Chapter 6
MORNING ROSE like a low current through glass-bright leaves. Light climbed the translucent canopy and returned in layered rainbows, every frond drinking color and giving it back.
The ground exhaled mist that scattered into thin, shivering sheets.
Beneath it all, the planet held a hum Apex could map like a heartbeat.
It wasn’t weather. It was a system. It threaded the clearing, the ship, the woman he guarded.
The rhythm had steadied in the night when he let the healing cycle take him.
He’d refused the med berth. He’d refused restraints.
He’d stabilized the ship, routed power to Core, and gone still in the glow beneath the hull until regeneration demanded the last word.
Now the blue-white residue dried in faint traceries across his ribs and hip, luminous for one breath before the skin drank it.
Swelling flattened. Heat bled away. Muscles knit clean. Function returned.
He was operational.
He opened his eyes into light and silence and Emmy watching him as if she could force the cycle to finish by will alone. The Valenmark warmed across his wrist in a steady, low pulse. Not burn. Not bite. Warmth that echoed her focus.
“Repair cycle completed,” Core said from the external speaker, voice lowered. “Vitals optimal. Regenerative cascade is stable. Apex now functional.”
Emmy let out the breath she’d been holding.
She didn’t touch him, and he marked the restraint.
Her gaze went to the Valenmark on her wrist as if the band itself had declared him safe.
Last night, she’d slept with her hand near his shoulder, not touching, but close enough to read his heat by the nearness of her palm.
A small lightness shifted at her collarbone.
The tiny, winged creature from last night stood in the hollow at the base of her throat, paws soft, rainbow wings furred and folded.
Enormous eyes took in color, movement, the angle of Apex’s attention.
The creature pressed a small hand to her own chest and shaped a sound with intent.
“Lu…me.”
The tone chimed clean as a bell. The little one tapped herself again and repeated it, softer, a demonstration. The ending rose like a question. Emmy laughed, helpless and quiet.
“Lume,” she repeated.
The creature trilled, delighted. Her star-silk tail, a velvet ribbon threaded with slow sparks, twined through Emmy’s hair as if laying claim.
Apex pushed to an elbow without the drag of pain.
He tracked Emmy first, catalogued color in her mouth, calm along her throat, the way her chest climbed in a steady rhythm.
He set his palm over the sealed wound along his left ribs and pressed.
No spike of sensation. No restriction. He rose to his feet with the economy of habit.
“You are all right?” he asked. His voice came rough from disuse. He watched her, not his wound. “You did not wake me.”
“You needed the cycle. Core said not to disturb you. I sat with you anyway and watched the seal knit along your left ribs.” She gave an awkward shrug, filled with a strange awareness. “It’s looking good so I’m guessing it’s better.”
The morning light cut a narrow bright path over him. Her gaze didn’t stray from it. The air between them charged as if the planet had increased the hum by a fraction. The Valenmark warmed to the same beat.
“You are watching me,” he said, quiet and certain.
She didn’t pretend otherwise. “I didn’t want to miss it.”
“What?” His gaze held on her mouth, on the soft shine of her lower lip, on the small beat at her throat he wanted under his tongue. The Valenmark warmed as if it approved.
“The moment you came back to me.” Her voice was warm and a little hushed, gold as her eyes, and something inside him answered.
Focus tightened through him. The mark answered with a slow, deep pulse that tugged like tide through bone. He inclined his head once. Acknowledgment. Acceptance. The private relief that followed didn’t reach his face.
The little creature peered around Emmy’s hair, curious. Apex measured wings, tail, the way she clung, the specific intelligence in her eyes, the low glow she made when Emmy said the name again.
“You kept it,” he said.
“Her.” Emmy stroked the tiny head with a careful fingertip. “She told me her name.”
“She told you.” The corner of his mouth shifted by half a degree. “Lume.”
The creature trilled at the resonance of his voice. Apex returned to what mattered. “You will keep her close. You will not let her wander. If she wanders, you will call for me.”
“You’re very sure she’s a menace.”
“I am very sure everything here may become one.” He rose to full height and the morning weighed him and found no weakness. Bruising gone. Edges clean. Weapon at rest. “We will repair the ship. Then we will leave.”
