A few days had passed since my nightmare. Most things were the same as before; we still spent ‘mornings’ in my art room, ‘afternoons’ wandering the caverns, practicing dance, or doing whatever else struck Zander’s fancy, and ‘nights’ resting. We still talked idly about whatever odd topics crossed our minds, though we didn’t directly address our conversation from that night.

But where before Zander had always carefully kept his distance, now he often sat close to me as I worked or meditated at night. Sometimes he would idly stroke my head or hold my hand. In turn, I sometimes found myself leaning against him, taking comfort in the warmth of his body.

I was starting to realize that what I felt for him was something more than the casual friendships I had built with various beings over the years. I didn’t say anything, though. For one thing, I was reluctant to put such amorphous feelings into words. For another, I didn’t want him to feel emotionally trapped, especially if he didn’t feel the same way. Who knew how long we would be stuck in this cavern? Best not to make things awkward.

So yes, things were normal. On this day I was busy putting the final touches on my chalk mural. To be honest, I could have called it complete the day before, but there were a few sections in the shell that I had decided at the last minute looked too empty. That was why I was currently sitting hunched over near the middle of the mural with my head tilted ninety degrees to the side, carefully drawing a tiny picture of a dancing Verdanti man.

“... over the second wave,” Zander was saying behind me. “But then the third one swamped the ship! And Chutzi got knocked right overboard! So obviously I had no choice but to grab the safety ring and jump in there. And stars, Si, you’ve never felt how cold water can truly get until you dunk yourself in the Verdanti sea…”

With two little flicks the chalk figure was complete, even down to the little antenna I’d drawn on top of his head. I sat back up properly and grunted as the world sloshed around in my head for a moment. Then I grumbled again as a sore, aching pain made itself known along the side of my neck, where I’d bent it oddly for too long.

Zander cut off his story and reached out to gently touch my knee. “You okay?”

“Yes,” I replied with a sigh. “Just strained my neck. It’s sore, that’s all.”

He grinned a little. “I was wondering why you didn’t just draw the figure the right way up.”

“That’s not how it wanted to be drawn,” I said with a grumble as I twisted my head back and forth, trying to ease the aching pain.

“Right, gotta remember the figure’s opinion,” Zander replied, overly serious as he looked me right in the eyes. I swatted at him with my free hand. “Still, that’s bad luck. I hope the strain goes away quickly.”

Something - shifted - in my body. I blinked, then experimentally moved my neck from side to side.

The pain had disappeared.

I felt a little shiver run over the place where my carapace connected to my shoulders as I looked at Zander. “It’s gone,” I whispered with wide eyes.

“Oh, already? That’s good -”

“No, Zander, listen,” I said hurriedly. “My neck was hurting, and then - then you said you hoped the strain would go away quickly, and just like that, it was gone.” I leaned forward and grabbed his hand. “I think you did that.”

“What?” He immediately shook his head in denial. “That’s impossible. I’ve tried changing other people hundreds of times before, it never worked then. This is just a coincidence.”

“Try it again,” I said urgently. “But this time, do something that wouldn’t happen otherwise.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll try,” he told me with a little laugh. He shifted position so that he was holding my hand with both of his and looked down at it intently. Then he looked back up and met my eyes.

I felt the change more clearly this time. It wasn’t even a surprise when I looked down at my hand, still held between his palms, and found that it had turned from its usual dark orange to a vibrant green.

“See!” I said, laughing in delight. “That’s amazing!”

Zander didn’t reply. He just stared at my hand, thunderstruck.

“And after you were so hard on yourself for not being able to do as much as the others,” I continued in a gently teasing tone. “I bet it’s just a question of practice. Or maybe you have to spend enough time with the person you’re trying to change? Or -”

“Si,” he interrupted, his voice serious.

“Hmm?”

He looked up at me, and his eyes were huge. “I think I can get us out of here.”

~

We had spent so many days with nothing but time. It felt strange to be in a hurry again. But with the hope of freedom alive once more, neither of us wanted to waste a single second.

Though I still made Zander pause for a moment before we ran out of the art room so I could stand back and take in every detail of my chalk mural. If everything went according to plan, I would never see it again. There was no way I would willingly re-enter this cavern once I got out, not even to come back and record the mural for my collections.

Now the two of us stood before the front wall, breathing hard after our run down the central hallway. Zander reached forward to run a hand over the wall, then nodded.

“You said this material felt organic to you, like carapace,” he told me as he continued staring at the wall. “If an organic material can be this hard, then even harder materials should be possible too, right?”

“I suppose,” I said with a shrug. Then my eyes widened. “And you want to make part of me into that material.”

“Exactly!” he said with a grin. “Your claws should do nicely.”

I tilted my head to the side and gestured towards him. “You have your own carapace, sort of. The nails on your hands. Why not change those?”

