Chapter 10
1296 Words
Vane
The examination room smelled like every other room in this place. Antiseptic. Recycled air. Stale authority.
I pulled my shirt over my head and sat on the table.
Standard procedure. They'd draw blood, run scans, write numbers on a chart like they meant something, and send me back. Another data point in a file no one would act on.
The door opened. The medic walked in with his head down, tablet raised, already talking. "Sentinel 001, I'll be conducting your routine—"
He hadn't finished the sentence before I caught it. Under the latex, under the disinfectant—pine resin. Old leather. A scent I'd known for fifteen years.
"Close the door, Aton."
He lowered the tablet. Pulled the mask down. The face underneath was leaner than I remembered. A scar I didn't recognize ran from his ear to his jaw. But the eyes hadn't changed.
"Took you long enough," he said.
"You've been here three months and this is the first time you've made contact."
"Hard to arrange a private audience with the most monitored patient in the zone." He set the tablet on the counter and leaned against the wall. Casual, but his eyes swept the ceiling corners. Counting cameras. Old habit. "Lucas has people inside. At least two, maybe more. I couldn't risk it until I had a clean window."
The name landed like a stone in still water. I let the ripple settle before I spoke.
"Talk."
Aton gave it to me clean. No padding. Lucas had the title. He didn't have the Pack. The old guard was waiting.
"For what?" I asked.
Aton looked at me. "For you, Vane."
Something cold moved behind my ribs. Not hope. The memory of the last time I'd lost control inside Pack walls. The sound a body makes when it hits a stone pillar hard enough to crack both.
I said nothing.
Aton shifted topics. Efficient as always. "I heard you matched. An E-class Guide."
"Yes."
"An E-class." He let the emphasis sit. "I can arrange a transfer. Better facility. A-rank Guides with actual field experience. The bond's new enough to reassign if we move fast."
"No."
Aton raised an eyebrow. Waited.
I kept my voice level. "Three days ago I went into a full collapse. She performed a deep-channel link and pulled me out."
His expression changed. The casual lean disappeared. He straightened. "A deep-channel link. On you. An E-class Guide."
"Yes."
"What happened to her after?"
"She was unconscious for thirty-one hours. Woke up functional."
In fifteen years I'd rarely seen him go quiet.
"That's not possible." He said it like a reflex. Then his jaw worked once, processing. "An E-class interfacing with an S-class at full collapse should have suffered permanent damage. You don't just sleep that off."
The muscles along my shoulders tightened. "Could the damage be latent?"
"I don't know." He shook his head. "Bring her in. If her psychic architecture really absorbed that kind of load—"
He didn't finish.
The bond detonated.
A whip-crack that tore through my sternum and lit every nerve from spine to fingertips. The instrument tray next to my elbow launched off the counter. Glass shattered against the far wall. The overhead light flickered twice.
I was on my feet before I registered standing.
"What is it?" Aton stepped forward.
"She's in danger."
"Let me send someone." He grabbed my arm. "You breach now, Lucas gets the footage. Everything we've built dies."
I stopped. Every reason not to move stood clear in front of me.
But all I could feel was the thread of her stretching thinner by the second.
The bond screamed.
"Too late."
I pulled free. The door was already behind me.
"Vane—"
The first guard stepped into my path. I put him through the wall without breaking stride. The second reached for his comm. My pressure dropped him before his hand got there.
I didn't stop.
The bond pulled me forward. Her signal guttering like a flame in a storm, barely there. And tangled through it, riding the same channel like a parasite in a bloodstream, something else. Something cold. Something massive. Something that wasn't hers and wasn't mine and was inside her.
I ran.
The door was reinforced steel. I hit it once and the frame gave.
The pressure hit me first. A wall of cold psychic force so dense my vision flickered. I knew what it was before I saw the source. The camp had a word for what made that kind of pressure.
A Destroyer.
He was enormous. Scarred across every visible surface. Collar pulsing a deep, sick red.
But I wasn't looking at him.
Harper was on her knees. Right hand locked onto the Destroyer's collar, fingers white around the metal. Her nose was bleeding, the blood running over her lips and off her chin. She hadn't wiped it away. Hadn't even noticed.
And the Destroyer was standing still. Not restrained. Not unconscious. Still. The way a predator goes still when something it has never encountered walks into its territory. His breathing had slowed. His massive hands, the kind built for crushing skulls, hung loose at his sides.
Something behind my sternum split open and what came out had teeth.
I crossed the room in three strides. Grabbed his collar. Hurled him backward. His body hit the wall hard enough to crater the concrete, dust and debris raining from the impact.
I dropped to one knee. Cupped Harper's face. Blood on my thumbs.
Under it, under her skin, I could feel the residue of his frequency still threaded through her, fading but present, humming against my palms like it had made itself at home inside the channels I had started to think of as ours.
My fingers tightened on her jaw. One involuntary second of grip before I forced them loose again.
"Harper."
Her eyes found mine. Slow. Swimming up from somewhere deep.
"I'm sorry." Her voice barely carried. "I didn't mean to."
I didn't understand. She was apologizing. Why was she apologizing.
She was bleeding. Trapped. Someone had locked her in a room to die and and the first word she chose was sorry.
Something cracked in a place I didn't have a name for.
"Don't."
I wiped the blood from her upper lip with my thumb. Gentle. Gentler than I'd known my hands could be.
Behind me, concrete shifted.
The Destroyer rose from the wall I'd put him through, dust falling from his shoulders like it meant nothing. He rolled his neck. One slow rotation. A man relearning the weight of his own body.
I turned and saw his collar.
The gem had been near-black when I entered. Standard for a Sentinel past the point of no return.
It was green.
He was watching her. Not with the empty stare of a Destroyer. Something had moved back in behind those eyes, and the first thing it had done was look at her.
The way a man looks at water after crawling through a desert.
I knew that look.
I knew it because I'd been fighting it for three days.
The room went very quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when two predators meet in the same territory and neither has decided to back down.
He took a step forward.
"Mine," he said. Cracked. Raw. Like a machine remembering how language worked.
The word landed in my chest and detonated.
I rose. Pulled Harper behind me and let the dominance break loose.
The floor cracked. The overhead light exploded. He stopped mid-step, muscles locking against the pressure rolling off me in waves.
"She's mine."
He didn't flinch. Stood in the dark, bleeding from where I'd put him through a wall, and smiled.
"Then why does her blood smell like me?"
- Writer
