Page 95 of Fated in A Time of War
Alice watches me crawl under the engine block, claws scraping at rusted panels. I pop open a maintenance hatch and start tracing wires with the tip of my finger. The smell of singed polycarbon and stale coolant hits me like a punch. My eyes water, but I keep going.
Every connection I test, every fuse I flip, I do with one thing in mind—get her out of here.
She deserves out.
I’ve spent most of my life tearing things apart. Killing. Breaking. This... this is different. This is building. Repairing. And I don’t hate it.
She kneels beside me after a while, laying the satchel down. “Fuel cells?” she asks.
“Two of ‘em intact. Third’s leaking. If I bypass the secondary converter, we can get lift, maybe half a day’s worth.”
She nods. “I’ll patch the rupture in the coolant line. You’re still bleeding, by the way.”
I glance down. Sure enough, my shoulder’s slick with blood—dull red against soot-black scales. A jagged shard’s still embedded near the collarbone.
“Huh. Didn’t notice.”
“Lie still.”
She digs into the satchel, pulls out a pair of gloves and the surgical kit. Her hands are steady. Focused. She’s good at this—too good. You don’t get this precise without doing it too many times.
I watch her face as she works. Eyes narrowed. Brows furrowed. Lips pressed in a tight, determined line. The kind offace that belongs to someone who’s had enough taken from her and refuses to lose one more thing.
When the shard’s out and the wound’s stitched, she tapes it with industrial gauze and leans back.
“All set,” she mutters.
“Thanks,” I say, quieter than I mean to.
She nods and sits beside me, stretching out her legs. The canal wall’s behind us, half-collapsed, giving just enough shade. We sit in it, pressed shoulder to shoulder, and for a long minute, we don’t speak.
The world hums around us—wind whistling through the fractured plates, the faint buzz of a still-hot circuit, distant thunder that might be another strike or just a storm rolling in. Doesn’t matter.
Eventually, I say, “We get airborne, where do we go?”
She doesn’t answer right away.
Then: “Somewhere they’re not.”
“Long list.”
“Shorter than it used to be.”
I turn my head, watching the way the light catches in her hair—still streaked with dust, but beautiful all the same.
“Still with me?” I ask.
She turns too, meeting my gaze.
“Always.”
Night fallsheavy over the canal’s edge, but inside the transport—our battered ship, half-buried, half-fired through the bones of Kru—there’s a hush unlike anything I’ve known. The engines quiet. The low hum of reactivated cells fades to a still heartbeat. We’re safe. For now.
My back aches with every breath, still tender from her needle and my landing on the mech. I feel the faint grit of ash and duston my skin, the lingering sting of sweat dried into salt. When Alice slides in beside me on the narrow bunk, she presses close enough that I feel the heat of her body seep into mine. Her hair, tangled and dusky with grime, rains warm shadow across my collarbone.
She doesn’t say anything at first. She just lets her head fall against my chest, and I lean into it. Her breath warms the scar there—a souvenir from Ornos Valley, where I nearly died for her. Just feeling her next to me, human and real, is more than comfort. It’s alive.
We stay tangled in that dark, cramped space—not from desperation, but from need. A need to feel skin against skin, to know this isn’t a dream. I carry every scar across my chest and arms, but in that moment, the only thing that matters is the softness of her curves pressed against me. She slides against me, every motion reverent, every breath shared. I have never been so gentle. Never felt more sure.
