The proof bundles are pressed against his chest. My blood is on the floor. The channel sees both.
White-gray light snaps up between us, bright as a blade. Kavor snarls and pulls. The vest tears. My hand slips. The chamber’s edge breaks beneath his claws.
“Kavor!”
I don’t mean it as a scream, but it comes out that way.
Then I fall.
26
KAVOR
Sera falls.
For one breath, the world ends cleanly.
No Council. No City. No proof. No zemlja. No old machine watching through stone.
Only her hand slipping from broken rock. Only her voice tearing my name open. Only the empty air where she should be.
Then everything returns at once.
The chamber screams. Humans shout above me. Stone collapses into the fissure. White-gray light snaps through the cracked floor, as bright as a blade. The proof bundles burn against my chest, blue and cold and wrong, answering the call of her blood below.
Sera vanishes into darkness. The red takes me.
Not slowly. Not like mist at the edge of sight. It strikes through bone and blood, a command older than speech.
Mine. No. Sera.
Falling. Bleeding. Afraid.
I lunge for the edge as the stone beneath my claws breaks. Virn shouts behind me. Adran’s guards move. Someone screams for ropes.
Too slow. All of them too slow.
The proof bundles shift against my chest. For one brutal heartbeat, instinct divides the world. The proof could save the City. Sera is below. There is no choice. Except there is. There must always be a choice.
I tear the proof harness from my chest and shove it into Virn’s hands before he understands what I am doing.
“Rosalind,” I snarl. “Only Rosalind until Sera speaks.”
Virn catches the bundle against his chest, wings flaring. “Kavor?—”
“Guard it.”
Then I drop into the fissure after her and stone eats the light above.
The fall is not clean. The shaft is narrow, broken by old braces and channel ribs. My wings slam against the walls, useless for flight, useful only to keep me from spinning. Pain sparks through the torn place near my wing joint. Claws scrape stone. Dust fills my mouth.
Below, Sera hits something hard.
The sound is small. Too small.
I catch a channel rib with one hand. The force nearly tears my shoulder from its socket. My body swings into the wall. White-gray light flashes beneath my claws. The old channel burns cold through my palm.
I drop again. Controlled now. Faster than safe. Safe is a word for creatures not listening to the woman they love struggling to breathe.
