24. Leah
LEAH
It happens fast. Too fast.
One second I’m sprinting behind Kalev through the fractured access corridor, boots splashing through ankle-deep coolant runoff, the next—an explosion erupts from the ventilation grate overhead, a sharp concussive boom that sucks the air out of my lungs and punches heat across my back.
The blast slams me sideways into the wall. Bone hits steel. Pain blooms.
I go down hard, my right leg twisting under me at a wrong angle. Something cracks. Not a clean break—no, this feels messier. Searing heat flares from my thigh to my ankle, and the second I try to push up, lightning shoots through my entire side. I scream through clenched teeth.
I don’t remember falling, but I remember the noise—the metallic grind of my armor against the grated floor, the splash of blood, the guttural shout from Kalev up ahead.
“LEAH!”
His voice snaps me out of the fog.
I try to stand. My leg buckles instantly, dead weight, and agony follows like shadow. “Fuck. Gods?—”
Pain blinds me. Not the kind that screams like an alarm but the deep, throbbing kind that sets into bone and doesn’t let go. My leg’s fucked—twisted somewhere back in the last hallway when the concussive charge went off. I didn’t even register the fall until I saw blood seeping through my boot.
Now, every step feels like I’m dragging dead weight. Mine.
Kalev won’t stop. He doesn’t ask, doesn’t check—just loops an arm around my waist and keeps moving. Half-dragging, half-carrying me through the narrowing maze of corridors. His breath is hard in my ear. Wet. His grip tightens every time I falter.
“Don’t look back,” he growls. “Just keep your eyes on the light ahead.”
There isn’t much light—just strips of flickering white hanging overhead, a few still trying to fight back the encroaching dark. But I nod. I trust him. Even when my vision sways and my lungs burn and my body screams for rest.
“You’re hurt too,” I mutter.
“Not like you.”
“Kalev—”
“Later.”
There’s steel in his tone that brooks no argument. I know it. I hate it.
The passage narrows into a utility crawl, the walls sweating condensation. I catch the tang of ferrofluid—burned wiring and old coolant. It clings to my tongue, sour and metallic.
He ducks low and pulls me with him, one hand steadying my head so I don’t smack into the pipe above us. Every movement is intentional. Brutal. Efficient.
“You’re not carrying me through the whole evac,” I snap, trying to push against him. “I’m not dead weight.”
He doesn’t stop.
I fight harder, hands braced against his chest. His heart is hammering under my palms—too fast. Too wild. His eyes flash, not angry, but something close to grief.
“You’re not,” he says quietly. “That’s why you’re getting out.”
“No.”
I see it in his face before he says anything else. That decision. The one I wasn’t supposed to notice.
“You bastard—don’t you dare.”
We break into the final corridor—a straight shot lined with evac pods. One remains undamaged, open, humming with low power. The others are charred out husks.
He drags me toward it.
I start to fight for real now. Elbows and fists and curses. He absorbs every hit like it means nothing. Like I mean everything.
The console bleeps. His fingers fly across it. Coordinates. Clearance codes. Automated trajectory.
“Kalev, stop!”
He doesn’t.
“STOP!”
I scream it, but the pod is powering up.
He spins, hauls me against his chest.
“I’m buying you time,” he whispers. “Don’t waste it.”
And before I can breathe, before I can scream again, he shoves me inside and slams the hatch shut.
“Kalev—!”
My voice hits the inside of the pod and comes back wrong. Tinny. Too small. The interior lights stutter on, washing everything in a sterile blue that makes my hands look like they belong to someone else. The harness snaps tight around my chest and thighs before I can rip it loose.
“No. No, no, no?—”
I slam my palms against the viewport. My injured leg screams, a white-hot lance of pain shooting up my spine, but I don’t even feel it properly. Not compared to this. Not compared to watching him on the other side of reinforced glass.
Kalev stands just outside the pod, one hand braced on the hull like he’s steadying himself.
Like he’s steadying me.
His chest is heaving. Blood still runs down his arm in slow, sticky lines, dripping onto the deck plates. His eyes are locked on mine.
And he’s calm.
Too calm.
“Open it!” I scream, clawing at the emergency release. “Open the fucking hatch, Kalev, I swear to God?—”
He shakes his head once.
