Chapter 9 #2
Apex drew himself tall, as if the Councilor could see him through the hull. “Inspection will be conducted on site under quarantine protocol. By registry proclamation, a Valenmark cannot be purchased, severed, or transferred. You will stand down.”
The Councilor paused. “Your bond is unregistered. The court will decide whether it is authentic.”
“It is authentic.” Apex’s voice held iron. “You will not touch her.”
Voss cut in with a sneer. “You keep saying that like you matter. She’s an account entry, Apex. Nothing more.”
Emmy flinched. Apex felt the spasm in his own chest. He wanted Voss’s throat under his hand, the world silent again beneath it. He wanted to take her face in his palms and tell her the truth. He couldn’t. There wasn’t time.
“Core,” he said, eyes on the viewport, “I need a harmonic decoy.”
“Specify parameters.”
“Mimic our Valenmark signal at reduced energy and send it through the damaged relays down the ridge.”
“Cloning.” Core’s hum thickened. “Decoy broadcasting.”
The ship vibrated as the fake signature spilled into the trees. Outside, a cluster of motes drifted toward the broken antennae like curious fish. They touched the metal. The whole ridge sighed with light.
“Movement,” Emmy whispered. “Look.”
He followed her pointing hand. Three figures in Council armor pivoted away, weapons up, tracking the false heartbeat through the trees. Voss’s private troopers hesitated, caught between orders and fear.
The lull lasted five breaths. Then a new sound gnawed through the clearing. A deeper hum. The annulment lattice.
Soldiers unfolded the device on a strip of luminous grass, gray coils opening like petals. The air around it buckled. The hum climbed from a drone to a scream until Apex felt it in his teeth.
Core’s tone snapped tight. “Adjudication lance at sixty percent. Ninety within thirty seconds.”
The words chilled him. The lance wasn’t just a weapon, but the Council’s instrument of judgment, an orbital strike designed to burn entire regions in the name of law.
Emmy’s pulse stumbled under his hand. He turned to her and that was when the world narrowed to two points of light. Her eyes. And the mark.
“Look at me,” he said, quiet and unyielding. “Agree.”
She swallowed. “Always.”
The lattice fired.
Light slammed through the ship. Apex caught her mouth with his, dragging her into the only shelter left.
Heat rolled through him with that kiss—bright, clean, unstoppable.
The moment their lips met, the mark ignited, answering the surge of the adjudication lance with its own pulse.
Power flooded between them, wild and sentient, every beat of their hearts syncing until their bodies became conduits for the energy.
The Valenmark’s resonance collided with the lance’s beam, bending it, then reversing the charge.
The weapon’s energy twisted inward on itself, imploding in a sound like thunder trapped inside glass.
The ship’s metal groaned under the backlash.
Wind tore through the ruptured seams, scattering light burst in a storm of white sparks that drifted down like snow.
Silence held for one breath. Two. Three.
Then the listening began.
The Echo Predator slid out of the dark. It detached from shadow in a way that made the eye misjudge it.
As if it had been there all along and had only decided to be noticed.
Its hide looked like liquid wrapped around bone.
Its paws made no sound. Its head tilted as if to taste the air.
The glow of motes sank into its outline and vanished.
Voss swore aboard his own ship, the word sharp and small in the hush. On the Councilor’s shuttle, the older man took one slow step back, his movement visible through the open viewport feeds that displayed the chaos below.
The broken lattice kept humming. A wounded sound. The Predator’s head turned. It listened like a hunter selecting a vein.
“It’s not coming for us,” Emmy whispered.
“No.” Apex kept his voice a thread. “It is hunting the sound.”
The creature flowed forward. Council soldiers steadied their weapons and then, one by one, realized that the noise of their own breath and their own hearts might call it. They tried to still themselves, but fear is noisy. And the clearing filled with it.
Apex moved his body in front of Emmy again, not because he believed the Predator had chosen them but because he refused to allow any world to hurt her while he stood.
He caught the tremor in her hand where it gripped the back of his shirt.