He snorted in reply. “These things?” he said, waggling a hand. “Si, my ability relies on really believing that the changes I make are possible. Sure, I can make myself taller, but there are limits; I can’t make myself as tall as a mountain. Same with my nails. Oh, I could make them harder, but as hard as this?” He knocked a fist against the wall. “Nah. That’s way too large a jump. But I look at your claws, and those look plenty hard to me. Maybe they’re close enough already.”

I nodded and offered him my hands. “Shall we try?”

He spent a long time, perhaps ten whole seconds, just staring at my hands. Then he looked back up and met my eyes.

The flash of change rippled through my body again. I lifted a hand to examine my claws more closely. They looked… mostly the same? Perhaps a slightly darker shade of gray than they had been before.

Zander let out a long breath, then gestured to the wall. “Ready to try?”

I nodded and stepped into place. I took a deep breath before lifting my hand and setting my claws against the wall.

Then I pressed in hard and scratched.

A mark was left on the wall.

A mark was left on the wall!

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

I laughed giddily as I scratched at the same location as before. The marks were a little deeper now. It would be slow progress, then, but it would be progress all the same.

Suddenly Zander swept me up in a hug and lifted me off the ground, twirling me around in a circle. “We can do this!” he yelled a little too loudly with a massive grin spread across his face. “We can get out of here!”

I pressed my forehead against his shoulder and sighed in relief. “Yes, we can,” I whispered in reply.

~

It took a long time. Days, perhaps, even after we learned that Zander could use his chisel to break off chunks of carapace once I’d weakened them with my claws.

But finally, after all those hours of hard work, finally we broke through to the other side.

I had expected to be blinded by the sight of sunlight after so long spent in the dark. Instead there was only the soft darkness of night. Still, the faint rush of fresh air streaming through the gash I’d made in the wall was cool and pleasant, and delightfully different from the still air of the caverns.

It took perhaps another hour for us to open up a hole large enough for both of us to pass through. Then we stumbled back out into the world, refilled rucksacks in hand, and stared out at the jungle that surrounded us.

“Stars,” I whispered reverentially as I looked up at the tapestry of lights above me. Oh, how I’d missed the sight of the night sky.

Zander threw his head back and howled at the sky in triumph, which sent some small animal that had been scavenging nearby running off into the forest. Then he took off running for our ships, which still sat in the distance. It looked like some of the undergrowth had grown around the landing legs in the time that we’d been trapped. Just how long had we been stuck in there?

I followed Zander at a light jog and reached the ships shortly after he’d disappeared into his own. A touch of the access panel on my ship opened the outer door, and I sighed in pleasure as a blast of climate-controlled air washed out and rolled over me.

Everything was as I’d left it before, of course. A few pieces I’d collected over the years were placed strategically on the walls, and a light Qoxian melody played over the speakers to set a relaxed ambience. Everything was comfortable, just as I liked it, and I was tempted to stroll through the rooms and rediscover every inch of my home-away-from-home now that I was back again.

Instead I hurried towards the cockpit, dumped my rucksack at the back of the room, and flicked on the switches to access the shipboard computer. I immediately looked for the current interstellar date, preparing myself for the worst.

Then I blinked.

Sixty-eight days?

… only a little over two months had gone by?

It was hard to believe. I had thought that at least four months had passed while we were stuck in those caverns, maybe more. Then again, time passed in strange ways in the dark when there were no machines to keep track of the minutes.

There were dozens of recorded messages on the audio receiver, and hundreds more in my electronic communications box. I scanned them briefly to see what I had missed, but after a few minutes I started feeling restless. We had escaped, yes. But what would come next?

So I left my ship and made my way over to Zander’s. The red speedcraft still looked garish to my eyes, but then again, most bright colors felt startling after the dullness of the carapace caverns. Zander had left the door open, so I hesitantly stepped inside.

His landcraft was smaller than mine, perhaps because he spent so much time out in the field when he was planetside. There was just a storage area packed haphazardly with crates and a tidy bunk, a small cleansing room in the back, and the cockpit towards the front. Zander glanced back from the cockpit when I entered and waved at me, then turned back to whatever he was doing.

I wandered up to join him and peered over his shoulder. He had pulled up articles on the current state of the Verdanti pandemic. I grimaced as I saw the numbers; there were over three thousand dead across the planet already, with many more suffering from the disease. The article said that the virus had recently found a way to cross the ocean, so now it was spreading across two other continents in addition to the one we were currently on.

“Wish we’d figured out how to get out of there sooner,” Zander grunted. “It sounds like these people need all the help they can get.”

“We did what we could,” I said with a sigh. Then I glanced over at the no-contam box he had perched on the seat next to him. It was good that the box automatically put its contents into stasis, because I could not bear the thought of going back into those caverns to collect a fresh sample. “Do you think these vines will do any good?”

“They better.” He leaned back to look at me, then raised an eyebrow. “Head over to the drop-off point together?”

I smiled, silently relieved that we wouldn’t be separated just yet. “That works for me.”

