Chapter 13 #2
Her cheek was against the fabric of his uniform, hot and rough under her skin. His breath ruffled her hair. For a moment, the storm seemed far away, their world narrowed to the space between two heartbeats. Then he stepped back and checked the gear clip as if nothing had happened.
“You did not panic,” he said finally.
“I screamed.”
He glanced down at her hand still gripping his sleeve. “You lived.”
She managed a shaky smile. “You’re a terrible comfort.”
His eyes softened. “You are alive. That is comfort enough.”
The words landed somewhere deep in her, and she could not quite breathe past them. She fell into step beside him again, the ghost of his hand at her back even when he wasn’t touching her.
Lume tucked close to Emmy’s collarbone, fur shivering, eyes wide and luminous. The little creature’s hum matched the faint tick in the Valenmark, and the two sounds braided into something that kept Emmy’s breathing steady.
She reached up and touched Lume’s furred side with a fingertip. “You’re doing great,” she whispered. “We’re almost there.”
Lume’s voice came, small but clear, the words formed through the hum of her wings. “I do not like this sky. It watches.” Her prismatic, rainbow-hued eyes narrowed toward the drifting tethers overhead. “But I will stay close, Emmy-light.”
A brief smile touched Emmy’s mouth at the affectionate nickname, no doubt derived from the Valenmark. They reached a split in the canyon where another blown-out bridge hung in ragged lengths.
Apex didn’t slow. He tested the anchor posts with one palm, then pulled a coil of cable from his belt and clipped it to a ring on his harness. “Hold here.”
She opened her mouth to argue and closed it again when he stepped cleanly across a gap that would have swallowed her in a heartbeat. He caught a dangling beam, swung, and landed on the far ledge with a muted thud that sounded like certainty.
A moment later, he fixed the cable and gestured. “Come.”
Emmy clipped in and went hand over hand across the void, boots skidding against glass. Halfway, a low ripple ran through the structure. Tiny sparks skittered along the cable and nipped her wrists.
She hung there, breath tight, and forced herself to think. “Core, discharge?”
“Angle right. Tap your boot against the pillar.”
She did, and the charge bled off in a glitter of harmless light. When her feet hit the far ledge she let out a ragged laugh that was mostly relief. Apex’s hand closed briefly around her forearm. Heat. Strength. The shock of contact grounded her more than the ledge beneath her boots.
Then, without seeming to think about it, he pulled her closer in a quick, desperate hug—just long enough for her to feel the solidness of him, the steady hammer of his heart, the brief concern that betrayed how close she’d come to falling.
It was gone almost before she registered it, replaced by the same measured stillness, but her pulse refused to settle. His gaze flicked to her mouth, down to the pulse in her throat, then away, but she’d seen it. The flicker of awareness. The thing neither of them dared name.
She didn’t step back. Not until he did.
They found the access port in a pocket of shadow where the canyon pinched inward. The entrance lay beneath a warped gantry, a circular iris of black alloy half fused shut. Field-weld spatter clothed the rim, as if someone had tried to seal the wound and the planet kept forcing it to breathe.
Apex studied the unfamiliar interface for a moment, tracing the faint seams with his fingertips until he found the right sequence.
He entered a series of commands and the locks released with a low mechanical sigh, unreeling inside with a series of low clicks.
The iris shuddered and opened a quarter turn, then stuttered, grinding to a stop.
“Manual assist,” Emmy said, already wedging a bar of discarded metal into the seam.
He set his hands alongside hers. Together, they pulled. The door groaned. Gave. Opened to a vertical shaft that sighed warm air up their faces.
The lock did not simply release. It yielded.
He looked over his shoulder, and the faint light caught the line of his jaw. “Stay close to me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Her voice came out low, rougher than she meant, and his eyes lingered for a heartbeat before he turned away.
They clipped into a descent line and slid into a shaft walled in dark glass. Halfway down, gravity twisted—an invisible hand rotating the world a quarter turn. Emmy’s stomach lurched. Her boot lost purchase and skated on the glossy wall. Her body swung out over open dark.
“Emmeline.” His voice cut clean through the hum. Not loud. Command absolute.
Her glove slipped. The line burned through her palm.
Apex caught her harness in one hand and reeled her in hard enough that her spine met the plane of his chest. For a heartbeat they were one breath, one rush of heat and fear. The mark thrummed between them, syncing their hearts until the panic bled out of her muscles.
