24. Rhykor #2
"She made me see clearly." The heat in my hands climbs past controlled, and I don't bring it back. "You know exactly how much that changes everything."
He steps off the catwalk edge and drops, wings snapping open above the pits.
Maddis’s shotgun roars to life, giving the alpha team covering fire as they engage Daxos's guard. Leaving the soldiers to my crew, I spread my wings to launch into the thermal updraft to meet the General.
He wants the reactor deck. The rising thermal columns give him a lift advantage, and the compromised ironwork below punishes anyone who loses altitude. I go up to meet him because letting him dictate terms from above is a habit I'm done catering to.
He’s good, a fact evident since our years serving in the same command division.
His rank was earned through genuine capability rather than just politics, and that cybernetic wing offers a distinct functional advantage over standard membranes.
Meticulous ferocity defines his fighting style; each strike is aimed with intentional focus by someone who has never known the need to hold back.
Now, he’s attempting to ground my wings to take away the one advantage my Luvon-born mutations give me over standard Kraaj biology.
I let him think it's working.
We trade three exchanges of wing strikes over the pits.
Every downward thrust of my wings tears the healing membrane further, sending blinding spikes of agony up my spine.
My flight is crippled, restricted to heavy gliding, utilizing the rising heat of the thermal columns to stay airborne while Daxos maneuvers with sickening ease.
One strike connects with my right wing membrane, an old tear Cassia bandaged twice, now splitting open along the seam.
The pain registers—a searing, blinding flash of agony tearing through nerves and wing webbing that had barely finished attempting to heal—but I force myself to file it away.
My regenerative biology is already desperately working to clot the tear, but the damage costs me speed.
Daxos seizes the advantage immediately, driving me lower, closer to the thermal columns.
He speaks while he fights, as he has always treated combat as a platform to deliver judgments rather than a mere competition.
Even now, he maintains that our mate bond is simply a biological override, reiterating that human-Kraaj coexistence is contamination.
And the settlers who built this district before the occupation as people who needed managing.
He says the families in the deep junction shelters, the ones Garrow organized, the ones Cassia spent months treating, are an acceptable population loss in a necessary restructuring.
He believes it. However, the difference from a taunt is that he means it.
I recall the old man I walked through the maintenance tunnel with, feeling the subtle presence of his hand against my arm as he trusted the species that conquered his world because I was his only option.
Elias's cracked teenage voice also echoes in my mind, begging me to bring her back.
My thoughts then drift to the crew members who followed me into these tunnels because they decided one medic underground was worth the risk of everything.
I stop letting him push me lower.
The thermal columns work both directions.
I roll into the rising heat, using the current rather than fighting it, and when Daxos follows the angle I've been presenting him, he catches the updraft wrong.
His cybernetic wing adjusts a half-second slower than an organic membrane would; the precision engineering closes most of the gap, though some remains.
I'm inside his reach before the adjustment completes.
My hands find the gap where the chest plate overlaps the underarm joint.
Composite armor holds against pulse fire, but the seal between panels is a different conversation, and I seat my palms taut against it.
I pour heat through the contact point, working into the internal mechanisms until the cybernetic wing seizes, locking in a half-extended position that throws his entire flight orientation sideways.
We crash into the catwalk.
The ironwork gives under combined impact, a section shearing from the support welds and tipping toward the pit.
We scramble on buckled metal, down to the basics where flight and positioning are gone, and two Kraaj are left fighting on ground that's trying to drop them into a furnace.
His armored knee slams into my thigh, sending a jolt of white-hot pain through my leg.
I counter with an elbow strike to his jaw, but he ignores it, his hand clawing at the burn salve dressing on my shoulder.
He rips the gauze away with enough force to nearly dislocate the joint, settling for the secondary damage of raw, exposed nerves.
He gets a hand around my throat. His grip is massive, zeroing in on the pressure points that disrupt the vascular supply to a Kraaj brain. Tunnel vision narrows my periphery, yet through it I can see his composed face carrying a calm assurance as he already decides how this ends.
"You could have been the greatest weapon we ever produced," he says, genuinely mournful. "Instead you're dying in a drainage tunnel for a human."
What spews from my hands is raw—unmetered, no longer the thermal bursts I use on machinery and circuitry.
It's the reserve I've been holding since the freight bay, since the moment Junia said Cassia's name over the comm and the last of my control tore loose.
I unleash months of restraint built up from the times I walked away from a door I wanted to go through and held the bond at arm's length while it screamed at me to stop running.
The composite armor holds longer than it should because Kraaj engineering is thorough. Sustained thermal load at a contact seal is a different test than pulse fire, and eventually the plating gives at the chest seal with a sound like a gunshot.
Daxos releases me. His face shifts, less surprise, more a man reappraising a threat he assigned the wrong weight. His approach, when it comes, is much quieter.
"The bond was supposed to break you."
"It did, and then it rebuilt me." With a final, agonizing surge of strength, I kick upward, shoving my boot hard into his compromised chest plate.
Unable to balance with his seized cybernetic wing, he tips backward over the sheared edge of the metal and plunges into the pit.
As I hold the catwalk edge and watch the heat take him, the vast, echoing silence that fills the space feels like freedom.
For thirty-four years, inherited ideology had suffocated me, starting with a framework pressed into my hands at fourteen.
Obedience became my currency, literally carved into my body, and I grew up convinced that strength meant the power to destroy.
Any hint of softness was, by that code, a weakness that would eventually cost me my life.
What's underneath is Cassia's voice. I love you. It’s precise as a coordinate and certain as a dosage.
The automated systems register the structural damage and begin cycling through emergency protocols above me. A facility rigged with thermal charges tells you everything you need to know before the countdown finishes its first second. I'm already moving.
Varrik's report crackles through the wrist comm, distant and choppy by interference.
"—charges are primed on the eastern grid; Nysera's codes are working but the window is closing—get deeper, get to Cassia; we'll hold the purge sequence from up here as long as we?—"
Static swallows the rest.
I drop to the lower access point, the vertical shaft that feeds into the deepest infrastructure layer, where Cassia's last confirmed position pulsed through the bond with the relentless, familiar rhythm of an old habit.
The reactor heat follows me down, and I welcome it.
My hands burn with spent reserves refilling slowly while the wing membrane screams along the tear line as my throat aches where Daxos's grip left its mark.
None of it matters.
The connection ignites—Cassia’s pulse is so close now that I can feel the very texture of her nerves, watching as the frantic dissonance of a target in danger gives way to the syncopated, calm relief of a woman who realizes I have come for her with an unwavering and fierce presence.
I push into the dark and run.