Page 10 of Fated in A Time of War

ALICE

T he tunnel swallows us whole.

It’s narrow enough that my shoulder scrapes rust on one side and cold concrete kisses my cheek on the other.

The air is wet—old water, oil, and something sweeter that turns my stomach.

Fresh blood. It threads the damp with a metallic tang that coats the back of my tongue.

Krall’s boots slap soft and sure, even with the hitch in his stride.

He’s limping, but he doesn’t make a sound.

His jaw is a carved thing in the dark, every muscle holding its breath.

The world above is still there—distant, muted by rubble and depth. Muffled thumps shiver grit loose from the ceiling. Somewhere, a voice barks orders through a speaker, distorted into a demon gargle I can’t translate. The Kru are hunting.

I stumble once, catching myself on a weeping pipe.

It leaves my palm slick with cold, chemical-flavored water.

It’s not pain that makes my knees soft. It’s the afterburn of terror, the adrenaline-hangover shake that hits when your body realizes you’re not dead yet and doesn’t know what to do with the leftover fear.

“Keep up,” Krall murmurs without looking back. His voice is gravel rolled in smoke.

“I am,” I whisper. My teeth chatter once. I press them together until they stop.

We angle left through a hatch so low I have to duck. Beyond is a maintenance junction, a crooked room where conduit veins meet and cross, where ancient warning labels curl off the panels like dead petals. A small service screen flickers in sickly green. It gives the darkness a heartbeat.

Krall sweeps the corners with his rifle, then points. “There.” The service corridor tightens to a bottleneck past the junction—good kill zone for anyone following.

Another rumble above—closer this time. Dust powders my hair. The Kru aren’t guessing. They’re triangulating.

“Give me thirty seconds,” I say, already moving to the junction panel. My fingers won’t hold still; they want to jitter. I force them to obey. “I can pull heat.”

He’s at my shoulder in two strides, heat of him pushing the tunnel’s damp back a step. “What?”

“Thermal spoof.” I pop the panel with a hiss of adhesive failing.

Inside is a rat’s nest of cables—red on black, yellow on gray, ancient code printed along the sleeves in a font the city forgot.

“Old buildings like this bleed residual current into the maintenance coils. If I reroute through one of the broken transformers, it’ll glow like a body on their scope. ”

“Will it hold?” His tone says he expects no.

“I only need it to lie,” I say. “Thirty seconds.”

He gives one curt nod and turns back to the bottleneck, posting himself there like a door you’d be stupid to open.

He’s bleeding. I see it now that the screen sputters enough light to stain him: a bloom spreading across his flank where the armor’s been chewed open, so dark it reads almost black but blooming crimson at the fringe where it meets air.

Vakutan blood is thick. It pulls light into it, syrupy, soporific.

It looks like midnight has learned to drip.

He moves like the wound isn’t there.

I try not to think about the way the universe tilted when our faces were inches apart on the platform. I try not to think the word jalshagar . Not now. Not with the enemy hunting.

Wires. Focus.

I strip a line with my teeth and spit copper.

Taste of pennies. My hands still shake, so I brace my wrists against the lip of the panel to steady them and cross the red into the broken coil.

The transformer hums awake in a ragged, uneven note.

Not enough. I yank a heating element from the panel’s base—burned black at the ends but still intact—and jam it into the loop, using a smear of thermal paste from the kit to close the gap.

The junction sighs and then purrs, warmth blooming under my palm.

“Come on,” I whisper to the machine. “Glow for me. Be a ghost somewhere else.”

Krall glances over. He doesn’t ask what I’m doing—just watches my fingers flick and tie, watches the way my breath slows with the work. He nods once, grim approval, and returns to the mouth of the corridor. The nod shouldn’t matter. It does anyway.

Overhead, the hunt shifts. I can feel it in the vibrations, the direction of the grit fall. The drone buzz drifts left, away from us, as the false heat signature spins a story with our names scratched out.

“Done,” I murmur, dropping the panel face back into place without sealing it so I can kill the phantom later if I have to. “It will burn hot for a minute. Then fry.”

“Good,” he says. “We’re gone by then.”

He pivots to move and the motion pulls a ragged sound out of him—half-cough, half stifled snarl. He covers it with a grind of his teeth, but I hear the softness the pain cuts from everything.

I step into his path.

He’s taller. Wider. Stronger. But I plant my boots and square my shoulders and put my hands up between us. They’re still bound in front, tape biting skin, but they are mine.

