"I'm done," Seraphyne whispered, pushing Vaelric’s hands away with a strength that surprised them both. She sat up, her spine popping like dry kindling. "Help me up. I need to see." Vaelric didn't move fast enough, his own obsidian-clad arm feeling sluggish, a heavy weight that seemed to drag on his nervous system. "See what? You can barely stand without keeling over. Sit back down before the infection decides to take another run at your heart." "My heart is fine. My lungs are clearing. And my eyes," she countered, pointing toward the heavy, grey-hued binoculars they had pulled from a dead drifter’s pack three days ago, "are perfectly capable of spotting a target." She swayed, her hand hitting his shoulder for balance. Vaelric caught her, his touch careful—a far cry from the metallic, crushing force he had displayed just yesterday. He felt the heat radiating off her skin; the fever had bro

 "I see a dozen men who look like they haven't slept since the Great Fissure, and a perimeter fence that's got enough current running through it to fry a bull," Vaelric murmured back, his fingers twitching against the soil. The golden veins beneath his skin pulsed, a faint, rhythmic glow that he quickly buried deeper into the mud. "And unless you brought a pair of insulated wire cutters in your back pocket, we aren't walking through the front gate." "I didn't bring wire cutters," Seraphyne whispered, her breath brushing against his ear as she lowered the binoculars. She shifted her weight, wincing as her bruised ribs caught on the collar of her jacket. "I brought you." Vaelric shot her a sharp, incredulous look. "Me? What am I supposed to do, punch the electric fence until the generator cries uncle?" "No. You're going to open the supply shed lock without making a sound," Seraphyne replied, her eyes narrowing

The heavy iron shackle of the padlock groaned under Vaelric’s grip, a sharp, metallic shriek that sounded in the enclosed space like a cracking bell. Vaelric froze, his breath catching in his throat as his obsidian-plated fingers held the shattered pieces of the lock together. For a terrifying heartbeat, the entire logging camp outside seemed to pause, the distant chug of the steam sawmill stuttering before resuming its steady, rhythmic pounding."Did it hold?" Seraphyne whispered, her hand dropping instantly to the heavy hunting knife she kept tucked against her thigh. Her eyes were fixed on the warped wooden door, her shoulders tense beneath the oversized canvas coat she had stolen from the line workers."It held," Vaelric breathed out, carefully pulling the broken iron pieces apart and letting them drop silently into a pile of sawdust near his boots. "The mechanism didn't even have time to scream. But if you ever ask me to pick another lock with brute force again, I'm throwing you

Vaelric’s right hand clenched inside the canvas pocket, the obsidian-plated fingers scraping against the coarse inner lining with a dull, synthetic friction that made his teeth ache. Every micro-movement of his joints felt like dragging glass across raw nerve endings, a constant, burning reminder of the subterranean catastrophe that had rewritten his biology. Beside him, Seraphyne adjusted the collar of her stolen coat, pulling it high enough to obscure the sharp angle of her jaw and the faint, bruised discoloration still lingering along her neck."Stop slouching," she murmured out of the corner of her mouth, her pace matching his step-for-step as they merged into the ragged stream of laborers shuffling across the mud-slicked central yard toward the mess hall. "You look less like a tired logger and more like a corpse trying to remember how to walk upright.""I am a corpse trying to remember how to walk upright," Vaelric shot back in a rough rasp, keeping his gaze fixed on the broad, m

"Move faster," Seraphyne muttered under her breath, her shoulder pressing hard against Vaelric’s left side as they slipped through the swinging kitchen doors of the mess hall.The heat inside hit them like a physical blow. The air swam with the thick, greasy steam of boiling lentils and the stale body odor of fifty men who hadn't seen a proper bath since the first snow melt. At the far end of the long, oil-stained room, a heavy radio transceiver sat mounted on a reinforced wooden desk, its glowing vacuum tubes casting a faint, sickly green light across the cheeks of the camp manager. The man’s voice rasped through a rusted horn speaker, jagged and sharp with panic."I don't care about your logging quotas, Sector Four," the manager barked into the microphone, his knuckles white as he gripped the heavy black handset. "We have an active perimeter breach. High-priority targets. The regional director wants every man with a rifle stationed at the upper switchback by midnight."Vaelric pause