16. Ragon
RAGON
I don’t touch her at first.
That’s the thing about moments like this—your hands know exactly what they want to do, and your brain has to tell them to wait or you’ll break something fragile without meaning to.
Sophie is sitting on the deck of the wreck, knees drawn up, data slates scattered around her like fallen cards.
The light inside the ship is wrong—filtered through bent metal and dust, thin and blue and humming faintly, like the air remembers being charged.
It smells like old circuitry and rust and the ghost of fuel that burned a long time ago.
She’s not crying.
That worries me more.
Her eyes are locked on one slate in particular, thumb tracing the etched lines over and over like if she memorizes them hard enough, they’ll turn into his voice.
I crouch a few steps away. Keep my distance. Keep my tone easy.
“You want water?”
She shakes her head once. Sharp. No.
“Food?”
“No.”
“Joke?”
That earns me a look. Not angry. Just… hollow.
“Don’t,” she says.
Fair.
I shift closer anyway, slow enough she can stop me if she wants. She doesn’t. That feels like permission, and I treat it like the dangerous thing it is.
“You did good,” I say quietly.
Her mouth twists. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You kept moving,” I reply. “You didn’t freeze. You didn’t turn this place into a shrine and forget to breathe.”
She exhales then, a shaky sound she probably didn’t plan on making.
“I thought finding it would be the end,” she says. “I thought it would answer something. Close a door.”
“And?”
“And it opened another one and now I don’t know how many doors there are or how deep this goes.”
I nod. “Welcome to Zhankar. It never gives you one problem at a time. It stacks them. Like it’s testing how much weight you’ll carry before you snap.”
She finally looks at me. Really looks. Her eyes are bright, feverish with adrenaline and something sharper—hope laced with terror.
“He didn’t run,” she says. “He didn’t just disappear. He stayed. He studied the field. He chose this.”
I choose my words carefully. “He chose curiosity.”
She flinches. “That sounds like blame.”
“No,” I say quickly. “It sounds like recognition. Curiosity is how people like us survive places like this. It’s how we change them.”
Her gaze drops back to the slate.
“That symbol,” she murmurs. “I’ve seen it before. In fragments. In dead languages.”
I lean in, squinting at the etching burned into the metal—sharp angles, concentric lines, a geometry that feels wrong in the back of my skull.
My stomach tightens.
“Yeah,” I say. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
She looks up fast. “You know it.”
“I know of it,” I correct. “Dzu’s citadel.”
The name lands heavy. Old. Dangerous. It tastes like iron when I say it.
Her brow furrows. “Dzu was a myth.”
“So was gravity,” I reply. “Until someone started falling.”
I trace the symbol with my finger, not touching the slate, just following the shape in the air.
“That mark is older than the Alliance. Older than the temples, too. It shows up in war records that don’t officially exist. Places where armies vanished.
Where leaders went looking for power and came back… wrong. Or not at all.”
Sophie swallows. “And my father was studying it.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell me this was where the trail led.”
I meet her gaze. Don’t dodge it.
“I didn’t know,” I say. “But if I had… I still would’ve brought you.”
Her eyes search my face, like she’s looking for the lie. She doesn’t find one.
“Why?”
“Because,” I say, voice rougher than I intend, “no one gets to decide how much truth you can handle but you.”
She laughs softly at that, a sound that cracks something open in my chest.
“Jax would hate you for saying that.”
“Jax hates me for breathing,” I reply. “We’ll call it even.”
The silence stretches. Comfortable now. Heavy, but not crushing.
She leans back against the bulkhead, finally letting her shoulders drop. Exhaustion floods her all at once, and I’m there before she tips too far, my hand closing around her upper arm, steadying.
She doesn’t pull away.
Instead, she turns into the contact. Just slightly. Enough that I feel the heat of her through fabric.
I freeze.
“Hey,” I murmur. “You okay?”
She nods, eyes closed. “Just… don’t move.”
I don’t.
The ship hums. Wind whispers through the ravine outside. Somewhere, metal ticks as it cools, the sound weirdly intimate, like a heartbeat.
“You ever get tired of pretending you’re not scared?” she asks suddenly.
The question catches me off guard.
I snort. “All the time.”
She smiles faintly. “You’re good at it.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s what scares me.”
I shift, sitting beside her now, shoulder to shoulder. Close enough to feel the rise and fall of her breathing.
“I’m afraid,” I admit, staring at the floor. “Not of the citadel. Not even of what’s waiting there.”
She turns her head, studying me. “Then what.”
“That I won’t be enough,” I say. “That I’ll bring you all this way, tear open old wounds, and still fail to change anything. Zhankar chews up people with good intentions. It’s very efficient about it.”
She’s quiet for a long moment.
Then she says, firm and clear, “No one owns my choices.”
I look at her.
“I’m here because I want to be,” she continues. “Not because you dragged me. Not because Jax protected me. Not because my father vanished. I chose this.”
The conviction in her voice is a blade. Clean. Sharp.
Something in me loosens.
“Okay,” I say softly. “Then I’ll choose with you.”
Her hand slides into mine before I can overthink it.
The contact is electric. Not a spark—more like a steady current, running deep, warming everything it touches.
We don’t rush it.
She turns toward me slowly, giving me every chance to pull back. I don’t.
Our foreheads touch first. Breath mingling. I can smell dust and sweat and the faint citrus of whatever soap she last used, a lifetime ago.
“Tell me to stop,” I murmur.
She smiles, small and fierce. “Don’t you dare.”
The kiss is not gentle.
It’s not desperate either.
It’s the kind of kiss that happens when two people finally stop pretending the gravity isn’t there. When mouths meet like they’ve been arguing for weeks and finally decided to settle it.
Her hand fists in my shirt. I groan softly before I can stop myself.
“Gods,” I mutter against her lips. “You’re trouble.”
She laughs into the kiss. “You love it.”
She’s not wrong.
I pull back just long enough to look at her, really look—dust-streaked, eyes bright, mouth swollen from kissing me like she means it.
“Are you sure,” I ask, voice low. “Because I don’t do half-measures very well.”
She cups my jaw, thumb brushing the edge of my mouth.
“I don’t want half,” she says.
That’s it. That’s all it takes.
I kiss her again, deeper this time, slower, letting it build instead of burn. My hands slide to her waist, feel the tension there, the strength. She arches into me with a soft sound that goes straight to my spine.
We move together, careful of the wreckage, finding a space that’s relatively clear. I shrug out of my jacket, spread it beneath her without thinking. She notices. Her expression softens.
“You always plan ahead?” she teases.
“Only when I’m terrified of doing something wrong,” I reply.
She pulls me down to her, laughter dissolving into another kiss.
When we finally come apart, breathless and flushed, the world feels different. Quieter. Like it’s stepped back to give us room.
I rest my forehead against hers. “When we face the citadel,” I say, “I’ll be there. All the way. No masks.”
She nods, eyes shining. “Then let’s burn the lies down together.”
Outside, the wind howls through the ravines like applause—or a warning.
I don’t care which.
Not anymore.