Chapter 11
Tove
The darkness was absolute, heavy and suffocating.
I woke with a gasp, my lungs burning as if I had been underwater for minutes.
My heart hammered against my ribs in a frantic, disjointed rhythm.
I couldn’t see my hands. I couldn’t see the ceiling.
There was only a pitch-black void, wrapping around me so tightly it felt like a physical weight pressing down on my chest.
I tried to sit up, but my limbs felt leaden, drained of all strength.
As I moved, the thick, heavily insulated material of an emergency thermal blanket shifted over my shoulders.
I clutched at the fabric, my fingers sinking into the padded, multi-layered weave.
Even though it was standard gear, it carried the unmistakable scent of Kaen—the rich, smoky heat of a sun-baked forest, and the faint tang of singed feathers.
Then, a sudden, sharp spasm of pain ripped through the center of my chest.
It wasn't a physical injury. It was a violent, tearing ache that seized the space beneath my collarbone, a phantom fist grabbing hold of my lungs and pulling.
Hard. The mate bond, locked and sealed in the heat of my ruined room, was no longer a warm, humming current in my veins.
It was a taut, vibrating wire under immense tension, screaming with a desperate, pulsing agony.
Kaen.
The bond transmitted his physical state with terrifying clarity. He was burning. Not with the comforting, healing heat of our claiming, but with a wild, runaway wildfire that was tearing his cells apart. He was far away, isolated, and fading fast.
A sudden constriction gripped my throat, and a cold sweat broke out along the back of my neck.
My fingertips trembled as I clutched the heavy blanket, but I forced my jaw to lock, drawing a long, slow breath through my nose.
My training clicked into place, instinct taking over.
I clamped down on the panic, focusing my mind entirely on a silent, cold checklist: check surroundings, assess resources, catalog systems.
I reached out, my palms sweeping over the surfaces around me. The walls were close, smooth, and curved—cold, reinforced titanium alloy. The seat beneath me was deeply padded, contoured to absorb heavy impact.
An evacuation capsule, most likely. Kaen must have carried me here. He had wrapped me in the emergency blanket and locked me inside to... what? Save me?
A mixture of exasperation and deep, aching warmth flared through my chest. I loved the man—or the alien Warden—with everything I had, but his stubborn, self-sacrificial protective streak was infuriating.
He thought he could just lock me away in a secure vault and face the end alone.
If I survived this, we were going to have a very long, very serious conversation about this annoying tendency of his to treat himself like a disposable shield.
But first, I had to find him.
"Kaen, you absolute idiot," I muttered, my voice raspy and hollow in the small, sealed chamber.
I leaned forward, searching the dark for the primary control console. When my fingers found the glass screen, it was stone-cold. I pressed my palm flat against it, expecting the soft blue glow of the automated Warden systems.
Nothing happened.
I tapped the screen repeatedly, my touch growing firmer, then swept my hand along the casing to find the physical override switches.
The emergency toggle switches were stiff, but when I flipped them, the console remained dark.
I pressed my ear to the interior bulkhead.
There was no deep, reassuring hum of a power grid.
There was only the distant, muffled howling of a storm outside, and the structural groaning of the basalt rock around the bay.
I was jammed on the launch pad. The external systems were completely dead.
I sat back, my mind racing. If the main terminal in the bay had fried, the heavy mechanical launch clamps holding the pod to the rails would still be engaged in their default, fail-secure state.
The pod was an armored vault—I was safe from falling debris and volcanic gases—but I was also entombed.
And Kaen was miles away, preparing to detonate alone.
I couldn't stay here. I couldn't break out on foot, either. The resort was empty, the dome was collapsing, and the Dead Zone was a volcanic wasteland too vast to cross without a vehicle.
I needed to use the pod itself.
I slid out of the seat, dropping onto my knees in the cramped footwell. I felt along the base of the seat frame, my fingers searching for the emergency maintenance panel. When my nails caught the edge of the latch, I pulled hard. The metal grate popped open with a sharp, echoing snap.
I reached inside the recess, my fingers tracing the thick bundle of the primary wiring harness.
Without light, I had to rely entirely on my tactile memory.
