did not know that part."

Malik sat there with her forehead on his shoulder and her hand over his heart and the unit on his wrist ticking green in the dark, and he didn't move. The mat under his boots had warmed through. The room smelled like crushed flowers and warm slate and the faint mineral tang of the walls, and somewhere through the layers of steel and glass the station kept its orbit and the colony turned on the dark side of the planet and the five closed doors of five sisters sat in the corridor behind him, each one holding a girl who'd been told she'd have a turn.

He put his hand on the back of her head. Her hair was warm and it moved under his palm, slow, like it was deciding something too.

"You should go back to your room," he said.

"I know."

She didn't move. Her forehead stayed against his shoulder, and her hand slid up from his chest to the collar of his shirt, and her fingers closed in the fabric, small and lavender and not quite trembling, and she held on.

"Lyra."

"I know." Her voice had gone thin. "I know what Korena will say. I know what the matriarch will think. I know I am not supposed to — that I have had my turn, that the others are waiting, that the clan does not belong to me." Her fingers tightened in his shirt, twisting the fabric, and she pressed her forehead harder into his shoulder like she was trying to push through it. "But I have never had anything that was mine. Not one thing. The clan raised me. The clan fed me. The clan will decide when I breed and how many and with how many, and I said yes because there is no other way, and I meant it, and I will do it, and I will not complain." She stopped. Her breath came out hot through the cotton of his shirt. "But tonight is the first night of my life that I have been in a room with someone who was not deciding something about me. And I do not want it to end yet."

Malik's hand stayed on the back of her head. He looked past her, at the wall, at the veins pulsing slow in the slate, and he thought about the empty bunk on the lower deck and the mess hall where nobody knew his name and the four months of white corridors and white noise, and he thought about how long it had been since anyone had wanted to be in a room with him for no reason at all.

"Then don't end it," he said.

Lyra went still.

Then she pulled back — just far enough to look at him — and her violet eyes were wet and steady in the blue-green dark, and her fingers were still knotted in his collar, and she didn't let go. She held his eyes for three long breaths. Then she leaned in and pressed her forehead back against his sternum, lower this time, right over the beat of his heart, and her hands came up and fisted in the front of his shirt, both of them, and she stayed there.

The room held them. The veins pulsed on and off, on and off, blue-green and slow, and the mat was warm under his boots and her hair drifted against his forearms and the unit on his wrist ticked green in the dark, counting time he'd already spent.

She stayed like that a long time — forehead against his chest, hands twisted in his shirt, breath coming slow and even, like she'd found a place to put something down. Malik let her. His hand stayed on the back of her head. The room pulsed around them, blue-green and slow, and the mat was warm and the air was warm and the whole ring had gone quiet the way a house goes quiet after everyone's finally asleep.

Then she moved.

Just her head. She turned it, slow, until her cheek was against his sternum and her ear was over his heart, and she lay there listening to it like a girl listening to a seashell. He felt her hair drift across his forearm, warm and alive, and her fingers loosen in the fabric of his shirt and then tighten again.

"Malik," she said.

"Yeah."

"Your heart." She said it like it was a fact she was still working out. "It has not slowed down."

"Been a long night."

"No." She pushed herself up — one hand on his thigh, one still fisted in his shirt — and looked at him from close range. In the low light her eyes had gone almost black, the violet drowned out, and her lips were still swollen from the medical room. "It is not the night. I know the difference." She sat back on her heels on the bed, facing him, and her tunic rode up her thighs, and she didn't fix it. "I have been with you for two hours. I have watched your heart. In the medical room it was fast and then it was slow and then it was fast. Now it is fast and it has not stopped."

"So?"

"So." She pressed her palm flat against his chest again — over his heart, her spot, the place she kept coming back to — and held it there, and her fingers spread wide, and she looked at him with an expression he couldn't read. "So I want to ask you something. And I do not know how to ask it."

Malik didn't move. He'd learned a long time ago that when a woman says she doesn't know how to ask a thing, the worst move is to help her.

"Ask it anyway," he said.

Lyra's throat worked. Her hand stayed on his chest. The veins in the wall pulsed once, slow, and the light moved across her face and turned her lavender skin the color of old coins.

