His glow is dim now, barely a simmer under his skin. But his skin is warm. Even without the light, the furnace of his body is running high. Honest, actual, radiant heat is bleeding out of him, cutting through the deep cave chill. My fingers have stopped screaming, the ache in my knuckles easing from “about to fall off” to “complaining quietly.”
So, if the mountain buries us alive down here, at least I won’t freeze to death.
Silver linings.
Across the new gap, through drifting dust, Haroth and Zan are vague golden shapes. They’re braced against the boulder that trapped Kelvan, working it inch by inch. On our side, Sarven has gone utterly still behind me. His breathing has gone shallow, his muscles have locked. It feels like he’s tuned all his attention outward, listening to the stone with his whole body.
My brain, in contrast, is stuck in a loop.
The way his arms snapped around my waist.
The moment my feet left the ground as he yanked me sideways and into him.
The slam of his chest as he curled around me, taking the brunt of the impact from the falling rock.
The roar. The dust. That I didn’t even get dust in my eyes because his hand was somehow already there, shielding my face.
He was a wall. A moving wall that smelled like desert sand and firebloom.
I should be spiraling about almost dying. About the water source going weird. About very real, planet-level disaster things.
Instead, every nerve in my body is reporting one stupid thing:
Trapped on a ledge with this golden alien is the safest I’ve felt in months.
And I don’t know what to think about that.
The ledge shifts again, just a whisper of movement, but it’s enough to send a fresh dart of adrenaline through my chest.
“Okay,” I say under my breath. “We need to move from the edge of doom.”
Sarven’s chin dips against my braids. He’s following my gaze down into the black.
He murmurs something, and my translator does its charming best: “Stone… angry.”
Yeah, okay, cool. When you’re inside a mountain that is, to recap, one hundred percent made of stone, “stone” and “angry” are not the keywords a girl wants to hear.
“We should move,” I tell him, pointing in the direction we came from, then freezing as I actually look at the gap.
Right.
The ledge is gone. There is no going back unless I’ve secretly developed the ability to jump a body-length-wide void, land on a crumbling path in the dark, and stick the landing. I mean, I was athletic, but I needed my eyes to land kicks.
“We need to get off the ledge,” I say instead, throat tight.
He seems to understand the gist, because he gives a sharp little nod, then turns his head, looking into the darkness further ahead, away from the collapsed section.
Deeper into the cave.
Away from the other people.
Excellent. Classic horror movie decision. First rule of survival: never split the party. Second rule of survival: never go deeper into the creepy cave.
But my gaze darts back to the broken chunk of ceiling, to the cracked gap in the path.
Away from this specific spot where things already failed suddenly sounds like a very reasonable plan.
“Yeah, okay.” I nod, swallowing hard. “That way sounds… really good.”
