Chapter 9
Aurelion had given them just fifteen minutes to prepare. That’s how it worked. The Guardian folded space and time, and Flash navigated it.
The team had moved out to the hangar floor, where Flash had cleared a working space for the transit.
She stood at the edge of it in her tactical kit, her braid tight, her hands locked at her sides because if she let them loose, she was going to reach for him without permission.
“We link arms, and we stay that way until I take us out.” He looked at her, and her heart skipped a beat.
“When we link, we link completely…as one. I’ll use the destination the Guardian saw in your mind for the exact coordinates on where to leave the stream.
We have to be touching at all times, or you’ll be lost. Do you understand? ”
She nodded. His gray eyes met hers across the four feet of cracked concrete between them, and they were so tired, so wrecked, so carefully careful with her that she nearly broke right there on the hangar floor. When he offered his arm, her chest tightened.
“It’s probably best if you concentrate on where we’re going. I’ll stay out of your way,” she said. The team registered her deflection, the tension thick in the air.
His arm lowered slowly, his shoulders set. He absorbed her refusal in stride with a quiet that was worse than anger would have been, recalibrating in his innumerable way.
She moved past him, keeping her expression neutral like it was no big deal.
But the ink on her ribs sent out a discordant flash of heat that burned like twelve suns.
Even as she heard Flash’s quick intake of breath, she endured the pain, willing it to stop reacting.
She was the master of her own body and soul. She was in control.
Easy looked at his watch. “T-minus sixty seconds.”
She had to keep walking, or she was going to turn around and seek the strength of those comforting arms. The pressure was almost unbearable.
Twister was a safe bet. He'd been watching the exchange with the particular stillness of a medic clocking a patient's pain threshold.
He simply offered his arm, the same offer Flash had made, the one that might simply shatter her if she had accepted, now coming from a man who allowed her to keep her sanity in check.
Twister’s elbow fit to her side as hers fit to his, warm and operational, and she felt the corridor's pressure begin to ramp as Fly stepped to her other side without being asked.
He linked her other arm just as strongly as Twister, the Visionary anchoring her from the second point.
Easy and North were already inside the fold, linked with each other and Flash, waiting.
With the sound like a landing 747, the corridor opened in front of her like a held breath.
The corridor itself wasn't a door, exactly, not a tunnel, exactly. It was a fold in the air. A pressure shift. The light around it bent in a way her eyes didn't want to track. She'd operated in almost every country on every continent, and she'd never seen anything like it.
They were sucked into the vortex in seconds.
She'd thought she was prepared for it. Her training had included many tactical environments that didn't respect human nervous systems. Free fall.
Decompression. Underwater egress. She'd pushed her body through enough wrong physics that she expected to handle whatever Flash's cosmic infrastructure threw at her.
She wasn't prepared for this.
She was inside him. Inside him. The corridor wasn't a space they were traveling through.
It was a structure made of him. Golden threads woven through dark space, each one humming, each one carrying the specific frequency of his soul, and her body was suspended in the weave of those threads the way a moth was suspended in the silk of a web.
She could feel them, each one a distinct and vibrant note in a symphony of impossible strength.
There was the low, steady thrum of Easy, the predator's patience, a hunter's stillness woven into the very fabric of this place. Twister’s calm, healing energy, a balm that only teased and tantalized her.
There was the sharp, clean pulse of Fly, his thread burning with a brilliant, analytical light, constantly calculating, finding the patterns in the chaos.
There was the deep, resonant frequency of North, a sound so solid and unyielding it felt like the bedrock of the universe itself, holding everything together.
Then there was him, running through them all, binding them, supporting them. The threads were Flash carrying them through space on the spun substance of who he was. He was the nexus, the keystone in the arch, the strands of gold that bound them.
She could feel the staggering weight of it, the sheer, crushing force required to hold five other human consciousnesses in this place of fractured physics and screaming entropy, five other souls, safe in an environment that was actively trying to pull them apart.
