“Where are we, anyway?” Naomi grouched.

Mark kept chuckling away, too giddy for a more intelligent reply. He felt like he had just cracked the code, unlocked the secrets of the universe, a man on the precipice of madness!

Naomi had the hots for him. Like… big-time!

Now, if he could just figure out what to do next.

Should he kiss her? Feel her up a little? Was that allowed? He had no idea.

She seemed to like it before, though. The woman was like a wild animal when she got excited, biting and scratching at him like that? He was pretty sure she had even drawn blood!

He… wasn’t actually sure whether he liked that part just yet…

But then he had run his hands down her sides, and she had just… unfurled—like a rose in bloom. And that sound she had made? His heart was still pounding just thinking about it.

Naomi thumped him on his chest. “What are you laughing at? You think this is funny?”

He shook his head helplessly. “No, I—well, yeah… kind of. I guess. With the way the tech around here reacts to us, it’s about the worst place in the world to find out you’ve got a secret crush.”

Naomi stared at him for several excruciating seconds—long enough for him to begin to seriously doubt his own conclusions. But then she clicked her tongue and sighed in apparent disgust of all things. “Yeah, alright. Just keep your hands to yourself. I don’t want to end up down a garbage shoot.”

That was an excellent point. But Mark smiled with renewed confidence, anyway. “I’ll behave if you will.”

“Shut up,” she said, finally cracking a smile of her own.

*

The lone figure burst through the hull, carried along by a flood of water mere moments before some previously dormant, automated process reawakened just long enough to reseal the hole he had made, effectively trapping him inside. A few seconds later, the water drained away as well, and he was left dripping in a wide, tube-like structure.

Seeming disoriented, he took some time to collect himself, then pulled his rebreather away from his mandibles, leaving it dangling about his neck. He then meticulously set to checking his equipment, just to be sure none of it had washed away. All seemed well.

That done, he cast a considering look first one way then the other, paused a moment on finding the camera still impassively monitoring him, before he dismissed it in favor of referencing a dimly illuminated, wrist-mounted screen. It flickered a few times, and he was forced to deliver a sharp smack to its side before it revealed a grid pattern and a pair of blinking white dots.

With a nod, he shouldered his rifle and began crawling along the tube.

*

Still giddy as a lark, Mark sat up to look around—or perve around, as Naomi had termed it. Not that he really needed to sit up to do it, but there was a psychological component involved that was hard to shake.

They appeared to be sitting in the center of a fairly large, circular room with a wide dome extending all the way to where it met the far walls. From there to the floor, he estimated some fifteen to twenty feet, which seemed consistent with what he had seen of the hallways. There was something unusual about the walls’ texture, though—perhaps the long-sought-after control panels or other such points of interest. There were also four pillars set along the cardinal directions, each about thirty paces away from where he was sitting. None of which could be perved with any detail from here. He would have to get closer first.

“Well,” he said finally, “I guess we should check out the pillars first. They might have some of those lightning bulbs in them… if we can figure out how to turn them on without teleporting ourselves out of here again.”

Naomi looked around uncertainly. “Pillars? What pillars? Where?”

“There.” He pointed them out for her, and she followed his finger about, squinting. For some reason. She might as well have been gesturing on the telephone for all the good squinting would do. “They’re kind of blurry from here, but it’s obvious they extend from floor to ceiling. I don’t know what else to call them but pillars.”

“What do you mean, blurry? I can barely see them at all with my heat vision. And they’re outside the range of my—” She stopped to whirl on him with a gasp. “Wait. Is that why you can perve from so far away—you have great range at the cost of clarity?”

He shook his head uncertainly. “What? No.”

With such an all-encompassing sensory ability available to constantly scan his environs, he had honestly forgotten to even check what things might have looked like under thermal vision. But since she mentioned it, he figured it couldn’t hurt to take another quick peek with his secondary lids in place.

