“Watch your step.” Torin’s voice breaks through my wonder. “The rocks are slippery.”
As if to prove his point, my foot slides on a moss-covered stone and I stumble. My bound hands can’t catch me properly, and I pitch forward?—
His hand closes around my uninjured arm, steadying me. The bondflares, heat racing up my arm from the point of contact, and we both freeze.
“Careful,” he says, but his voice has gone rough.
“Hard to be careful when I can’t use my hands.”
He releases me like I’ve burned him. Maybe I have. “The rope stays.”
“I wasn’t asking you to remove it.” I wasn’t. Was I? “Just stating a fact.”
We stare at each other in the mushroom-light, and I wonder if he can feel what I feel—the way the bond keeps reaching between us, trying to close a gap neither of us wants closed.
He turns away first. “We need to keep moving.”
The tunnels get worse.
What started as passable corridors—tight, but manageable—begin to narrow. The ceiling drops. The walls press closer. The bioluminescence thins until we’re walking through near-total darkness, Torin’s hand occasionally reaching back to guide me around obstacles I can’t see.
Every touch sends the bond singing. Every touch makes me want to scream.
And then the passage narrows to a crack.
“Through here.” Torin turns sideways, sliding into the gap like water through a drain. “It opens up on the other side.”
I stare at the crack. It’s barely wide enough for shoulders. The stone presses in from both sides, slick with moisture, close enough to touch without extending my arms. Beyond it, darkness. Above it, more stone. Below, more stone. Stone everywhere, pressing down, squeezing the air from the world?—
I can’t breathe.
The panic hits like a physical blow. My chest constricts. My vision tunnels. Lightning crackles along my skin, sparking uselessly against the damp walls, and somewhere in the rational part of my brain I know I’m being ridiculous, know this is just a narrow space, know I’ve faced worse?—
But the sky. I need thesky.
“Zara.”
Torin’s voice cuts through the panic. He’s back—when did he come back?—standing in front of me, his gray-green eyes catching what little light exists. He’s not touching me, but he’s close enough that the bond hums with his proximity.
“I can’t.” The words come out strangled. “I can’t—the walls—I need?—”
“The sky. I know.” His voice is low, steady. Not mocking. Not impatient. Just... there. “All aerial shifters struggle underground. It’s not weakness. It’s instinct.”
“Instinct is telling me to blast through these walls and fly until I can’t see land.”
“Please don’t. We’re under a river. You’d drown us both.”
A laugh escapes me—brittle, half-hysterical, but real. He almost smiles. Almost.
“Listen to me.” He reaches out slowly, giving me time to pull away, and takes my bound hands in his. The bond surges at the contact, but this time it brings calm instead of chaos—like cool water on a burn. “Twenty steps through the passage. That’s all. On the other side, there’s a cavern with a hole in the ceiling. Not sky, but close. Starlight reaches it on clear nights.”
I focus on his voice. On the unexpected gentleness in it. On the way his thumbs move in small circles against my wrists, probably unconscious, definitely helping.
“Twenty steps,” I repeat.
“Twenty steps. I’ll count them with you.”
He doesn’t let go of my hands as he guides me into the crack. The stone presses close—too close, suffocating—but his voice anchors me.
