20. Rhykor
RHYKOR
The supply run falls apart three blocks from the clinic. We hear the mob before we see it, a roar that swells up from the lower corridors like an earthquake, hundreds of voices tangling into a single wall of sound that makes the floor tremble.
Cassia grabs my arm, and I pull her sideways into a service corridor as the first wave of rioters pours through the junction ahead.
Civilians of humans and Kraaj mix together for once, united by the shared fury of people who've recently learned their own government plans to burn them alive.
They're tearing through the district's infrastructure with bare hands and salvaged tools, ripping apart Kraaj military signage, smashing surveillance equipment, dragging supply crates into the streets, and distributing the contents to anyone who reaches.
The corridors between here and the clinic are flooding fast, and a crowd this size will swallow everything in its path regardless of who's standing where.
"We can't get through." Cassia hugs the wall beside me, med-pack to her chest, her pulse pistol already in her other hand.
She's been running supply drops to the mid-tier shelters all afternoon—burn salve, antibiotics, and the remaining saline bags—and the effort has left her pale underneath the grime, with dark circles hollowing her eyes.
"The main routes are blocked. If we go back the way we came?—"
"They'll have closed off the southern access by now.
" I scan the service corridor. There is a dead end to the left.
To the right, a stairwell leads upward, moving away from the crowd and the clinic to leave the safe positions I've mapped across this district behind.
My wings collapse into a rigid seal against my spine in the narrow space, their tips scraping the walls. "We’re going up."
"Up where?"
"Anywhere that isn't down here."
We climb, and the pre-occupation stairwell features poured concrete and rusted handrails, wide enough for Kraaj wingspan if I angle sideways, and it rises through thirty stories of abandoned residential tower, each appearing more derelict than the last. The sounds of the riot fade as we ascend, changing into the whistle of wind through broken windows and the distant percussion of explosions in Sector Nine.
Cassia keeps pace beside me, one hand on the railing, her breathing even despite the climb.
Thirty flights, and she matches me stride for stride; her pace never falters.
We reach the top floor.
The penthouse is a ruin. Whatever this space was before the occupation, someone's home, maybe, someone who could afford thirty stories of distance from the streets, it's been gutted.
Panoramic windows shattered inward, leaving a carpet of glass that crunches under my boots.
The remains of furniture litter the floor, including a charred frame that might have been a sofa beside the twisted skeleton of a dining table, covered in scraps of fabric that disintegrate when the wind touches them.
An intact ceiling and solid walls shield the room, and at this altitude, the thermal interference rising from the burning sectors below creates a radar shadow that blinds the orbital tracking arrays.
"Four hours," I tell her, checking the sightlines through the empty window frames. The skyline stretches everywhere, broken towers and smoking rooftops and the ugly orange haze that's been hanging over the district since the blackouts started. "Patrol rotations shift at midnight. We move then."
Cassia drops her med-pack against a support column and slides down the concrete until she is sitting on the floor.
It starts as a slow, orderly descent, but halfway through, her control fractures; she surrenders to gravity before her brain can absorb the exhaustion.
With her head tipping back against the cold stone, she finally lets her eyes close.
The bruise above her left eyebrow is a sickly yellow-green, and the raw patch on her shoulder where my vest rubbed her skin during the climb is already darkening toward purple.
I stand at the window and watch the city burn.
The view from up here turns District Seventeen into an abstract painting where patterns of light and shadow blend into the geometric sprawl of failing infrastructure, with fires blooming orange across a landscape I am watching disintegrate.
Somewhere down there, Britt holds the compound perimeter.
At the same time, Varrik coordinates supply drops to the sublevel bunker.
Somewhere, Elias hunches over a signal array, mapping corrupted relay networks with the obsessive focus a teenager brings when deciding the world’s problems are solvable if you run enough simulations.
And somewhere, underneath all of it, the thing that started everything continues to grow.
