Chapter 7 #2
Lume curled in Emmy’s lap and went boneless, a warm form settling into the cradle of her thighs.
Tiny wings rose and fell in a slow, mesmerizing rhythm that seemed to smooth the air.
Emmy’s fingers slipped through the soft fur between wing and spine and the little body purred, a fine vibration that ran into her palm and along the inside of his ribs.
Bioluminescence dusted her knuckles and made her skin look kissed with starlight.
The Valenmark on her wrist shone tender blue-white and pulsed slow and deep, and his own band warmed in reply.
Safety. Want. The two braided in his chest while he watched her hand move, the world narrowing to breath, light, and the promise beating between their wrists.
He sat at the edge of the firelight, half in shadow, half in glow.
Light cut planes across his chest. His hair took the fall of rain like liquid metal.
He let duty hold his body still and let desire live where she could see it.
He looked like a male who’d stand there until the universe ended and then cross what remained to put his hands on her at last.
The planet kept a low music that threaded the clearing in a steady undernote.
Light drifted in slow sheets and settled on metal and skin.
Lume slept without a twitch, tiny breaths lifting her furred wings.
Emmy’s breathing matched the rhythm, soft and sure.
The Valenmark held true on her wrist and warmed against his, a quiet, steady pulse that moved through his chest until it became one rhythm learning another.
He let stillness cover him and kept watch while want coiled low and patient, growing heavier with every measured beat.
He didn’t move.
He kept watch, torn cleanly between the law he had broken and the life he wanted, and let want win in his eyes if not yet in his hands.
THE PLANET’S music changed.
It had been a low, patient undernote all night, a rhythm Apex could map against Emmy’s breath and the small rise and fall of Lume’s furred wings. Now the pitch slid thinner, like tension pulled through wire. Light still drifted, but the drift seemed watchful.
Lume woke first. The tiny body stiffened in Emmy’s lap. Her star-silk tail tightened around Emmy’s wrist, sparks threading along the silk and fading.
Apex had already turned toward the ship when Core whispered from the console, voice pared down to a thread.
“Return ping. Airborne. Vector east to west. Range thirty meters and closing.”
He stood without sound. “Signature.”
“Recon bead, light class. Spectrum shows foreign augmentation. Harmonic sweep in the human band. Secondary sweep keyed to Valenmark frequencies.”
Emmy’s head lifted. “Drone?”
“Affirmative.” He reached for her and she came up fast, Lume clinging to her shoulder. He put Emmy behind his left side and felt the exact point where her sternum met his spine. “Do not run.”
“Not running,” she breathed.
The drone slid over the clearing like a drop of ink through water, small and exact.
It moved into the drift of light with no disturbance, then halted above the hull.
A red lattice unfolded from its belly, a fine-meshed scanning grid that combed the ship in slow passes, patient as a predator with no heart.
The lattice reached his boots.
“Stay,” he said. He did not move. He set his pulse and let the planet take it. The lattice climbed his legs, his torso, cataloguing shape and heat. It reached Emmy and made a thin sound like glass cooling. The red grid trembled. The mark warmed under her skin and under his. The drone slid closer.
“Dampeners engaged,” Core said. “They will not read the ship’s core from this altitude. Warning. The secondary sweep is adjusting. It seeks resonance.”
“Of what?” Emmy whispered.
“Of us,” Apex said. He turned his head enough to speak into the space where her mouth hovered near his neck. “Match my breath in two. Breathe.”
She set her palm to his chest. The Valenmark answered in a slow rise, heat steady rather than bright. He set his hand over hers and pressed until her heartbeat landed in the shape he wanted. One, then another, then both together.
“Follow the count,” he ordered in an undertone.
She nodded, breath soft and level. Lume’s tail twined tighter, the slow sparks dimming to nothing.
The lattice passed over them again. For one long breath they were nothing but a quiet in the light. The drone stuttered half a meter to the left and corrected.
“Hold,” he said. “Look at me.”
She did. Her eyes were golden-hazel and steady. The soft beat at her throat settled into the count he had set.
The lattice shivered. Red points brightened and knit, as if the drone had made a decision.
“Secondary sweep has lock on a subharmonic,” Core said. “Probability favors the Valenmark signature. Adjusting.”
The grid tightened. Heat kissed his skin without burning, like a net pulled snug.
“Lume,” Emmy whispered. “Stay.”
The tiny creature peered at the drone and made no sound at all.
She lifted her star-silk tail, velvet fine, and stroked it once along the back of Emmy’s hand.
Sparks lifted like pollen and didn’t fall.
They hung in the air in a soft chain, each bead of light taking the next and delaying it, a gentle, impossible hesitation.
The lattice wavered across the chain and lost a fraction of its straight line. The drone corrected. It drifted closer.
Apex didn’t look away from Emmy. He felt the drone in the same way he felt a weapon raised behind him, a change in pressure against the back of his neck. He shifted his stance a fraction to the right and set his body as a barrier.
“Do not move,” he murmured.
“I won’t.”
The drone dropped a filament, thin as a hair. It fell in a slow curve toward his wrist. He saw the glint just before it touched. He did not give it his skin.
His left hand shot to the engine access where a sharp, straightened shard lay from the afternoon’s work.
He took it and cut the filament clean above the band.
The shard left his fingers without a sound and slid across the air like a second filament, bright for one instant when light touched its edge.