Standard Warden tech was alien, but Cynder Bay was a joint-venture resort, its emergency facilities built on the same standardized safety-grid templates I had spent a career analyzing.
As a crisis negotiator, you didn't just talk—you studied the physical anatomy of the structures you breached.
I had spent countless sieges memorizing the exact schematics of orbital and high-security escape pods, planning how to disable them to block a suspect's getaway, or how to manually bypass a jammed console to retrieve a barricaded hostage in the pitch black.
The cold, rubberized jackets of the data lines, the braided copper ground cables, and the thicker, rigid conduits of the emergency ignition grid felt identical under my raw fingertips.
Every evacuation pod was equipped with independent, secondary rocket boosters—a backup propulsion system designed to blow the capsule free from a collapsing orbital bay if the primary launch rails failed. But to fire them, I had to bypass the dead console and trigger the igniter sequence manually.
The physical pull in my chest spiked, a sudden, blinding throb of pain that made me gasp and collapse against the console base. Kaen’s energy was fracturing. I could feel the heat of his core approaching a critical, explosive boundary.
Hurry, the bond screamed. Hurry.
I forced my hands to stop shaking. I reached out, my hand finding the emergency storage console beside my seat.
I popped the latch and grabbed a small, steel utility clip from the basic toolkit inside.
Using the sharp edge of the clip, I began to saw through the tough, rubberized coating of the primary booster ignition line.
The wire was thick, the copper strands inside cold and stiff.
I found the auxiliary power bypass cable, stripping the insulation until the bare wires exposed their metallic threads.
If I crossed these, the high-voltage current from the pod’s internal chemical batteries would dump directly into the rocket igniter. There would be no automated countdown. No stabilization protocols. Just immediate, raw thrust.
I scramble back into the padded seat, pulling the heavy thermal blanket tight around my bare body, wrapping the thick fabric securely over my shoulders. I gripped the bare ends of the bypass wires in my right hand, holding them inches apart.
"Hold on, Kaen," I whispered into the dark.
I pressed the wires together.
A blinding blue spark erupted in the footwell, casting a split-second, violent shadow across the capsule.
Roar!
The backup rocket boosters ignited with a deafening, thunderous shriek that shook the pod to its very rivets.
The sudden, brutal acceleration slammed me back into the padded seat with crushing force, the air violently squeezed from my lungs.
Outside the hull, a horrific, metal-on-metal screech tore through the cabin as the sheer, raw thrust of the rocket engines physically sheared the heavy durasteel launch clamps, ripping them from the jammed rails.
The capsule surged forward, vibrating so violently my teeth rattled. The view out the lead-glass viewport transformed from pitch black to a blinding, fiery streak of red and orange as we blasted out of the pneumatic exhaust gate and shot into the wild, storm-tossed sky.
I was airborne.
But my relief lasted only a fraction of a second.
As the capsule climbed, the automated interior lights finally sputtered to life, casting a dim, clinical blue glow over the console.
Under the blue light, the reality of my situation became clear.
I was completely bare beneath the heavy blanket, my skin still flushed and tingling from the energy of our mate bond.
I leaned down and popped open the pod's emergency survival locker beneath the console, pulling out a pair of thick, oversized thermal emergency boots.
I quickly tugged them onto my bare, ash-stained feet.
At the top of the display, a synthetic voice chimed, calm and entirely detached from the chaos.
Emergency launch confirmed. Auto-navigation active. Target: Orbital Rescue Hub Seven. Estimated time of arrival: twelve minutes.
"No," I choked out, fighting the immense G-forces that pinned my shoulders to the seat. "No orbital hub."
I struggled to lift my arm, the weight of my own limbs feeling three times heavier than normal as the rocket engines continued their vertical burn.
I reached for the touch console. The navigation screen had flickered to life, showing our trajectory rising rapidly through the ash clouds, heading straight out of the atmosphere.
Away from Kaen. Away from the caldera.
The physical tether in my chest pulled downward with agonizing strength.
It felt like a heavy anchor dragging behind us, trying to tear me out of the ascending capsule.
He was down there, in the dark, volcanic heart of the island.
If I let this pod carry me into orbit, I would never see him again.
He would detonate alone, and the bond would snap, leaving me hollowed out in the cold vacuum of space.