Chapter 5 #2
By barrel five my arms are screaming and sweat plasters my hair to my temples. Flynn's tee shirt is soaked through, clinging to topography I'm deliberately not cataloging. We haven't spoken in twenty minutes. The only sounds are steel on clay, breathing, and the wet slap of soil turning over.
By barrel nine he reaches across to adjust my grip on the paddle. His hand covers mine entirely. Fingers closing over rubber-gloved knuckles, repositioning my wrist angle, and he holds on for exactly two seconds longer than the correction requires.
By barrel fourteen I'm so exhausted I stumble. His arm catches my waist. Pulls me upright. His palm spreads across my lower back, hot through my overalls, and my spine arches into the contact.
He lets go. Steps back. Picks up his paddle.
"Three more."
My lower back burns where his hand was. An afterimage. A brand.
"Three more," I repeat.
We finish barrel seventeen as the sun drops below the garage door's frame.
Orange light floods the concrete floor, catches the dust motes swirling between us, turns everything amber and gold.
We're both wrecked. Filthy. Breathing hard.
I'm leaning against barrel twelve and he's braced against the workbench and the space between us is maybe four feet and full of volcanicite dust and something else entirely.
Flynn clears his throat.
"Your technique improved significantly by barrel eleven."
A laugh rips out of me. Raw, breathless, aching. "Was that a compliment?"
His runes flicker. Just once.
"It was an observation."
I open my mouth to fire back something sharp—something about how his "observations" sound a lot like flirting in a language that forgot to include fun—but the words die on my tongue.
Because Flynn is rolling up the sleeves of his ruined shirt, methodical, precise, fold over fold, and the runes on his forearms are telling a story.
Not the glowing ones. The others.
Scars. Dozens of them. White-silver against moss-green, layered so thick in places they form ridges.
Some are clean, surgical. Others are ragged, torn, healed wrong.
They run underneath the runic tattoos like a palimpsest, the ink laid over damage so old the skin has forgotten its original texture.
One scar wraps his left wrist entirely—a shackle mark, unmistakable, the kind that comes from metal worn too long against skin that was still growing.
He catches me looking. His hands stop mid-fold.
The garage goes quiet. No paddle strikes, no breathing. Just the hum of fluorescent tubes and the settling clicks of cooling soil.
"Warband."
One word. Dropped like a stone into still water.
"I was eleven when they conscripted my village.
" He doesn't look at me. His fingers resume folding the sleeve, mechanical now, precise the way a person is precise when precision is the only thing between them and something they'd rather not visit.
"Eight years in the Khar'voth campaign. They didn't organize supply lines.
Didn't maintain weapons. Didn't bury the dead in rows. "
His hand closes around the workbench. The steel frame whines.
"Everything was chaos. No structure. No patterns. Just blood and mud and noise, and if you stopped moving, you stopped breathing."
The fluorescent light catches the shackle scar. Pale as bone.
"When I got out, I bought a lawn mower." A breath that's almost a laugh, if a laugh could be made of broken glass. "First thing. Before food. Before a bed. A lawn mower and a measuring tape and a bag of grass seed. Because if I could make one patch of ground stay exactly how I put it—"
He stops.
His jaw locks. The rune over his sternum—the serpent and moon—has gone completely dark.
I don't say anything.
I don't say I'm sorry, because sorry is a bandage over a wound that needs air. I don't say I understand, because I don't. I've never been eleven in a warband. I've never needed a lawn mower to feel safe.
Instead I pick up the garden hose coiled on its labeled hook by the garage door.
"Give me your arm."
His head turns. Amber eyes narrow.
"Why."
"Because you're covered in volcanicite powder and you just told me it has a pH of eleven point four and will strip skin. Your arm, Flynn."
He looks at his forearm. Grey dust caked into the creases of his scars, packed into the channels between runic lines, crusted along the shackle mark like ash on old iron. He's been so focused on the barrels he hasn't noticed.
Slowly, like a drawbridge lowering one chain at a time, he extends his arm.
I turn the hose on. Low pressure. The water runs cool and clear over my thumb as I test the flow, then I cup my hand under his wrist and guide the stream across his skin.
The dust runs off in grey rivulets. Underneath, the scars emerge clean.
The runes catch the water and refract it, throwing tiny prismatic sparks across the garage walls, and his skin is warm under my palm, warmer than the water, warmer than any skin should be.
My fingers trace the path of the hose stream without meaning to, following the channels, clearing the powder from each scar like an archaeologist brushing sediment from something ancient and worth keeping.
His hand trembles.
Barely. A vibration so slight I'd miss it if my fingers weren't pressed to his pulse point. But they are. And his pulse is hammering. Fast, hard, the beat of something caged hitting the bars.
I don't look up. He doesn't pull away.
Water pools in the hollow of his palm. Overflows.
Runs between his fingers and drips onto the pristine concrete floor, and he lets it.
This orc who counts aphids and labels his label maker and needs the world to hold still—he stands in his cathedral of order and lets muddy water stain his floor because my hand is on his arm and neither of us is breathing right.
The hose stream catches the shackle scar.
My thumb follows. Press gently into the ridge.
He gasps. A single, sharp intake that echoes off the pegboard walls.
I look up.
His eyes are molten. Pupils blown so wide the amber is just a thin ring, and the serpent rune over his heart ignites—sudden, fierce, green-gold fire that throws our shadows against the garage ceiling in sharp relief. His lips part. My fingers tighten on his wrist.
The sky screams.
Not metaphorically. The actual sky outside the garage door opens its throat and produces a sound like sheet metal tearing, and something black and chitinous and horribly alive pours through the orange sunset in a writhing column.
Beetles.
Hundreds of them. Each fist-sized carapaces gleaming with an iridescent sheen that no natural insect produces, mandibles catching the dying light like paired scimitars. They spiral once—a tight, organized helix that speaks of magical breeding and deliberate intent—then dive.
Straight for my yard.
Straight for my orchids.
"No. No, no, no—"
The first wave hits my prize Cattleya like a chainsaw hitting silk.