Chapter 4
THE FIRST explosion didn’t sound real.
It was too high, too sharp, like glass being pulled apart instead of breaking.
The ship lurched hard enough to whip Emmy sideways, her harness biting into her abdomen and shoulders as sparks burst from the upper conduit.
Every light along the control board went crimson at once, alarms stacking until the cockpit sounded like a furious choir.
“Apex!” she shouted, but he was already moving—steady, silent, infuriatingly calm while the world came apart around them.
His hands flew across the flight board, each motion exact, clean, deadly efficient, as though he could muscle order back into a universe intent on unraveling.
The ship bucked again. A streak of blue light scissored across the forward screen, and then another.
“Voss,” she gasped. “He found us!”
“Drones,” Apex corrected, his voice like carved stone. “Four pursuit units. Core, run defensive projection.”
Core, the ship’s AI answered in its calm, disembodied tone: “Defensive projection initiated. Calculating evasive trajectories. Pursuit drones locking on vector three-five.”
Another impact hammered the hull. Emmy’s vision went white.
When it cleared, the view ahead was a storm of fire, blue, green, and something that shimmered like living light.
For a disorienting instant she thought it was weapons fire, then realized the blaze came from below, a nearby planet’s upper atmosphere catching their descent.
They were entering the world’s first veil, skimming through the outer layers of burning air that shimmered around it. The ship spun end over end until Apex slammed both palms against the stabilizer control. Gravity seized her stomach and flung it sideways. She heard herself cry out.
“Hold on,” he commanded. Hard and clipped. No mercy.
They slammed into another invisible wall. Warning tones howled. Smoke curled from beneath the console in a dark, snaking coil that smelled like burned metal and acid. Apex yanked the manual override and threw power to auxiliary. The lights dropped from harsh white to bruised blue.
The ship’s AI spoke in its calm, disembodied tone: “Warning: atmospheric frequency matches Vettian resonance. This world hears you.”
Apex froze for half a heartbeat, eyes flicking to the readout. The violet in them darkened to amethyst. “Repeat that.”
“This world hears you,” Core said again. “Entering upper atmosphere. Energy field interference escalating. Impact trajectory… unsustainable. Recommend emergency descent burn. Repeat: this world hears you.”
“Descent burn accepted,” Apex said, and his voice went lower, colder, as if he’d banked his focus and will into fuel. “Angle two-seven. Bleed speed through the gradients.”
Emmy clutched the edges of her seat and searched for the gradients—those narrow seams of darker shadow inside the dark that most pilots missed. Seams that opened like knife-cuts in the sky.
A drone zipped past the port, close enough to throw sparks across their hull.
The Valenmark at Apex’s wrist flared bright, so bright the light printed against her vision.
Heat pulsed through Emmy’s own mark in reply, a sudden burn that made her gasp.
Not pain exactly. More like pressure. As if the planet had reached inside the ship and touched them both at once.
“Core,” Apex said. “Countermeasures on my mark. Do not fire until I say.”
“Acknowledged.”
The ship tilted. Emmy experienced every degree of it, each shift tightening the webbing across her ribs. She forced herself to breathe through it, to keep her voice steady. “Tell me what you need.”
“Right hand thruster status,” he said. “Now.”
She scanned the board. Numbers jumped, jittery with interference. “Fifty-three percent and dropping. You’ve got a heat spike in the cascade.”
“Reroute coolant from environmental,” he said. “We can breathe hot.”
She swallowed the taste of fear and did it. Heat bloomed in the cockpit, a damp mass that made her skin slick inside her clothes. Another drone clipped their flank. The ship jolted sideways. Metal screamed deep in the bones of the hull.
“Countermeasures—now,” Apex said.
“Deploying.”
The Core flung a burst of chaff into the path of the drones. The screen filled with a cloud of glittering fragments that looked almost beautiful before the first drone hit and went up in a white-blue flare. The second veered. The third and fourth lanced straight through—relentless, precise.
Apex angled into it. “We do not run,” he said. “We slide.”
Emmy had heard those exact words when things were not trying to kill them.
They’d sounded like poetry then, an arrogant promise wrapped in velvet.
Now they sounded like survival. He set the ship’s nose into a seam, fingers light, heel pressure measured, eyes on the gradients rather than the bright threat.
Breath by breath, motion by motion, he placed them inside a space that didn’t look like space at all.
