Chapter 5 #2
She did. The motes outside had formed a loose ring.
The gap in the hull framed them, the wreckage making a rough amphitheater.
The air tasted wet and mineral, like rain about to happen though she couldn’t see clouds through the torn canopy of leaves overhead.
The hum slid lower again and something brushed against her thoughts. Not a word. A shape. A curve.
Apex’s hand curled around her wrist where the mark burned. “They’re not fire,” he said quietly. “They’re energy—traces of something running through the surface. Maybe the planet’s own current. We’ve disturbed it, and it’s reacting.”
Her heart sped. “You think the whole planet is… one thing?”
“Affirmative.” He looked at her. “You are not afraid?”
“I am,” she said. “Just not of that.”
“Voss,” he said.
“And losing you,” she said, voice steady despite the admission.
His throat worked. His gaze dropped to her mouth and rose again. The hunger in it was a clean, beautiful blade. “You will not.”
She hoped the planet was still listening when she kissed the corner of his jaw. Just that. Just skin to skin in a place that was claiming without demanding. The mark flared. The motes brightened as if she’d struck a match in their air.
Apex’s breath went rough. “Emmeline.”
“I know.” She pulled back before he had to. Her body punished her for it with a wave of hot, stupid wanting. “Later.”
“Later.”
They worked.
She set up an air scrubber using one good filter and two bad ones, plus a piece of insulation she shaved to fit with a blade that was too dull.
Apex directed, not because he wanted to be in charge—well, yes, because he always wanted to be in charge—but because his mind was the sharpest weapon they had and he wielded it from a seated position like a general with a broken leg.
He made her re-route power through a secondary junction she would’ve missed, and when the lantern tried to die entirely, he had her cannibalize the drone jammer’s power cell and feed it into the base.
They scavenged water from a burst line and boiled it in a field pot with a heating coil she had to hold at a specific angle because the casing had split and tried to burn her thumb off. Apex showed her how to rig a signal band to throw a narrow-beam pulse through the opening in the hull.
“Even if no one’s listening?” she asked.
“We’re still here,” he said. “If no one else answers, we’ll hear our own signal—and know we survived.”
The ache in her ribs sharpened. She nodded and held the coil at the right angle and thought about a future that might actually be possible again.
When she got careless—twice, both times when he said her name in that tone—she judged herself for it and then let it go. Perfection didn’t survive impact. She wasn’t aiming for perfect. She was aiming for alive.
Midway through what might have been morning, the ship gave another long, sinking creak. Emmy froze with an armful of thermal blankets. Apex’s gaze snapped to the cracked bulkhead behind her.
“Move,” he ordered tightly.
She didn’t argue. She dumped the blankets in a tangle and jumped back just as the bulkhead seam split another half-inch and a thin bright thread of outside bled through.
The motes streamed into the gap. Emmy stared, breathless.
They didn’t pour in. They stepped. That was the only way her mind could frame it.
They came forward as if each one held a mind that could decide.
A single mote drifted in and hovered over the back of her hand. Her skin prickled. Not heat. A knowing.
“Hi,” she whispered, as ridiculous as she’d been earlier. “We’re still okay.”
Apex held very still. “Do not move too quickly,” he said. “Do not show your teeth. Hands open.”
She huffed a tiny laugh. “They’re not wolves.”
“They are not not wolves,” he said.
“Comforting.” But she followed his instructions. Hands open. Shoulders loose. Pulse trying not to sprint.
The single mote pressed closer to her skin. The mark at her wrist brightened. The mote answered, small body pulsing in a perfect echo. Another drifted in. Then another. They wheeled in a slow, deliberate orbit around her wrist, then circled out to hover over Apex’s.
His mark answered with a slow throb. The motes brightened.
Emmy’s vision prickled. She didn’t cry. She refused to.
She bit the inside of her cheek and thought about the first night she’d stood under a human sky and wished for magic.
She hadn’t wanted it for herself. She hadn’t been greedy. She’d wanted to know it existed.
It did.
“Look,” she whispered.
“I see it,” Apex said, and something inside his voice that wasn’t hardness or command made her throat go tight.