Unfortunately, everything seemed to be a fairly uniform temperature—save for a fading glow just beneath their feet. He assumed that had something to do with their recent transit. But there were no other hotspots out there to draw his attention. Naomi was right, though; the pillars were just visible as indistinct bars of blue breaking up the darkness.

He turned back to her. “If anything, it’s more like being nearsighted. Close up is fine, but after about a dozen paces, everything goes indistinct. I’ve been thinking of it as having a secondary range.”

Her mouth dropped open with indignation. “You have a secondary range?!”

“You don’t?”

“No! Everything goes dark for me after that. How is that fair? It’s total bullshit!” she yelled, then began angrily thumping at the light embedded in her wrist. It was blinking a lot faster than usual for whatever reason. “You hear me in there? You forgot something when you installed your garbage software in my head.”

He grimaced with complete sympathy, often having bemoaned that very thing. Though he was not sure if ‘software’ was the right word. More like wetware. “I… don’t think it’s listening. Or cares.”

“This isn’t fair!” she groaned again, heedless.

“I don’t know if you recall, Naomi,” he began, trying to comfort her through simple logic, “but we got this ability by trying to improve our sense of hearing. I was already ahead when it came to that sort of thing.”

He tactfully sidestepped any mention of what they had been doing at the time that might have caused her lapse in memory. Neither of them needed the reminder.

She let her head fall back into a listless slump. “That’s not fair, either. You’re a guy. You’re already bigger and stronger just by default. I’m the one who should be getting extra skills.”

There wasn’t much he could say to that. Never mind the weird avenues the implanted technology had taken them down, Naomi was airing some perfectly legitimate complaints about regular, old human evolution. Men and women were different, and there was absolutely nothing fair about it.

Oh, he could wax eloquent about the difficulties that came with being a man—the loneliness, how expendable society seemed to treat his sex, the trials of finding even a willing partner to say nothing of a good one, amongst others—but comparing the two was a zero-sum game. There could be no winner without trivializing the other’s plight, so it was best to just listen with an open mind and try your best to empathize.

But this was Naomi. She would appreciate absolutely none of that.

“You get boobs,” he said instead. “Those are pretty cool.”

“Dork,” she replied with a snort of laughter. “What? You want a pair of your own? You jealous?”

“Well, you do get to feel them anytime you like,” he returned, playing along. And also hoping she might just offer to let him, then and there. But when she didn’t… and the silence began to stretch a little too long, he coughed gently into his hand. “So, yeah. Totally jealous. And besides, it’s not like you’re weak. You killed a shark with your bare hands!”

She shrugged, unconvinced. “The cliff did most of the work.”

“And you’ve got those wicked-sharp claws,” he persisted.

“Fat lot of good they do me in here.”

“Only so far,” he countered. “We haven’t even explored this room yet. And they’re great for hunting. Come on, Naomi… you have to admit, it’s at least a little useful to have skills that complement each other.”

She just looked at him. “How is it useful to be blind past thirty feet?”

His mouth worked for a second. “Okay, you’ve got me there. But hey… once we figure out how all this ‘garbage software’ in our heads works, maybe we can fill in the gaps.”

She snorted again and spread her fingers, displaying the webbing that had filled certain of her gaps already. “At this point, I’d settle for getting clear of the ocean. I’m tired of having to dodge growing flippers all the time.”

He grunted. “Yeah, well, we’re going to have to deal with that sniper first.”

Of course, that assumed they could even get back out into the hallway, never mind the ocean. There were no doors nearby that he could detect, and even the ones they had found in the previous areas had shut behind them. It was like they were falling ever deeper into some kind of oubliette.

“You think he’s still out there?” Naomi asked, apparently having avoided his worries over their eventual escape. But before he could answer, her stomach gave an ominous rumble. “I wonder what he’d taste like, don’t you? And what kinds of abilities we could get from him? I’d bet an alien would have all kinds of cool mental powers. Like reading minds. That might be neat.” She glanced up at him at that and gently bit her lower lip, as though something interesting had just occurred to her.

“Maybe…” he allowed when she did not explain. “Though you realize you’re talking about eating an intelligent being.”

