Page 54 of Sixth
Lume’s voice came, small but clear, the words formed through the hum of her wings. “I do not like this sky. It watches.” Her prismatic, rainbow-hued eyes narrowed toward the drifting tethers overhead. “But I will stay close, Emmy-light.”
A brief smile touched Emmy’s mouth at the affectionate nickname, no doubt derived from the Valenmark. They reached a split in the canyon where another blown-out bridge hung in ragged lengths.
Apex didn’t slow. He tested the anchor posts with one palm, then pulled a coil of cable from his belt and clipped it to a ring on his harness. “Hold here.”
She opened her mouth to argue and closed it again when he stepped cleanly across a gap that would have swallowed her in a heartbeat. He caught a dangling beam, swung, and landed on the far ledge with a muted thud that sounded like certainty.
A moment later, he fixed the cable and gestured. “Come.”
Emmy clipped in and went hand over hand across the void, boots skidding against glass. Halfway, alow ripple ran through the structure. Tiny sparks skittered along the cable and nipped her wrists.
She hung there, breath tight, and forced herself to think. “Core, discharge?”
“Angle right. Tap your boot against the pillar.”
She did, and the charge bled off in a glitter of harmless light. When her feet hit the far ledge she let out a ragged laugh that was mostly relief. Apex’s hand closed briefly around her forearm. Heat. Strength. The shock of contact grounded her more than the ledge beneath her boots.
Then, without seeming to think about it, he pulled her closer in a quick, desperate hug—just long enough for her to feel the solidness of him, the steady hammer of his heart, the brief concern that betrayed how close she’d come to falling.
It was gone almost before she registered it, replaced by the same measured stillness, but her pulse refused to settle. His gaze flicked to her mouth, down to the pulse in her throat, then away, but she’d seen it. The flicker of awareness. The thing neither of them daredname.
She didn’t step back. Not until hedid.
They found the access port in a pocket of shadow where the canyon pinched inward. The entrance lay beneath a warped gantry, acircular iris of black alloy half fused shut. Field-weld spatter clothed the rim, as if someone had tried to seal the wound and the planet kept forcing it to breathe.
Apex studied the unfamiliar interface for a moment, tracing the faint seams with his fingertips until he found the right sequence. He entered a series of commands and the locks released with a low mechanical sigh, unreeling inside with a series of low clicks. The iris shuddered and opened a quarter turn, then stuttered, grinding to astop.
“Manual assist,” Emmy said, already wedging a bar of discarded metal into theseam.
He set his hands alongside hers. Together, they pulled. The door groaned. Gave. Opened to a vertical shaft that sighed warm air up their faces.
The lock did not simply release. It yielded.
He looked over his shoulder, and the faint light caught the line of his jaw. “Stay close to me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Her voice came out low, rougher than she meant, and his eyes lingered for a heartbeat before he turnedaway.
They clipped into a descent line and slid into a shaft walled in dark glass. Halfway down, gravity twisted—an invisible hand rotating the world a quarter turn. Emmy’s stomach lurched. Her boot lost purchase and skated on the glossy wall. Her body swung out over opendark.
“Emmeline.” His voice cut clean through the hum. Not loud. Command absolute.
Her glove slipped. The line burned through herpalm.
Apex caught her harness in one hand and reeled her in hard enough that her spine met the plane of his chest. For a heartbeat they were one breath, one rush of heat and fear. The mark thrummed between them, syncing their hearts until the panic bled out of her muscles.
“Local grav-vector unstable,”Core warned, voice hushed and close.“Adjust descent angle by six degrees. Hug the south wall.”
“I’ve got you,” Emmy whispered, not sure whether she meant the shaft or him or herself.
“Hold to me,” hesaid.
She did. They moved as one down the last twelve meters, boots scraping, bodies aligned. At the base, the shaft bloomed into a short corridor of rippled glass that shivered with distant thunder. And then into a vault that breathed heat like a sleeping beast.
Emmy could smell him now beneath the metallic air, the faint mix of stale air and the scent that lived against his skin. When she landed, he reached for her automatically, one hand at her waist to steady her. His fingers lingered just long enough for her breath to break.
“Sorry,” she said quickly.
“For what?”
