Chapter 20 #2
Sera cuts the strap loose.
“Now,” she says.
I pull.
She shifts back as I surge upward, claws digging into rib and wall. My injured shoulder burns. My wing scrapes the stone hard enough to tear. Sera grabs the back edge of my harness and throws her weight backward.
Not enough to lift me, but enough to change my direction. Enough to bring my chest over the lip instead of letting me swing back into the opening.
I roll onto the slanted rib beside her. For one breath, we are both down. Too close. Her side against mine. Her breath harsh near my throat. Her blood is on my shoulder. The sample pulsing between us.
My hand closes around stone, not her. The restraint hurts. That is good. Pain is clean.
The passage behind us collapses into the opening. Dust and stale air explode upward.
The anchor is gone, swallowed by the wall it woke, but its rhythm remains, traveling through the old channels around us.
Sera coughs hard. I rise first and pull her up without asking because the rib beneath us splits. She does not protest. We run. Not softly. Fast.
The slanted rib leads into the relief seam she saw. The wall tears open in stages ahead of us, each pulse forcing stone apart. The opening is narrow, jagged, and blue-lit from below. We are running across a wound as it forms.
Sera leads. I follow.
Her steps are uneven. Pain takes pieces of her. But her mind is faster than the breaking stone.
“Left!”
I move left.
“Down!”
I drop low as a slab swings inward above my horns.
“Jump the white line!”
I jump. The pale seam collapses behind my heel.
“Stop!”
Every instinct screams against stopping, but I do.
A sheet of old glass drops from the ceiling ahead and shatters across the route where I would have been. Sera grabs my arm and pulls me through a narrow gap to the right. She saved me. Again.
The realization is not gratitude alone. It is terror. It is awe. It is the brutal unmaking of every instinct that says protecting her means keeping her behind me.
She is not behind me. She is beside me. Ahead of me. Saving me.
The zemlja pressure surges below. Closer.
The tunnel beneath us is not the zemlja’s main path, but the creature’s turn has woken every weak place. The floor ahead bows upward, then drops. A long split opens across the relief seam ahead.
It is too wide for Sera’s stride. Maybe not too wide for mine. She sees it. Calculates.
“No,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You thought it.”
“We don’t have time for your hearing thoughts.”
“You cannot jump that.”
“No.”
She looks at me, and I know that look. I hate that look.
“Throw me,” she says.
“No.”
“Kavor.”
“No.”
“The rib behind us is failing.”
“No.”
“Your no is about feelings.”
“It is about gravity.”
“Gravity can be negotiated with enough force.”
“Sera.”
The rib cracks behind us. A section drops. Dust blasts against our backs. She steps close, too close, eyes fierce and bright in reflected blue light.
“Trust me,” she says.
My chest locks. Cruel words. Necessary words.
She grips the front of my harness.
“You throw. I land on the far shelf. I secure the line from my pack. You cross after.”
“You have one good arm.”
“I have one excellent arm.”
“Sera.”
“The alternative is you carry me and we both fall when the shelf breaks under your weight.”
She is right. I hate her for it.
No. I love—no.
Not here. Not now. Not with stone dying around us.
The word is a tunnel I cannot enter. The rhythm pulses. The ground answers. No more time.
I wrap one arm around her waist. Her body goes rigid for half a breath. Then she nods once. Permission. Choice.
I lift her. She is too light. Still too light. Anger burns through fear. Later. If we live, later.
I turn and measure the far shelf, the angle, the broken lip where she might land, the cracks under it, the movement of the wall. My body knows force. Hers knows route.
“Feet first,” she says.
“I know.”
“Not too high.”
“I know.”
“If I hit the upper rib, I’ll bounce wrong.”
“I know.”
“Do not look like that.”
“I do not know what that means.”
“Yes, you do.”
The shelf beneath us drops another finger-width. I throw. Releasing her tears through me.
For one terrible breath, she touches neither earth nor me, held by nothing but momentum and trust. Then she lands on the far shelf, rolls hard, and slams shoulder-first into the wall.
Not on her wounded side. Good.
She gasps, but her hand is already moving.
She reaches for the line from her pack. The pack that hangs from my shoulder. No. Her pack is still on my back. The line is with me.
Her eyes meet mine from across the gap.
