27. Cassia
CASSIA
The tunnels come down behind us in stages.
That's the only mercy in it—the collapse travels outward from the reactor core in waves rather than all at once, each detonation giving us three, maybe four seconds before the next section of ceiling follows the last. I count the intervals like I’m counting a patient's pulse, using the rhythm to pace us, and Rhykor moves on those counts because moving is all either of us has left.
He weighs more than anything I've ever carried.
The physics of it are laughable because one human woman is hauling a seven-foot Kraaj male through a collapsing tunnel system while her shoulder screams and her boots slip on dust-covered stone.
His arm across my shoulders bows my spine.
Every step requires a renegotiation with gravity that I win by centimeters and stubbornness alone.
His wings drag behind us, too damaged to fold properly, the torn membrane catching on debris and ripping further with each snag, and when it catches, he makes a sound deep in his chest that tells me how much he's swallowing.
"Keep moving," I mutter, mostly at myself.
"I’m moving," he rasps.
"Faster."
A deep, prolonged groan vibrates through the bedrock above us; infrastructure pushed past its tolerance is finally splintering and sighing into defeat.
A support strut somewhere ahead buckles with a crack that echoes through the shaft, and the ceiling ahead drops six inches before catching on a lateral beam.
I pull Rhykor left toward the maintenance access Britt mapped, a narrower route, but the walls are solid pre-occupation stone rather than the military construction that's currently deciding to become rubble around us.
He fits through the opening by compressing his wings flat against his back, a movement that drags another suppressed sound from him, and then we're in the maintenance shaft, and the air is cleaner and the ceiling holds.
The wrist comm crackles to life, signal finally punching through as we climb higher, the relay towers above catching what the deep rock swallowed, and Britt's voice cuts in mid-sentence.
"—northern access open. Thirty yards ahead, right branch.
Move fast, the lateral supports on the main shaft are going. "
"Copy." I adjust Rhykor's arm across my shoulders and push forward. "We're moving."
We round the corner into the northern shaft and run straight into Varrik's advance team—four crew members and a handful of civilians who made it through the eastern collapse, all of them battered and gray with dust. Two of them take Rhykor's weight instantly, and the relief that floods my legs is so sudden I stumble. Nobody comments on it, and we move.
The thirty yards takes four minutes. Every step is a negotiation; Rhykor's legs function in a loose, unreliable way that suggests the damage from the overload affects his motor pathways, and twice he goes down on one knee and the crew members haul him back up through sheer collective refusal to accept the alternative.
The wrist comm pulses green the entire time, Elias's partition still running, still capturing everything, the recording I started in the core chamber now containing the full confession of a machine intelligence that has been hunting us for longer than either of us has been alive.
The northern access opens into gray morning light.
Britt is there, and Dessik, and six crew members who look like they've spent the night fighting their way through burning tunnels because they have.
Varrik stands back, leaning on his cane, his face carrying an expression I've seen exactly once before, a veteran's face when someone walks out of a fight that should have killed them, still processing the math of it.
Rhykor raises his head and finds the old war captain across the distance.
Varrik dips his chin once. The acknowledgment carries everything neither of them will say.
We get Rhykor to the compound on a cargo sled because walking is no longer a viable option.
Rhykor stops arguing about it halfway there, which frightens me more than anything else that has happened today.
His body has simply overruled him, and the implications of that keep my hands moving, periodically checking his pulse while monitoring the blistering skin of his forearms alongside the rise and fall of his chest with the obsessive focus I reserve for patients I refuse to lose.
His presence feels fragile, stretching thin like a wire pulled past its tensile limit.
The empathy of the bond works both ways now; every stutter of his damaged heart echoes as a hollow, phantom flutter in my own chest, a sympathetic ache that leaves me gasping if I focus on it too long.
The deep, grounding energy he normally radiates fractures into something arrhythmic and labored.
He's alive, and I repeat it at each check of his pulse like a medical finding rather than a prayer because the prayer version is too fragile to say out loud right now.
Once he's stable on the table with his vitals running and burns dressed as Britt stations herself at the door—I step into the corridor and find Junia already moving toward me.
Junia meets me with a new data-pad along with three separate comm units, displaying the manic, electric focus she gets when scattered pieces finally click into place at once.
"The recording from your wrist comm," she says, falling into step beside me before I've fully cleared the doorway.
"Elias built the comm to cache recordings locally to the device's hard drive while out of range.
The second you climbed high enough into the maintenance shaft to hit a relay tower, the comm unleashed a data burst upload to Elias's array.
Once you surfaced, he had the full partition.
" She holds up the data-pad. "I've spent the last two hours splicing Nysera's supply chain documentation with the infrastructure corruption data I mapped from the relay network. All that’s left is to scan those physical Precursor slates you have in your med-pack to add their translated texts to the broadcast." I pull the heavy slates from my pack and hand them over, watching as she quickly feeds the ancient text through her scanner.
“The words Legion said to you. The admissions about the manufactured outbreaks, the engineered attacks, the targeted purge.
Daxos's authorization chain. All of it is sourced and timestamped, cross-referenced against physical evidence.
" Her eyes find mine above the pad. "I want to broadcast it.
Right after I finish with the Precursor slates, across the open frequencies in the district.
Human channels, Kraaj channels, military and civilian both. "
I look back through the med bay doorway at Rhykor on the table. The blistering on his forearms has spread past his elbows, and the intricate scarwork on his chest shows through the tears in his vest as raised, angry lines against skin that has gone from dark crimson to char at the edges.
"Do it," I tell her.
Junia's fingers move across the pad.
The broadcast reaches the district in fragments and then all at once.
From the med bay where I am working on Rhykor's burns, I hear Junia’s voice take over the open frequency, unwavering and precise as she narrates the evidence streaming across the receivers in District Seventeen.
Legion's own words play back through altered speakers and salvaged comm units. The machine's synthetic admissions ring out: the outbreaks were manufactured, the purge authorization was engineered. Then comes Nysera's documentation, exposing Daxos's cipher on the transfer orders.
Finally, the translated text from the Precursor slates I carried out of the core chamber plays.
The revelation washes over the district's receivers.
Humans and Kraaj share an ancient, genetically engineered origin.
The fated mate connection constitutes a purposefully seeded architecture fashioned to draw the two species together, rather than a mere mutant anomaly.
The realization that we were literally made for each other, that the divisions and hatreds between us are a lie built over a shared destiny, strikes the district like a thunderclap.
I work on Rhykor's burns and listen to the district respond.
It starts as noise, shouting from the outer corridors, the compound's perimeter guards relaying what they're hearing from the streets.
Then Dessik patches the surface feeds through to the med bay comm unit so that I can hear the voices from across sectors, human and Kraaj alike, as they process the same information simultaneously and arrive at the same conclusion.
The anger that comes through the feeds is enormous.
But underneath it, a different current, a stunned, fragile recognition, is spreading through the district like heat through metal, the collective understanding spreading through a population that has spent decades blaming each other for the damage a third party engineered.
Wen appears in the doorway; she walked from the clinic when the broadcast started, she tells me later, because she needed to see for herself. "The streets are filling up."
"I know."
"People are standing still and listening," she says, and then pauses. "Both kinds."
I look up from Rhykor's forearm long enough to read her face, then go back to work.
The burn treatment requires full concentration—Kraaj tissue responds differently to standard protocols, the cellular repair mechanisms creating complications that human medicine lacks the framework to navigate.
I improvise and cross-reference everything Rhykor's biology has taught me over months of stitching him back together after various disasters, and I work through the damage layer by layer with the focused patience of someone who decides that patience is the only tool that matters right now.