Page 21 of Fifth
Locus stepped forward until the light from the gate painted his chest in cold silver. He stopped, and she stopped, as well. He studied the carvings with that same surgeon’s patience, then the ground, then the air. He had spent a lifetime looking into places that would kill him if he looked wrong. She let him doit.
“What does it say,” she asked.
“It is not a language I like,” he said. “It is the mathematics of cruelty. To open, an input must be made at two points. Blood here, pressure there.” He pointed. “It is the design of men who enjoy watching.”
“Blood and pressure.” She lifted her chin. “Does it need mine?”
“No.” He didn’t look at her when he said it. “It needs mine.”
“At the same time?”
“I think not.”
He pressed his palm against a small plate near the base of the frame. The metal flared, then drank. The smell of hot iron rose. He didn’t flinch. Heat shimmered over his skin, and the thin band of light around the frame thickened until it looked like a seam about to split. He lifted his palm.
A mechanical hum rolled in from behind them. Hannah turned. Three drones dropped, fat and ugly, their lens clusters glittering like flies’ eyes. The nearest dipped, then stabilized at a height that looked performative, as if it were bowing.
“Smile for the buyers,” a voice crackled from a speaker. It was the headman. She recognized his voice instantly. It rasped through the speaker with a familiar cruelty. “We thought you would leave a pretty corpse in our pit, alien. You disappoint.”
Locus didn’t turn. “The show is over.”
The headman’s chuckle hissed through the static. “You have forgotten our rules. There is only one. Survive. You have not done that yet.” The drone on the left spun lazily as if to show her the dark mouths of the other pits that lined the path they had not taken. “You think the gate is your friend. Perhaps it is. Perhaps itopens into a meadow with clean water. Perhaps it opens into the second trial.”
“Which is it?” Hannah asked.
“That depends on what I sell tonight,” the headman said. “Buyers like romance. They like a show of devotion. Akiss might help decide the next trial. Ihave numbers to hit.”
Heat crawled up Hannah’s chest and into her face. The kiss earlier, forced by a different drone in a different part of the preserve, had been a humiliation that burrowed in straight to her bones. It had also been fire. She hated thatmore.
“We decline,” Locus said. “We have paid in blood.”
“I have a better currency,” the headman crooned. “Want.”
The drone drifted closer until it was an arm’s length from Hannah’s cheek. She wanted to slap it out of the air. Locus stepped between her and the machines without looking. His body erased them from her line of sight. The gesture was simple. It made her heartache.
“Move,” he told the drones. “Or be removed.”
“Kiss her first, alien.” Two of the drones seemed to shut down and Hannah wondered if they weren’t now speaking privately to the head slaver. “Do it or else you won’t like what you find on the other side of that gate. Agree and you’ll have time to defeat what’s coming.”
An instant later the other drones revived, red recording lights blinking, lenses trained mercilessly on them. Their gazes met, the pressure of a hundred watching eyes sinking into Hannah’s skin. Locus’s expression turned to iron, but his gaze dropped to her mouth. Her pulse stumbled. She lifted her chin, fury and defiance tangling with something hotter.
He moved first, closing the space in a single breath. His mouth caught hers hard, abrutal claiming that made her gasp against him. Heat roared through her veins, shame and want colliding as his lips pressed deeper. The crowd’s roar blurred into nothing. There was only the sear of his mouth and the way he angled her back against the cold stone to shield her body from the cameras.
She clutched at his shoulders, meaning to shove him away, but her fingers tightened instead. His kiss changed, deepening, his tongue parting her lips until the humiliation of being forced became tangled with a fire she hated herself for answering. The taste of him—salt and heat, relentless and male—filled her. Her body betrayed her, arching into him as his hand cupped the back of her skull, holding her exactly where he wantedher.
When he finally pulled back, the air between them snapped hot and thin. Hannah’s breath shuddered in her chest, lips swollen, every nerve aware of him. The drones hovered, lenses gleaming, feeding on the spectacle, but she no longer cared who watched. Her reluctant acceptance had become something else entirely—terrifying, consuming, undeniable.
“Take off her top,” the headman ordered.
Locus straightened, his voice cold and final. “No. You will not command me to perform vile acts. The next drone that speaks of her body or orders me to strip her will be torn apart.” He lifted his hand, heat shimmering in the air like a warning. “Test me and I will destroy every machine you send, and then I will come for you.”
Dead silence followed for a beat, then: “You can’t destroy your only audience,” he protested.
“I can and I will.” Heat rolled off him in a wave. “And then I would follow your voice to its source. What do you suppose thebets will be on who will win that confrontation? Now do as you promised or you will see me far sooner than expected.”
Silence. The drones held for one long breath. The nearest shivered in the air like a gnat in a hot updraft. “You will pay for this, alien.” Then all three lifted at once and zipped backward through the preserve with the speed of cowards.
Behind them, the gate brightened. The surface of the arch shivered, light sliding across it in waves like heat off asphalt.
