Chapter 13
THE PLANET hung beneath them like a fractured jewel, black and silver veins pulsing with light.
Emmy leaned forward against the cockpit rail, watching lightning crawl between the floating landmasses as Core whispered telemetry through the comm.
The atmosphere was alive, crackling with magnetics that made her skin prickle and her teeth ache.
“Field harmonics destabilizing. Recommend manual descent.”
Apex’s hands slid over the controls. “Understood.”
His voice carried that clipped precision she was coming to know—calm, deliberate, terrifyingly steady. The ship dropped lower, slicing into clouds that flamed from within. Bolts of blue fire rolled along the hull before discharging into the air behind them.
Lightning spidered across the canopy and, without warning, leapt inside in a single white lash that turned the cockpit to day.
The world snapped and Emmy flinched. Heat slammed her skin, then a body did.
Apex’s arm came across her chest, the other braced to the bulkhead as the surge ripped through the ship.
The Valenmark blazed, pain-bright, then steadied to his heartbeat.
Ozone filled the cabin, sharp and metallic, and the strike poured itself through him like water finding ground.
The strike had left its scent everywhere: heat still radiating from the console where Apex’s forearm had absorbed most of the energy.
Emmy’s heart had not slowed. It kept stuttering in that rhythm that matched his.
She couldn’t stop watching the place where his hand had landed across her chest, a print like a brand through the thin fabric of her shirt.
He moved with his usual concentration, checking systems, but the edge of his jaw was tight.
He’d taken more of that blast than he admitted.
When the next turbulence hit, he gripped the control yoke and the muscles in his shoulders bunched. She reached over and set her palm lightly on his arm. “Are you okay?”
“I am functional.”
“Functional isn’t the same as fine.”
He turned to her. “You are unharmed. That is sufficient.”
It wasn’t an answer, but it was all he was going to give. The next flash came from beneath them, not above. Lightning surged upward from the canyon floor, a column of blue fire that turned the cockpit into a cage of shadows.
Apex threw the ship sideways, and gravity peeled her out of her seat.
She hit the safety web and would have slammed into the bulkhead if he hadn’t caught her again—both hands this time, one at her shoulder, the other locking at the small of her back.
The harness bit into her ribs, their bodies fused for an instant of weightlessness before the ship righted itself.
Her face was a breath from his. She could smell the faint scorch on his collar, the clean heat of his skin underneath. The next heartbeat was his, hammering through her. The air felt thinner than it should.
He released her slowly, fingers sliding away with exquisite self-possession. “Secure yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” she murmured, voice rough, and turned back to her console to hide the flush climbing her throat.
“Stay with me,” he said, voice level. He didn’t pull away until the light bled out of the air and Core’s diagnostics chimed green.
“Primary systems stable. Surface arcing only. Hull plating at ninety-two percent.”
Emmy turned her face into the curve of his shoulder for a breath she pretended was just to clear the smell. The heat of him stole the tremor from her hands. “I’m with you.”
His gaze flicked over her mouth, then the pulse at her throat, a single, searing pass that left her skin prickling. He eased back by inches, precise as a knife sliding home, and set the ship into a hard bank that dropped them below the worst of the charged sky.
Emmy tightened the harness across her chest. “Tell me again how this isn’t suicide.”
He didn’t answer. He never did when she was joking to hide fear. The Valenmark on her wrist pulsed, echoing his focus, syncing with the rhythm of his heartbeat.
The connection filled her with the scent of his skin—clean metal and storm—and the faint warmth that always bled through the bond when he concentrated.
It steadied her even as it scared her. When the ship hit the first magnetic shear, her breath caught.
He absorbed it like he absorbed everything. Through sheer will.
Below, the storm broke open to reveal a canyon glowing with pale light. The valley floor wasn’t solid but a lattice of metal, half-buried in glass. Emmy caught the shimmer of containment spires jutting from the cracks. “There,” she said softly. “That’s not natural.”
Apex adjusted their angle, bringing the ship down behind a jagged ridge.
Dust and charged particles rained over the viewport.
When the thrusters cycled down, the silence pressed in hard.
He turned toward her, light from the controls reflected in his eyes—violet fire, quiet and sure.
