He didn't move. Just held her there, cockhead lodged in the wet clench of her entrance, the rest of him a long ache she couldn't reach. His right hand stayed flat on the slate beside her head, fingers spread, the veins standing up in his forearm. His left hand had her hip in a grip that would leave prints.

Lyra's breath came in short pulls through her nose. Her blue hair was stuck to the wall behind her, strands of it fanned out against the glowing slate like something growing there, and the light bled through the strands and turned them purple at the edges. Her thighs shook on either side of his hips. She was up on her toes, calves cramping, trying to drop her weight down onto him, and he wasn't letting her.

"Malik —"

"Say it."

Her violet eyes opened. Wide. Wet at the corners, though nothing had spilled yet. She looked at him the way she'd looked at him on Deck Seven, when she'd stood in front of the matriarch and pointed and said him — like the whole world had narrowed to one shape and that shape was his.

"Please," she said. "Please, Malik. Fuck me. I nee it."

He drove in.

One stroke. All the way. Her cunt took him to the hilt and then squeezed, a long ripple of muscle that started at her entrance and worked its way down his shaft like she was trying to drink him in. Her mouth opened on a sound that never quite became a word. Her nails raked down his shoulders — not scratching, digging, four points of bright pain on each side — and her heels came off the floor.

The wall pulsed.

Once. A slow bloom of light that started behind her shoulder blades and spread across the slate, blue-white, then faded. Then again. Twice. In time with the clench of her around him.

"That's it," he said. Low. Right against her ear. "There it is."

"Don't stop — don't —"

"I'm not stopping."

He pulled back — slow, dragging, letting her feel every inch of the retreat — and then buried himself again. Harder. The slap of his hips against the backs of her thighs cracked through the room. The wall flared. Her head went back against the slate and her hair fanned wider and the light came up through it and made her look like she was burning from the inside.

"Oh — oh, fuck —"

She didn't usually swear. He'd noticed that. She said please and thank you and I don't know what to do with my hands, and now she was saying fuck into the wall with her voice cracking on the vowel, and something in his chest turned over.

He set a rhythm. Long, deep, pulling almost all the way out and then driving back to the root. Every stroke bottomed out against something that made her whole body jolt. Her tits pressed flat against his chest, the woven tunic she still wore bunched up under her arms, and he could feel her nipples hard through the fabric, dragging against him with every thrust.

"Look at me," he said.

She did. Barely. Eyes half-lidded, pupils blown so wide the violet was almost gone. Sweat beaded along her hairline and ran down her temple. Her lips were parted and wet and she kept trying to say his name and losing it halfway.

"You wanted this," he said. "You picked me. You stood in that room and pointed at me in front of your whole clan."

"Yes —"

"You knew what it was gonna be."

"Yes —"

"Say it again."

"I —" Her voice broke. He felt her cunt clamp down around him, a fist closing, and the wall behind her went bright enough that he saw his own shadow thrown across the slate. "I wanted you. I want you. I — Malik —"

She came.

Not the way she had on the bed earlier, quiet and surprised. This one took her whole body. Her back arched off the slate and her heels dug into the small of his back and her cunt gripped him in waves, one after another, so tight he had to brace his hand harder against the wall to keep from being pushed out. Her mouth was open and nothing came out of it. Her eyes were open and nothing was behind them. Her nails were in his shoulders and she was holding on like the room was tilting.

The wall pulsed twice more and then held steady, glowing, a low even light that turned the whole room the color of deep water.

Malik stayed buried to the hilt and let her ride it out. His breath was ragged against her throat. His cock was throbbing inside her, hard as it had ever been, and every ripple of her orgasm dragged along the length of him and made his hips twitch. He wanted to move. He wanted to fuck her through it and past it and keep going until she couldn't remember her own name.

He waited.

"Okay," she whispered. Her voice was wrecked. Her hands slid down off his shoulders and lay flat on his chest. "Okay. Okay."

"You good?"

She laughed. A small, cracked, wet laugh against his collarbone. "I don't know what that word means right now."

"Means you're still standing."

"I'm not standing."

"You're close enough."

