Chapter 76
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
AIRIK
Nora…means…light.
His light. She had always been meant to be his. From the moment she’d been born and given her name.
Airik watched Nora’s face for a long time, unwilling to close the glass lid, a ruinous ache growing in his chest with each beat of his heart.
He wished it were fatal. The puncture over his chest didn’t bleed enough to kill him, but he hoped it would.
He wanted to climb into the chamber with Nora so that when he died, their limbs would be twisted together and decay with one another.
When the suns would swallow this planet billions of years from now, all that would be left of their bodies would burn together, and finally there would be no him without her.
She had only been a few weeks of his life. But it had been enough for her to become his whole heart.
He sank to his knees, pressing his forehead against the cold side of the regeneration chamber. The metal handles of the chamber shook and deformed in his fists as he gripped them.
Nora’s death was inevitable. The biological metrics displayed over the chamber confirmed it.
Everything was too slow or not enough—her heartbeat, the oxygen in her blood.
Activity in her brain had also slowed, though that could have been the heart-slowing serum Aelior had given him, which he’d injected into Nora’s heart, perhaps killing her.
Airik could no more keep Nora alive than he could stop the suns from setting on this day.
If he’d ever doubted the existence of gods, he was sure now.
To let him feel Nora’s warmth and then strip it away was a specific torment, intelligently designed to punish him for daring to love a single life when all he had done was take them from others.
On the floor beside the regeneration chamber, silver glinted. Nora’s chain. Frantically, he retrieved it, then shoved his hand into his pocket, searching for the cross pendant. To make things whole. To fix things.
Nothing. He must’ve lost it earlier in the gravity field. The last parts of her world, and now it was gone.
He slammed his eyes shut. Pressure built in a chaotic pitch behind his ribs, where Nora had filled his heart with stars and set him aflame.
He clutched his chest, gasping, as something horrible and ugly surged within him.
Airik collapsed under its weight, falling to his knees, facing the ceiling where, beyond the silver hull, lay a sky that would give him no answers.
A roar burst from the pit of his chest. A deep, sucking hole that had torn open, threatening the light of all around it. Every surface of the room rang with the pained screams.
Again. And again. And again. Until all he could do was emit hoarse, weakened cries, begging for this anguish to end.
For long minutes, he sat in the silence, deadly in its finality. Knowing he wasted time, but without direction.
The drozekar’s voice chimed in the hall—someone was speaking to it.
Tucking the chain back into his pocket, he didn’t close Nora’s chamber, afraid that the next time he opened it, she wouldn’t be there.
Like a man walking through a nightmare, Airik found himself in the command hall. Nearly all traces of what had just happened had vanished. Hygiene bots swept the floor, spraying antiseptic where blood had pooled.
The vruukar—Iver—not yet noticing Airik, knelt beside the captive, stroking her head over the layers of cloth. She lay unmoving beside a small sack.
Reclaiming his sword, Airik’s throat tightened as his eyes fixed on a massive form lying on the floor and a smaller creature beside it.
Torren and Lucky had been placed together, both soaked, perhaps the vruukar’s doing to clean them.
Incapable of shedding even a single tear more, Airik sank beside his forgemate’s body. Torren was nearly split through his center, only two narrow strips of flesh holding his chest to his lower torso.
The word fragile and Torren had never existed in the same realm. But now, one wrong twist could break him in half.
“Help me,” Airik choked out, stupidly checking Torren’s throat for a pulse.
Iver got up, then came with a limp, stopping just short of his reach.
“He’s too broken,” Airik said, trying to mask his anger. “I cannot take him to the chamber alone.”
Iver muffled a gasp but didn’t step back. “He is missing part of his spine.”
“I know.”
“He is missing most of his lungs. There’s no air moving within him. His blood is dead.”
Torren’s eyes were closed, but his body didn’t feel cold.
Airik didn’t understand the mechanisms that made a prime or the traits their bodies had been engineered to possess.
The few who were allowed to live were wildly different from one another, yet all were enhanced in some way.
Even Torren didn’t seem to understand the limits of what he could do.
But if Torren’s body could reject the Veynari’s oath—an imminent mark meant to punish the strongest—then he could withstand even death.
“It doesn’t matter. He will heal.”
“He is missing his heart,” Iver said louder. “Nothing can replace a heart. And even if it somehow grows back, this man will never walk again.” He turned to go. “Absolutely not! I’ve already gained enough marks against my soul today. The Devil won’t let so much debt go unpaid—”
Airik’s arm shot out, gripping Iver’s ankle. With a hard tug, he dropped him to the floor. “I did not permit you to leave.”
Iver stared at him, mouth agape. His fangs dripped a thick fluid, which he quickly licked away. “He is not alive,” he said, trying to yank his leg free from Airik’s grasp, but he’d lost too much blood, and Airik held him fast.
“He is also not dead.”
“Torture,” Iver growled. “Do you know the word?”