For one impossible beat, both of us realize it. Then she smiles. Not soft. Savage.
“I hate when plans improve themselves,” she says. She wedges her quiet knife into a crack beside her and braces her boot under a stone lip. “Throw me the line.”
I tear the coiled line from the side of her pack and throw it. She catches it one-handed. The shelf under me splits.
I leap before she finishes anchoring.
The line snaps taut halfway across. It is not enough to hold me fully. It is enough to turn my body.
Enough to keep my body from slamming chest-first into the broken edge. I hit the far shelf with one clawed hand, then the other. Stone crumbles beneath my grip.
Sera throws herself backward, the line wrapped once around her forearm.
Her injured arm. No. She bites down on pain so hard I hear her teeth click. Red floods my vision. I climb.
Every claw finds purchase. Every muscle tears upward. The sample pouch drags against my chest, blue-white and pulsing hard. The shelf breaks under my left hand.
Sera screams. Not fear. Rage.
“Move, Kavor!”
I move.
I surge over the edge and roll into her, twisting before my weight can crush her injured arm. We slam into the wall together.
The line snaps. The far side drops into darkness. For a breath, there is only our breathing. Her body is half beneath mine. Her face is inches from my throat.
Her good hand is fisted in my harness. Her wounded arm is trapped between us, but not crushed. The bandage is red again. Too red.
“Sera.”
“Don’t,” she pants.
“You used the injured arm.”
“I used the available arm.”
“You—”
“Saved you.”
Yes. She did.
The red bijass has nowhere to go. It wants to become command. Roar. Claim. Rage against every force that has touched her. Instead, I close my eyes for one breath.
Choice. Door. Devotion.
When I open them, she is staring at me. Not afraid. Not exactly. Waiting.
I shift my weight off her slowly. I give her space. But not too much. The shelf around us still trembles.
“You saved me,” I say.
Her expression flickers.
“That surprises you?”
“No.”
“Yes, it does.”
“It terrifies me.”
The truth leaves me before I can make it smaller. Her mouth parts. The signal pulses below us. The floor answers. We are not safe. Not nearly safe. But the words remain between us, alive and dangerous.
Sera pushes herself upright with a wince. “Good.”
“Good?” I ask, staring.
“Certain people are careless.”
That line was mine, but now it is hers. Something in my chest breaks open just enough to hurt.
The seam ahead widens into a broken slope. Blue light pours up from below, strengthening with every pulse. Not the cold white-gray of the signal. True blue. Purple at the edges. Living light hidden beneath old dust for too long.
Air moves upward. Mineral sweet. Zemlja leavings. Epis. So much of it.
Sera turns toward the glow. I do too. The relief seam collapses behind us with a roar.
There is nowhere to go but down. The slope drops beneath our feet, and this time, neither of us has a route, a line, or enough stable stone to argue with gravity. I grab Sera by the waist. She grabs the sample pouch against my chest.
We fall. Not far enough to die. Far enough for the world to become blue.
We hit a slope of damp mineral dust and slide. I twist to take the worst of the impact, my wings flaring uselessly in too little space. Sera stays locked against me, one hand on my harness, one over the sample.
Stone rushes past. Blue light grows. The slope spits us into open air.
For one breath, we hang above a cavern large enough to swallow the City’s hunger. Then we drop onto a bed of soft, fresh zemlja leavings and mineral moss below.
The impact drives the air from my chest. Sera lands against me. Alive. Hurt. Alive.
I roll us to a stop and lift my head. The world below the City glows.
Blue-purple strands hang from the ceiling in curtains.
Thick clusters climb the walls. Pools of faint light shimmer between ridges of fresh zemlja leavings and old stone channels.
The remains of ancient structures rise half-buried inside the cavern, their cut lines threaded with living glow and black corruption both.
Epis.
More than the City could dream of. More than any starving person should see at once.
Sera lifts herself on one trembling arm. Her face is shaded blue by the glow. Her eyes widen. All the ration-math in her goes silent. For the first time since I met her, Sera looks at abundance and has no idea how to make herself smaller around it.
Then, high above us, the signal pulses through the old channels.
Once. Pause. Again.
Across the cavern wall, a curtain of blue epis flickers in answer. A black line cuts through the glow like a blade.