He pulled out slow. Her cunt dragged at him the whole way, reluctant, and when the head slipped free she made a sound like something being taken from her. He looked down. His cock was slick from root to tip, shining in the blue light, and her thighs were wet and her entrance was still open, still fluttering, still hungry.

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what."

"Don't put me down."

He didn't. He turned her instead — one hand on her hip, one under her thigh, lifting her off the wall and spinning her in the air while she grabbed at his neck and gasped. Her back hit the slate on the other side of the room and her legs wrapped around his waist on instinct.

"Bed," she said. "Bed, bed —"

"You're gonna have to point."

She laughed again, breathless, and pointed over his shoulder, and he carried her across the room with her legs locked around him and her tits pressed into his chest. The bed was low and wide, a slab of pale stone covered in something soft, and he dropped her onto it and came down on top of her before she could bounce twice.

"Again," she said.

"I'm getting there."

"No, I mean —" She caught his face in both hands. Her palms were hot and damp and she held him still and looked at him straight on, and her eyes were violet again, and something in them was steadier than it had been all night. "Again. Please. I want to feel you do it."

"Feel me do what."

"Come."

He didn't answer. He reached down between them, found her entrance with two fingers first — slick, swollen, hot — and then lined himself up and pushed back in. She took him easier this time, but she still gasped, still arched, still dug her heels into the backs of his thighs.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's — you're so —"

"So what."

"So much." Her hands slid down his chest and gripped his waist. "You're so much."

He moved. Slow this time. Rolling his hips instead of driving, letting her feel the whole length of him drag in and out of her cunt. The stone bed was cool under her back and she was hot everywhere else, and every time he bottomed out she made a small punched sound and her tits shook.

"Faster," she said.

"No."

"Malik —"

"You said you wanted to feel it." He rolled deeper. Slower. "So feel it."

She made a sound that was half frustration and half something else. Her hips tried to speed him up and he pinned them down with both hands, thumbs digging into the crease of her thighs, and held her still while he fucked her at his own pace. Her cunt clenched around him on every stroke, trying to pull him faster, and he ignored it.

"Please —"

"Please what."

"Please go faster. Please. I need —"

"You need what."

"I need you to fuck me hard. I need —" She grabbed his wrists. Her nails were back. "I need to feel you come inside me. Or on me. I don't care. I just — I want to see it. I want to know it happened."

He looked at her. Flushed lavender, blue hair spread across the pale stone, violet eyes wide and fixed on his face, tunic twisted up around her collarbones, tits moving with every breath.

"You want to know it happened," he repeated.

"Yes."

"Then watch."

He pulled out. The drag of her cunt on his cock made him grit his teeth, and the cold air on his wet shaft made him throb, and he crawled up her body and straddled her ribs and took his cock in his hand.

"Turn over," he said.

"What?"

"Turn over. On your stomach."

She did. Slow, shaky, her thighs still trembling. She rolled onto her belly and turned her face to the side and looked up at him over her shoulder, hair spilling across the stone, and her ass was right there, wet between the cheeks from where he'd been inside her.

"Like this?"

"Just like that."

He straddled her thighs and stroked himself over her lower back. Fast. His hand was slick from her and the sound was wet and loud in the quiet room. Her shoulders were bunched up around her ears and she was watching him over her shoulder, breathing hard through her mouth.

"Don't close your eyes," he said.

"I'm not."

"Good."

He came. Hot, thick, striped across the small of her back and the swell of her ass, and he kept stroking through it, one long rope after another, until his hand slowed and his breath came out of him in a long shudder. Some of it hit the stone beside her hip. Most of it stayed on her skin, gleaming in the blue light, sliding slow toward the dip of her spine.

Lyra didn't move. Her cheek was flat against the bed and her eyes were still open and she was watching him over her shoulder with an expression he couldn't read — not satisfied, not finished, something hungrier than that.

"You didn't put it inside," she said.

"You said you didn't care."

"I lied."

He laughed. Short, surprised, out of breath. He climbed off her thighs and sat back on his heels and looked at her — spread across the bed, marked across the back, her cunt still wet and open between her legs, her hair a blue tangle across the stone.

"You're a problem," he said.