"In the medical room," she said. "When you — when you finished. Inside me. You were — " she stopped, hunting the word, and found it, " — finished. Your body was finished. I saw it. Your shoulders dropped. Your breath came out of you like something leaving. I thought, that is it. That is what the old women mean. One time, and then he is done." She looked down at her own hand on his chest. "But you are not done. I can feel it. You are sitting here like a man who is still — " she made a small frustrated gesture, " — still standing in the doorway of something."

Malik looked at her. Eighteen years old. Sitting on the edge of a bed in a room her clan built for breeding, asking him a question she'd probably rehearsed on the walk down and still couldn't get clean out of her mouth.

"Say the rest," he said.

"Can you." It came out fast, all at once, like she'd been holding it behind her teeth. "Can you do it again. Tonight. Is that — do human males — " she stopped. Swallowed. Her hand pressed harder against his chest. "I have read the files. Veth gave me everything. There is a section on — on recovery time. It said hours. It said sometimes a day. But that was an average. That was — " her voice dropped, " — that was the file. And you are not the file."

Malik let the quiet sit for a beat. The room held them. Her hair drifted against his forearm, warm, and the unit on his wrist ticked green against the dark, and outside the door the corridor was still and the five closed rooms of five sisters held whatever they held.

"You asking if I can go again," he said.

Lyra's chin came up. "Yes."

"Say it plain."

She blinked. Then her jaw set — the same jaw that had come up in the medical room when she'd told her aunt he did not hurt me — and she said it plain. "Can you give me more. Tonight. Can you put it in me again and give me more."

Malik reached out and took her wrist. Not hard. He turned her hand over, palm up, the way he'd done in the medical room, and looked at it — small lavender fingers, the fine bones, the faint blue glow of the veins in the wall catching at the edge of her thumbnail. Her pulse jumped under his thumb. Same as before. Same as always.

"Human stamina's real," he said. "That file of yours left some things out."

"What did it leave out."

"It left out that when a man's been wanting something for months and finally gets it, he don't tap out after one round." He closed his hand around hers, slow, and pulled her forward on the bed until her knees hit his hips and she had to brace one hand on his shoulder to keep from falling into him. "It left out that I'm not tired. It left out that I've been hard since the nursery."

Lyra's breath caught. Her eyes dropped — down his chest, down his stomach, to where his jeans were still open and his cock was still heavy against his thigh, half-hard and getting harder, and she looked at it the way she'd looked at the cribs. Like something she'd been told about and never seen.

"You are still — " she said.

"Yeah."

"Because of me."

"Because of you." He said it flat. No cushion. "Because you stood in that doorway and asked if you could stay, and because every time you put your hand on my chest I feel it in my dick. That's the whole answer. That's the file your machine didn't write."

Lyra stared at him. Then her face did something complicated — relief, and heat, and something underneath that looked almost like permission she was giving herself — and she leaned in and kissed him. Harder than the medical room. Less clumsy. She'd learned something in the last two hours, and what she'd learned was how to open her mouth and take his lower lip between hers and pull.

Malik let her have it for a second. Then he took the back of her neck — one hand, the same grip he'd used in the white room — and held her where he wanted her, and kissed her back until she made that small sound against his mouth, the one that wasn't a word.

When he broke off, she was breathing hard and her hands had already found the collar of his shirt and were working at it, clumsy, pulling.

"Off," she said.

"Say it right."

"Take it off. Please." She got the last button and yanked the shirt down off his shoulders, and her palms came flat onto his chest, both of them, and slid down over the muscle and the old scars and the dark hair, and she watched her own hands move like they belonged to somebody else. "I want to see all of you. I did not get to see all of you."

"You saw plenty."

"Not all." Her hands reached his belt. Her fingers were shaking — not much, just enough that he felt it against the leather — and she didn't look up at him while she worked the buckle, and her voice came out small and stubborn. "In the medical room you did everything. You were — you were in charge of it. You told me what to do and I did it and it was good, it was so good, but it was your — your — " she found the word, " — your version. I want to do something. I want to be the one who does something."

Malik caught her hands. Both of them. Held them still against his belt.

"Look at me," he said.

She looked. Violet eyes, blown wide, the blue of her hair brightening at the tips again, faint, like a light coming up under water.

"You want to be in charge of something," he said. "That's fine. That's good. But you don't get to be in charge of the whole night. You get one thing. One thing you pick, and you do it, and then I take it back. That's the deal."

Lyra's breath came out slow. She thought about it — he could see her thinking, the way her brows drew together, the way her fingers flexed under his hands — and then her chin came up again, and she said, "The belt."

