Page 35

When the man turns feral, snapping, Damaris ends it quickly.

I do not look away.

The quarantine wards go up within a week.

Those who fall ill are isolated, watched, waited on. Some recover. Some don’t. There is no pattern. Trix and the healers whisper theories until their voices fray thin, and yet the moon comes up again and again, distant and pale from somewhere beyond where we can see.

I start noticing the rash more closely on missions. The way it begins beneath the veins, black blood pulling tight as if something is tugging it upward. Then the color drains. White dots surface, luminous and strange, clustered like constellations mapping toward the sky.

“It’s spreading,” I murmur, crouched beside a woman whose breathing rattles like broken stone.

Atlys stiffens beside me. “Yes.”

That is all he says.

We work well together, despite everything.

Atlys knows my movements now. There are moments when his hand brushes my back to guide me away from danger, when his voice drops low in my ear to warn me of shifting ground or unstable wards. Intimate, unspoken gestures only learned through time together.

I still haven’t forgiven him, though the anger has softened.

A month in, we are sent to the southern crevasse. The one bound to Hel.

The air here is wrong. Heavy and pressurized. The ancient seals above the gap tremble beneath Atlys’s hands as he reinforces them, jaw tight, shadows curling along his arms like living things.

“The gate shouldn’t be straining,” Cadex says. “Not like this.”

“No,” he agrees. “It shouldn’t.”

“What happens if it opens?” I ask.

His eyes flick to mine, dark and endless. “We lose more than Terraguard.”

The ground shudders. Somewhere far above, the moon drifts imperceptibly farther from where it should be.

Atlys finishes the warding and exhales, centuries of control locked behind his ribs. His hands shake.

I pretend not to notice.

The casualties climb.

We lost a scout. Then a healer. Then an entire patrol that never makes it back from the western tunnels. Cadex comes back bloodied and furious, orders snapping from him like broken glass.

And Atlys grows quieter.

I catch him once, alone in the war room, staring at an old star map etched into obsidian. His fingers trace the moon’s path, then drift outward into empty space.

“You knew this could happen,” I say softly.

He doesn’t deny it. “I feared it.”

“What is it exactly?”

Atlys takes a deep breath. “Our home planet.” He taps the moon on the diagram. “When it collided with Earth long ago, most of the impact was absorbed into the crust of the world. But the rest of it… legends say eventually became the moon.”

“Two halves drifting farther apart.”

He nods.