Duty said leave. The planet wouldn’t keep them.
Voss would circle. The Council would come.
He told the truth and watched the way her shoulders shifted, the small grief that didn’t quite reach her mouth.
The Valenmark’s warmth on her wrist read as safety when she looked at it with him close. He filed that data since it mattered.
“Tell me what you need,” she said. “I’ll find it.”
Asset and risk in one package. He swallowed down the heat that rose with the offer. Then he nodded.
“Core analyzed local geology. The primary engine requires alloy reinforcement. Trace minerals in the eastern ridge match composition. The crystals will look like ice with light inside. They will cut your fingers, so wear the gloves in the lower locker.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“I will repair the fuel shunt and align the stabilizers. We will remain within sight of one another at all times.” He braced a palm against the torn frame of the access panel and the metal answered him. “If you move beyond that ridge, I will come for you.”
She pretended not to shiver. He noted it.
She pulled on the gloves as Lume climbed to the knot of hair at the crown of her head, a small warm form like a promise.
Emmy moved into the crystalline grass and it parted around her without breaking, flexing like water, color sliding from the pressure of her steps and flowing back. She glanced over her shoulder once.
He worked bare to the waist in the rising heat, hands inside his ship’s open heart.
Survival demanded accuracy, and his care read as reverence.
Her gaze touched him the way a scope settles on his chest, cool and exact, impossible to ignore.
He didn’t look up. Awareness lived under his skin.
The pull between them had shifted from fire to a steady burn.
The mark glowed warm, not hot, like a hand closing around his.
Focus.
At the ridge, the crystals were as predicted, ice with light inside. His gloves on her hands spared skin from the cut. Lume chirred warning whenever Emmy reached for a shard too deep in the seam and lifted it instead with her tail, efficient and pleased with herself.
“Show-off,” Emmy murmured, smiling. The creature answered with a sound that harmonized with the world’s hum.
Apex heard the change in Emmy’s breathing from fifty meters away.
Joy, small and unguarded. He drew the plate he’d straightened across the engine’s mouth and spanned the width of the cavity, shoulder braced, both hands locked.
Every muscle engaged and held, despite sweat beading.
Light caught and made each drop of perspiration a glowing star.
He didn’t grunt. He didn’t curse. He applied pressure until metal yielded and the seam kissed closed.
He exhaled once and the mark pulsed. Across the clearing Emmy pressed her thumb to it as if she’d experienced the same exhale in her own lungs.
When she returned with the satchel full, he reopened the housing. Cupping a shard, he lifted it to the light and nodded. He reached for her wrist without asking, found the quick heat of her pulse, and let the Valenmark draw him.
The band pulled his hand the way a moon pulls tide.
His thumb stroked a slow arc over the light.
Warmth uncoiled through both of them, the kind that comes after cold, the sure seal of a door against weather.
She drew in a breath and swayed. He steadied her and held, watching her pupils expand and the soft flush rise along her throat.
“Does it still hurt?” she asked.
“It does not.” He kept her wrist a breath longer, reading the quick beat against his thumb.
“What changed?”
“You.” His answer came quiet and unyielding. “You stopped fighting the Valenmark’s pull. You let the bond settle and do what it was made to do.”
The band warmed under his touch and her breath caught, not in fear, in heat. “Which is?”
“Bind us together.” He let her go with care like a promise and slid his hand along her forearm, guiding her closer to the open housing. “Give me the rest.”
They worked as if the world had narrowed to hands and breath.
With any other partner the task would’ve been silence.
With her it carried current. When she fitted small shards into their sockets he steadied the back of her neck with his palm, barely there.
When he torqued microfasteners she held tight, and the brush of his knuckles against her thigh stayed where it landed because neither of them moved away.
When she leaned over the engine he reached instead of making her rise, chest crowding her back for one breath that smelled like sweat and heat and her.
“Tell me if I am in your way,” he said. He meant the opposite. He wanted to be in her way. He wanted every space measured by his body first.
“You’re fine,” she said, and the tremor in it slid across his nerves like heat.
He heard it. He didn’t feed it. He took a slower breath because the instinct to put his mouth where her shoulder met her neck had sharp teeth.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, a quiet question to keep them both breathing.
“Other than you?”