He was their ship, their atmosphere, and their shield.
The energy it took, the sheer, unrelenting focus required to maintain this structure, to navigate this non-space while protecting everyone within it, was a kind of power she had never conceived of.
It was more brutal than any physical strength, more terrifying than any weapon.
It was the beautiful, devastating power of a man who had accepted a sacred burden, would rather die than let it fall, and she was suspended in the middle of it, held safe in the golden heart of his will.
He couldn't hide anything from her. His exhaustion.
The bone-deep depletion of a man who'd been running on something other than sleep for too long. His grief lived in his chest and made breathing slightly more expensive than it should have been. His restraint. The active, ongoing, costly work of not following her, not pulling her back, not asking her why. His bond. The unmediated connection underneath it, sending fear through her. She’d built her life on curating connection, not cleanly accepting, but gathering.
The thing he couldn't perform or modulate or shape for her comfort.
It was so much more than she'd let herself believe.
It was so much more than she could survive feeling without weeping.
She'd hurt him, deliberately. She could feel it inside the threads, inside his soul.
The refusal had hit him in the chest. He was processing it in real time while he was carrying her through cosmic space.
She'd told herself it was for his safety.
She'd told herself she was the danger and the distance was the protection.
She'd told herself she was being kind, but she shied away from the truth.
She was protecting herself much more than she was protecting him.
That recognition squeezed hard with the same sickening drop she'd felt in the bedroom when his hand passed over her chakana and lit the cross on her skin. The cosmos wasn't letting her hide from what she'd done.
The memory of his hands on her skin, the searing connection of their chakanas answering each other across the space between them, had been a constant, low hum, a promise of a belonging she had never allowed herself to want.
Now, suspended in the impossible beauty of his will, that hum erupted into a roaring, desperate need.
It was a primal, aching hunger that went far beyond the physical, a craving for the solid, grounding weight of him to press her into reality.
She wanted the abrasive scrape of his jaw against her throat, the wet heat of his mouth claiming hers, the taste of his sweat on her tongue.
She wanted to feel the heavy, undeniable proof of his desire, the thick, hard length of him filling her so completely that there was no room left for the void, for the fear, for anything but the overwhelming, possessive rhythm of his body driving into hers, anchoring her soul to his in the only way that truly mattered.
Her body was burning to ash inside the corridor.
The threads carried her anyway. He didn't know what she was experiencing. The corridor was a one-way channel from his weave to her body. He was holding her with everything he had, and he didn't know that she was suspended inside his pain wanting him with a hunger that was about to take her down.
Twister and Fly tightened their line when her knees gave out.
The fold unfolded. The pressure shifted back to normal physics.
The air smelled different. Higher altitude.
Pine and something sharper underneath, mineral, old.
The sun was already low here, late afternoon Peru time, the light coming gold across mossy rock and an open stretch of ground that had once been a courtyard.
Twister steadied her as the transit released her. Fly unlinked. Easy and North were already moving, kit shifted, sidearms checked.
Flash stood six feet from her, his face composed, his eyes flat the way they'd been at the table in her tower, the wreckage tucked inside him where the team wouldn't see it. He looked past her at the terrain and gave the team a quiet order to set perimeter.
She'd hurt him so badly that he couldn't look at her, and she was the only person in the world who knew exactly how badly because she'd just spent thirty seconds inside the spun substance of his soul. His pain and hers mingled in a clawing, aching ball in her gut.
She turned away from him because she didn't trust her face.
She made herself look at the ground. The outskirts of Inti Llaqta lay around her in the late light, the moss-covered stone of her ancestor's seat, the cloud forest rising at the edges, the path to the font visible only because her body knew where it was without being told.
She walked because the woman she'd trained herself to be didn't let pain change her operational tempo. She walked because if she didn't walk, she was going to break. Opening the font alone was the answer, and she had to keep moving toward that answer or admit the answer was wrong.