*

The figure worked his way through the maze of tubes at a brisk pace, checking his wrist screen after every few turns. Whether for something as simple as ventilation or some other mysterious purpose, the tubes had been laid out in a mostly hexagonal, grid-like pattern, so navigating them was of little challenge. Even so, there were several areas that had been unexpectedly blocked off, forcing him to double back and try another route.

Eventually, he came to a section with a decided uphill slope, where he climbed steadily until arriving at its summit. There, he paused.

Once again, he had discovered an intersection. But unlike most he had so far encountered, this one had four directions he could choose from, not just the two.

More importantly, the faint babble of voices was just discernible in the distance.

The figure quickly rechecked his wrist screen, eager now, but this time, it only revealed a garbled mess of static no matter how often he swatted at its side. Frustrated, he switched it off and chose a direction at random.

The camera zoomed after him quickly; even so, it almost missed him tumbling out of control along the slope and disappear down a wide—and apparently deep—hole.

*

“…who was trying to shoot us,” Naomi reminded him. “Any immunity that malaka might have claimed was forfeited the moment he opened fire.”

Mark glanced back at her from the ceiling. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

Mark did not answer immediately. Whatever it was had fallen silent now, and he was not completely certain he had heard anything to begin with.

“Nothing, I guess,” he said after a moment.

Old and abandoned as this place was, it would hardly be surprising for some rodent or other to have found its way into the rafters. Or face-huggers…

Ignoring the shiver that had just rolled its way down his spine, he decided on a hasty return to their earlier topic. “What’s a malaka, anyway? You use that word a lot, but I’ve never heard it anywhere else.”

“Huh? Oh, it’s just something we say in my family,” she explained. “It’s Greek. Means something like ‘jerkoff,’ I think.”

“Oh.” From her features, he had been assuming she had at least some ancestry from one of those middle-eastern countries, and he supposed Greece technically bordered them. It had even been a part of the Ottoman Empire for quite a while. That said: “I thought you were Jewish.”

She looked at him quizzically. “I am Jewish.”

He opened his mouth… then immediately closed it. Now that he had said it out loud, he had no idea why those two things could not go together. Instead, he just went with: “You have a lot going on with your family.”

“I’m an American,” she countered. “What else would you expect?”

“Fair enough.”

He was Irish-Hispanic himself, after all—not that the second half of that combo was at all evident from looking at him. So, he decided against divulging it for now. People tended to get upset when he claimed that part of his heritage, but then, he could not speak a word of Spanish to ‘prove his claim.’ For some reason, people seemed to think that mattered.

He could not speak any Gaelic either, but no one ever gave a rat’s ass about that.

Standing, he said, “Come on. Let’s go check out the place. Maybe they have a fridge or something around here. You talking about eating has got me hungry again, and I could go for a sandwich.”

Made of what, he had no idea. Still, he turned and headed for one of the nearby pillars.

“Moss not cutting it for you?” Naomi called as she scurried after him.

Witnessing her run for the first time in her newly improved form practically blanked his mind—so much so that he almost missed what she had said. It was all he could do to filter out the image of her jiggling through his awareness, like she had been designed from the ground up to be as distracting as possible. The sweep of her hip, the bare cleft between her legs, even the thin fabric just barely holding on for dear life as it struggled to contain the wonders upon her chest, danced through his mind’s eye whether he actively looked on her or not.

With a monumental effort, he summoned up the memory of the bitter moss… and grimaced with distaste at the juxtaposition. “I didn’t eat all that much of it,” he argued finally. “It didn’t trigger any changes, either. Wonder why…”

“I think it was mostly dead,” she informed him. “Your fill-meter barely flickered while you were eating it, you know.”

He looked down at her, surprised. And annoyed. “You can see fill-meters?! Ugh… and you want to talk about stuff being unfair.”

“Well…” she began, only to trail off. In terms of user interfaces, she had clearly gotten the better end of the deal, so there was no arguing the matter. “Okay, fine. I guess I can be satisfied with that.”

