"Zaph." Ella looked at me in horror. "Don't."
Her voice tethered me back from the edge. I swallowed the roar and instead let my anger funnel into a quieter thing: resolve. I would burn every trade-lane, every Ohrur ledger, every Moggadesh caravan, if that was what it took. But not here. Not in a frenzy that would cost the lives of those we could still move.
I sawhim before I could think. One moment, the lab was a blur of metal and stink and panic, the next he was there, tall, terrible, and golden. A god wrenched from the heart of some electric sun. He moved through the shadows as if the universe parted for him. The sight of Zaph fractured the world into a before and an after: everything before had been fear and animal instinct to survive; after was a wild, dizzy hope. Relief hit me so hard I thought my heart would crack open from it, a pressure so physical I almost staggered back. My first, irrational thought was that I was hallucinating, that my mind had shredded itself and conjured him as a final, fevered mercy. But he was real. He was here—my Zaph.
He didn’t come alone.
There was a woman with him, moving like someone from an action movie. She swept the room with her eyes, cataloging threats, moving with the confidence of someonewho had been here before and knew exactly who would die first.
For a freeze-frame instant, I forgot the cages, the tanks of writhing things, the stench of ozone and antiseptic. I forgot that I was a specimen, tagged and bagged for some experiment I couldn’t begin to understand. I forgot the hunger that gnawed through my bones and the cold that had chewed up my nerves. I forgot everything except Zaph, how he looked at me—not with the clinical detachment of the Ohrurs or the naked curiosity of the wet-eyed researchers—but with something raw and incandescent, a love so exposed it almost hurt to see it.
And I saw her, too. The woman. She was beautiful in a way that felt threatening. Every movement was a challenge, every flicker of her eyes a test. I wondered who she was, what she meant to Zaph, and why he would bring her here, to this place. Jealousy was supposed to be a slow poison, but this was an injection straight to the sternum, sharp and sickening. I couldn’t help it. My last shreds of pride wanted to scream,What is she doing here with you? and the question tasted like battery acid.
They moved as one, neither pausing nor hesitating, as if they had fought their way through a hundred such rooms side by side and knew the choreography by heart. Zaph came straight to my cage, and his eyes found mine, frantic and soft at the same time. He reached for the bars and tore them open like they were made of crepe paper, then he was dragging me into his arms, crushing me against him, like he never wanted to let me go again. Hesmelled of hope and freedom, and I wanted to breathe in that smell, desperate for it to linger for the rest of my life. I held onto him like he was the last warm thing in the universe.
His mouth was pressed to the top of my head, mumbling apologies. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m here, I’m so sorry.” Over and over, as if he said it enough, it could fix what had happened to me. His hands were shaking. My brain tried to assemble the words to say it wasn’t his fault, that all that mattered was this moment, but the rest of the lab kept yanking me back.
The woman was a storm. She moved through the Ohrurs with a cold, methodical violence. She didn’t fight for sport or spectacle; she fought like she was being paid by the corpse, each kick and punch measured for maximum effect. I saw her face as she paused to take in the whole lab, heard the horror in her voice when she called out to Zapharos, and felt his muscles tense around me in response.
“Let’s get out of here,” he barked, already rising with me in his arms.
“Zaph—what about the others?” I asked. My voice cracked. “You have to free them.”
He let out a long, put-upon sigh that would’ve annoyed me if the situation weren’t so dire. But then his aura flared—bright, molten gold—and the room seemed to exhale with him. All around us, the cages responded. One by one, metal locks clicked, disengaged, and began to slide open in a rippling sequence.
Harsh, surgical light spilled across the cramped cells as the bars retracted.
The women inside blinked against it, unsure if they could trust what they were seeing. Some stumbled forward as if their legs barely remembered how to work. Others clung to the bars even after the doors were fully open, too stunned, terrified, or broken to move.
Faces I recognized, faces I didn’t—gaunt, hollowed, haunted—all of them flinched toward freedom like animals stepping out of traps. One woman fell to her knees and sobbed. Another curled up on the floor and refused to let go of the metal she’d been gripping for who knew how long.
The air thickened with panic, ozone, and the iron tang of old blood. Drones buzzed overhead, mapping faces and relaying information.
And in that moment, I realized we weren’t out of danger yet—not even close. I watched the woman take down three Ohrurs as she made her way down the bank of cages. At one point, she caught my eye and, for a fraction of a second, I thought she might put me down too if I looked at her the wrong way.
I didn’t blame her. There would be a time for sorting out loyalties and reflexes. For now, the only thing I could feel, besides the dizzying relief of Zaph’s presence, was the inferno of hatred I had been incubating for the Ohrurs ever since they took me. Seeing their bodies hit the floor, seeing their blood pool around their fallen bodies, I felt a sick joy that I tried to tamp down but couldn’t. I wantedthem to suffer; I wanted them to understand pain the way they had taught it to me and the others.
That scared me. The urge to let anger be the judge, jury, and executioner hummed under my skin, louder than reason, louder than fear. I could almost hear it—do it, do it—an animal chant that made my hands curl into claws.
As if he had heard my thought, Zaph whispered “Do it” to the other woman as she appeared to hover over a downed Ohrur, her hand clenched tightly around the grip of her weapon; his voice was so low I almost thought I’d imagined it. His breath was warm against my ear, and it steadied me, but it also scared me, the intensity of it, the way he didn’t even look at the Ohrur he wanted dead. What had happened to him while I was gone? What had he become?
I found my own voice, and it came out raw and strange. “Zaph—don’t.”
He froze, staring at me like he’d never heard my voice before. In that split-second, I realized something about myself that I didn’t want to know: I was not above the violence. Part of me wanted to see the Ohrur’s head caved in, wanted the wet crunch and the silence after. And another part—smaller, weaker—remembered what it felt like to be the one in the cage, the one at the mercy of someone else’s hatred.
I didn’t ask Zaph to stop because I was virtuous or noble. I wasn’t. I just needed to believe there was still some line—between them and me, between justice and vengeance—that I wouldn’t cross. The line wasthin and slippery, and I didn’t know if I could keep from crossing it, but I was still alive, still choosing, and that would have to be enough for now.
Leaving the Ohrur alive, the other woman moved to a corner of the lab and was already working to free more prisoners; her movements were so efficient that they were almost impersonal.
"Are we really safe?" one of the human women asked.
"We just need to get to the ship," the stranger assured her. "I'm Sloane."
"Edith," the woman introduced herself.
"Let's go," Sloane ordered.
Zaph held me tighter, his arms were a wall against the chaos, as if he could shield me from the danger we were still in, and maybe he could. I wanted to melt into him, to stay hidden in that golden glow, but the reality pressed hard against my senses—the stink of chemicals, the cries of women, the cold corridors filled with shadows that moved when they shouldn’t.
