Naia

The planet tried to kill me in the first eleven seconds.

I remember the Parallax shearing apart. I remember the emergency harness locking across my chest, the snap of metal giving way somewhere below my feet, and then thinking that I had not finished repotting the ferns in Greenhouse Bay 4, and that felt like the most important thing in the world as the hull tore open above me.

Then impact. Then nothing.

Then air.

Except it was not air. Not the kind my lungs wanted. I took one breath and my throat closed, my eyes watered, and my body became a single screaming alarm repeating: Not this! Whatever I was inhaling tasted like hot pennies and lightning, and my ribs locked so hard I thought they would snap.

Something wet ran down my forearm. I looked. A piece of hull plating had opened the skin from wrist to elbow, a dark line already swelling with blood. I did not feel it yet. That would come later.

I was on my hands and knees in rubble. The Parallax was a smoking spine of metal across a volcanic plain, cracked open like an egg, and the sky above me was the color of a bruise. Purple and amber and wrong.

Second breath. Worse. My vision blurred. I could feel my lungs refusing, the tissue swelling, and I understood in the detached way of someone who has already accepted the outcome that I was going to suffocate on an alien planet forty-seven light-years from the greenhouse where I had been perfectly happy.

I crawled anyway.

My hands dragged through volcanic gravel. My knees left blood on the rock. I was heading for a split cargo panel from the Parallax, because some idiot part of my brain had decided that if I could reach the ship, there would be air inside, that the wreckage would hold an atmosphere even though I could see the hull ripped open like paper. It did not make sense. I kept crawling.

Three meters. Four. My arms gave out and I collapsed face-first into the dirt, breathing poison, and I tried to get up and I couldn't, and I tried again and I couldn't, and the sky above me pulsed amber and then went dark.

Not dark. Blocked.

Something enormous stood over me. Nearly eight feet tall, a silhouette the color of dark stone, and his veins were glowing. Blue light traced paths under skin that looked like weathered basalt, and the glow pulsed with a rhythm I did not recognize.

He knelt. Close. So close I should have screamed, but I did not have the oxygen.

I tried to speak. What came out was a croak, barely a syllable, scraped out of a throat that had nothing left. I forced it again. "Help." A sound shaped like a word. Close enough.

He tilted his head. Those amber eyes, no white, pupils that expanded in the low light. He said something in a language made of consonants and low rumbles, and I understood none of it.

And then I could breathe.

Not all at once. Gradually, like the air itself was changing around him. The hot-penny taste faded. My lungs unclenched. I gasped, sucked in a raw, burning gulp that tasted clean, and my body went so limp with relief that I could not have stood if my life depended on it.

He picked me up.

Not gently, exactly. Efficiently. He scooped me against his chest like I weighed nothing, which, compared to him, I probably did. His skin was warm under my cheek. Not human-warm. Furnace-warm. And he was vibrating.

A low, rolling sound, somewhere between a purr and a subsonic hum, was coming from inside his chest. Not a growl. Not a threat. I could feel it in my sternum, in the backs of my teeth. It was so low it was almost below hearing, and it did not stop.

He carried me. Across volcanic rubble, past pieces of my ship, past shapes I did not let myself look at. The sky was still wrong. The air was still poison. But in the radius around him, I was alive.

My lungs seized again. A thin thread of the toxic air slipped through, and I coughed, and my vision spotted, and I had one second to decide.

I turned into him. Pressed my face against his neck, where the vibration was loudest and the air was cleanest. My arms went around him before my brain could stop them.

I am not someone who leans on people. I am the person who stays late to clean up, who carries her own bags, who does not call when she is sick. I do not lean.

But I could breathe against his chest, and I could not breathe anywhere else, and terror takes a back seat to oxygen every single time. I told myself that was the only reason.

His arms adjusted. Not tighter. Different. The way you hold something that just changed from cargo to something else. The vibration in his chest shifted, lower, and the air around me cleared completely, and I stopped coughing, and my body gave out.

I passed out against his chest. The last thing I heard was the vibrating. That low hum. And I swear, I swear it got louder the moment my eyes closed.