“Local grav-vector unstable,” Core warned, voice hushed and close. “Adjust descent angle by six degrees. Hug the south wall.”
“I’ve got you,” Emmy whispered, not sure whether she meant the shaft or him or herself.
“Hold to me,” he said.
She did. They moved as one down the last twelve meters, boots scraping, bodies aligned. At the base, the shaft bloomed into a short corridor of rippled glass that shivered with distant thunder. And then into a vault that breathed heat like a sleeping beast.
Emmy could smell him now beneath the metallic air, the faint mix of stale air and the scent that lived against his skin. When she landed, he reached for her automatically, one hand at her waist to steady her. His fingers lingered just long enough for her breath to break.
“Sorry,” she said quickly.
“For what?”
“For needing that.”
He looked down at her, unreadable. “Need is not weakness.”
The words vibrated through her chest long after he released her.
The corridor opened into a chamber where stasis pods glowed in the dark like lanterns in water.
Her breath left her in a tremor. For a moment she simply stood, hand against Apex’s arm, picking up on the tremor under his skin as he saw what she saw: two of his brothers and two women—one of them her sister, Hannah—suspended in that cold light.
Forcing herself to focus, she went to work. Fingers flew. Breath steadied. Her own heartbeat’s cadence, guided by Apex’s quiet instructions and Core’s steady hum, threaded the cold logic of the console until her hands and the machine found a rhythm.
She broke the data leash first, a quiet, vicious pleasure, then eased the environmental seals one degree at a time, listening to the pitch of the pumps like a mechanic listening to an engine that matters.
The pod seams flashed amber, then green.
“Apex,” she said.
He was already there, bracing to take Locus’s bulk. When he lifted his brother out of the gel, the tendons in his forearms stood out in stark relief and his expression didn’t change, but the mark on Emmy’s wrist surged hot with a wave so fierce she had to bite her lip to keep from making a sound.
“Hannah next,” she told Core, and moved. When the seal released she caught her sister against her chest. Cold. Heavy. Alive. “Hey,” she breathed into damp hair. “I’ve got you.”
Apex hovered several paces back—heat, shield, promise—while she checked pulse and respiration.
The bond brushed against her consciousness, carrying both his sharp focus and the concern he tried to bury, heavy and electric beneath her skin.
She turned her head and he met her eyes across the chamber.
The world fell away until there was only the two of them breathing in unison, and the living rhythm of the people they were trying to save.
As she pressed her mouth to Hannah’s temple, Apex joined her, his body a barrier of heat and tension. His hand came to rest just above her shoulder for a single, searing heartbeat, not quite a touch and somehow more than one.
The want that lived beneath her ribs surged up, basic and inconvenient and real. She swallowed it because there were lives in her arms, and because he was a promise she wasn’t ready to break open in a room full of machines.
His voice was quiet but absolute. “We will not fail them.”
She nodded, because she couldn’t speak. Then she turned toward the last two pods, the faint light reflecting off her trembling hands. Apex joined her without a word. Together they disengaged the locks that held First and Winn.
The seals broke with a hiss, and steam rolled over them as the chamber filled with the scent of thawing gel.
Apex lifted his youngest brother from the pod while Emmy steadied Winn’s limp, pregnant form, checking for the rise of her chest. Both breathed, shallow but alive.
Relief hit her so hard it made her dizzy.
She managed a nod in Apex’s direction, and he returned it once—barely a movement, but enough.
Only then did the two of them allow a single breath of victory before the world began to change around them.
The air thickened. The color of the light shifted from blue to red.
She saw the change before Core announced it.
The hum in the walls turned hungry. The Valenmark pulsed once, hard, as if to warn her.
She spun toward Apex at the same instant he straightened, his head turning toward the far corridor.
“Someone’s here,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer. His hand brushed hers as he stepped forward, a touch meant to secure her. A promise.
The overhead speakers crackled. A distorted laugh rolled through the chamber, metallic and cruel. “You never could resist playing hero, could you?”
Emmy went cold. That voice—she’d only heard it a few times before, but she’d never forget it. “Voss,” she whispered.
The voice purred, heavy with mockery. “Took you long enough to find me, Lord Vettar. I almost got bored.”