Her throat burned, her eyes watered, and she grabbed fistfuls of hair in the hope that the pain would provide some sort of stopgap, short-circuit the panic. She pulled and pulled, then dug her fingernails into her skull until she felt moisture on her fingertips. She was so deep in her own torment that it was only now that she fleetingly wondered if Ampersand was feeling this, too.

Dynamic fusion bonding was what he called it, the way that members of an amygdaline “phyle” bound themselves to each other. Dynamic fusion bonding was the crux of amygdaline social structure, with members of a phyle called symphyles. Symphyles were bound to each other in the familial sense, if not the alien equivalent of the biblical one, which she was pretty sure would be the case if these guys hadn’t evolved past reproducing the old-fashioned way. Ampersand had told her that when he had attempted to fusion bond with her, he had expected it to fail, because he was a sleek and sophisticated 650-ish-year-old cyborg alien technocrat Oligarch and she was a lowly human, a being of meat and hair. And yet now here they were, bound together, ’til death do us part.

The ability to sense each other’s “state” was also a part of the package, only there was no rhyme or reason to how intensely they felt each other. Sometimes he couldn’t sense her at all, sometimes it was, in his words, “mildly debilitating.” She hoped now was not one of those times, hoped he wasn’t feeling his own alien equivalent of this tempest.

Then she realized someone was talking to her, a voice in her ear. It had spoken to her several times, and she hadn’t been coherent enough to respond.

“Dear one, come to me.”

She tried to get words out, but they weren’t coming. She could barely comprehend what he was asking.

“Dear one, come to me, I will stop it.”

“I can’t,” she garbled. “I can’t. Someone will see!”

“I can stop it.”

“Someone will see!” she all but shrieked. “I’ll lose my clearance. Sol is always looking for an excuse to revoke my clearance, if they see me like this! If they see me like this!”

There was a ripple on the tiled floor in front of her, and then a cloak of invisibility melted off a liquid metal plate. He must have slipped it under the door. It took a few dozen breaths before she could tear herself away from the wall, collapse onto the plate, curl into a fetal position, and let the liquid metal sweep over her, enveloping her in darkness.

When the metal unwrapped, the panic was still going strong. Her eyes, used to the bright fluorescent lights, could hardly see in the dark of Ampersand’s quarters. She rolled off the plate, her vision still swimming, her skin still prickling, her breath still coming in rapid bursts. Her vision coming in fits and starts, she could almost see Ampersand standing over her—giant by human standards at over eight feet tall, even with his forward-leaning center of gravity like a silver velociraptor. Long clawlike fingers floated over her, a head that was somewhere between a dragon and a praying mantis looked down at her.