“Rakkh!” I bolt forward before I think, reaching for him.
“No!” he roars—not at me but at the sentinel.
It hears the sound. It recognizes the protectiveness. And it shifts targets.
To me.
It launches.
Rakkh moves with impossible speed—shoving me back, taking the brunt of the sentinel’s strike across his shoulder. His scales spark as the creature’s limbs scrape him. I hit the wall hard, pain flaring in my hip.
“Rakkh!” I scream.
He roars—pure, primal fury—and slashes across the sentinel’s core. His claws sink into the violet-lit veins and tear.
A burst of bioluminescent fluid sprays in a sharp arc. The sentinel spasms. Its limbs twitch frantically. Then—it freezes. The violet glow fades.
Rakkh throws the husk aside, breathing hard, shoulders heaving. The chamber is silent again except for Tomas’s shaking breaths and Travnyk’s low groan.
My legs buckle.
Rakkh is there instantly, catching me before I hit the ground. One arm wraps around my waist, the other slides behind my shoulders, lifting me against him like I weigh nothing.
“Lia,” he rasps, voice trembling despite his strength. “Are you injured? Did it touch you?”
“N-no,” I gasp. “Are you?”
His jaw clenches. His shoulder bleeds where the sentinel struck him, violet-tinged ichor steaming faintly.
“It is nothing,” he says. “You matter more.”
My breath catches. Hard.
His forehead dips toward mine—not touching, but close enough that I feel the warmth of him, the tremble of adrenaline still shaking through his body.
“You do not face these things alone,” he murmurs. “Ever.”
Heat floods my skin, my heart, everything.
“I know,” I whisper. “I… know.”
For a moment, we stay like that—breaths mingling, danger humming in the metal walls around us, the ship pulsing with its quiet, eerie glow.
The sentinel is dead, but the ship is not.
Something deeper in the corridor pulses once—slow and heavy. Awakening.
13
LIA
The metal beneath us hums—deep and resonant, like a distant heartbeat buried beneath a thousand years of sand. Travnyk lifts his head, sharp and sudden.
“That was from… within,” he murmurs, low.
Within the ship. Within the thing that opened for us. For me.
A cold tremor snakes along my spine. I take a step back from the widening seam, and Rakkh’s arm comes around me again—protective, tense, cool, and reassuring. I shouldn’t lean into him, but I do. I shouldn’t crave his touch, but my knees feel like they’re melting, and I can’t quite stay upright on my own.