For a heartbeat she believed they might make it cleanly through. The stars wheeled. Gravity pressed them down hard. Another flash raked their flank and the cabin went dead dark for half a breath before the backup grid throbbed into life, weaker and more honest.
“Apex—”
“We will clear it,” he said. “Hold on.”
Something in his calm steadied her, even as the ship roared.
She connected herself with the rhythm of his hands, in the way his knuckles blanched then flexed, in the line of his mouth—hard, focused.
The Valenmark at his wrist pulsed again, brighter, and the sound in her blood changed.
The hum outside the ship answered in a tone she could sense along her skin.
This world hears you.
The Core didn’t say it this time. The planet did.
“Do you feel that?” she whispered.
Apex didn’t answer. He took them lower.
They hit atmosphere like a fist. The nose vibrated and heat shimmered across the view as clouds tore open.
Lightning bled sideways in sheets of pale green and indigo.
The drones followed, three now, angling sharp, relentless as sharks.
One dove too close to the bright wake of their descent burn and spiraled. The other two held.
Apex dragged the ship through a lateral slip that made the world shear and slide. Emmy’s stomach bottomed. She swallowed bile and kept her eyes on her work. The environmental readouts were crying for attention. She muted everything that didn’t matter and shoved power at what did.
“Voss won’t quit,” she said, hating how breathless she sounded.
“He will make a mistake,” Apex said. “We will not.”
Another hit. The sound this time wasn’t a crack.
It was a tearing, an ugly rip somewhere under her feet.
The lights blinked and the right-hand console sparked violently and went dark.
A flash of heat grazed her leg through the deck plating, close enough to sting, but she forced herself to stay focused on the controls.
“Emmeline,” he said, sharper. “Status.”
“I’m fine,” she replied. “You’re losing hydraulics on starboard. I’ve got manual control.”
“Keep it.” He shifted. “Core, flare on my mark. Three. Two. Now.”
The Core threw a savage burst of light from the belly of the ship. The nearest drone overcorrected and kissed their wake like the first one. It exploded in a violent bloom that shook the cockpit. Emmy flinched. Apex didn’t. He took advantage of the opening and slid them through another seam.
The planet rose up to meet them.
She saw it then between cloud breaks, an ocean of color, a forest that wasn’t green so much as shifting.
Slow, tidal pulses of turquoise, amethyst, and violet-blue bled through the sky, more waves of light moving under a forest of leaves.
The sight stole her breath, as fire skittered along the hull.
“Core,” Apex said, “mark me an open ridge.”
“Ridge located. Vector one-one-three. Warning: resonance intensity increasing. This world hears you.”
“We hear it,” Emmy whispered.
They didn’t have time to aim for anything like a landing zone. The last drone slashed in on an intercept course. Apex rolled hard to starboard to protect the cracked forward shield, then reversed so violently that her vision tunneled. He swore in a language that made the air sharper.
“Can you shake it?” she breathed.
“We will break before we shake it,” he said, and then, in a voice she’d never heard from him: “Emmeline. Brace.”
His use of her full name came like a hand closing around the small bones of her wrist. This time it came possessive. Certain. She curled forward, forehead nearly to her knees, arms locked across her chest, breath held against the pressure.
The drone hit them hard right where the hull was already weak. The ship screamed. Everything tilted.
Then the world hit back.
It wasn’t a single collision so much as a chain of them.
The ship chewed through something like a living net—fibrous, flexible, so saturated with light it smeared across the cockpit in luminous streaks.
The keel slammed down, bounced, slammed again.
A support strut snapped with a sound like a thunderclap.
Emmy’s teeth clicked and she tasted blood.
Gravity punched her down and then flung her sideways as the ship rolled.
A hard shape—console edge?—caught her ribs. Pain blazed white.
When the motion finally stopped, the silence that followed wasn’t absolute silence. The whole world vibrated. The air held a humming pressure, low and intimate, like a throat clearing in the dark.
Emmy’s harness had locked. It took her three attempts to find the release.
Her left hand wasn’t listening, fingers numb and stupid.
The buckle came loose and she sagged forward, catching herself on her palms. Her nails scraped metal.
The floor beneath her was canted, the cockpit a triangle of strange angles and half-light.
The view beyond the cracked screen looked like underwater moonlight caught in leaves.