23. Cassia #3
"He's coming down here with humans and Kraaj standing shoulder to shoulder.
" I extend my left wrist forward, making sure the comm captures it cleanly.
"People who hated each other a month ago.
Scavengers and soldiers and civilians with pipe wrenches who've never fought anything bigger than a bar brawl.
He stands entirely transformed from his past role under high command, operating now as a leader rewriting the entire social architecture of this district.
They dismantle long-standing barriers, uniting separate people into a single front.
" I stare directly into the nearest infected camera and the crimson optic contracts as it focuses on my face.
"And that's why you're terrified. Because your entire system depends on us staying apart, and we won't."
The chamber shudders as a deep, grinding vibration rolls through the bedrock, the unmistakable concussion a breaching charge makes when it detonates somewhere in the upper levels.
It sounds distant and muffled, but it is real.
A white-hot resonance flares in my center, and the sudden, jagged spike of his presence—closer now, burning through rock and steel—hits me hard enough to make my breath catch.
He's in the tunnels.
The violet light flaring through the cables surges bright, then dims as the network diverts power toward the upper levels. The machine is pulling its resources toward the breach and marshaling units for the fight it engineered by trapping me down here in the first place.
"The thermal purge sequence remains active," the Hollow Signal announces, and its voice has slowed, grinding and mechanical, a system redistributing processing power toward immediate threats. "Our corrective protocol will conclude before his arrival."
"You keep telling yourself that." I adjust the straps on my med-pack and step forward, tracking the fading violet light deeper into the corridor beyond the chamber.
The cables thin where the power has diverted, and the darkness ahead opens like a mouth.
"But the last time someone underestimated the Dragon, they ended up zip-tied to a comm terminal with a message burned into the wall beside their head. "
Speakers crackle as the watching cameras track my movement with diminishing focus as their power bleeds toward the surface. The industrial drone in the shadows settles back onto its calcified legs, optics dimming to a sullen red glow.
I walk past it.
My pulse pistol stays up. My med-pack stays on my shoulder.
And my wrist comm records until the green light burns constant against my skin, ensuring Elias's partition logs the precise audio frequencies and verbal data embedded within this transmission—the words and confessions the machine made about the bonds and the Precursors and the centuries-long war against a volatile, breathing defiance it can never predict or control.
I have the evidence that holds up. The kind that proves the outbreaks were manufactured, the purge was political, and the thing lurking deep within District Seventeen has been hunting bonded pairs since before anyone alive was born.
Junia will get this. The district will get this. And when the smoke clears—if the smoke clears—the people standing in that freight bay with pipe wrenches and stolen pulse rifles will know exactly what they fought for and exactly what tried to erase them.
The corridor narrows ahead. The violet glow fades to nothing. And from somewhere far above me, filtering down through hundreds of feet of ancient stone and fractured infrastructure, I hear the distant sound of dragonfire.
The tremor builds in the walls and in the marrow of my bones where the bond lives.
Heat bleeds through the rock, faint but unmistakable, and Rhykor's presence surges through the connection with an unstoppable, crashing momentum, proving his absolute commitment to reach me whenever danger threatens.
He's closer than the machine expected; if the frantic redistribution of power through the cable network is anything to go by, violet pulses in the corridor racing upward now, feeding defenses and marshaling machines toward the breach points.
It is pulling resources away from the depths where I'm walking, away from me.
I sink my hand on the stone wall and close my eyes.
His heartbeat thunders through the bond, wild and heading straight for me, cutting through rock and steel when the world has tried to bury me.
From the clinic floor to the rooftop to the collapsing tunnels beneath Sector Nine, whenever I've been in danger, whenever the world has tried to bury me under stone and distance, he's torn through it.
The machine knows that. It engineered this entire trap around that predictability, and it still underestimates what it means to stand between the Dragon and the thing he loves.
"I'm here," I whisper into the dark. "I'm right here."
And I keep walking toward the core, because standing still has never been my forte, and if the Dragon is tearing his way through an army of machines to reach me, the least I can do is meet him halfway.