He stood upright, wavering for a moment, uncertain whether he should run to or away from her. There were no guards. She had no weapon. Her smile widened as she took a step forward and he tried uselessly to compose himself, brushing a palm through his hair, shaking some dirt clods off his torn clothes. He coughed out a spumy cloud. Fireflies rose from the grass and alighted upon him like jewels.

He held out a hand spangled with their green-yellow light, and she took it and squeezed it. “I know you’re afraid,” she said. “I do. But I can protect you. I can take care of you. As long as you promise to be loyal to me, I’ll be loyal to you.”

He looked over his shoulder at the beckoning dark. A wind hushed through the trees and shook their branches like welcoming hands. “I don’t—” he said. He didn’t what? He didn’t want to? He didn’t know?

She answered for him. She always did.

“You won’t ever have to see Dr. Gunn again. After what he did to you, I gave him a talking-to. I scolded him raw. I told him to get the H-word out of here, and let me tell you, he ran off with his tail tucked.”

Because he wanted Isaac locked up and experimented on. As a proto soldier. “But that’s cruel and cold and positively stupid. Why would we punish someone who has given us so much? Why would we let one of our most valuable assets collect dust when he could be out on the front lines?”

“I—” Isaac said. “I want to be with you.”

“You’re so sweet,” she said.

She leaned in then and paused for just a moment, inches from his face, to say, “Your eyes—they’re green now.” Then she kissed him. Her mouth was hard and hungry. He allowed her to do what she wanted. She ended the kiss by sucking his lip into her mouth and biting down on it. He made a little yelp of pain and pleasure, and she released him. He could see his blood on her teeth. It gave him some satisfaction to know that he was in her, and from now on, he would imagine them in this way: interspliced, bound together, mixed. Anyone who studied her cells beneath a microscope would find his face smiling back. A team. A couple. A they.

Now he pulls on his socks and nudges his feet into his shoes and says, “We’ll need to gently excavate this area. Let’s say a ten-meter perimeter from where we currently stand. No shovels. Trowels and whisks.”

She says, “It goes without saying that all the soil should be bagged.”

“It goes without saying.”

“How deep?” she says.

“Not very. Less than three meters.”