He wanted to turn and press his mouth to her palm.
He wanted her to know he was steady because she was.
“Core,” he said, barely shaping the words, “map the creature’s path.”
The AI responded so softly, they hardly heard her comment. “Predictive model unstable. Variable driver is harmonic amplitude. The Predator will attack the loudest frequency source.”
“The lattice,” Emmy breathed.
“And any man who panics,” Apex said.
From the safety of his ship, Voss lifted his voice just enough to be heard more clearly. “Kill it,” he snapped. “All batteries. Fire.”
The first volley tore through the quiet.
Bolts chewed trunks and set blossoms ablaze.
The Predator collapsed into itself, then unfolded in a ripple and slid sideways with impossible speed.
It wasn’t evading so much as arriving somewhere else.
It crossed the space between two shots without seeming to travel the distance.
The third soldier to fire made the loudest sound.
He died first, throat opened by something Apex’s eye couldn’t catch.
The rest broke.
They tried to hold formation. Training warred with a raw survival urge as old as existence.
The forest punished them for choosing noise.
The canopy shook loose a rain of glowing seeds that stuck to visors with adhesive sweetness.
When a man swiped at his faceplate, the sound of his glove on glass drew the Predator like blood in water.
“Remain behind me,” Apex told Emmy. “If it turns, get to the ship belly. Crawl.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“You will if I tell you.”
Her hand tightened, as if she could hold him in place. “Then don’t tell me.”
It would have made him smile if he had remembered how. He didn’t answer. Instead, he watched.
The Predator slid toward the annulment lattice. The broken coils wailed. The Councilor’s operator kicked the device, trying to shut it down, making a new sound that rolled like metal in pain. The Predator struck. Coils snapped. The scream cut off as if a knife had sawn through the air.
For a breath the world softened. The motes rose. Leaves relaxed. The bloom that had closed when the shuttles landed uncurled one cautious finger of light.
Voss ruined it. He raised a different weapon. Not sound. Light. A narrow beam designed to lace a nervous system with obedience. He had used it on women he called product. He fired at Emmy.
Apex moved without thought. The beam crossed the space where her heart had been, missing them both and hitting the ship. Emmy made a sound he had never heard from her before. It was not fear. It was fury.
“Enough,” she said.
She stepped out from behind him before he could stop her and pressed her glowing wrist to the ship’s flank.
The mark pulsed. The motes woke like a storm of fireflies.
They poured over the hull, coating the breach in a veil of living light.
A soft, breathing curtain unfurled from bow to earth.
When Voss fired again the beam struck that curtain and bent away, splitting into harmless sparks that floated down like dandelion seeds.
Apex stared at the veil, then at her. “How did you know to do that?”
“I didn’t,” she said, breathing hard. “It just seemed right.”
He should have told her she was brilliant. He should have told her what it did to him to watch her make the world obey. He only said, “Stay close,” because that was all the language had left for him.
The predator lifted its head. The curtain’s soft murmur interested it. Not dangerous. Just present. It turned away.
A Council trooper panicked and ran. His boots slapped light. He screamed when he stumbled. The scream made a shape in the air. The Predator leapt and the shape vanished.
“Head Councilor,” Apex called over the open channel, tone formal and hard. “Stand your men down. The planet is hostile to your weapons. You will withdraw.”
Fear thinned the man’s voice. “You presume to issue orders.”
“I issue warnings.”
Voss cut across him. “I’m taking the girl.”
“You will not.” Apex’s calm came like ice. “By Sovereign law, by registry proclamation, by the right of the bond, you will not touch her.”
Voss laughed, and the sound was brittle. “You talk like a desperate trader selling broken wares at a market. Move aside and I will make your death quick.”
Emmy angled closer until her shoulder pressed his.
The contact made the mark hum. The hum spread through his ribs, through his spine, down his legs.
He found himself counting the beats between her breaths.
Found that if he slid his thumb along the inside of her wrist the hum steadied to something that made the world outside of them a little softer.