“Stop,” I say. Not loud. Not pleading. The sort of soft you use at the bedside, like you’re calming a heart that doesn’t know how to beat right. “You’re bleeding out.”

“No.” It’s bare and immediate, a reflex. He tries to shift past me. I match him, a mirror. The tunnel makes us inches and breath. “We don’t stop.”

“You’ll drop.” I tip my chin at his side. The dark stain has thickened; each breath spreads it a fraction wider. The smell of iron is everywhere. “You won’t say it, but I can smell it. Shrapnel. Maybe a tear.”

He flexes his claws on the rifle. “I said no.” His eyes are gold coals banked hard, heat under ash. “Move, necklace.”

“A healer’s what I am.” The words are soft and steady, and I hear the old abbess in them. “You want to keep moving? Let me make sure you can.”

He leans forward, and for a heartbeat I think he’ll simply lift me by the throat and put me aside like fallen wire. He’s done it before. He can do it again. His breath is heat on my cheek, edged with pain and ozone.

Overhead, boots stutter, shift, then recede toward the lie I built. Thirty seconds of grace. Maybe forty. It isn’t much. It’s ours.

“Krall.” I say his name because names can anchor people to their bodies. “Let me look. Thirty seconds. I can pack the wound, seal it. I have coagulant. If it fuses to your armor, I’ll cut the plate free and retape. You’ll lose time fighting me you can’t afford.”

His gaze flicks past me, measuring the corridor, calculating distance and death. The muscles along his jaw feather and lock. Pain sparks the edges of his voice when he speaks again, a touch of rasp that wasn’t there a minute ago. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.” My voice tightens. He isn’t the only one who can be iron. “I see the way you’re holding yourself. Like if you flex wrong your insides will spill. You got us a signal out. You dragged me into the dark. Let me do the next thing.”

“Why?” The word cracks. Not the anger—something behind it. “So I owe you?”

“So you don’t die stupid,” I say, and let my mouth hitch toward a smile that isn’t humor. “So the child I’m trying to save doesn’t lose both his chances today.”

That lands. He flinches, barely, an electric twitch under scales.

“Thirty seconds,” I say again. “Count to thirty out loud if you have to. Growl it for all I care.”

He stares at me like I’m the cliff and he’s the tide deciding whether to break. Somewhere high above, someone shouts “Clear!” and a drone whines in the wrong direction. My heart hammers hard enough to shake my ribs.

For the first time since he threw me over his shoulder in the ruins, he doesn’t push me aside.

He stands there, imperfectly still, heat licking through the narrow space between us, and lets me be the one who doesn’t move.

He finally lowers himself to the damp floor, a grudging collapse that sounds like surrender even if it isn’t.

The tunnel wall takes his weight with a groan of ferrocrete and rust, and he sits there, bleeding into the dust. His eyes stay on me, unblinking, daring me to waste the time he thinks we don’t have.

I kneel in front of him. The stink of iron is thick—hot and raw, like a forge gone sour. My hands hover for half a breath before I force them to move. I can’t hesitate. Not with him letting me close.

“Hold still,” I murmur. My knife flashes dull silver in the green-glow light as I cut away the shredded edge of his chest plate. The blade scrapes against the cracked plating with a sound that bites into my teeth. Beneath, I peel back the broken harness until muscle and scale are laid bare.

He’s torn open along the flank. The scales there are cracked, edges lifted like shattered glass. The skin beneath is slick, blood pulsing in thick ropes. It isn’t human blood—darker, heavier, syrup that clings to my gloves and shines like oil. But it’s blood all the same.

He flinches when I press around the wound, jaw ticking. “Don’t?—”

“I’m not asking permission,” I cut in, calm, steady. My voice has to be the rock here, not the quake. “I need to see how deep it runs.”

His breath growls through his teeth but he doesn’t shove me off. His claws curl into the dirt. His restraint feels louder than any shout.

I reach into my pouch, fingers finding the small vial of emergency nanites—tiny, humming things suspended in nutrient gel.

Next, a pouch of crushed herb that smells sharp, bitter-sweet, like scorched mint and pine resin.

Ataxian coagulant. Contraband to the Alliance, but I’ve carried it for years.

Old remedies don’t ask which flag you bow to. They just work.

I mix them in my palm, the gel fizzing faintly as the powder eats its way through, releasing a sting sharp enough to water my eyes.

“This will burn,” I warn, and smear it directly into the wound.

He jerks, muscles bunching under my touch. His eyes flare like twin suns, teeth bared in a snarl—but he doesn’t shove me away.