“Yeah?”
“What the hell did you do?”
“Definedo,” he says, voice too calm, drifting somewhere overhead.
I snap my head up, barely catching sight of him above me. We’re floating now—freefall thanks to the gravity cutout. The overhead light flickers like it’s mocking me, casting the vault in alternating bursts of gold and shadow.
“You rewired the neural core,” I say, fists clenched, trying to keep from drifting. “You said you were ‘fine-tuning’ it to yourinstincts, whatever the hell that means?—”
“And now it’s more reactive,” he argues, kicking off a side panel to hover near the ceiling. “More adaptable.”
“It’s on fire.”
“A minor setback.”
“Minor?! We’re in a sealed room with no gravity and no O2 filtration. The emergency override didn’t trigger. You locked us in here?—”
“I didn’tlockus?—”
“—with a flaming drone, Naull!”
A beat of silence.
Then, like the overconfident menace he is: “Okay, that part was accidental.”
I want to scream.
Or punch him.
Or both.
But I settle for gripping the wall handle, jaw tight, chest tight, everything in me too wound up to unravel.
My pulse hammers. The air already feels thinner. The CO2 sensor blinks orange, then red. I try to reroute the vent through the console, but it’s toast. Literally—the interface is scorched from the drone’s freakout.
I feel him drift behind me before I hear him. That’s how synced we’ve become.
“Aria,” he says, low and rough, voice closer than I expect. “I can fix it. Just give me a minute.”
“You’ve hadfifteen,” I shoot back. “We’re at twenty-six percent air saturation and dropping.”
He floats up beside me, steadying himself with a gloved hand on the ceiling. His skin’s still smudged with oil, hair mussed, sweat lining the edge of his brow. He looks like hell.
He looksgood.
Which only pisses me off more.
“You’re not even taking this seriously.”
“I am.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Just… breathe.”
“Iam?—”
And then the gravity fails completely.
