Page 222 of Reaper Said Mine

“Tomas, I need you to cover your ears again.”

He obeys.

I drive my claws into the seam of the shelter door.

The first pull does nothing.

Pain travels up my arms as the warped metal refuses me. The door is pressure-rated, built to hold against fire, vacuum, and debris. Sensible engineering. Obnoxious engineering. I plant one foot against the wall, curl both hands into the seam, and pull again.

Metal shrieks.

The sound vibrates through my bones.

Behind me, someone begins to sing.

One voice first.

Low.

Rough.

Reaper.

Then another joins.

The injured woman.

Then a worker.

Then three civilians who do not know the words but understand need when it fills the air.

The corridor trembles with the harmonic. Reaper song is not pretty in the way court musicians like to define pretty. It is old pressure, grief made into force, hunger disciplined into sound. The vibration gathers in my chest and arms, wraps around the warped door, and makes reality remember that metal is less stubborn than survival.

I pull a third time.

The door tears open.

Civilians surge through, guided by emergency workers into the shelter. I hold the frame while the damaged mechanism tries to close crookedly. The injured woman pushes Tomas ahead of her, then falters.

I catch her before she falls.

“My arm,” she grits out.

“Still attached.”

“Barely.”

“Barely counts.”

She laughs once through pain, and I carry her through the doorway while the last civilians scramble inside. The shelter marshal on the other side is a Vakutan woman with soot across her pink-scaled face and a plasma pistol on her hip.

“Seal it behind us,” I say.

“The mechanism is torn half to hell.”

“Then flatter it.”

She looks at the door, then at me. “That your technical order, lord?”