“Core,” he said without looking away from the clearing, “what is our power?”
“Twenty-seven percent and climbing as the motes contribute charge to the hull. Weapon grid at twenty. Shields at thirty-two. Hull breach shielded by living veil.”
“Options.”
“Select: Shield burst to push enemy back ten meters. Or deploy sonic null field to soften local harmonics. Or fire.”
Emmy’s voice brushed his ear. “Sonic null. It will quiet us too.”
He nodded once. “Do it.”
Core thrummed. “Null field active.”
The world went hushed in a new way. Not the deadly listening of the Predator.
A gentle lowering of volume. Even the concern in Apex’s veins dimmed to something he could harness.
He turned to Emmy. Her eyes were wide with the light of the veil gilding her skin.
He wanted to lean in until there was no space left.
He didn’t. He wasn’t a man who stole moments when war was at his door.
“Agree with me,” he said instead. “On the next move.”
She nodded, lips parting. “I agree.”
He touched her mouth with two fingers, a promise and a command. “Stay alive.”
He stepped into the doorway. Light poured over him. The veil rippled where his shoulder brushed it and left a shimmering print that looked like a hand of stars. He kept his arms loose, palms visible, the way one approached a wary animal.
“Head Councilor,” he said, voice carrying. “Your men die because of your noise. Leave. Now.”
From the bridge of his ship, Voss signaled his gunnery team. “You first.” He fired. The beam struck the veil and curled away again. Voss cursed and fired a spread. The curtain caught it and fed it to the ground, where mushrooms flared with sudden lamps and then went quietly dark.
As the Predator shredded what remained of the Council’s landing troops, the night filled with screams and static.
Apex stepped back and held Emmy close inside the fractured ship, every muscle locked, the Valenmark burning steady against her pulse.
The Echo Predator moved with liquid silence through the undergrowth, its form vanishing and reforming as it hunted sound itself.
A single soldier from Voss’s ship broke formation and bolted into the woods, his boots hammering through the bioluminescent moss. The Predator turned toward the noise, pursuing him in a blur of darkness and teeth. The forest swallowed them both.
On his bridge, Voss leaned forward, eyes narrowing. He saw the distraction—the creature had gone after easier prey. The path to Apex’s wreck was open.
“This is my chance,” he hissed. He barked an order to his gunnery crew to hold fire and unsealed his ramp.
The Councilor’s voice crackled through the comm. “Voss, stand down. That thing isn’t gone—it’s feeding.”
Voss ignored him. “Cover me. I’ll end this myself.”
He descended the ramp into the glowing mist, the air thick with the smell of ozone and ash.
The forest glimmered faintly, pulsing with the heartbeat of the world itself.
He moved fast, confident, weapon drawn, his boots crushing the glowing leaves.
The sight of the ship—the faint blue shimmer of its living veil—filled his visor.
Inside the wreck, Apex felt the disturbance. “He’s coming,” he said quietly.
Emmy’s voice trembled. “The Predator?”
“No. Voss.”
She went still beside him. “Why would he come here?”
“Because he thinks he can take what isn’t his.” Apex turned toward the hatch. “Stay behind me.”
The veil rippled as Voss approached, his weapon raised. “Come out, Apex! I can’t hit what I can’t see.” His voice echoed through the clearing, the words vibrating like bait.
The mark burned against Apex’s chest. “He doesn’t realize the Predator hunts echoes,” he murmured.
Emmy’s eyes widened. “He’s making noise.”
“Exactly.”
Outside, the glow of the veil caught Voss’s faceplate as he stepped closer. He smirked, lifting his gun to fire—but the air behind him twisted. The forest seemed to inhale. A soundless shadow uncoiled from the trees.
The Echo Predator returned.
Apex saw it before Voss did—a ripple of living darkness sliding through the mist, drawn to his voice, to the pounding thunder of his heartbeat amplified by fury. The creature closed the distance in a breath.
Voss’s head snapped around. He froze.
The Predator leapt.