And it’s like the first time we touched. Like the first kiss. Like that moment in the containment room when everything else was fire and fear and her body wrapped around mine.
It’s trust. It’s truth. It’s the kind of love that terrifies because it rewrites everything you thought you were.
The Meld blooms. Not a bridge—an entire cosmos.
Ifeelher now. Not just in my head but in my skin, my bones. Every breath she takes is mine. Every thought I have she’s already half said. And Whiplash?
Whiplash sings.
She’s not a mech anymore. She’s a hymn.
And we are the fire she’s chosen to burn.
CHAPTER 28
ARIA
The world fractures open like glass around us.
Everything burns. The sky. The air. My veins.
But beneath it all—the chaos, the heat, the screaming static of the Meld—there’s Naull.
And for the first time since the war began, I don’t feel alone.
The Meld isn’t just thought anymore. It’s belief. It’s us, unfiltered and terrifyingly whole. Every heartbeat. Every scar. Every unspoken word we’ve been too proud or too afraid to say.
I’m sorry,I whisper inside the mind-space between us, the one that used to hurt to touch.
Me too,he answers, voice steady and warm.
It’s not sound—it’s pulse.
Our pulses, braided together like they’re learning how to beat in unison.
Whiplash moves before we do, fluid as blood through arteries of light. Our hands fly across controls that barely matter anymore, because we’re past mechanics now. The machine is responding to us directly—to intention, to will.
Spectra’s mech looms through the storm like a deity carved from lightning. Its form constantly shifts, flickers—a thing thatrefuses to be defined. Every movement feels like blasphemy, and every sound it makes is scripture.
“You think you can stop evolution?” her voice hisses through the comms, layered with echoes that make my skull vibrate. “You think your love means anything to the void?”
Naull bares his teeth. “Watch us.”
We move.
Whiplash lunges, every servo screaming, every joint lighting with raw energy. Plasma chains whip from her arms like tendrils of molten sun. I feel Naull’s focus sharpen through the Meld—his anger, his precision, his stubborn, beautiful defiance—and it feeds me, fills the hollow places inside that used to ache when I thought of him.
We strike first.
Chains lash through the smoke, cutting into Spectra’s mech with sparks that bloom like flowers. The contact burns through the metal, but it’s not enough. She laughs—a sound that makes the sand ripple, makes my nose bleed.
Naull shouts something, but it’s drowned by the roar. We twist left, just in time to avoid a blade of psionic light that slashes through the air where we were seconds ago. The heat is so intense it scorches the hull.
“Overload the whip nodes!” I yell.
“That’ll melt her arm!”
“She can take it!”
