I run faster.
Behind me, the upload bar ticks to 48%, and the fortress shields continue to fail, and in the War Room, my sister prepares to hold the line against whatever comes next.
Ahead of me, somewhere in the smoke and chaos and screaming, the man I love is dying.
Not if I have anything to say about it.
15
The Generators
Rynn
Thegeneratorchamberishell made manifest.
Smoke chokes the air, thick with ozone and the copper tang of blood—some of it mine. Sparks cascade from damaged machinery like dying stars. The massive generators groan behind our defensive position, wounded but still running, still feeding the shields that stand between everyone I love and orbital annihilation.
I fire twice. Two Meridian elites drop.
Pain screams along my ribs where plasma burned through my armor. My scales absorbed most of it, but not all, and each breath feels like swallowing broken glass. The wound has already begun to seal—enhanced biology doing what it does—but not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.
“Valorian!” Henrok’s voice cuts through the chaos. The Zaterran warlord crouches behind a barricade of bodies and rubble, his massive frame coiled for violence. “I need covering fire on that mech! Now!”
The assault mech looms at the far entrance, its armor scarred but holding, weapons cycling for another barrage. Between us and it: twenty meters of open ground, six Meridian elites, and absolutely no cover.
“Busy not dying!” I fire again, catch an elite in the throat as he breaks position.
“Try harder!”
I would laugh if I had the breath for it.
Through the bond, I feel her. Polly. Getting closer with every heartbeat, her presence burning through me like a beacon in the dark. She should be in the War Room. Safe. Protected. Not running toward the killing floor where I’m bleeding out by inches.
Hold on,she’d sent.I’m coming.
I didn’t have the strength to tell her not to.
Now I don’t have the will.
Another wave pushes through the smoke. I count eight—no, ten—new contacts, their sealed armor gleaming in the emergency lighting. My rifle’s charge indicator blinks warning. Two shots left in this cell. Backup cells nearly depleted.
The math is simple. The math is always simple in moments like this.
We cannot hold.
Henrok knows it too. I see it in the set of his jaw, the way his clawed hand flexes around his blade. But his warriors are falling around him, and someone has planted charges on Generator Two, and if that goes, everything goes, and—
Movement. In my peripheral vision.
The maintenance shaft above the eastern entrance. A panel shifting, dropping away.
A figure drops through, pink hair bright as a solar flare against the smoke and shadow.
My heart stops.
Polly.
She lands in a crouch, rifle already up, already sweeping. No hesitation. No running to me for reunion. Just immediate, ruthless competence as that pilot’s brain of hers catalogs threats and angles in the space between heartbeats.