"Yes." She turned over. Slow. Her back stuck to the bed where his come had pooled and she peeled free of it with a small wince and then lay on her back looking up at him. "I know."

"You want to tell me what that means?"

She was quiet for a second. The wall light had dimmed back to its resting glow, soft and even, and in it her skin looked less lavender and more grey, and she looked younger than she had all night.

"It means I'm supposed to do this with all of them watching," she said. "It means there's a schedule. It means the matriarch decides who's next and when, and I'm not supposed to want anything about it except that it works."

"And you want something else."

"I want this." She said it plainly. No hesitation. "Just this. Just you. I don't want to share it."

Malik sat there with his hands on his thighs and looked at her. The contract was on his wrist. The empty cribs were somewhere down the ring, twelve of them, waiting. The matriarch had already told him what he was for.

"That's not how this works," he said.

"I know." She reached up and touched his knee. Her fingers were cool. "I know it isn't."

Somewhere out in the ring, a door opened and closed. Footsteps, light and quick, moving past the room and then stopping. Malik's head came up. Lyra's hand tightened on his knee.

The footsteps didn't move on.

Malik's hand was already moving — pushing up off the stone, weight shifting forward onto his knees, the whole of him coiling toward the door. He didn't think about it. His body had decided before his brain caught up, and his brain was still catching up when Lyra's hand came off his knee and flew to his face.

Two of her fingers landed flat across his mouth. Hard enough to press his lip back against his teeth.

He stopped.

She shook her head. Slow. Her eyes were on the door, not on him, and her hand stayed where it was, and she shook her head again, smaller this time, like she was afraid the motion itself would make a sound.

Malik went still under her fingers. He listened.

The footsteps hadn't moved. Whoever it was stood on the other side of that slate, close enough that the light from the corridor had started to bleed under the seam at the bottom of the door — a thin line of paler blue, wavering slightly, the way light wavers when something is standing in front of it and breathing. Then the shadow came. It ate the line from the left, moved across it, stopped.

Lyra's fingers pressed harder against his mouth.

He could feel her pulse in them. Two little taps against his upper lip, quick and shallow, and he could feel the rest of her — the whole length of her body next to his on the stone, close but not touching except at the hand, and she was holding herself away from him like a person holding a match away from a curtain.

He looked down at her. She was still on her back. His seed was drying on her skin and her tunic was twisted up under her arms and her hair was everywhere, and she had one hand clamped over his mouth and her eyes fixed on the door and her ankle hooked around his calf, pulling him back down onto the bed with a pressure so light he almost missed it.

Almost.

He let her pull him down. Slow, so the stone didn't creak, so nothing shifted, so the two of them became just weight on a slab and a hand on a mouth and nothing else in the room worth hearing.

The shadow under the door waited.

Malik counted. He wasn't sure why. Four, five, six. The light coming under the seam flickered once — someone shifting their feet, someone deciding. Then a voice, low, right outside, pitched for the corridor and not for the room:

"She's in there."

Korena.

He knew the voice. He'd heard it in the ring that first day, when she'd stood behind her sisters with her arms crossed and her jaw set and looked at him like he was a stain on the floor. Green eyes. Blue hair cut shorter than Lyra's, hacked off uneven at the jaw like she'd done it herself with a knife and no mirror. She'd said one thing to him the whole time — so it's you — and she'd said it the way you'd say it about weather you couldn't do anything about.

Lyra's hand went rigid on his mouth.

A second voice answered Korena. Farther down the ring. Malik couldn't make out the words, only the shape of them, and Korena answered back, still low, still pitched away from the door:

"No. She's in there. The walls told me."

The walls. Malik's eyes moved off the door and up the slate beside it, where the bioluminescent film was still breathing its slow blue, resting, dim. He hadn't thought about it. He'd watched the wall flare under Lyra's back and he'd thought pretty and he'd thought weird and it hadn't once crossed his mind that the wall was also a witness. That it had been keeping a record. That every pulse of light he'd watched travel up her spine had been going somewhere else too.

Lyra's hand slid down off his mouth and closed around his wrist instead. Her grip was too tight. Her nails were in his skin again, and this time they weren't in passion, they were just holding on.

"She knows," she whispered. Her lips barely moved. "She knows I stayed."