He just grunted. They had drawn even with the pillar, so he quickly focused his attention there.

In the dark, the only thing he could tell about it was its texture, and other than it being smooth, straight, and slightly more than his own shoulders in width, he could not detect much of interest. But there were none of those distortions he had come to associate with the light fixtures around here. Not that that necessarily meant anything. He had not been able to detect them in the entry hall, either, so they could have just been well hidden.

Frustrated, he placed his palm against the rubbery substance for a moment.

*

Woozily, the figure stood using the walls of the vertical tube for support, and gave his head a vigorous shake. One of his legs was now snapped at an odd angle, and his left antenna was bent sharply out of alignment. Both would heal, given time and medical attention, but he had neither.

The voices were louder now, seeming just on the other side of the curved walls. However, when he looked around, he discovered no other paths he might take to reach them. He was trapped by a uniform blue on all sides and a flat, unbroken surface at his feet. There were no obvious panels or doors through which he might escape. The only way out was apparently back up the hole he had fallen down.

Visibly irritated, he fumbled a simple control fob out of a chest pocket and thumbed the ignition switch… only to be met by a faint clicking sound from his pack. His face fell.

Silently, he dropped the pack to the ground and gave it a quick once over, but it was obvious at a glance that one of the exhaust pipes had been crushed by the fall. And there was an ominous dent running along one side.

His head jerked about as he worked his way through swear after inaudible swear, and he reared back to kick the thing before reconsidering. He would probably just break a toe… and he only had three good ones left.

Heaving a sigh, he allowed his wings to flare out, preparing to fly out under his own power, but then he cast another look at his pack. And his gun. He would have to leave both behind if he did that; his wings were not strong enough to carry a load. And he would need his tools if he were to have any hope of escape.

Or to carry out his plan.

But then, high on one of the walls, he began to see a change in color. First in greens, then dull oranges—moving from the center outward into an alien… yet familiar shape.

It was a palm. A human palm.

Mandibles clattering in anger, he drew his knife and hurled himself at the shape.

*

The pillar was cool to the touch, but when Mark concentrated, he felt sure there were some sort of irregular vibrations traveling through it. They were really faint, though, so he had no idea what they signified or where they might be coming from. And when he pulled his palm away, it left behind a satisfying five-fingered imprint in dull oranges and yellows, so clearly, the material could retain heat; there just wasn’t much to go around.

The only explanation he could think of was that the place had been dormant so long the ocean had simply sapped away whatever had been left of its heat energy, leaving everything with the cool atmosphere of a cave.

Or a crypt.

“So…” Naomi began again after a moment. “How are you feeling?”

“About what?” he asked, distracted. And mildly disturbed by the direction his thoughts had gone.

If it was a crypt, it was an awfully strange one. He could see no use in burying the dead with the kinds of technology they had encountered so far, so it seemed unlikely. Still, crossing one item off an otherwise infinite list of possibilities was not doing him much good. He needed answers.

Or barring that, a vague clue or three.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

If he could just wake up the place, he might have a chance of finding some. But how to safely accomplish that? Never mind getting shunted off into some other room or turning on the lights; without a precise understanding of how the tech down here might react to their fumbling attempts at operating it, there was every possibility they might activate some long-dormant self-destruct sequence.

There had to be a way to fine-tune things to be more exacting, else the people that had built the place would have had a hell of a time getting around. But that was assuming he and Noami were using this stuff like it had been intended. Which seemed even less likely than it being a crypt.

“What do you mean, about what?” she said, miffed. “About me, you dunce. About us. We were making out not five minutes ago!”

He glanced down at her, but the orange and red curves of her body only redoubled the amount of space she was occupying within his mind. So he quickly jerked his eyes away. “Honestly, I’ve been trying not to think about it. I seem to recall someone having an aversion to garbage shoots.”

“Oh.” Her head waggled horizontally along her shoulders, and she grinned. “Worried you might not be able to control yourself around me?”