~

The Verdanti authorities were stunned to hear from us. Apparently they had assumed that the disease had affected us after all and we’d died in the caverns. I was a little surprised that they thought a half-Xinian of all people could be taken down by a mere disease, but, well, they were dealing with a lot at the moment; they probably hadn’t thought very deeply about it. The officials hadn’t sent anyone to check on us, since they didn’t want the illness to spread to even more of their citizens, so they hadn’t known about the cave-in.

We set up camp a few miles away from where we left the no-contam box and watched from a distance with my ship’s long-range viewer. A team of scientists arrived, fully decked out in the most advanced protective suits the Verdanti had access to, and started setting up a research station around the box using remote-controlled drones. After a few days the woman who had first given us permission to go on the mission sent us a report where she shared that there was indeed some kind of connection between the vines - or, rather, the tiny purple flowers on the vines - and the Rasping Breath virus. It would still take a while to develop a cure, but their understanding of how the disease functioned had progressed by leaps and bounds now that they had access to the source.

We had agreed to hold a ten-day quarantine after we left the caverns, and we kept to that promise. We both spent much of the time catching up on correspondence. Often I would bring a set of printouts and a notebook over to Zander’s ship, or he would bring a portable computer over to mine, or the two of us would both sit outside between our ships and chat idly as we worked our way through everything we had missed. I had been worried that leaving the caverns would change what we had, but it seemed the same as before. Zander was still easy to be around, and for some reason he still seemed to enjoy my company.

The ten days passed faster than I had expected. A doctor was sent over to our ships in heavy protective gear to test us and, as we’d both expected, neither of us carried the disease. It took another three days of bureaucracy and paperwork after that, but eventually we were cleared to leave the planet.

When the call giving us the official news ended, we both sat in silence for a few moments. I fiddled anxiously with my claws, which Zander had turned back to normal days ago after I’d accidentally sheared through a metal panel on my ship. He scratched the back of his neck.

“So -” I murmured as he said “Well -”; then we both stopped and looked at each other.

“You go first,” I said after a beat had passed.

“Mmm.” He rested his hands down in his lap and looked off to the side, not meeting my eyes. “Well, I was thinking I’d probably head off-planet, like they offered. Learning to dance was fun and all, but I’m ready to try something a little more active.”

I smiled briefly at the mention of dancing, but it was hard to keep the expression on my face. Instead I looked down at my own hands. “Sounds sensible. Where do you plan to go?”

“I’m not sure,” he said after a pause. “There are a few options, but nothing really sticks out.” I glanced over at him and saw that he was watching me; he hurriedly looked away again, and I did the same. “How about you? You got any plans?”

“Not really,” I murmured. “Getting off-planet does sound nice. I haven’t looked at the options yet, though.”

To be fully honest, I hadn’t looked at the options because I was waiting for Zander to say where he wanted to go. If he named a planet I could do some research and find some methodology or artist, something that would provide a suitable excuse for me to head in the same direction.

I hissed softly in frustration at myself, which made Zander look at me in surprise. What was I doing? I didn’t have the excuse of being stuck in the caverns anymore. I couldn’t keep avoiding this conversation forever. It was time to speak my mind clearly. Perhaps that would lead to crushing disappointment, but really, wouldn’t that be better than never knowing, always wondering?

“And, and I was thinking it would be nice if we traveled together,” I said all in a rush as I kept staring at my claws, not daring to look at him. There were words deep in my heart that I knew I wasn’t ready to say, but I had to say something. “I like spending time with you. I like you. And I’m not ready to say goodbye yet, so I thought, what if we didn’t? Say goodbye, I mean. We could find a planet where you could explore and I could do art, and we could still spend time together, and if you ever get bored of me you could leave and it would be absolutely fine, I swear I don’t expect anything, I just -”

Zander’s hand wrapped around my shoulder and he pulled me close against his side. I finally looked up, and my heart felt like it did a flip at the expression on his face.

“I like you too,” he said, and my heart turned over again at the way he said it. “Let’s do it.”

~

Many years have passed since that day, but I still remember it so clearly. The soft look on his face, the warmth of his body next to mine. The giddiness I felt as we started delving into the options, looking for where we wanted to go next. That giddy feeling faded over time, but the warmth never did.

It’s strange, isn’t it? Even after all these years I still sometimes worry that he’ll get bored of me. He’s always looking to experience something new, after all. Shouldn’t he get tired of spending so much time with one person?

Whenever I bring that up, he says I have it backwards. He tells me I’m sure to get sick of his rambling and mad ideas one of these days. I don’t see how I could ever grow weary of him.

We’ve made each other no promises. It’s hard to tell someone you’ll be there forever when the word is literal. And we do spend some time apart, when he goes on a long expedition or I immerse myself in one of my deeper projects. Yet we always return to each other in the end. Day by day, we both choose to stay.

And being there, with him? That’s enough for me.