"What about it."

"I want to take it off. And then I want to — " she stopped. Swallowed. Her eyes dropped to his lap and came back up. "I want to put my mouth on you. The way you put your mouth on me."

The room went still. The veins pulsed once. Malik's cock jerked against his thigh, hard enough that he felt it in his stomach, and he let go of her hands.

"Then do it," he said.

Lyra's hands went back to the belt. She got the buckle this time — a small triumphant sound in her throat when the leather came loose — and she pulled the belt free and dropped it on the mat, and then she hooked her fingers into the waistband of his jeans and worked them down over his hips. He lifted up off the bed to help her, and she got them to his knees and then he kicked them the rest of the way off, and then he was sitting on the edge of the bed in nothing but his skin with his cock standing up off his thigh and a lavender-skinned girl kneeling in front of him on a woven mat, looking at it like it was the first one she'd ever seen.

Which it was.

"It is — " she said, and stopped.

"Bigger than the file said."

"Yes." She said it on a breath. "The file said — the file had diagrams. The diagrams were — " she made a small dismissive gesture, " — clean. This is not clean."

"Nothing real is."

She reached out. One hand, slow, and her fingers closed around the base of him — small hand, warm palm, and the feeling of it made his jaw clench hard enough that his teeth ached. She held him like that for a second, learning the weight of it, the heat, and her thumb moved up the shaft, exploratory, and when it found the slick bead at the tip she stopped and looked up at him.

"What is that," she said.

"That's me wanting you."

"Oh." She looked back down. She rubbed her thumb through it, slow, spreading it, and watched the way his cock twitched in her hand, and something crossed her face — not disgust, not surprise. Fascination. The same look she'd had in front of the cribs. "It is for me."

"All of it."

She bent her head. She didn't know how to do it — he could tell from the first touch, the way she pressed her closed lips to the side of his cock like she was kissing it hello, the way she pulled back to check his face for approval — but she was paying attention, and she was learning fast, and when he put his hand on the back of her head and guided her down, she went. Open mouth. Wet heat. Her tongue came out and dragged up the underside of him, clumsy and slow, and she made a sound against his skin that he felt all the way up his spine.

"That's it," he said. "Take the tip."

She took it. Her lips closed around the head of his cock and her eyes came up to his — checking, always checking — and he held her gaze and nodded, and she pushed down, and half of him went into her mouth and her cheeks hollowed and she pulled back up with a wet sound that was loud in the quiet room.

"Fuck," Malik said.

Lyra pulled off him. Her lips were wet and her hair was drifting and her eyes were bright. "Is that good."

"That's good."

"Say it again."

"It's good." He tightened his hand in her hair, not pushing, just holding. "Now do it slower. And use your tongue on the underside. There's a — " she found it before he finished the sentence, the vein running up the shaft, and she dragged her tongue along it and he stopped talking. "Yeah. That."

She worked him like that for a while — slow, wet, learning, stopping every few strokes to check his face and ask a question with her eyes, and every time he nodded she went back down a little deeper. Her hand stayed at the base of him, small and warm, and her other hand came up and cupped his balls, light, like she was holding something she didn't want to drop, and Malik sat on the edge of the bed with both hands in her hair and let her take her one thing.

She got him most of the way down her throat before she gagged. She pulled off fast, coughing, eyes watering, and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth.

"Sorry," she said. "Sorry — I do not — "

"You're fine." He pulled her up off her knees by the hair — gently, but enough that she felt it — until she was standing between his legs, looking down at him. "You did good. Now I take it back."

Lyra's breath came out shaking. Her hands were already reaching for his belt — his belt, which was on the mat, which she'd already taken off — and then they stopped, and she looked down at him with her mouth open and her hair drifting and her tunic hanging off one shoulder, and she didn't move.

"What now," she said.

Malik stood up. He was taller than her by a foot, and naked, and she had to tip her head back to keep his eyes, and he watched her throat move when she swallowed.

"Now," he said, "I can go all night."

He didn't wait for her to catch up. Malik took her by the hips — both hands, thumbs digging into the soft hollow above the bone — and turned her.

She went with a small startled sound, light in his grip, and her hands came up and caught the wall to keep from stumbling. The slate was warm under her palms. Where her fingers spread, the veins brightened — a slow bloom of blue-green light rising out of the stone and climbing the wall in thin lines, up past her wrists, past her elbows, until the whole stretch of slate in front of her was glowing like something under water.