She wanted to say something, anything to pierce that silence, but his gaze stole the words from her.
She unbuckled fast, every muscle tight. “Core, atmospheric toxins?”
“Minimal. Radiation index within human tolerance. However, electrostatic potential exceeds safe parameters.”
“So basically, don’t touch anything shiny,” she muttered.
“Correct.”
Apex opened the hatch. Wind whipped inside, metallic and sharp.
The light here was strange—cold, refracted, humming faintly like a living thing.
Lume hovered just above Emmy’s shoulder, her tiny body dimmed to a soft violet glow.
The little creature’s wings trembled. “You feel it too, huh?” Emmy whispered.
Lume’s answer was a faint vibration in the air, a sound that wasn’t sound. Apex paused on the ramp, scanning the horizon before stepping ahead of her. His white hair caught the electric glow, gleaming like forged silver.
“This way.” He didn’t need to say more. The bond between them pulled like gravity. She followed.
The wind wrapped around them, cool and wet. When she stepped beside him, the world narrowed to the heat radiating from his arm. The pulse of his heart echoed through the Valenmark—a rhythm that matched her own until the lines between them blurred.
Her pulse climbed. She was aware of him in every way that mattered: the power in the curve of his back, the quiet that lived in his stillness, the controlled violence in his every breath.
Her boots slid on glass grit as they dropped behind a stack of fused pillars.
The wind shifted and carried a scent that reminded her of hot coins and rain.
She found herself watching the way Apex moved when the ground turned treacherous.
He never wasted effort, not a single step.
He simply altered momentum and the ship inside his body obeyed.
It always startled her that someone forged for war could make danger look like a kind of grace.
She wanted to touch that steadiness, to know what it would be like to have that calm affixed to her skin.
“Recommend path B. Surface charge density is lower by twelve percent,” Core murmured, voice a cool ribbon at her wrist.
“Show me.”
A faint thread of light traced across the canyon floor.
They climbed a narrow slope where the stone had liquefied and re-hardened, glazed smooth as a mirror.
The sky above flickered with sheet lightning that didn’t crack so much as breathe, a slow surge that rolled from one floating plate to the next.
Far overhead, a continent drifted, its edges glowing with slow lightning.
Silver tethers snaked from its underbelly down into the atmosphere, shimmering like strands of a web.
They looked delicate until the currents pulsed through them, and the entire plate shuddered as though alive—tethers pulsating, flexing, dragging the massive landmass back into balance.
The motion sent ripples of light across the clouds, a heartbeat of the planet made visible.
Emmy caught her breath, awed and uneasy. The whole world seemed to be suspended on threads of silver, beautiful, but on the verge of breaking.
The canyon trek gave them no peace. The magnetic storms above spilled tendrils of light that lashed the rock faces, filling the ravine with shifting glare and shadow.
Emmy’s hair stood on end from the static charge.
Once, when a flash hit too close, a filament of electricity crawled down her arm like a living thread.
Apex caught her wrist and closed his hand around it, grounding the spark before it could bite deeper.
The light flared between their joined skin, then vanished.
His grip lingered a fraction longer than needed.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
He inclined his head. “Do not fall behind.”
“I’d like to see you try to lose me.”
The edge of his mouth almost curved—almost—but then the world exploded again.
The bridge they’d been crossing shuddered, the left side shearing away in a hiss of molten glass.
Emmy yelped as her boot slipped on the smooth surface.
The cable clipped to her belt snapped taut, jerking her sideways.
She swung out into empty air, the canyon yawning beneath her.
“Emmy!” Apex’s shout wasn’t loud but it carried the full power of command. He dropped to one knee, line between them straining, both gloved hands braced on the anchor post. The muscles along his forearms stood out, silver cords under the skin. “Do not look down. Move your right hand higher.”
“I can’t—”
“You can.”
He pulled once, a surge of energy that lifted her enough for her boot to catch a shard of metal still clinging to the edge.
She scrambled up the last meter, grabbed his arm, and fell against him when she reached solid ground.
He wrapped his other arm around her automatically.
The sound that tore from her was half sob, half laughter.
“I hate bridges,” she gasped into his chest.
“I noticed.”