It struck the slit beside the drone’s primary eye.
The drone rocked. The lattice flared and dimmed.
“Partial damage to the sensor vane,” Core said. “Warning. The drone broadcast a short burst on impact. Recording.”
Apex did not answer. The clearing went too quiet. The planet’s music flattened and held.
The trees at the edge of the light shaped a new dark. It gathered into height and length until the line of a spine resolved and a shoulder rolled. A forelimb poured forward, triple jointed, claws like clear glass tasting the ground.
“Ec-ho Pred-tor,” Lume shivered the words through the air.
The Echo Predator stepped out and the world lost its color.
Its hide bent radiance inward so the glow slid over it and vanished, a light-eating sheen that turned its body into moving absence.
Thin fans along the skull opened and closed as it sampled heat.
Each breath made a soft click inside the ribs, stone against stone.
It flowed two more steps and tilted its head, listening to the drone’s charge the way a hunter listens to a heartbeat.
Emmy’s breath checked. He set his hand over her wrist and pressed once, steadying their count. Her yes came in the small shift of her chest. Lume’s body went very still. The sparks along her tail were gone.
The Predator angled its head and looked at the heat the drone gave off. Its mouth opened without sound. The drone lifted, lattice contracting to a tight square that tracked the line of the Predator’s skull as if the drone could weigh the odds.
“Do not break,” he said against Emmy’s hair. “Take the air slow.”
“Okay.”
The Predator lunged.
The drone shot upward and tried to cross the clearing in one breath.
The red lattice snapped and re-knit as it moved.
A line of that net brushed across Emmy’s throat and left a fast chill.
Apex’s palm found that skin at once. The Valenmark flared under both bands and pulled their pulse into one hard beat.
The lattice lifted away and the chill went with it.
The Predator ripped empty air and landed in the light with a force that shook the roots. It turned with surprising grace and tracked the drone’s heat. The drone wheeled, sensor vane stuttering, then streaked over the trees. The Predator followed the trail like a storm.
Silence dropped again. Light drifted down in the Predator’s wake, thin as ash, soft as breath.
Emmy’s hand stayed on his chest. He didn’t move it. Lume’s tiny claws flexed once in Emmy’s hair and then relaxed.
“Transmission intercepted. Two relays answered the burst. Voss. Sovereign code present on the second. House of Sovereigns node nine.”
“Confirm,” he said.
“Confirmed.”
Emmy’s eyes lifted to his. She had color in her mouth again, but her pupils stayed dark and wide. “They know where we are.”
“They do not have a fix on position.” He wanted that to be true for more breaths than he could count.
“Correction,” Core said. “They do not have a fix yet. The drone captured a partial of the Valenmark harmonic. The burst carried it.”
The band heated against his wrist, not burning, not warning, but an answer. The planet’s music rose again into something like a slow bell.
The clearing darkened by a shade that didn’t belong to night.
Apex tipped his head and saw the second machine unfold from above the canopy, larger than the first, blunt and quiet.
It carried no lattice. It carried a single red point that fell from the round belly and touched the ground between his boots.
The point lifted and walked a clean line up the center of him, over his ribs and throat, along his mouth. It left him and climbed the air to Emmy. It paused at the hollow above her collar. It moved, small and slow, to the corner of her mouth and rested there.
Apex did not take his eyes off the light. He drew Emmy closer so her pulse stayed with his. Lume made a low sound nobody but them would ever hear.
The sound deepened—no longer only Lume’s hum but something larger, vaster, moving through the forest around them. Leaves shimmered with color that wasn’t color, a vibration that quivered the air. The ground throbbed once beneath their feet.
Lume’s wings flared to full brilliance. “Echo Predator returns,” she whispered, the words trembling. Her speech had improved dramatically, impressing the foukk out of Apex. “Close. Soon.”
From far beyond the wreck came a resonance like an animal breathing through stone—deep, distorted, pulsing through roots and air alike. Emmy sensed it in her ribs, in the thin skin at her throat. It wasn’t a roar. It was a listening.
Lume spun in frantic circles, then darted toward a glade that shimmered with living light. “Come! Come!”
They ran. The hum followed, louder now, skipping through the forest in waves that bent the air.
When they burst into the clearing, a vast bloom towered at its center, its petals the color of sunrise glass, open wide and glowing from within.
Each petal curved inward like cupped hands offering sanctuary.
The flower breathed, exhaling a mist that smelled faintly of honey and heat.
“In, in, in,” Lume hissed.
Apex caught Emmy’s hand and pulled her into the heart of the bloom.
The petals were warm, almost silken, yielding beneath them.
Light flowed through them in ripples, changing color with every breath.
Gently, the petals began to close. When the last petal folded above them, the outside world vanished.
The roar softened to a heartbeat’s echo, then to nothing.
They were enclosed in color and scent, gold and rose and something deeper, like lightning caught in velvet. The air was heavy with perfume, dizzying, sweet enough to steal thought. Emmy’s head swam. Apex’s heartbeat throbbed under her hand, heavy and sure, their pulses matching.
Outside, the forest trembled once, then stilled. The great petals sealed tighter, muffling Lume’s faint chatter.
Emmy exhaled slowly, her voice a whisper against the living hush. “You said soon,” she murmured, eyes half-lidded, the faintest wry smile touching her lips. “Is this soon?”