18. Rhykor #2
The retreat is ugly. Machines pursue us through the corridors.
Twice I have to stop to unleash blasts that collapse entire sections of tunnel behind us to slow the advance.
The effort tears at my reserves, causing my hands to shake and my wings to ache at the joints.
A stabbing pain lances through my ribs when I channel energy above my baseline threshold.
A fatal block feels wrong with how my body processes the thermal output.
A syncopated, internal rhythm—the ghost of her own pulse—ripples through my nerves, creating a jarring dissonance with the combat; I am physically here tearing metal apart, yet my instinctual core is tethered to her, working in the clinic above.
We breach the surface through the processing station hatch with all five of us covered in ash and machine fluid.
The raw, harsh exhaustion of a fight that went sideways clings to us all over.
Trakis seals the hatch behind us with a plasma weld that fuses the metal shut.
Dessik collapses against the rubble pile, his teal-green skin streaked with hydraulic fluid and shallow cuts from shrapnel.
Maddis sits on the concrete while methodically reloading her shotgun.
She curses under her breath in a continuous monotone that would be impressive if I had the energy to appreciate it.
Trakis leans against the station's crumbling wall before sliding down to a sitting position. His pulse rifle rests across his knees while his indigo skin turns chalky through layers of grime. He stares at his hands, and I notice the tremor in his fingers from where I stand.
I make it four steps from the hatch before the pain hits.
It comes from somewhere deeper than combat exhaustion, a resonance that throbs through my blood with a frequency I recognize because I've felt it before, such as in the clinic when Cassia first treated my burns, on the rooftop when she leaned against my shoulder, and in the transit station when the bond finally snapped into place.
Except now the sensation has teeth. It rakes through me in waves that buckle my knees and send heat spiraling out of control through my hands, scorching the concrete supporting my palms as I catch myself on all fours.
Dessik lurches forward. "Commander?—"
"Stay back," I grit the order through my fangs as another wave of resonance tears through me, and the concrete glows orange where the heat bleeds through. Dessik freezes with his arm still outstretched until Trakis grabs him by the shoulder to pull him clear.
Varrik is beside me in seconds, cane discarded, his hands gripping my shoulder despite the heat radiating through my frame. "Talk to me. What's happening?"
"The bond." Each word grinds out separately. "Something underground—it agitated the connection. Like a frequency slamming against a frequency. It's amplifying everything."
Varrik's pale eyes narrow. He crouches beside me, near enough that I see the stratagems running behind the creases and furrows forming on his brow.
"When the machines targeted you," he says, dropping into the systematic register he uses when processing intelligence faster than he can speak it, "they ignored everyone else.
The active waves and drones lock onto your thermal signature directly.
That's behavioral targeting, Rhykor. Whatever is running that network has a profile on you specifically. "
"My energy output. It's the strongest Luvon-born signature in the district?—"
"It's more than output." Varrik settles back on his heels.
"The Luvon-born mutations—the wings, the enhanced thermal channeling—they're adaptations triggered by the planet's environment.
Generations of Kraaj biology reshaping itself in response to local conditions.
The mate bond is different. That's older.
Precursor-linked, if Mother Serak is right.
" He taps my shoulder with two fingers, right over the point where the mate bond resonance concentrates.
"The bond is rewriting your energy signature into a variable Luvon-born evolution alone would never produce.
Legion recognized that altered pattern. It identified a feature in your biology that it considers a threat, and it threw everything it had at neutralizing you. "
The pain recedes in slow, uneven waves, leaving me hollow and shaking on the concrete. I drag myself upright, my wings trembling, my hands still radiating residual warmth that sends tendrils of steam curling from my knuckles into the cold air.
"If Legion is targeting bonded Kraaj," I rasp, "then Cassia is a target too. The bond connects us. Whatever signature they're tracking runs through us both."
Varrik says nothing. Picking up his cane, he tucks it under his arm to offer me his hand.
We limp back to the compound as the daylight bleeds from the sky.
Dessik and Trakis report to Britt at the perimeter while Maddis vanishes toward the armory to resupply.
I make it to the command station, approaching a folding table covered in maps and comm units that Britt has organized into precise columns during my absence.
Suddenly, the encrypted intelligence frequency chirps at my hip.
It’s Nysera's cipher, buried three proxy channels deep with a packet header obscured by enough misdirection to survive a full military intercept sweep, so I plug the comm into the station's shielded receiver to decrypt the transmission.
The routing pattern tells its own story.
She's bouncing this signal through four relay stations across the southeastern region, masking her physical location behind intelligence division travel orders that give her autonomous movement across military installations.
The autonomy is standard for her rank. Using it to undermine the command structure that granted it is treason, and every transmission she sends burns another layer of cover she'll never get back.
Her message is longer this time. She sounds precise and unequivocal, delivering sentences that bear the grim price of her career and her life.
Authorization chain traced. Senior Central Command ciphers signed the transfer orders routing Legion-infected components through three black-market redistribution networks into Districts Seventeen, Nine, and Twelve.
Significant internal communications were recovered from the quartermaster division, detailing experimental research directives dating back eighteen months—classified under "Project Threshold.
" Objective: controlled deployment of Legion remnants to test containment protocols and justify expanded military authority over frontier settlements.
Test populations: civilian. Kraaj and human.
No evacuation contingencies. No survival projections.
I haven't cracked the final signature yet, but it reaches the very top of regional command.
Cultivation was the goal.
I read the message twice, even three times. Each sentence embeds itself deeper, and the composite picture they form is unavoidable.
For over a year and a half, an entity with supreme authority has been deliberately feeding the Legion into our districts, using black-market channels to spread the infection and letting machines ravage the people they were meant to shield.
My memories of the battles fought and the sectors lost now take on a sickening new meaning.
I realize it was all manufactured by the command structure that gave me my rank and orders.
This is the truth of Project Threshold, where test populations were abandoned without survival projections.
The entire conflict—from the escalating droid assaults to the eventual purge authorization—is nothing more than a connected, calculated campaign.
The experiment is reaching its intended conclusion while Daxos watches from Kor-Viir.
He planted the weapon to let it grow. Now he's using the chaos to justify seizing permanent military authority over the settlements in the southeastern region.
But the weapon he planted has discovered a variable underneath this district that Daxos never anticipated.
There is an unexpected biological anomaly woven into the bond between evolved Kraaj and their human mates.
This is a variable Legion considers threatening enough to redirect its entire operational focus toward eliminating.
I survey the comm station. The maps spread across the table show a district tearing itself apart.
However, the real war is happening on a scale that stretches beyond District Seventeen and beyond the southeastern region.
It exceeds anything a single territorial commander can fight with three dozen crew members and a clinic full of refugees.
Cassia's voice echoes through my memory. Trust me to come back.
I close my eyes. There is a frantic alignment thrumming in my blood, an unerring compass needle pointing toward the woman whose fierce amber eyes define the new gravity of my existence.
Deep beneath my feet, machines are weaving a network specifically designed to track and exterminate all bonded pairs on this planet.
Meanwhile, inside a bunker on a ridge, a general is using that very expansion to justify burning four thousand people alive.
Caught in the center of this, a stubborn human medic plans to walk into the heart of the conspiracy, driven by the belief that the evidence she carries can actually change the outcome.
She is right, and I know it will change everything.
The scope of what we're fighting expands past anything I can win alone, and the realization settles into my bones with the quiet finality of a door closing behind me.
Opening my eyes, I pick up the comm to start planning.