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“If it is,” I say, “then I do not know why losing you feels as if it would take the air out of every room I enter for the rest of my life.”
Anita’s lips part slightly.
The words leave me exposed and furious at myself for giving them shape. I look away before her face can make the confession worse.
“What is destiny?” I continue, staring at the glowing wall. “What faith survives contact with what we have seen? I do not know whether purpose is discovered, assigned, inherited, or invented by frightened people who cannot bear the alternative. I only know that when the geometry took you from my sight, something inside me answered before belief had any chance to speak.”
The silence that follows is not empty. It is full of the corridor’s hum, Brakk’s held breath, Sira’s gentle stillness, and Anita’s slow step toward me.
She touches my forearm.
The contact is light, careful, and completely devastating.
“I don’t have better answers,” she says softly. “I wish I did, because I enjoy being insufferably correct. But even if the bond started as engineering, biology, or some ridiculous cosmic leftover from beings playing with reality like a toy, what’s happening between us still matters to me.”
Her thumb shifts against my sleeve. “I’m not saying that fixes it. I’m not saying it makes any of this less terrifying. I’m saying I know what fake reverence looks like, and this doesn’t feel fake.”
The corridor’s hum changes pitch.
I open my eyes.
Sira turns sharply toward the darkness behind us. “Something is wrong.”
Brakk lifts his cutter immediately. “More specific would be great.”
The wall beside Sira ripples.
Black stone becomes transparent for a fraction of a second, revealing shapes moving through an adjacent passage we did not know existed. Matte armor. Mechanical climbing braces. White sigils of a split throat inside a circle.
The Choir has found a parallel route.
“Down!” I shout.
The wall bursts inward.
A concussion charge detonates inside the corridor, punching air and silver dust into our bodies with brutal force. Anita is thrown against me. I catch her and turn, taking the worst of the shock across my back. Brakk’s cutter fires wildly, carving a bright line through the smoke. Sira is knocked sideways, her shoulder striking the wall hard enough to drive a cry from her.
Choir soldiers pour through the breach with disciplined speed.
No shouted sermons. No wasted motion. Two shooters kneel, two advance, one raises a device that emits a shrieking harmonic tone aimed at the archive case. The case in Anita’s grip flares violently, and she gasps as the strap jerks against her body.
“They’re trying to pull it!” Anita shouts.
I fire twice and drop the soldier with the device, but another takes his place immediately. Brakk lunges toward the breach with his cutter, forcing the nearest attackers back. Sira staggers to her feet and reaches for the wall, silver light flashing under her palm as she tries to disrupt the passage.
“Anita, behind me!” I order.
For once, she moves without arguing.
The Choir changes tactics. One fireteam pins me and Brakk in place while another circles through the shifting wall, using the geometry as cover. I see the pattern too late because their target is not the case.
It is Sira.
Two attackers emerge behind her from a panel that opens silently in the black stone. One clamps a restraint collar around her throat before she can turn. The other drives a shock prod into her side. Her body arches, eyes flaring white with pain.
“Sira!” Anita screams.
I swing my weapon toward them, but the corridor pitches sideways. Gravity stutters hard enough to slam my shoulder into the wall. Plasma fire rips through the space where my head had been. Brakk roars and tackles one attacker near the breach, but three more push through behind him.
