Page 16 of Fifth
“You like to pull.”
His mouth curved, adangerous flicker. “Affirmative.”
They moved together, bodies recalling the rhythm they had built the day before. The ground toward the gate looked black and smooth in the dawn, aribbon of something not quite dirt, not quite stone. It reminded her of the surface of the lake when the wind died and the water became glass. She thought of boards that creaked and grandmothers who smelled of soap wrapped in paper—and then she thought of nothing, because the earth gave under Locus’s weight in a fool’sbow.
His hand shot back, clamped her hip, holding her as if his fingers were driven into the ground itself. The smooth surface trembled and held. He eased his grip but didn’t lift hispalm.
“Do you trust me?” His eyes never left the ground.
She thought for a single heartbeat. “Yes.”
“Then we will go through.”
She wanted to laugh. To cry. To kiss him until the memory of her abduction shattered. Instead she set her palm flat between his shoulder blades, fingers pressing into hard muscle. “Through,” she said, and the word clicked like a key turning in alock.
He stepped, and the ground thinned.
The night ended there, with the taste of his kiss still on her mouth, his heat still burning in her bones, the rules they had spoken etched under her skin like ink she couldn’t wash away. The gate waited. The drones stirred. The world held its breath, ready todrop.
“Stop.”
Hannah froze mid-step, breath suspended. Locus’s voice cut the hush of the preserve like a blade, quiet and certain, vibrating along her spine until the small muscles between her ribs went still.
Nothing moved. Not the air. Not the leaves above the pathway. Not the faint dust at her feet that had looked so harmless a momentago.
He eased fully in front of her, silent, heat pouring off his body. The preserve absorbed sound, yet she heard every shift of his weight, every measured breath. He studied the ground the way a surgeon studies an exposed artery. Her mouth dried. Shelooked too, and the dirt that had seemed ordinary now looked wrong. It carried a muted, padded quality, like fabric stretched tight to cover a trapdoor.
“You see it.”
“I see something.” Her whisper barely left her lips. “I don’t know what I’m seeing.”
“The filling is fresh. There is a seam three steps ahead. Others would miss it.”
Her throat worked. “But not you.”
“No.” His attention returned to the ground. “Not me.”
They spent hours retracing a path that bent like a circle, only to find every trap reset behind them. The iron jaw they had jammed open previously was now ready to spring again, as if it had never been touched, nets torn earlier now coiled again. The slavers wanted them to sense the clamp of an invisible hand. It was working.
They turned toward the only route left. This corridor of dirt and short scrub was narrower than any before. Somewhere ahead, the gate waited. She sensed it the way a shipyard worker senses the sea behind a wall, the way a pianist senses a stage through a curtain. It was close.
Her eyes burned from exhaustion. Locus had offered his body like a wall and told her to rest, and she had sat upright against him with eyes open and mind racing. That memory pressed on her now: the warmth of his chest, the heavy rhythm of his breath, the delicious taste of his kiss. She shoved everything aside and watched his hands instead.
He crouched and drew two clean lines in the dirt with his fingertips, one to her left, one to her right, careful not to break the surface. “Step only where I step. Match my stride exactly.”
“I’m not a soldier.” Her mouth tilted despite herself. “I trip on flat sidewalks.”
“You will not trip today.” His look steadied something inside her. “Give me your hand.”
She set her palm in his, heat shocking through her arm, settling in her belly with a significance she didn’t want to name. He guided her hand to his lower back, above the strap of the loincloth they’d forced on him. “Keep it here. If I shift, you shift. If I stop, you freeze.”
His spine flexed beneath her fingers as he moved. She mirrored him, palm splayed, muscles taut. He placed each foot with precision, heel to ball to toe, never committing until he tested the surface. Not elegant. Elegance was for show. Efficient. Deadly. It felt like safety, the way a bolt feels when it locks adoor.
They covered ten steps. Fifteen. Each footfall like stepping over a sleeping predator. The dirt shifted, gave, then held. He paused, and she sensed the pause in his body before her eyes caught it, arigid stillness that spoke louder than words. He was a living telegraph, every muscle signaling warning. Instinctively she shortened her breath to match his, as if syncing her body to his would tether her to safety.
“Almost there.” His voice camesoft.
“How do you know?”