"Oh," she breathed. "It has never — "

"It knows," Malik said, behind her.

He stepped in close. His chest against her back, his hips against the curve of her ass, and she felt the length of him press into the small of her back, still wet from her mouth, hot, and she made a sound low in her throat and tipped her head forward against the wall.

The tunic was still on her. He got both hands in the hem and pushed it up — up over her hips, up over the small of her back, up until it bunched around her ribs and caught under her arms. She raised them without being asked, and he pulled it off over her head and dropped it on the mat behind them. Bare now. Lavender skin and the long line of her spine and the blue hair falling loose down the middle of her back, drifting, moving slow in the dead air like it was underwater.

He put his hand flat between her shoulder blades. Not pressing. Just there. Feeling the shape of her — the shoulder blades like small wings under his palm, the spine, the breath going in and out of her fast.

"You still want it," he said.

"Yes."

"Say the whole thing."

She turned her head against the wall, cheek to slate, and looked back at him over her shoulder. Her eyes in the blue-green glow were almost black again, and her mouth was open, and the hair had fallen across her face in a long blue strand that she didn't bother to move.

"I want you inside me again," she said. "From behind. Like this. Please."

Malik's hand slid down her spine. Slow. Over the small of her back, over the swell of her ass, and then lower, between her legs from behind — his fingers finding her from underneath, sliding through the wet there, and she gasped and pushed back against his hand and her palms came off the wall an inch before she caught herself and put them back.

"You're soaked," he said.

"Since the nursery."

"Yeah?"

"Since the cribs." Her voice was thin against the wall. "When you said okay. When you said you would do it. I felt it — I felt it happen in my body. Like something opening."

He pushed two fingers into her and she cried out, short and sharp, and the veins under her hands flared brighter. He worked them in and out of her, slow, feeling how wet she was, how tight, and she rocked back onto his hand and her thighs started to shake and her forehead pressed hard against the slate.

"Malik — "

"Not yet."

"Please — "

"Not yet." He pulled his fingers out and she whined at the loss, and he used that same wet hand to take himself in his fist, stroking once, twice, watching the way her hips tilted back toward him like her body had already decided and was waiting for him to catch up. "You want to feel it."

"Yes."

"You want me to put my cock in you and fuck you against this wall."

"Yes."

"Then say it like you mean it."

Lyra turned her head again, cheek to the glowing slate, and her voice came out low and clear and nothing like the careful girl from the medical room. "Put your cock in me," she said. "Fuck me against this wall. Please. I want to feel all of it."

He lined himself up. The head of his cock found her from behind — slick, hot, so wet it slid along her without going in — and he held there a second, teasing, watching the way her whole body went rigid with wanting it.

"Breathe," he said.

She pulled in a breath.

He pushed in.

Not the slow first inch from the medical room. This was one long stroke from behind, deep, all the way to the hilt, and she screamed — not loud, but real, a raw sound that came out of her chest and hit the wall and came back — and her hands scrabbled against the slate and her whole body arched and her cunt clenched around him so hard he had to stop and hold still or he would have finished right there.

"Fuck," he said. Through his teeth.

Lyra was shaking. Her forehead was pressed to the wall and her breath was coming in short hard pulls and her hair had flared bright at the tips, all of it, like something electric running through it.

"It is — " she gasped. "It is different. It is so much — "

"Deeper."

"Yes. Deeper. It is deeper."

He pulled back — slow, almost all the way out, feeling her grip him the whole way like her body didn't want to let him go — and then drove back in. Hard. Her ass slapped against his hips and she cried out and the veins under her hands flared again, brighter this time, and he did it again, and again, and the room filled with the wet sound of him fucking her and the slap of skin and her voice breaking on every stroke.

He got one hand on her hip, fingers digging in, holding her steady. The other hand he put flat on her shoulder blade and pressed — not hard, just enough to pin her to the wall, to keep her from sliding up the slate with every thrust — and she went still under his hand and took it. All of it. Every stroke.

"Harder," she said. "Please. Harder."

"Greedy."

"Yes." She said it without shame. "Yes. I am. Harder."

He gave it to her. Fucked her like that, deep and rough, his hips slamming into her ass, and she braced her hands on the wall and pushed back into every stroke and her hair drifted across her back and the veins in the slate under her palms glowed bright enough to light the whole room — blue-green, pulsing, in time with the rhythm of him inside her.

