3. Olivia
OLIVIA
T he heat sinks into both palms at once and I don't pull back, which says a lot about how much my pain threshold has improved in the last few hours.
It’s not like touching a hot stove. A hot stove is a clean shock — contact, register, withdraw, the whole transaction over in a tenth of a second.
This is the opposite of that.
This is my palms pressing into something solid the way a promise from a used car salesman is technically a guarantee, and the heat doesn't spike and recede, it climbs , building in layers from the surface inward, through skin and into the tissue beneath it.
My hands are telling me a series of increasingly urgent things that I am choosing not to act on.
It’s okay, I tell myself. When we respawn, this pain will be over. This is temporary. Everything is going to be all right.
I had burn patients before. I know what a partial thickness burn looks like.
I am currently giving myself one on both hands simultaneously while standing in a volcanic arena in space, and the most alarming thing I can say about this moment is that it is not in my top three most alarming moments of the last forty minutes.
I hold position.
The sigil flares.
The Crown above it blazes white-hot and then the pulse comes — not from the Crown, from everywhere , from the ground and the air and the inside of my chest simultaneously, a concussive wave with no sound attached to it, just force, rolling outward from the pedestal in all directions.
“Hold on!” Goldie bellows. “Don’t let go!”
For a second, nothing happens.
Then the barrier slams into existence.
It doesn't build. Doesn't shimmer up gradually like something politely establishing itself.
It arrives, complete and total, curved translucent bands of light snapping into place from ground to apex in a single instant, and the air inside changes immediately — pressure, temperature, sound, all of it shifting by a degree I feel in my eardrums and my sinuses and the back of my throat.
Outside, I watch Four-Arms run directly into it.
He doesn't see it coming. He is mid-stride, closing the last ten yards at a speed leaving nothing on the table, and he hits the barrier surface with his full mass.
The impact sends concentric rings of light spreading upward from the contact point — amber and white, rising and fading and rising again.
He bounces backward, hits the fractured rock, slides, and lies there, unmoving.
“The Boundary is in place,” Goldie says. “You can let go now.”
I lift my hands from the sigil and hiss through my teeth.
The air on my burned palms is agony in both directions — stillness hurts, movement hurts, existing as a person with hands hurts. I press them flat against my thighs and breathe through my teeth and add this to the list of things I am managing.
Behind me the pedestal pulses.
I turn.
The shield is doing something it wasn't doing thirty seconds ago. A rhythm to the light — a pulse that starts at the base and rises to the apex in a slow wave, base to top, base to top. It’s consistent, reminding me of a countdown .
"How long do we have?"
Goldie is three feet away. His left side — the burn, the damage I have been professionally not-examining since the clearing because looking at it directly would require me to do something about it and I don't have the resources — is worse up close.
The material across his ribs is gone on one side entirely and what's beneath it is a wound I would triage as serious in any context I have ever worked in, and he is standing on it with the energy of someone who has decided it is simply not relevant right now.
"Twenty minutes," he says. "Maybe less."
“Then…?”
“Then the Boundary disappears.”
Then the baddies get to come in here and finish what they started…
I look at the Crown.
It’s right there. Sitting in its pedestal, molten veins threading through the metal, warm light pulsing. I can feel the heat from here.
"Why can't we just take it?"
He looks at me.
"The bond has to come first," he says, tone flat. Factual. "Then it activates."
I knew this. I absorbed it in the briefing pod and I have been storing it in the part of my brain labeled things I am not thinking about right now.
Now I realize there is a significant and non-trivial difference between knowing a thing in theory and standing three feet from the practical application of it with burned palms and a ticking shield.
A bright flash detonates against the outside of the barrier.
I flinch hard, turn — and through the shimmering surface I watch Chuckles's bioluminescent marks flare as he works the ash channels.
Then I see it: a redirected lava stream crawling toward the base of the shield in a thin bright line, controlled and deliberate, aimed at the junction between barrier and ground. It hits.
