Page 11 of Fifth (Intergalactic Warriors #5)

A DRONE swooped 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 the drone 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?”

“It is leverage,” he said. “You will feel it.”

She almost laughed, breathless and a little wild. “I have been feeling it.”

Below them the spikes surged upward on hidden tracks, wicked tips lifting until she swore they were kissing her calves.

Aroar went up from the bettors above, voices chanting for blood, shouting odds on which of them would be skewered first. Terror clawed through her chest—one slip, one heartbeat too slow, and they would be nothing but meat for thepit.

His voice grew more demanding. “Now.”

She did what he told her. She drove her legs in and the physics changed. He rose. The last brace was old steel bolted into rock. He took it with both hands and held for the space of three hard breaths. Then he made a sound deep in his chest and threw them toward thelip.

They cleared it.

He caught the edge with one hand, then two, and hauled. Dirt broke loose and fell past their feet like dry rain. He turned himself into a lever and rolled them both onto solid ground an instant before spikes would have skeweredthem.

Above from the drone, the crowd erupted.

Some cursed, furious at lost wagers. Others howled with disbelief that the pit had not claimed at least one of them.

Men shouted over one another, demanding new odds, voices split between rage and reluctant awe.

The sound poured down into the preserve, astorm of noise that made Hannah’s skin crawl.

They had survived, and still the world jeered.

The sky above them stretched like a dark ribbon. Her vision blurred. For a moment she lay flat on her back with his body caging her. She couldn’t move. She wasn’t sure she wantedto.

Air dragged into her lungs in great, untidy pulls.

She saw each inhale lift the dense muscle of his chest. His heart hammered against her, until gradually it became a heavy, steady drum against the underside of her palm.

She realized her hand was still on him, splayed over his sternum, and that her fingers were spread wide as if she meant to claim his heat for herself and never give itback.

He didn’t move away. He braced on one forearm and lowered his head until his forehead touched hers. Not a kiss. Apress. Their breaths mingled. His exhale warmed herlips.

“Say it,” she whispered, not sure what she was askingfor.

“It is done,” he said. “We are out.”

Her throat closed on a sound she refused to let out. She nodded once and then the accusation broke through. “You knew we’d face that pit. You knew the spikes would come for us.”

“Affirmative.”

“You led us into it.”

“Affirmative.”

“That was insane.”

“Affirmative.” A faint breath of wry heat touched his mouth. “Insane is sometimes necessary.”

She should have shoved him away. She should have struck him.

She surprised herself and lifted her other hand to the back of his neck, fingers brushing the tense muscles there, finding the raised ridges of strain and the slick heat of his skin where fear had once driven her nails.

He shivered very slightly when she touched the marks. It wasn’t weakness. It was reaction.

“Don’t do that again,” she demanded. “Don’t decide for both of us.”

“I will decide when the decision keeps you alive.” His voice turned quiet and iron-strong. “You may argue later.”

“I’m arguing now.”

“Good. This is later.” He pushed up and away from her in a controlled surge and rose to a crouch. Open wounds streaked his back with blood and she shuddered. “And you are alive enough to fight me.”

She would have cursed him if her mouth weren’t so dry. “Oh, Locus. Your poor back. It needs to be cleaned and stitched.”

“Eventually,” he replied.

She rolled to her side, then up onto her knees, then onto her feet. Her legs shook at first and held the secondtime.

He stood beside her, an efficient, massive tower. He didn’t offer his hand. He didn’t need to. The line of his body said he would catch her if she fell. She hated that she liked it. She hated that she believedhim.

The path ahead opened like a throat. At its end, the gate waited.

It looked nothing like the abraded iron barrier she had expected.

It was a heavy steel arch bolted into stone, eight feet high, its surface dark and faintly reflective, like oil spread across water.

Aframe of hammered metal ringed it, carved with jagged symbols that might have been letters and might have been warnings.

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.