He almost scoffed. She had been looking pretty nice for a while now, but controlling himself had not been an issue until after she had engaged him in that stupid transformation battle. If she only knew the kinds of ridiculous bullshit he was forced to fill his mind with just to avoid becoming engorged every time she moved…

A person might think he actually cared about the heat-absorption properties of a random pillar in the middle of an alien Superdome.

Still, just because he now had a degree of tacit approval from this woman did not mean he was going to suddenly pounce on her. “If anything, you’re the one with self-control issues.”

Her mouth dropped open. “I beg your pardon?”

He rounded on her. “I have never once touched you when you didn’t touch me first,” he said, defensive—and hoping against hope that by arguing with her, he could somehow maintain eye contact without popping another boner. Then a grin spread across his face as his own words snapped quite a few of their prior interactions into sudden focus. “Now that I think about it, you’ve been all over me ever since we had our growth spurt. You… have a fetish for tall men!”

“That’s not a fetish! That’s just normal,” she countered indignantly. Which was not a denial, he noted. “Besides, I never thought of you that way at all until after you saved me from that Tyrano-taur.”

“That was like twenty minutes later.”

“It was more than that. And who cares?! You’re paying attention to unimportant details. Again. What you should have realized was that after I jumped down that hole and you weren’t there, I thought you had died,” she said. Then her face began to crumple with the beginnings of tears, of all things. “You can’t blame me for getting a little emotional afterward.”

He shook his head, suddenly uncertain as to what was happening. He had been trying to avoid a sudden onrush of blood surging into his loins, not make her cry. “I’m not blaming you. We’re bantering. Tit for tat. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Abruptly, her expression firmed, and she started swatting him solidly across the chest. “It. Doesn’t. Work. Like. That,” she pronounced from between her gritted teeth. “You don’t go around accusing women of having fetishes. You make me sound like I’m some kind of slut!”

“What’s wrong with being a slut?” he asked, genuinely mystified. And holding his arms defensively across his now-tanned hide. “I like sluts.”

She settled her hands on her hips. “Oh, you like being cheated on? Is that it?”

“Who said anything about cheating, you maniac? Just because you enjoy sex, that doesn’t just automatically make you unfaithful,” he reasoned with a squawk. Then a cheeky little grin settled on his face. “And anyway, who are you going to cheat on me with, saddled with a fetish like that? You’re already taller than most NBA players.”

Her mouth dropped open again. “Oh, you bitch…” Then, she raised a finger in front of her, he assumed to raise hell. Instead, she said, “That was pretty good, though. You’ve been holding out on me.”

At her words, he started to relax slightly. “It helps when I know what page everyone is on. Now that I know you like me, I feel more comfortable messing with you.”

“Really?” She quirked an eyebrow. “Maybe I should have said something sooner; it would have saved me an awful lot of hair pulling.”

One of her hands lifted to unconsciously scratch just beneath her right breast, and his eyes followed the motion before he could stop himself. That fast, he felt his control slip, and he jerked away before his manhood could start bucking loose.

“Well, nothing interesting here, I guess,” he said just a little too loud, then hiked a thumb toward the edge of the room. “Let’s go check over that way. The walls have some kind of weird texture to them.”

Naomi quirked an eyebrow. But whatever else she might have thought about his abrupt change in subject, she did not say. She merely fell in beside him… and stared suspiciously up into his face.

He cleared his throat. “Why didn’t you?” he asked, more to give her something to chew on than out of genuine curiosity. “Say something, I mean. I would have been thrilled.”

She tilted her head away, still giving him a side-eye, before shrugging. “I didn’t know that. And anyway, that’s not how the game is played. I’m supposed to flirt with you until the message finally drills itself into your thick man-skull, and that’s when you’re supposed to suddenly realize you have a crush on me.”

“Is that how it works?” he said with a snort. That sounded like rom-com logic, not real life. “But it’s obvious I would like you. Especially once you started—” He grimaced. No matter how much he tried, he simply could not keep his thoughts from straying into how soul-destroyingly sexy she was, and knowing he might actually have a shot at her was not helping.

