Page 24 of Fated in A Time of War
“Give me thirty seconds,” I say, already moving to the junction panel. My fingers won’t hold still; they want to jitter. I force them to obey. “I can pull heat.”
He’s at my shoulder in two strides, heat of him pushing the tunnel’s damp back a step. “What?”
“Thermal spoof.” I pop the panel with a hiss of adhesive failing. Inside is a rat’s nest of cables—red on black, yellow on gray, ancient code printed along the sleeves in a font the city forgot. “Old buildings like this bleed residual current into the maintenance coils. If I reroute through one of the broken transformers, it’ll glow like a body on their scope.”
“Will it hold?” His tone says he expects no.
“I only need it to lie,” I say. “Thirty seconds.”
He gives one curt nod and turns back to the bottleneck, posting himself there like a door you’d be stupid to open. He’s bleeding. I see it now that the screen sputters enough light to stain him: a bloom spreading across his flank where the armor’s been chewed open, so dark it reads almost black but blooming crimson at the fringe where it meets air. Vakutan blood is thick. It pulls light into it, syrupy, soporific. It looks like midnight has learned to drip.
He moves like the wound isn’t there.
I try not to think about the way the universe tilted when our faces were inches apart on the platform. I try not to think the wordjalshagar. Not now. Not with the enemy hunting.
Wires. Focus.
I strip a line with my teeth and spit copper. Taste of pennies. My hands still shake, so I brace my wrists against the lip of the panel to steady them and cross the red into the broken coil. The transformer hums awake in a ragged, uneven note. Not enough. I yank a heating element from the panel’s base—burned black at the ends but still intact—and jam it into the loop, using a smear of thermal paste from the kit to close the gap.
The junction sighs and then purrs, warmth blooming under my palm.
“Come on,” I whisper to the machine. “Glow for me. Be a ghost somewhere else.”
Krall glances over. He doesn’t ask what I’m doing—just watches my fingers flick and tie, watches the way my breath slows with the work. He nods once, grim approval, and returns to the mouth of the corridor. The nod shouldn’t matter. It does anyway.
Overhead, the hunt shifts. I can feel it in the vibrations, the direction of the grit fall. The drone buzz drifts left, away from us, as the false heat signature spins a story with our names scratched out.
“Done,” I murmur, dropping the panel face back into place without sealing it so I can kill the phantom later if I have to. “It will burn hot for a minute. Then fry.”
“Good,” he says. “We’re gone by then.”
He pivots to move and the motion pulls a ragged sound out of him—half-cough, half stifled snarl. He covers it with a grind of his teeth, but I hear the softness the pain cuts from everything.
I step into his path.
He’s taller. Wider. Stronger. But I plant my boots and square my shoulders and put my hands up between us. They’re still bound in front, tape biting skin, but they are mine.
“Stop,” I say. Not loud. Not pleading. The sort of soft you use at the bedside, like you’re calming a heart that doesn’t know how to beat right. “You’re bleeding out.”
“No.” It’s bare and immediate, a reflex. He tries to shift past me. I match him, a mirror. The tunnel makes us inches and breath. “We don’t stop.”
“You’ll drop.” I tip my chin at his side. The dark stain has thickened; each breath spreads it a fraction wider. The smell of iron is everywhere. “You won’t say it, but I can smell it. Shrapnel. Maybe a tear.”
He flexes his claws on the rifle. “I said no.” His eyes are gold coals banked hard, heat under ash. “Move, necklace.”
“A healer’s what I am.” The words are soft and steady, and I hear the old abbess in them. “You want to keep moving? Let me make sure you can.”
He leans forward, and for a heartbeat I think he’ll simply lift me by the throat and put me aside like fallen wire. He’s done it before. He can do it again. His breath is heat on my cheek, edged with pain and ozone.
Overhead, boots stutter, shift, then recede toward the lie I built. Thirty seconds of grace. Maybe forty. It isn’t much. It’s ours.
“Krall.” I say his name because names can anchor people to their bodies. “Let me look. Thirty seconds. I can pack the wound, seal it. I have coagulant. If it fuses to your armor, I’ll cut the plate free and retape. You’ll lose time fighting me you can’t afford.”
His gaze flicks past me, measuring the corridor, calculating distance and death. The muscles along his jaw feather and lock. Pain sparks the edges of his voice when he speaks again, a touch of rasp that wasn’t there a minute ago. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” My voice tightens. He isn’t the only one who can be iron. “I see the way you’re holding yourself. Like if you flex wrong your insides will spill. You got us a signal out. You dragged me into the dark. Let me do the next thing.”
“Why?” The word cracks. Not the anger—something behind it. “So I owe you?”