Tightening his grip on Iver’s ankle until the vruukar grunted in pain, Airik answered in a harsh hiss, “Yes.”
“Then you know if you put him in the chamber, you’re prolonging his death.” He cast a regretful glance at Torren. “I don’t know what in God’s name they’ve done to him, but whatever magic animated him—it’s gone. Let him go—”
“I won’t!” Airik’s chest heaved with strained breath. He wanted to gut this man right here, right now. But he needed his help, and his reckoning would come later. “You have already failed once today—letting Nora go. If you fail twice, I will make it so you cannot fail again.”
Iver’s jaw twitched. “There’s nothing left of you, is there? Not a shred of humanity—ironic to use the term, I know. But you’ll live to regret this. Whatever happens to him, he won’t forgive you.”
“I don’t want his forgiveness. I want him alive and angry with me.
” The vruukar’s leg was thick, but if Airik wanted, he could snap his ankle so he couldn’t escape.
But in this moment, with Nora’s heart beating above him as a reminder, sinking into violence would accomplish nothing. “Brother—do you know the word?”
The vruukar let out a sharp exhale. “I…do,” he replied quietly. He looked to Torren, hesitating. But then he stopped resisting and made a tight nod. “All right. Whatever his princely highness wants.”
Satisfied that the word brother had stunned Iver into compliance, Airik let him go. Both men rose and lifted Torren together. Iver held his legs, and Airik carefully supported his upper body, refusing to look where the sharp ends of Torren’s ribs poked through skin as they took him back.
The second regeneration chamber whirred to life, and the instant Torren was laid in its bed, a cannula extended from the matrix and inserted into his remaining arm.
“Maybe you don’t realize this because you’re wild,” Iver said, lingering in the doorway, “but his injuries are well beyond the capabilities of a chamber—”
“I know the capabilities of a chamber.” Airik pulled the glass lid of the enclosure around Torren, then flipped the latch to seal him in.
A metric panel flickered on, displaying no signs of systemic life and a negligible amount of basal-cellular activity that he didn’t know how to interpret.
“All of my life, I have been reminded of what a chamber can and cannot do.”
He pushed past Iver to collect Lucky, who still made a broken purr—an attempt to soothe and heal himself.
“My good boy,” he whispered, placing a kiss on Lucky’s head.
His fur was bloodstained beyond recognition.
Another life Airik had carried and failed.
He should never have left Torren and him behind.
Mistakes burned even harder when witnessed from the future’s perspective.
But even now, shame gnawed at him because he would’ve done the same.
Left them both behind to return to Nora.
Maybe if he’d done it sooner, she’d still be with him.
Cradling Lucky, Airik returned to the regeneration room. Iver had already left, going around the drozekar in the opposite direction to avoid crossing paths with him.
Airik stood over Nora’s still-open chamber, holding Lucky to his chest. “I am ashamed,” he said into the fur of Lucky’s ears, which had only hours earlier been stroked and cherished.
“But—I need to ask more of you. Find her. Our Nora. I think if anyone can find her in the dark, it is you. Bring her back to me—” He swallowed tears that somehow formed despite the exhaustion setting in.
“Bring her back, and you come back, too. You are ours.”
Lucky stirred, making a raspy squeak. His left eye cracked open, just enough for a slitted pupil to focus on Airik, a fervor in his gaze as if to say: I hear you. I’ll find our Nora—because I am a good boy.
Before Airik could praise him, Lucky’s eye slid shut, releasing a strained sigh.
There was just enough space beneath Nora’s feet for their ooshi. Airik carefully straightened his tail, correcting the broken kinks while murmuring apologies, then placed the tip in Nora’s loose grasp. This was how Lucky would lead Nora from the river of death that flowed away from Airik.
With nothing left to do, he pulled the glass cover over Nora and Lucky, but just as the chamber’s hinges activated, Airik threw the lid back open.
He buried his face in the curve of Nora’s neck, breathing her in.
Kisses—she liked his kisses. She said they were perfect.
So he pressed dozens of them to her, trying to lure her back to him.
Her delicate eyelids that fluttered when he touched her, just as she liked.
Her golden cheeks that had deepened a shade from their time in the suns.
Her nose that she’d scrunch when he made a stern statement.
The dip at the base of her throat that he’d taste after they loved each other’s bodies.
The soft skin between her breasts that had become his only refuge.
The haunting blue color of her lips had returned, but he pressed his lips against hers anyway.
“Good night, demon eyes,” he said, hoping his words would reach her.
Once Airik closed and latched the lid, a dense mix of oxygen and sedative gas filled the chamber. Fog obscured her.
He stumbled back, feeling the immense weight of his sword on his belt. Torren’s metrics showed no heartbeat, but Nora’s did—weak and irregular.
“Drozekar, amplify the sound of her heart—I need to hear it in the command hall.”
The ship obeyed, pumping the slow lub-dub of Nora’s dying heart through the halls.