"You feel that," he said. Low, at her ear. "The wall. It's lighting up for you."

"I know." Her voice was wrecked. "I can see it. It is — it is doing it because of — "

"Because of you."

"Because of us."

He reached around her with the hand that had been on her shoulder blade and found her clit from the front, two fingers, wet with her own slick, and started working it in small circles while he kept fucking her from behind. Lyra's whole body bucked. Her hands came off the wall — both of them, up, clutching at nothing — and he caught her by the back of the neck with his free hand and pressed her face back against the slate and held her there.

"Don't let go of the wall," he said.

"I cannot — "

"You can. Put your hands back."

She put them back. Both palms flat on the glowing slate, fingers spread wide, and the light under them flared so bright it threw their shadows on the far wall — his broad shape behind her, hers small and bent and pinned, the two of them caught in the pulsing blue-green like something out of a story the old women would tell.

He fucked her harder. Fingers on her clit, cock in her cunt, palm on the back of her neck, and she started to come apart under his hands — her breath going high and thin, her thighs shaking, her cunt clenching around him in fast irregular waves.

"I am — " she gasped. "I am going to — "

"Do it."

"Malik — "

"Come on my cock. Right now."

She came with his name in her mouth. Her whole body locked up and her cunt squeezed him so hard he saw white and her hands clawed against the slate and her hair flared bright, bright, brighter — and the veins in the wall flared with her, all of them at once, the whole room going blue-green and then dimming back down to that slow pulse like something had just exhaled.

He didn't stop. He kept fucking her through it, and she sobbed against the wall and pushed back into him anyway, oversensitive and shaking and taking every stroke.

"Again," she said. "I want to — again — "

"You want to come again."

"Yes."

"On my cock."

"Yes. Please. Please, Malik."

He pulled out. Just the tip left inside her, just enough that she felt the loss, and she whimpered and pushed back trying to take him deep again and he held her hip still with one hand and didn't let her.

"Say please again," he said.

"Please."

"Say it like you did the first time."

She turned her head against the wall, cheek to slate, eyes wet and blown and fixed on him over her shoulder, and her voice came out small and raw and honest. "Please put it back in me. Please. I need it. I need you."

He drove back in.

She was still tight around him from the first one. Every stroke dragged through the aftershock and he felt it — the flutter, the clutch, the way her cunt hadn't finished letting go. He bottomed out and held there and she made a sound into the wall, a wet broken thing, and her fingers curled against the slate and the light under them jumped.

"That's twice," he said. Quiet, against the back of her neck. "You feel that? Still squeezing me."

"I cannot — it will not stop — "

"Don't want it to stop."

He pulled back slow, all the way to the head, letting her feel every inch of the withdrawal, and she moaned and her hips chased him and he let her chase. Then he snapped forward and buried it, and the slap of his hips against her ass cracked off the slate and came back off the far wall, and the sound of it was so loud in the little room that he caught himself listening for the door.

Nothing. Just the low hum of the station, the water in the pipe somewhere behind the wall, and her breath.

He set a rhythm. Not the fast one — the other one, the slow deep one, pulling out to the tip and driving home, out to the tip and home, and every time he came back her forehead knocked soft against the slate and her mouth opened and nothing came out of it.

"Count them," he said.

"What?"

"The strokes. Count them out loud."

"One." Her voice was unsteady. "Two. Two — Malik — "

"Keep going."

"Three. Four. I cannot — five — "

"You're at five. Keep going."

"Six. Seven. Oh. Oh, that is — eight — "

He reached around and put his hand flat on her belly, low, fingers spread over the soft place below her navel, and pressed. She stopped counting. Her whole body went stiff and then loose at once, and she turned her face and looked at him over her shoulder with her mouth open and her eyes wet and bright, and she didn't say anything at all for a long moment. Just looked at him. Like she was trying to find something in his face and had found it.

"Malik," she said. Just that.

"Yeah."

"You are — you are not like the stories."

"What stories."

"The ones the old women tell." She had to stop between words to breathe. "About the men. Before. They say the men were — careful. They say the men were gentle. They say it was not like this."

He didn't answer that. He kept fucking her, slow and deep, hand still flat on her belly, and she gave up on the sentence and put her forehead back against the wall and let him have it.

The light in the slate had gone strange. It wasn't pulsing with the rhythm anymore. It was steady now — a low even blue-green, no flicker, holding, like the wall had stopped breathing and was just watching. He noticed it the way you notice a sound that stops. The room felt smaller for it.

