"No more talking, K! Just move!" I yell, pushing away from the console.
The mark flares with a white-hot intensity. I gasp, my knees buckling as the interface fights back. I pull my hands away from the console, the connection snapping like a frayed wire. My head thumps with an unyielding, sharp pain, and for a second, my vision swims with amber and violet light clashing behind myeyelids. I want the ship to stop coming through me. I want its ancient, aching circuits gone from my senses. I just need out.
“K-Seven, status of the bridge doors!” I cry, staggering deeper into the room.
"Internal sensors are failing, but the Unit detected a seismic spike in the primary lift-shaft," the drone babbles. "Something heavy just fell. It appears the shaft is blocked."
A quick glance at the fading holographic display shows multiple men and women in the first wave, with more funneling in behind them from the leeches still clamped to the hull. They reach the primary lift-shaft directly beneath the bridge. If the lift car drops, it might buy Draevik time, but only briefly—they’ll find another way up.
Fear for myself fades into a distant, muffled echo. The real terror stems from the image of Draevik standing there, a giant in a suit of armor slowly becoming a coffin. He waits for a war in the stars, but death is climbing out of the floorboards.
The weight in my chest is not fear for myself because I want to save the man who looked at a broken scavenger and decided she had some kind of worth.
"I have to get out of here," I gasp, my legs feeling like lead as I regain my footing. "I have to get to the spine. I have to reach him."
"Sector Nine is on Lockdown Level Nine, Nyra! The doors will only open for a Sovereign-key!" K-Seven vocoder blares, hovering inches from my ear.
I charge toward the massive obsidian slabs that seal the Sanctum, but they remain a solid, mocking wall of stone. Draevik’s lockdown is absolute. I slam my fists against the cold surface, a useless, frantic flurry of desperation. He’s being buried alive on the bridge, and I’m buried in the heart.
"The ship knows me," I shout, spinning around to scan the room. "There’s always a back way. Scavengers don't look at doors, K. We look for the cracks."
My eyes lock on an alcove near the base of the primary reactor pillar. It’s a rough seam, one I noticed during my late-night pacing but dismissed as a structural quirk. Now, in the red flicker of the combat alert, it phosphoresces with a faint, invitation-like violet light.
"K-Seven, illumination!" I command.
The drone darts forward, its spotlight cutting through the shadows. The light reveals a series of interlocking stone plates, etched with the same bio-reactive script found throughout the ship. This surpasses a mere storage locker to function as a manual access point.
"Unit identifies this as a primary maintenance artery," K-Seven chirps, sounding skeptical. "It leads directly to the core systems and the central spine. However, the clearance required is?—"
"I have the clearance right here," I growl, clutching at the burning heat on my chest.
Without waiting for a digital handshake, I rip a thin bracket from the base of the nearest pillar—the obsidian is ancient, and the fittings are brittle where the bio-reactive coating has worn thin—and wedge it into the seam, using every ounce of my scavenger leverage to pry. The stone resists for a heartbeat, then yields with a grinding, metallic groan. I press my palm against the inner sensor. For a terrible second, nothing happens. Then the mark tattooed on me flares, an intense, white-hot burn that feels like a key turning in my very bones. Instead of it just scanning a brand, it's reading the living blood vibrating underneath it, recognizing the Warlord’s own mark pumping through me. The panel shudders and slides back with a reluctant groan, revealing a narrow, vertical shaft lined with lambentcables and blazing neural conduits. It’s the nervous system running throughVirex Prime.
The time for being the thing he protects finally reaches its end. I have to reach that bridge before Selra's ghost code finishes sealing him in. If I can get into the core, I can bypass the lockdown from the inside and tear those bridge doors open myself.
Staring down the dark, narrow tunnel, I resign myself to the claustrophobic nightmare rather than staying hidden, while Korr’s butchers carve their way through the ship. I want to be at his back. I want to ensure that when the butchers arrive, they find more than just an old Warlord waiting for them.
"I'm coming, Draevik," I promise, climbing into the artery. "Don't you dare die before I get there."
I pull the stone plate shut behind me, plunging into the electric dark.
The darkness in the maintenance artery feels thick and alive, moving with the frantic clattering of a ship undergoing a lobotomy. I scramble upward, my fingers digging into the narrow ridges of the dark walls while K-Seven bounces against the conduits behind me, its light strobing in a dizzying sequence. Every timeVirex Primeshudders from a distant impact, the walls press in, threatening to turn this crawl space into a coffin.
"Nyra, the core temperature in this sector is rising," K-Seven babbles, its voice echoing sharply in the confined space. "The invasive code is triggering a purge sequence in the secondary cooling lines to force the Commander to reroute power. We must move faster!"
"I'm moving, K! Just keep that light steady!" I shout, my lungs burning from the thin, ozone-heavy air.
The mark acts as a compass now, pulling me toward the storm’s eye. I ignore the scrapes on my knees and the way the raw energy from the conduits makes the hair on my arms standup. I have to be the variable Selra failed to calculate. I have to be the one thing in this ship that operates outside a digital command.
I reach a junction where the cables thicken into a trunk of bedazzling violet fibers—the central spine. Deep in the guts of the ship, a massive labyrinth of stone and power cables separates me from the bridge. Yet here I stand, at the threshold of the core systems.
"K, the manual bypass," I gasp, pulling myself onto a small ledge. "Draevik has the bridge on lockdown, but Selra is loop-feeding the internal security to keep the automated turrets from firing on the boarders. I have to physically break the link."
"Unit identifies the primary release valve at your eleven o'clock," the drone reports, its spotlight pinning a heavy, circular dial half-buried under a mess of neural webbing. "But Nyra, the pressure required to turn that?—"
"I’ve spent my life turning valves that didn't want to move," I grunt, throwing my weight against the dial.
I lock my boots against the opposite wall and pull with everything I have. The metal is freezing, biting into my palms, but I hold on. I mull over the way Draevik looked at me before he sealed the doors—the weight of a thousand years of loneliness in his eyes. I recall the way he set a place for me in his world.