Page 19 of Fifth
“Now.” He drove power through his legs and pulled. The brace screamed but held. He rose the height of his arm and planted a foot on an old handle.
Time narrowed. Sweat slicked her back. The tang of corroded metal thickened the air. Her hands skidded, then corrected, fingers biting the cords at his neck. He slipped once—areal slip—and her heart crashed, then surged as he corrected like gravity was only rumor.
“How much farther?” Her voice cracked, half-plea, half-demand, the strain breaking through.
“Do not ask.” His answer came like iron, unbending.
“I need a number. Ineed something to hold on to.”
“You do not.”
“Yes, Ido. Give me something.”
A breath. Two. “Ten hand spans. Maybe twelve.”
“Fine.” She gritted her teeth. “Give me ten.”
Her words clung to the dark, thin air. Below, the pit answered with the scrape of shifting spikes, metal groaning as they began to lift and rise faster than Locus was climbing. They angled upward, reaching not just hungrily but with lethalprecision, as if the abyss itself meant to spear them before they ever saw therim.
Chapter 6
A DRONEswooped close, lens glittering as it captured their climb from inches away. The headman’s voice crackled through its speaker, oily with amusement. “Place your bets, boys. Alien falls first? Or maybe the girl screams and slips? Maybe they both bleed together on the spikes. But don’t waste coin on them both making it out. That’s a fool’s wager.”
Jeers and laughter rose in answer, voices shouting numbers, aman barking that he wanted odds on her breaking his grip before they reached the top. Another shouted he’d pay double to see them bothdrop.
Hannah’s stomach turned. Heat rushed to her cheeks as if the men had just priced her skin like a cut of meat. She wanted to scream that she wasn’t theirs to wager on, but the words stuck in her throat. Her nails dug harder into Locus’s neck, fury rising hot enough to choke.
The sharp bite of her own anger pressed into his skin, the tremor running down her grip. She saw his eyes flick toward thedrone once, then back to her, steady and unyielding, and it hit her that he’d noticed every thread of her fury.
Her humiliation burned hotter under the echo of laughter, but in the way he shifted, widening his stance, shoulders hardening, she caught a silent promise—that he’d bear their cruelty beside her. The drone hovered, feasting on the spectacle, then buzzed back as Locus set his focus again.
Hannah looked up past his shoulder, measuring the endless stretch of braces still above them, the yawning pit beneath with its wagging tongue of razor sharp spikes. The distance to the lip appeared impossible—ten, maybe more, each one higher than the last. Her stomach knotted at the thought of how far they still had to go and how little stood between them and the spikes rising from below.
They took the first five handholds faster than she believed possible. His body found a rhythm that used the pit’s design against itself. The braces that had been intended to snag falling bodies became a ladder if approached with care. Each time his hand rose to a new metal mouth, he set his weight in a pattern that protected them both from the sharpest edges.
At seven, the iron brace groaned and lurched. For a fraction of a second, there was no purchase under his foot. The world sawed sideways. She lost the thread of breath, clamped down harder with her thighs, and her nails bit into hisneck.
He bared his teeth and caught a seam. Bones popped in his shoulders with the strain. He didn’t cry out. He let the force ride through him until it found a home and settled.
When he looked at her, sweat tracked the edge of his cheekbone. “You are doing well.”
She gave him a look that would have cut a lesser man. “Flattery,” she informed him, “is for after we live.”
His mouth almost curved. “Noted.”
They took eight. Nine. At ten, the next brace shifted under his palm with a grinding whine and peeled half loose from the wall. The sudden give wrenched them both backward. The pit yawned below like a mouth. They dropped. She felt the drop in every organ. She saw the spikes coming for them and thought of yellow and blue and brown.
He slammed them into the wall with a twist that stole her breath. Stone bit into her shoulder and pain flared down her arm. She tasted blood where her teeth had cut her lip, coppery and sharp. He planted his foot and braced a knee, turning so the impact drove into his hips instead of his ribs, holding them steady. The motion pressed her into him with a shocking closeness, obscene in how her body reacted before her mind caught up, answering like a struck string.
Heat flooded her limbs. It came with shame and defiance in equal measures. She wanted to sob. She wanted to bite him. She wanted him to hold her until the world forgot tospin.
“Look at me,” hesaid.
She did. His eyes were a fierce, impossible color in the dimness. He wasn’t smiling now. He wasn’t pretty. He was power harnessed and made loyal to a single task. Her survival.
“We have two more hand spans,” he said. “When I say now, you drive your legs into me. Not up. In. It will push my weight closer to the wall.”
“How is that a thing?”
