Page 14 of Sixth
When the motion finally stopped, the silence that followed wasn’t absolute silence. The whole world vibrated. The air held a humming pressure, low and intimate, like a throat clearing in thedark.
Emmy’s harness had locked. It took her three attempts to find the release. Her left hand wasn’t listening, fingers numb and stupid. The buckle came loose and she sagged forward, catching herself on her palms. Her nails scraped metal. The floor beneath her was canted, the cockpit a triangle of strange angles and half-light. The view beyond the cracked screen looked like underwater moonlight caught in leaves.
“Apex,” she said, voicedesperate.
He’d slumped against the console. The side of his head was wet. Blood ran into his hair and then down his neck, dark in the blue glow. His chest moved. Too shallow. Tooslow.
“Core?” she rasped, heading for the locker in the hopes of retrieving a first aid kit. “Talk to me.”
The AI’s voice flickered in and out.“Stabilization… protocols… engaged. Seal compartments… administer suppressant… check vitals…”The words degraded, tone fading to static.
“No, no, don’t go.” She coughed through smoke and swept debris off the first aid kit with her forearm, sending panels clattering. The kit snapped open under her hands. She didn’t think about the tremor in her fingers or the way the ship creaked ominously around them. She crawled to Apex, bare knees slipping in something wet. Blood.
She got her shoulder under his and heaved. He was heavy, all that lethal muscle suddenly nothing but sheer bulk with his breath skimming like a stone over water.
“Stay with me,” she muttered. “You don’t get to check out.”
His lashes didn’t move.
She forced his body back from the console to lie along the floor where the angle wasn’t as savage. The mark at his wrist still shone softly, pulse for pulse with hers. She peeled back his jacket with shaking hands, then tore his shirt down the seam. Her breath hitched. For some reason, the sight of him did that—hard planes, brutal beauty, achest built like armor—but there was nothing beautiful about the bruising already blooming beneath his skin or the way his ribs shifted wrongly under herpalm.
“Core,” she said, trying for steady and almost getting there, “diagnostic.”
“…hemothorax… right side… displaced fracture—clavicle… possible splenic bleed… recommend binder application… evac… evac…”The voice frayed, thinned.
“Evac to where?” she whispered, and hated that her voice shook. There was nowhere. Not right now. Only this broken hull, this humming forest, and the pulse of her mark beating back thedark.
She found the hemostatic spray and the sealant patches and the rib binder in the tiny medbay. She cut away more of his shirt, hands close to trembling now from adrenaline, heat, and the electricity that ran under her skin when she touched him. Not helpful. She shoved the emotion into a corner and fitted the binder around his chest, careful of the angle of his broken collarbone. He didn’t wake, but a thin line appeared between his brows, his mouth pulling tight. She wanted to kiss the tightnessaway.
Not helpful. Focus.
There was more blood along his side. Too much. She pressed her fingers there and sensed another’s rhythm beside his heartbeat, the tide-hum of the planet. The light through the cracked screen pulsed once, brighter, like the world held its breath withher.
She looked around frantically, scanning the wreckage. “Core, is there anything here I can use to fix him?”
“Medbay cabinet two… lower left… auto-suture available…”
She dug for it, ripped the pack, and sprayed the cold gel along the worst of the open edges. The gel foamed, shifted, knitted. She watched the numbers on the portable monitor creep a fraction toward the right direction. Not enough.
“Talk to me,” she told him, because it was easier than talking to Core. “Tell me how you’re going to browbeat me for being reckless. Tell me I touched the wrong switch. Tell me anything.”
His lips were pale instead of their usual bronze color. She touched them lightly with her fingertips, wanting, ridiculously, to feel warmth flare. Instead the flare came from her wrist. The Valenmark burned hot, then hotter still, and the heat rolled across her skin like atide.
She didn’t know what made her do it, maybe the way the forest’s light slowed to match the rise and fall of his chest, maybe the way her own breath became trapped against her ribs, but she pressed her marked wrist to his. Flesh to flesh. Mark tomark.
The response was immediate. Heat slammed through her, bright as lightning. Her mind went thin at the edges, as if something had opened a door behind her eyes. There wasn’t language in it, not exactly, but there was pattern. Rhythm.
She sensed Apex like a shape in a dark room. The outline of him—discipline, focus, that low endless potency—blazed across her senses. And under it, pain. Sharp. Compartmentalized, the way a soldier would holdit.
“Apex,” she breathed. “Come back.”
For an instant his pulse jumped under her wrist. Her vision blurred and bizarrely, his attention turned. Not waking yet, but orienting. This way, her body seemed to tell him.Here.
The forest brightened. The hum in the air slid a fraction higher in pitch. The cracked screen took the glow and bent it across his skin. He looked otherworldly like that. Or rather, more otherworldly.
“Emmeline,” he grated, voice rough and faraway.
Her eyes stung. “Hey. Stay with me. Please.”
