Thump... thump...
My heart stuttered. A long pause. Too long.
Kick-start,a feral voice whispered.
Flynn hit me with a jolt of pure kinetic energy. It felt like being electrocuted.
My heart didn't just beat; it convulsed. It slammed against my ribs, a frantic, rabbit-fast rhythm that forced the blood through veins that were trying to turn to glass.
Run,Flynn snarled through the bond, his mind a blur of motion and teeth.Don't stop. Friction creates heat, Pup. Move the blood or it freezes. Move!
He was abrasive. He was vibrating my very cells, forcing them to violently crash against each other. It felt like he was scrubbing my insides with steel wool.
"She is convulsing!" Kaelen yelled, panic rising again as my body jackknifed on the slab.
"She is circulating!" Hephaestus corrected, bringing the hammer down on my hip.CLANG."Good! Keep the tempo! Don't let the metal settle!"
"It’s chaotic!" Elias’s voice cut through the din, high and thin with strain. "The energy is omnipresent, but it has no shape! She is a storm in a bottle, and the bottle is shattering!"
I felt it. He was right. Kaelen was melting me, Thane was crushing me, and Flynn was shaking me apart. I was a soup of divine energy with no container. My thoughts were fragmenting.
Suddenly I couldn't remember why I was there. I couldn't remember my name. Was I Aria? Was I Pandora? Was I just a mistake made of clay?
I looked to the East.
Elias stood there, his hands weaving patterns in the air. His eyes were glowing turquoise, vast and deep and terrifyingly intelligent. He wasn't looking at my body; he was looking at the air above me, at the shimmering heat haze where my soul was trying to unravel.
Design,I pleaded.Weaver. Stitch me.
He grabbed the threads.
It felt cold. Clinical. It was the sensation of a needle piercing skin, precise and sharp. Elias took the fire, the gravity, and the motion, and he forced them into a grid. He imposed geometry on the chaos.
The femur is a lever,his mind whispered, sliding the concept into place.The ribcage is a vault. The heart is a pump.
He was rebuilding my blueprint in real-time, forcing the molten metal of my body to remember it was supposed to be a woman. It was intrusive. It was violating. He was digging around in the architecture of my self, rearranging the furniture of my soul.
This line is weak,he critiqued, tightening a mental screw in my spine that made me gasp.Reinforce.
"The lattice is holding!" Hephaestus grunted, dropping the tongs. He grabbed my jaw with a soot-stained hand, forcing my head back. "Look at me, girl."
I stared into his mismatched eyes, one brown, one blind white.
"You are not dying," the Smith God lied. "You are just molting. Now, scream. Let the pressure out before you crack a tooth."
I opened my mouth. And finally, the sound came.
It was a scream of pure, metallic resonance. It shattered the remaining glass dials on the far wall. It shook the dust from the ceiling.
It felt good.
"Again!" Hephaestus ordered, picking up the hammer. "We have to temper the spine!"
He swung.
CLANG.
White light exploded behind my eyes. I saw memories that weren't mine.