Malik kept his voice at the bottom of his chest. "Stayed how."

"The walls remember." Her eyes were wet at the corners again, but this time it wasn't the good kind. "Every room in the ring remembers. The matriarch reads them. The sisters read them. Korena —" Her breath hitched. "Korena reads them every morning. She always has. She says it's the only way to know what's true in this clan."

"So she saw the light."

"She saw the light."

Under the door, the shadow shifted. Korena's feet, turning — one step away from the door, then stopping, then turning back. Malik watched the seam. He'd been in enough fights to know the difference between someone leaving and someone working up to something, and this was the second one. She was standing out there with her hand probably already on the door, doing the math on whether she wanted to open it.

Lyra pulled at his wrist. Trying to get him to move, maybe, or trying to get him closer — he couldn't tell which, and then he could, because she pulled until his ear was next to her mouth and then she said, barely audible:

"If she opens it, don't say anything. Don't move. Let me —"

"Let you what."

"Let me handle her."

"You're naked on a bed with my come on your back."

She made a sound. Not a laugh — close to one, but it came out wrong, wet and tight, and she pressed her forehead into his shoulder and held it there. He could feel her breathing against his collarbone. Fast. Too fast. He put his hand flat on her back, on the part that was still clean, and left it there.

Outside, Korena said something else. Malik caught one word of it — Lyra — and the way she said it wasn't a question and wasn't a greeting. It was the way you say a name you've been holding in your mouth for a while.

Then a third voice joined them. Closer to the door than Korena's, and older, and tired in a way that made Malik's neck prickle.

"Korena."

The shadow under the door went still.

"You're standing outside your sister's door."

Korena said something. Too low. Malik heard the shape of it and not the words, and then the older voice again, flat:

"I know what the walls said. I read them before you did."

Zara.

Malik's jaw tightened. He knew that voice too — clipped, unhurried, the voice of someone who had never once in her life needed to raise it. He'd heard it on Deck Seven when she'd handed him the wrist unit and told him what he was for. He'd heard it when she'd said you'll be told when the time comes, and he'd heard the thing underneath it that she hadn't said, which was that he was not going to be asked again.

Lyra's hand tightened on his wrist hard enough to hurt.

"She's out there," she breathed. "She's out there with Korena. They're both —"

"I heard."

"Malik, if she —"

"I heard, Lyra."

He kept his voice flat and low and it came out steadier than he felt. His hand stayed on her back. Under the door, the shadow had split into two — one still and one shifting, and the shifting one was Korena's, he could tell by the way it kept trying to move and kept getting pulled back.

Zara spoke again. Still pitched for the corridor. Still not for the room.

"Go to your bed."

"I want to know —"

"You want to know what the walls said. I've told you what the walls said." A pause. "You want to know what it means. That's a different question, and it isn't yours to ask in a corridor."

"She's my sister."

"She's my niece." The words came out of Zara like a door closing. "And she's in there with the only genetic match this clan has seen in nineteen years. Do you understand what you're standing outside of, Korena? Do you understand what happens if that door opens and that man decides he's done?"

Silence.

Malik watched the seam. The shadow under it held still. He could hear Korena breathing — actually hear it, thin and quick through the slate — and then he heard her shift her weight and take a step back.

"He wouldn't," she said. Quiet. Almost sullen.

"You don't know that. You don't know anything about him." Zara's voice moved closer to the door. "You know what the walls told you. You don't know what he is. Neither do I. That's why I'm standing here and you're not."

Another silence. Longer.

Then Korena's footsteps — quick, hard, the sound of someone walking away angry and making sure you knew it — moved down the corridor and faded. The shadow under the door thinned to one.

Zara didn't move.

Malik lay on the stone with Lyra's forehead against his shoulder and his hand on her clean back and listened to the matriarch breathe on the other side of the door. He could picture her out there. Tall, lean, leather armor creaking at the shoulder, short blue hair and pale green eyes and a face that had been carved by a war he'd only read about in the contract briefing. She'd stood in front of him that first day and looked at him the way a farmer looks at rain.

She was looking at the door now. He could feel it through the slate.