Slow. Final.
My throat closes around a sound that isn’t a word.
“You don’t get to decide this alone!” I shout. “You don’t get to?—”
He leans forward, presses his palm flat to the viewport.
I mirror it without thinking.
Glass between us.
Always glass. Always something.
His mouth moves.
The pod’s audio channel crackles to life.
“Leah,” he says softly.
I sob. Just once. It tears out of me, ugly and animal and humiliating.
“You don’t get to do this,” I whisper. “You don’t get to leave me.”
His jaw tightens.
“I’m not leaving you,” he says. “I’m staying so you can go.”
“That’s the same thing!”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
The pod begins its countdown.
EVAC TRAJECTORY LOCKED. T-MINUS 30 SECONDS.
My pulse roars in my ears.
“Kalev, please,” I choke. “I can still move. I can still shoot. I can?—”
He cuts me off, voice suddenly sharp.
“You can’t run. And you won’t leave me behind.”
The truth of it hits like a blow to the sternum.
“You bastard,” I whisper.
His mouth twitches. Almost a smile.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “I know.”
Behind him, at the far end of the corridor, shadows shift.
Movement.
Armed figures pour into the blown-out service bay—Coalition gear, League markings, rifles already up.
They fan out fast.
Professional.
Efficient.
Too many.
My blood turns to ice.
“Kalev,” I whisper. “They’re behind you.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t turn around.
He lifts both hands slowly.
Empty.
Open.
A ripple of shouts echoes down the corridor.
“ON YOUR KNEES!”
“DROP TO THE FLOOR, NOW!”
“HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM!”
My vision tunnels.
“No,” I say. “No, no, no—don’t you dare?—”
He glances back at them once.
Then he looks at me again.
And lowers himself to his knees.
The sound it makes—armor plating hitting metal deck—will live inside my skull forever.
I scream his name.
He flinches.
Just a little.
“Look at me,” he says quietly into the comm.
I’m sobbing now. Full-body, lungs tearing, snot-and-tears sobbing.
“I am,” I choke. “I’m looking at you.”
His eyes soften.
“Listen to me,” he says. “You live. You get out. You heal. You go somewhere they can’t touch you. You wait.”
“For what?” I scream. “For your execution broadcast?!”
He shakes his head, just barely.
“For me.”
My heart cracks.
The soldiers close in around him.
One of them kicks his rifle away.
Another yanks his hands behind his back and slams restraints around his wrists.
He doesn’t fight.
Not even a little.
The pod shudders as its engines spool.
T-MINUS 10 SECONDS.
“I love you,” I say.
It falls out of my mouth before I can stop it.
The words feel like a grenade going off in my chest.
His eyes go wide.
Just for a second.
Then something in him caves in.
He bows his head.
When he looks back up, his voice is wrecked.
“I know,” he says.
Then the pod drops.
The floor falls out from under me and my scream tears loose as the launch rails slam me backward into the harness.
The viewport blurs.
The service bay shrinks.
Kalev gets smaller.
Smaller.
Gone.
The sky above Yareth Prime is the color of bruised steel.
Cloud layers shear past the viewport as the pod punches through the upper atmosphere, rattling violently as turbulence batters the hull.
My body is still convulsing.
I taste blood.
I can’t stop shaking.
“Kalev,” I whisper into the empty pod. “Kalev, Kalev, Kalev?—”
There’s no answer.
Just the whine of engines.
Just the cold, automated voice counting down orbital insertion.
I press my forehead to the viewport.
“I’m sorry,” I sob. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
I see it over and over again.
His knees hitting the deck.
His hands behind his back.
The way he looked at me like he was carving my face into his memory because he knew he’d never see it again.
He chose this.
He chose death.
For me.
The grief hits before the pod even clears orbit.
It hits like a physical thing.
Like someone punched a hole straight through my ribcage and left me bleeding out into vacuum.
I curl inward, clutching my stomach, my chest, my ruined leg—anything I can hold onto that still exists.
My sobs echo off the inside of the pod.
I don’t care.
There is no dignity left in me.
Only loss.
Only the terrible, unbearable knowledge that the man I love just surrendered himself to monsters so I could live.
And I don’t know how I’m supposed to live with that.