The planet breathed. The motes circled. The bond burned. For a long, long moment, the three things were one thing.
And then, far above them, something tore the harmony like a fingernail raking down the back of a song.
Emmy jerked. Apex’s head snapped up. The motes scattered to the hull’s edges, lights dimming, as if the planet had winced.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Apex’s eyes had gone knife-sharp. “Listen.”
She did and heard it now too, thin and distant and wrong. Not the low hum of the forest. Not the static of their broken Core. A whine that didn’t belong to anything alive. Her stomach turned cold.
“Voss,” she breathed.
“Possibly,” Apex said. “Or his drone.” He pushed off the brace and tried to stand.
She moved fast to stop him, palms to his chest. “Absolutely not.”
He looked down at her hands, then up at her face. He didn’t shove her away. He could have. He could’ve moved her without trying. He didn’t. “Emmeline.”
“No,” she said, shaking now for a different reason. “If you tear open that shoulder we’re done. I’m not losing you because you had to prove you could stand.”
“I am not proving,” he said. “I am protecting.”
“You can do both sitting down,” she said.
His eyes flickered. Heat moved through them like a shadow. He sat back. “Affirmative.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, so relieved her knees shook.
They waited. The whine rose and faded like something searching. The forest’s hum deepened as if the planet had thickened itself, hushing its surface, making its light small. The motes clung to the hull’s torn edges and went very still.
“It cannot find us if the world refuses to echo us,” Apex said, too soft for anything but truth. “Be quiet, Emmeline. Be calm.”
She nodded and did the hardest thing she’d done since the crash. She calmed on purpose. She forced her breath into his rhythm. She matched her mark to his beat. She pressed her palm, very lightly, to the center of his chest and let the planet take that as the note to tune to.
The whine faded.
The motes brightened by a shade. The forest’s hum loosened, like muscles unclenching. Emmy only then realized how hard she’d been shaking.
“You did that,” she whispered.
“We did that,” he said. “The planet did that.” He tipped his head, studied the light. “We were too loud. When we are in agreement, we are less visible. When we are afraid, we are bright.”
She thought about the flight, the crash, the way the mark had flared hottest when she’d panicked. Heat flushed her cheeks. “So… kissing keeps us safe.”
His mouth curved. “You are not wrong.”
“Then later we should… you know… keep the planet calm.”
“Emmeline,” he said, and the warning in it made her toes curl. “I will make the planet shake.”
She choked on a laugh and pressed her face into his shoulder because if she looked at him she’d climb him. “Noted.”
They held that quiet for as long as the planet held it with them. When the wrong-sound finally drifted away entirely and the hum of the forest came back up like tide, the motes eased into their slower orbits again.
A single one, braver than the rest, drifted close enough that it hovered just beyond the arc of Apex’s mouth, as if tasting his breath.
“The Core was right,” Emmy murmured, the words a soft echo of the line that had followed them out of the sky and into this new world. “This world hears us.”
Apex’s gaze stayed on the lights. “Then we will listen in return,” he said, every word a vow.
Outside the wreck, the motes rippled through the forest’s blue-violet dark, their movement too exact to be random.
A high, melodic chitter shimmered from the shadows, bright and familiar.
A creature swept in on silent wings, her fur catching the bioluminescent light until she looked spun from starlight.
Her huge eyes changed color as she hovered—rose gold to sapphire to soft green—as if greeting old friends.
The motes reacted instantly, gathering around her in an orbit of living fire.
They knew her, and she knew them. With a delighted trill, the fairy-like creature twisted midair, scattering tiny trails of light that formed fleeting patterns, spirals, pulses, something almost like language.
Apex’s breath caught. Emmy’s hand slid into his, their joined marks pulsing in response to the same rhythm the motes now followed.
The planet listened. The bond burned. And as the fairy creature turned in slow, effortless circles within the glow, the lights responded in kind—forming shapes that pulsed once, twice, then steadied into a single, unmistakable pattern.
“They’re communicating with us,” Emmy whispered.
Apex didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The pattern hovering above them was not random. It was a symbol, and it was glowing in the exact same shape as the Valenmark on their wrists.
The planet had spoken.