The barrier doesn't notice. The lava splits cleanly around the curve and flows away in two harmless rivers on either side, and the shield does not flicker, does not flex, continues its patient base-to-top pulse like Chuckles's entire effort was a minor scheduling conflict.
Scratch, above on the ruins, is trying angles.
Even with the joint damage he is working — repositioning, calculating trajectories, and I watch a chunk of burning debris arc toward the dome apex and strike it.
The whole shield rings with the impact, a deep resonant tone I feel in my chest, and the light flares white at the contact point and fades. And still, the barrier holds.
It holds.
But the pulse rhythm is faster now.
Goldie has not moved an inch. But all rights, he could cross that space, lay hands on me and take me right here and now. Nothing could stop him.
Nothing… but himself .
Instead, he watches me with those dark steady eyes that have been on me since the pod chamber.
"The shield is counting down," I say.
"I know."
"If it falls before we?—"
"I know." The briefest pause. Something in his jaw. "I will not force you. Not if the shield falls. Not if they come through." His eyes don't move from mine. "Not even then."
Outside the barrier, Four-Arms is back on his feet.
He walks to the surface slowly and presses his one functional hand flat against it and looks at me through the light. Not at Goldie. At me. His eyes are flat amber and they are approximately twelve feet from my face with nothing between us except whatever this shield is made of.
The pulse quickens.
Base to top. Base to top. Definitely faster.
Our time is running out.
Goldie is burned across his ribs, bleeding into his boot, both palms damaged from the sigil he pressed his hands into.
Standing in front of me with the full knowledge of everything this situation would justify and every physical advantage it would take to act on it and doing absolutely nothing with any of it.
I have been reading people since I was old enough to understand that what they said and what they meant were not always the same thing.
I have a decent success rate. I have been reading him since the pod chamber — cataloging, recalibrating, running the data — and I keep arriving at the same answer and keep being surprised by it.
There is no angle. There is no version of this that is strategy or performance or long-game manipulation.
He means it.
He will stand here and bleed for twenty minutes and watch the barrier fail and let whatever happens next happen before he touches me without permission.
I do not know what to do with that. I grew up in a world where people meant things sometimes and performed meaning other times and the skill was in knowing which was which.
This is not a performance.
Four-Arms hits the barrier again. The rings spread upward, slow and bright.
The pulse rises another increment.
I look at Goldie's face. The scar along his jaw. The markings at his throat that catch the Crown's light and throw it back warm. The dark eyes that have been watching me like I am a problem he finds genuinely interesting — not a prize, not an acquisition, not the flag at the end of the course.
Like I am a person he has not finished figuring out and would like more time to work on.
I have been in shock since the parking garage in Chicago.
I have been in survival mode since the first descent.
I have been scared and furious and calculating since the moment the pod doors opened, and all of those things are still completely true, and at the same time?—
At the same time, I am standing in front of someone who would rather burn than take. Despite the shield counting down, despite the rivals outside. And I have twenty minutes or less to make a decision that will change everything.
I close my eyes.
The heat of the arena sits on my skin. The ash is in my lungs. His warmth is three feet in front of me and entirely distinct from everything else — specific and directed and patient, waiting without asking.
It has to be me that takes the first step .
And so I do.
He doesn’t move when I step toward him.
Not back. Not forward.
He simply holds his ground and lets me come.
The stillness isn’t submission. I’ve learned that now. It’s focus. It’s the kind of attention a predator gives the single thing in the world that matters. And right now, somehow, that thing is me.
I stop two feet away and do what I do best.
I assess the damage.
Up close, it’s worse. The burn along his flank isn’t a scrape or a surface injury. It’s catastrophic. The kind of wound that would have a trauma team swarming in my ER—bright lights, clipped commands, sterile trays snapping open.
The skin has split in two places, raw tissue exposed beneath charred edges. Heat radiates from it, a fever localized to a single brutal line across his body.
His body is fighting for him.
And he is not acknowledging that fight.
He’s looking at me.
“You need to sit down,” I tell him. Before you fall down, I almost add.
One dark brow ridge shifts slightly, as if he finds that suggestion… intriguing.