“—filling out?” she finished for him. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed to talk about it.”

Embarrassed? His brow furrowed with momentary confusion. But then he recalled that women generally did not care for being thought of in such shallow terms, which meant he had been mere seconds from making a complete ass of himself. He was about to apologize, but then Naomi glanced down at herself and squeezed her shoulders together, accentuating her bosom… and he totally forgot everything he had been about to say.

“They are pretty big now, aren’t they?” she observed.

“Yep,” he said stiffly.

She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re allowed to look at them, Mike. I don’t mind.”

He almost groaned in despair.

“Oh, I’m looking,” he assured her, eyes closed and fighting tooth and nail to avoid that very thing. “I’m just not look-looking.”

He caught a satisfied grin spilling across her lips before she glanced away. “Good,” she muttered under her breath, then idly began inspecting her claws. “I’m not exactly… look-looking… at you, either. I never knew penises flopped around so much when men walked.”

Startled, his eyes flew open. But when he glanced down at himself, he realized what he should have known from the start: his shorts were missing. Somewhere between Naomi jumping on him and their subsequent travel through hyperspace, he had lost track of them. He was totally nude!

And Naomi had been completely aware of every pulse, twitch, and swell of his junk the entire time.

Lightnings spread briefly outward from beneath his feet as he flushed with humiliation before extinguishing themselves without explanation less than a second later. The only signs they had been there at all were the glowing trails they had left behind as their heat dissipated into the floor.

“Ha!” Naomi crowed triumphantly and began thrusting her chest at him like a drunken frat-boy picking a fight. “Whatch’ya got to say now, punk?! Who’s the one with self-control issues? Huh? Huh?”

Annoyed, he took a heavy step toward her, and she jerked back with fright. In the same instant, a pulse of… something emanated outward from her body, distorting the air around them and heralding another round of crackling lights along the ground. But this time, one of them connected with the nearby pillar, and he heard the distinct hiss of depressurizing air coming from that direction before the lightning died away again.

*

A sudden bolt of electricity spat through his knife, vibrated through his hand, then kicked him away to slam against the far wall.

Oscar laid there for a moment, blinking the stars from his eyes while smoke curled lazily from his scorched hide. He had no idea what had just happened. Or why. He had simply been trying to cut a hole through the wall without risking the gas from his torch filling the chamber, but whatever kind of ‘rubber’ the walls were made of, they seemed every bit as durable as the outside hull. He had been about to give it up and risk the torch anyway, then pow!

The sound of his knife clattering to the ground finally snapped him out of his daze, and he looked up from it to see the blackened hole it had fallen from. He rolled to his knees in surprise. A hole?!

Quickly, he scurried forward to peer through it… and grinned.

There they were, the fuckers. It was the two aliens who had murdered his girlfriend. He had tracked them down at last!

Tim had not wanted to show him what had happened, had even tried to lie about it, but that one had a kind soul. He simply could not stand to watch a man worry over his missing fiancée. So he had cracked.

Oscar almost wished he had not. That moment… watching the love of his life being eaten alive… screaming.

He clenched his fist. All he needed to do now was to widen the hole just a bit more, and he would have them. Dead to rights.

*

Naomi swatted him across the arm. “Damn it, Mike! Don’t do that.”

“What did you think I was going to do?” Mark asked, pulling his attention away from the odd sound to look down at her. The light at her wrist was blinking almost bizarrely fast now. “Hit you?”

She glanced away. “Not exactly.” She did not elaborate further.

He grunted but decided against pursuing the matter. Or mentioning the light. The thing always seemed to have a mind of its own. “Anyway, you’re the one who decided she wanted to play games with the fucked-up emotional sensors in here.”

“I was just making a simple observation,” she countered, innocent as can be. “It’s not my fault you got all worked up about it.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You knew what you were doing.”

“That makes one of us,” she replied. And so quickly, he had to stop for a moment even to make sense of what she had said.

Actually, what had she meant?

