“I am not making a heroic mistake.”
“You’re making the quiet version,” she says.
I wedge my claws under the loosened anchor rib and pull. Stone cracks around it. The anchor shifts. A blast of white-gray light slams up the channel and through my arm.
My muscles seize. For one breath, I am not in the cavern. I am in memory that is not mine. Surface towers. Rolling sand dunes under a red sky.
Zmaj wings in formation over harvest routes. Ships above them, bright as knives. Chains called trade. Stone called freedom. A corridor with no door. Then Sera’s voice cuts through.
“Kavor!”
I come back with the taste of metal in my mouth. The anchor is still in the arch. My hand is locked around it. The bridge is almost gone. The red in my sight surges.
No. Not now.
I brace both feet against the stone and pull with everything I have. The anchor tears free.
The cavern screams blue. The pool erupts in a sheet of glowing water and root-light. The white-gray machine beneath it flickers, loses shape, then dims by half. The drain slows.
It is not stopped. Only slowed.
The bridge collapses. The shelf beneath me drops. I leap too late for the ridge. Too far from the bridge. Sera moves.
She throws the loose end of the snapped line, the shortened section still tied to her pack. I did not see her ready it. I should have.
The line strikes my arm. I catch it midair and it goes taut. Pain rips through my injured shoulder.
Sera anchors herself against a pillar with one foot and her good hand, the line wrapped around her waist this time, not her wounded arm.
Learning. Good. Terrible.
I swing and hit the ridge below her hard. I dig my claws in, gouging stone, the torn anchor clutched in my other hand. The sample pouch flares against my chest. The entire cavern pulses blue-white.
Sera cannot pull me up, but she can hold the line long enough for me to climb.
She knows it. I know it. Trust.
I climb.
The ridge shudders. The black corruption races toward the pool, then slows where the anchor broke free.
Blue returns to some of the roots. Not all. Some remain black. A victory with rot beneath it.
I reach the top. Sera releases the line the moment I gain purchase and stumbles backward.
I catch her. This time I do not stop myself.
My arm goes around her waist. Her body hits mine. Her good hand lands against my chest, over the sample, over the wild hammering pulse of my hearts beneath it.
The anchor falls from my claws and hits the stone with a dead metallic clatter. For one breath, every system around us answers.
The sample. Her bandage. The epis on the wall. The water beneath the pool. My own blood where the anchor burned me.
Blue light surges through the cavern. Sera looks up at me. Her face is close. Too close. Not close enough.
My hand is still at her waist. Her breath touches my throat.
The red comes again, braided with blue. Not rage. Not only mate pull. Something deeper. A pressure that says here. Now. Hers. Yours. End the distance. End the fear. End the hunger.