"Your wall's gone quiet," he said.

"I know." She sounded almost sorry about it. "It is — it is listening."

"To what."

"To me." Her fingers spread wider on the slate, pressing, and the light didn't move. "It does that. When the — when the body is past the first. It stops answering and it starts — remembering. It keeps what happens. The clan will know."

Malik's rhythm didn't break. But his jaw set.

"Know what, exactly."

"That I came." Her voice was very small. "That I came twice. That I asked for it. That I said your name."

"That a problem."

She was quiet for three strokes. Then: "It is a problem for Korena."

He filed that. Didn't chase it. He'd learned enough about this place in one day to know that the women in it kept their knives where you couldn't see them, and that the youngest one had been standing in the corridor with her arms crossed and her lip curled like she'd already decided something about him before he'd opened his mouth.

"Korena can wait her turn," he said.

Lyra laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of her, and it turned into a moan halfway through because he'd pushed in deep at the same moment. "Her turn," she repeated. "You say it like — like a ration line."

"Isn't it."

"Yes." Sober now. "Yes. It is exactly that. That is what the contract is. That is what I am."

He stopped moving.

Not out — just stopped, buried to the hilt, and she made a sound of protest and tried to rock back and he held her hips still with both hands and wouldn't let her. She turned her head and looked at him, and whatever she saw in his face made her go still too.

"Say that again," he said.

"Say what."

"That you're a ration line."

"I — "

"Because that's not what I asked for when I signed." His voice was low and flat and he was looking at her the whole time, not blinking. "I didn't sign up to fuck a number. I signed up because you stood in that room and told me the truth about what your people are. And then you asked me for something, and I said yes. That's the deal. That's the whole deal. If you want to tell me it's a ration line, then tell me straight and I'll walk out of this room right now and we'll see how the matriarch likes it."

Lyra stared at him. The blue-green light on her cheek was steady and flat and her mouth had gone soft and open and she looked, for a second, like the girl in the medical room again — eighteen, uncertain, standing at the edge of something she'd been told to want and had started to want for reasons nobody had prepared her for.

"Do not walk out," she said.

"Then don't call yourself a ration line."

"It is what the clan — "

"I don't care what the clan calls it. I asked what you call it."

She was quiet. Then she turned her face back to the wall and her hands flattened on the slate and she said, very quietly, into the stone: "It is the first thing I have ever wanted for myself."

He moved again. Slow. One long stroke, and she let out a breath that had been held a long time, and the light under her palms flickered — just once, a small pulse, like the wall had heard her too.

"Say it louder," he said.

"It is the first thing I have ever wanted for myself."

He fucked her. Steady now, no counting, no games — the two of them finally in the same rhythm, her hips meeting his, her back arched, her hair loose and drifting in the blue-green and her breath coming in soft even pulls instead of gasps. The wet sound of it filled the room. The slap of skin. The soft knock of her forehead against the slate on every stroke, light, almost gentle now, like she was leaning into him instead of being pinned to the wall.

His hand had moved up off her belly and found her breast, cupping it, thumb dragging rough across the nipple, and she arched into his palm and made a small high sound and pushed back harder.

"There," she said.

"Where."

"There. Do that again."

He did it again. Thumb, drag, and she whimpered and her cunt clenched around him and he felt it travel all the way up his spine.

"Greedy," he said. But there was no edge in it this time. It came out almost fond.

"You keep saying that."

"Because you keep being it."

"Yes." She turned her cheek to the slate and looked at him over her shoulder and her eyes in the low blue light were the color of the inside of a flame. "Yes. I am. And you like it."

He didn't answer that either. But his hand tightened on her breast and his hips picked up speed and that was answer enough.

He pushed in one more time — deep, all the way, hips flush against her ass — and held. Felt her cunt flutter and grip and hold him in there like her body had made its own decision. Her forehead went flat against the wall. Her breath went out of her in one long unsteady exhale. And then, quiet and cracked and full of something she probably didn't have a word for yet, she said his name again.

"Malik."

Just that. Just his name, said into the wall, like a prayer she'd been told not to make.

He pulled back. Slow. Almost all the way out, until only the head was still inside her — just enough that she felt the loss, just enough that her whole body went tight and her hips chased him and she made a small wounded sound into the slate.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, please — "

He held her there.