He shook his head. “Whatever. You heard that, right—that hiss? It wasn’t just me?”

“Yes, I heard it,” she affirmed, annoyed. “But I was too distracted by your thing coming at me to pick up on where it might have come from.”

He blinked.

“Anyway,” she continued before he could muster a retort, “I can’t tell if anything’s changed or not. Can you?”

“Um…” He was still shaking away the mental image she had evoked, so he had yet to make the effort. But when he focused back toward the pillar, he could sense nothing out of the ordinary. “No, I guess not.” There was a beat of silence while he reviewed the last few moments over again. “We must not be close enough to one of those distortion things—or none that control the lights, anyway. Otherwise, I’m sure some of that lightning we triggered would have hit one and caused them to stay on. Like the others did.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, then heaved an annoyed sigh. “To be honest, Mike, I’m having a really hard time concentrating right now, so trying to figure out the light situation is a little…” she waved her hands vaguely in front of her, “beyond me.”

“Same,” he admitted before he could think better of it.

Her eyes sharpened with sudden interest. “Why?”

He just shook his head. “Garbage shoots, Naomi. Garbage shoots.”

She sucked in a deep breath, staring up at him, and ever so slowly, the air around her started to thicken somehow. More worryingly, the floor beneath her began giving off a continuous stream of microscopic sparks—not enough to see by, but noticeable as a highlight around her feet.

It was difficult to be… completely certain what she was thinking right then, but he was pretty sure figuring it out would only make things worse. So instead of saying anything at all that might have continued their conversation, he merely turned and resumed his trek toward the edge of the chamber while he desperately recited Pokémon evolutions under his breath.

Naomi trailed behind, fixated on him like a cat hunting its prey while those liquid distortions rippled through the air after her. Whatever was going on, they did not seem to be quite strong enough to affect anything other than the floor. He had to wonder how she could be missing the periodic bursts of plasma reacting to her every footstep, but then, as hyper-focused as she seemed to be, she probably was not paying attention.

Finally arriving at the wall, he scanned the nearby surface for anything at all that might help at least divert her attention, but as usual, he had no idea what he was looking at. The place seemed lined from floor to ceiling with nothing but row after row of trapezoidal panels, which he would normally have disregarded as mundane wall decorations were it not for their absence everywhere else.

Each was slightly more than a meter across at its base and half as high with a tapered indent that made its top only a few inches narrower on either side. The panels were raised about a knuckle from the surrounding wall and uniformly rounded along their edges, giving them the overall appearance of a decorative installation meant for a child’s playground.

Unfortunately, he could tell nothing at all about their function… if they even had one. And Naomi was getting closer.

“Michael…” she sang from behind him, her voice echoing faintly in the cathedral-like space. “What’s the matter? You look nervous.”

He whirled in place, but the space around her was started to get so thick, he could barely detect her at all through his perving senses. Unfortunately, his heat vision remained completely unaffected. “Uh… look, Naomi. Let’s not get too excited. We both know doing anything right now would be—”

“I don’t care,” she interrupted. “Not anymore. You want me. I know you do. You’ve wanted me from the very first moment I ever walked into your store. You can barely even look at me, you want me so bad.”

He cleared his throat. “Well—” he began, trying to mount some feeble defense.

In one smooth motion, Naomi yanked her improvised top over her head and tossed it, uncaring, to one side, leaving her swaying and blessedly… gloriously naked before him.

His response was instantaneous. There was nothing he could do to stop himself. It was automatic. Instinctual. Every muscle in his body tensed with the sole purpose of shunting every scrap of spare hemoglobin into his crotch. In less than a second, he was so hard he could have punched his dick through a concrete block.

In the same instant, sparks sprayed out from beneath his feet, launching themselves out in all directions until they connected with the ones beneath her, and they snapped together into a chaotic lightning ball under the floor between them.

A high, plaintive moan rolled out of her, jerking his eyes from the floor back to her. She was beginning to rub her hands sensually up the sides of her body. “God, that’s so hot! Seeing you get like that… for me… I want to see it over and over again. It’s all I can think about anymore! I’m going crazy!”