My hands ache. The thermal reserves I've been burning through drop past the point where discipline can compensate. I feel it in the joints of my wings, a grinding fatigue that turns microadjustments into a negotiation, and in my palms, where the heat that usually runs constant and controllable now flickers erratically, spiking and dimming without my permission. In the gathering dark, my forearm’s network of old wounds glows faintly, ancient combat markings thrumming with residual energy beyond my control.
"You're overheating."
I turn, and Cassia watches me from the floor, those eyes tracking the shimmer around my hands with the remedial focus that surfaces whenever my biology performs actions she considers medically unreasonable.
"I'm fine."
"Your hands are flickering. You've been running at combat output nonstop, and the thermal distortion around your forearms is visible from across the room.
" She pushes herself upright, wincing at a discomfort in her shoulder.
"Sit down before you melt through the floor and drop us both thirty stories. "
"The perimeter needs?—"
"The perimeter is thirty stories below us, and there's nothing up here except broken glass, bad air, and me." She points at the floor beside her. "Sit."
As I sit, the concrete groans under my weight, and my wings splay outward across the dusty floor, too exhausted to fold properly.
The moment I stop moving, the fatigue hits like a wall, my muscles locking up simultaneously, the accumulated damage crashing through the adrenaline that's been keeping me vertical.
Cassia shifts closer. Her med-pack materializes in her lap, and she pulls out antiseptic wipes and a roll of gauze with the automatic efficiency of hands that have performed this ritual a thousand times. "Take the vest off. Let me see what you've been hiding."
"Nothing that needs?—"
"Rhykor, vest off now."
I reach back and blindly release the magnetic wing-clasps, then strip the heavy vest over my head. The fabric sticks to a fresh scrape across my left shoulder blade, and I grit my teeth when it pulls free. Cassia's hands are on me immediately.
"Couple of surface burns. A scrape on your flank that opened up again.
" She probes along the wing membrane, clicking her tongue.
"And the membrane tear on your right wing is pulling apart at the edges.
You've been flying on this? District Seventeen spans many miles, and you've been forcing altitude with compromised lifting muscles. "
"Riding the thermal drafts from the fires," I correct roughly. "Gliding, mostly."
"Oh, well, gliding. That makes it perfectly reasonable.
" She dabs antiseptic along the burn, and the sting barely registers through the deeper ache radiating from everywhere else.
"You are the worst patient I have ever treated, and I once stitched up a man who tried to reset his own broken jaw with a wrench. "
The laugh catches me off guard. It scrapes out of my chest unbidden, rough, abbreviated, and closer to a cough than anything resembling humor, but it's real. And from Cassia’s hands pausing against my skin for half a second, I know she heard it too.
She works through the injuries in silence after that.
Cleaning, wrapping, and applying salve to the membrane tear with a softness that leaves my skin humming.
Her breath warms the skin between my shoulder blades.
Her fingers trace the edges of old ceremonial markings as she navigates around them, and the point of contact radiates through my awareness until the pain recedes and the only thing left is her.
She has become a gravitational constant.
Beyond the chemical sting of antiseptic, I feel her warmth thread through, accompanied by the frantic, audible rhythm of a heart racing from the climb.
As the world outside the windows tears itself apart, her hands remain changeless and sure against my skin, anchoring me to her steady pulse.
"I need to tell you something." The confession grinds out of me without permission, dragging from somewhere below strategy and discipline—from the place where the bond lives, coiling around my spine, wound so tight now that breathing around it takes effort.
"And you must carefully hear it as what it is, not what it sounds like. "
Her hands are still on my back. "Okay."
I glance down at the floor. The glass shards catch the firelight from outside, throwing tiny reflections across the concrete.
A heavy pressure gnaws against the inside of my ribs, demanding release, a confession that's been building since the night she seared her palm over the markings on my chest and told me she loved me, and I stood there mute because the size of what I felt dwarfed every language I've ever spoken.