“Is rude but not moving yet.”
A crack opens under her knee. She does not flinch.
Her good hand slides under the strap. The angle is bad. Her fingers scrape across the metal filament. Blood drips from her bandage onto my shoulder.
The sample flares. The anchor pulses behind us.
Once. Pause. Again.
The exposed filament twitches toward her blood. I see it. So does she. Her eyes widen. Then narrow.
“Oh no,” she says. “Absolutely not.”
She draws the quiet knife with her good hand and hooks the blade under the filament.
The filament snaps toward her wrist.
I slash at it with my free hand and catch it between two claws before it reaches her skin. The filament squirms. Scentless. Cold. Wrong.
I crush it.
It breaks with a sound like a scream swallowed in metal.
Sera cuts the strap loose.
“Now,” she says.
I pull.
She shifts back as I surge upward, claws digging into rib and wall. My injured shoulder burns. My wing scrapes the stone hard enough to tear. Sera grabs the back edge of my harness and throws her weight backward.
Not enough to lift me, but enough to change my direction. Enough to bring my chest over the lip instead of letting me swing back into the opening.
I roll onto the slanted rib beside her. For one breath, we are both down. Too close. Her side against mine. Her breath harsh near my throat. Her blood is on my shoulder. The sample pulsing between us.
My hand closes around stone, not her. The restraint hurts. That is good. Pain is clean.
The passage behind us collapses into the opening. Dust and stale air explode upward.
The anchor is gone, swallowed by the wall it woke, but its rhythm remains, traveling through the old channels around us.
Sera coughs hard. I rise first and pull her up without asking because the rib beneath us splits. She does not protest. We run. Not softly. Fast.
The slanted rib leads into the relief seam she saw. The wall tears open in stages ahead of us, each pulse forcing stone apart. The opening is narrow, jagged, and blue-lit from below. We are running across a wound as it forms.
Sera leads. I follow.
Her steps are uneven. Pain takes pieces of her. But her mind is faster than the breaking stone.
“Left!”
I move left.
“Down!”
I drop low as a slab swings inward above my horns.
“Jump the white line!”