Lyra lifted her head off his shoulder. Her face was close to his, close enough that her breath moved the hair at his temple, and she looked at him with her violet eyes wide and her mouth set and her chin up, and she put one finger to her own lips this time. Not his. Hers. And she shook her head, just once, and mouthed a word he didn't need to hear to understand:

Wait.

So he waited.

Zara stood outside for a long time. Long enough that Malik's arm started to ache from holding still, long enough that his own come dried on Lyra's back to a stiff pale film, long enough that the wall light dimmed further and the room went from deep water to near-dark. He counted his own heartbeats for a while and then stopped counting.

Then Zara spoke. Not to Korena. Not to anyone he could see. Just loud enough to carry through the slate, like a woman talking to a door on purpose:

"You have until the first bell. Then I send Sefa in with water and a clean tunic, and Lyra comes out, and we talk about what happens next."

A pause.

"You're doing well, human. Don't make me regret saying that."

Her footsteps moved away. Slow. Unhurried. Not the sound of someone leaving angry — the sound of someone leaving a room exactly the way they'd planned to.

Malik didn't move until the sound was gone. Then he let his head fall back against the stone and breathed out through his nose, long, and Lyra let go of his wrist and put both her hands flat on his chest and pressed her forehead into his sternum.

"First bell," she said. Her voice was muffled against his skin. "That's — I don't know how long. I don't know what time it is. I don't know anything right now."

"She knew you were in here the whole time."

"Yes."

"She knew before she walked up."

"Yes." Lyra lifted her head. Her face was blotchy and her eyes were red at the rims and she looked at him like she was waiting for something. "She reads the walls too. She reads them every night. She knew the second I came in here."

"And she let it happen."

"She let it happen." Lyra swallowed. "She wanted it to happen. That's — Malik, that's what she does. She doesn't stop things. She lets them happen and then she decides what they mean."

Malik lay there and looked up at the ceiling slate. It was dark now, almost black, with only a faint blue pulse moving through it like something breathing slow in its sleep. Somewhere down the ring there were twelve empty cribs and a woman in leather armor who'd just told him he was doing well.

"She said Sefa's coming in with water and a clean tunic."

"Yes."

"So I need to be somewhere else when that happens."

Lyra was quiet. He felt her hands move on his chest, one of them up to his jaw, thumb finding the little scar there by feel in the dark. She traced it once. Twice.

"You don't have to be somewhere else," she said. "There's a washroom behind the far wall. You can — you can go in there. She'll knock. She'll leave the water. She's not going to look at you."

"She's going to look at you."

"Yes." Lyra's thumb stopped on the scar. "She's going to look at me and she's going to know, and she's going to leave, and then we're going to have to figure out what the matriarch decided while she was standing outside the door."

Malik sat up. The stone was cold under his back and colder under his ass and his legs were stiff from lying still so long. He swung his feet off the edge of the bed and put his elbows on his knees and looked at the room — the low slab, the dark walls, the seam of light under the door, and Lyra behind him, still on her back, still marked, still watching him.

"Get up," he said. "You're gonna want to wash that off before your sister sees it."

She didn't move.

"Lyra."

"I know." She sat up slow, wincing, one hand braced on the stone behind her. Her hair fell forward over her shoulder and caught the last of the wall light and went from blue to purple to blue again. "I know. I just —" She looked at the door. Then at him. "I just wanted one more second."

"You've got about forty."

"That's not a second."

"It's what you've got."

She stood. Her legs were unsteady and she caught herself on the edge of the slab and stood there for a moment with her tunic hanging off one shoulder, looking down at him, and Malik looked back up at her from the bed with his hands on his knees and his jaw set and his chest doing something he didn't have a name for.

"Go," he said.

She went.

The far wall opened when she pressed it — a seam he hadn't seen, splitting the slate in a line of pale light — and she stepped through and the wall closed behind her and the room went dark again.

Malik sat alone on the edge of the bed. He looked at the door. The seam of light under it was steady and pale and he knew, the way you know things you can't prove, that on the other side of it a woman with scars and cropped hair was already walking back down the ring, deciding what he was going to mean.

He wiped his palm on his thigh. It came away tacky. He looked at it for a second, then stood up, and went to find his jeans.