He took a helpless step toward her. “Naomi…”

A hitching breath escaped her lungs. “I want you! Now! Please!”

He took another step. And another. There was no fighting it. No matter how foolish he knew it to be, there was simply… no… fighting it!

*

Oscar eased his rifle through the hole, now just barely wide enough to accommodate the barrel, and took careful aim.

He doubted he would get another shot at this. If he missed, those two would be on him in a second, tearing and scratching their way through the—to them—thin walls of his protective barricade. Once they got through, he might be able to down one… but then the other would rip him apart.

His only hope was to kill them both before they realized what was happening.

He adjusted his sight carefully, checking the light telemeter for distance. Then his hand extended ever-so-slowly toward the trigger.

*

They collided in a monument to fiery… youthful passion.

Lip met lip. Tooth clicked uncomfortably against tooth. Tongue wrapped around clumsy, inexperienced tongue. Their hands roved about one another, seeking to draw out any sort of pleasure they could from the other, but mostly just hoping to pull the heat from the other’s body against their own skin.

Mark had absolutely no idea what he was should be doing, when to do to it, or how exactly he was supposed to accomplish any of that without being able to see down there. Whatever was warping the air had completely nullified his ability to perve, and Naomi seemed to have no inclination of releasing him so that he might apply his rigorous—if thoroughly unhelpful in the moment—studies of pornography. Also, some distant part of his higher brain function kept screaming something about condoms, but even if he’d had any, there was no way the rest of his animal instincts would listen.

Those were solely focused on one thing: mating. With Naomi. The most attractive woman he had ever conceived of. Then and there. No matter what else might happen.

It was a good thing she was on the same page. Not a moment later, she hitched herself up, reached between them, and speared herself, mouth agape in her own satisfaction, atop his waiting mast.

“Ooooh, myyyyy Gooooood!” she howled.

He almost blacked out from how aroused hearing that made him. And then the heat of being inside another person rocketed through his consciousness. He was so happy, he almost cried.

But there was no enduring the pleasure. None at all. He had no way of contextualizing it. No training to hold it back. His trigger in that moment was so fine, even a hair was too great a measure. All he could do was wrap his arms about this glory of a woman who had foolishly decided she wanted to pop his cherry… and hang on for dear life.

“I’m sorry,” he almost choked out.

Lightning erupted from below his feet, spreading in all directions in violent parallel to his orgasm. It colliding with the walls, up and through the strange panels, and even above them into the ceiling. Each of the panels it collided with flashed in response, but then one lit up with a solid, teal glow.

Distantly, Mark thought he heard something that might have been a wooshing sound from behind him, but he was kind of busy emptying his brains out into the hottest girl on the planet…

He just hoped she would forgive him.

*

Oscar held his breath. It had to be now, while they were distracted by their freakish human mating ritual. He would never get a better opportunity.

His gun signaled its readiness. It was primed. His target was on lock. His finger began to squeeze around the trigger.

Thunk.

He stopped, blinking uncertainly at the strange noise that had just echoed through his chamber. What made a sound like that? And why was there a breeze in here, all of a sudden?

Thoomp, thoomp… Thoomp!

Slowly, his eyes were drawn upward. And widened in alarm.

*

Crunch!

Mark and Noami spun as one toward the noise.

“Okay… you had to have heard that,” Mark said.

Naomi grimaced, clearly in acknowledgment, but her legs only wrapped themselves tighter around his waist. “No, not a thing,” she lied, her hips continuing to grind themselves over his erection. “Keep going, please.”

He wanted to protest, but her ministrations were making it almost impossible to think about anything beyond the friction stimulating his overwrought nerves.

Abruptly, a panel opened up in the nearby pillar, and some kind of enormous capsule smoothly slid out from it and onto the floor. The pillar then resealed itself, leaving nothing behind to indicate an opening had ever been there.

Naomi’s forehead slumped against his chin, and she sighed.

“Fuck.”