The Atmospheric Processor Seven was a dead god. A colossal latticework of rusted steel and shattered carbon-scrubbing vanes that straddled a poisoned river valley like the skeleton of a fallen titan. In its heyday, it had breathed for a million people. Now, it was a monument to collapse, and for Harbor Grey, a treacherous but necessary source of salvage: high-grade polymers, intact wiring, and precious catalytic metals.
The supply run had been Finn's idea, mapped with his usual paranoid precision. It went wrong with the predictability of a law of physics: the moment they were most vulnerable.
Liam, Kai, and a two-person scout team were on a gantry midway up the god's ribcage, sixty meters above the sluggish, chemical sludge of the river. They had just secured a crate of valuable fiber-optic cable when the distant, familiar whine of grav-skiffs cut through the constant wind. Not scavengers. The skiffs were too new, their engine signature too clean. Purifier remnants. Or worse, something new.
"Company. East ridge," Liam's voice was a flat line in their helmet comms. "Abort. Back to the extraction point. Now."
The retreat was a tense, silent scramble. The gantry network was a maze of crumbling walkways and missing sections. They had to traverse a long, skeletal support beam—little more than an I-beam twenty centimeters wide—to reach the next secure platform. Below was a long, fatal drop onto jagged wreckage.
Liam went first, testing the beam's stability with his weight before signaling the others. He moved with a predator's balance, every muscle engaged, his focus absolute. The scout, Jax, followed. Then the other, Miko.
Kai came last. He was agile, but his strength was not in this kind of raw, physical precision. The wind, which had been a constant moan, chose that moment to gust. The beam vibrated. Kai's foot, placed exactly where Liam's had been, came down on a patch of invisible, wind-polished rust.
It slipped.
There was no cry. Just a sudden, sickening lurch as his balance vanished. He windmilled his arms, the crate on his back shifting treacherously.
Time didn't slow. Itshattered.
Liam, already on the platform, turned. He saw Kai falling. Not the analytical assessment of a tactical problem—subject losing balance, 63% probability of fatal impact—but a visceral, white-hot detonation in his gut that had no name for the first two microseconds, and then screamed one: TERROR.
Pure, unmodulated, primordial terror. For Kai.
His body moved before the scream finished echoing in his soul. He lunged back onto the beam, not with careful steps, but in two reckless, long strides that defied physics and sanity. He didn't think about the drop, the wind, the pursuers. There was only the arc of Kai's body, the widening of his grey eyes.
Liam's hand shot out, not for a steadying grip, but in a desperate, clamping vise around Kai's forearm just as his other hand found a purchase on a twisted strut. The impact wrenched Liam's shoulder, sending a bolt of fire down his spine. Kai's full weight, plus the salvage, swung out over the void, held only by Liam's grip and sheer, adrenalized will.
For a second that lasted an eternity, they were a frozen pendulum of fate. Liam gritted his teeth, his muscles corded, as his boots scrambled for purchase on the slick beam. Below, Kai hung, shock etched on his face, then a dawning, horrified understanding of the risk Liam had just taken.
"Don't you let go," Kai gasped, not a plea, but a fierce, choked command.
With a roar of effort that tore from a place deeper than his lungs, Liam hauled. He pulled Kai upward, using the strut as a fulcrum, dragging him back from the edge. They collapsed together in a tangled heap against the relative safety of a giant, rusty gear housing, the beam now a deadly bridge behind them.
The world rushed back in. The whine of the approaching skiffs grew louder. Jax was yelling something over the comms. Liam couldn't hear it. His universe had narrowed to the frantic, hammering rhythm of his own heart and the matching tempo he felt through Kai's jacket where they were crushed together. His arms were locked around Kai, one still gripping his forearm as if fused to it, the other wrapped around his back, holding him against the cold, riveted steel.
Kai was trembling, or maybe Liam was. He could feel Kai's breath, hot and rapid, against his neck. He could feel the Echo of his own terror reflected and amplified in the resonance between them, now a screaming, silent siren of alive, alive, we are alive.
Liam pulled back just enough to see Kai's face. Dust, sweat, raw fear. Their eyes locked. There were no words for this. No strategy, no past, no future. Only the shared, electrifying truth of a brush with absolute nothingness, and the other person who had been the sole reason to fight it.
The kiss was inevitable. It was not like the one in the weather station, which had been a collision of anger and need. This was something else.
Liam closed the last inch, his mouth finding Kai's. It was hard, desperate, and tasted of dust and adrenaline. It was a seal. A physical affirmation of a truth too overwhelming for language: You are here. I am here. We did not fall. It was a raw, grateful, terrifying acknowledgment of life, and of the other's indispensable presence within it. Kai kissed him back with equal ferocity, his hands fisting in Liam's jacket, anchoring himself to the solidity of the man who had just defied gravity for him.
A ricochet whined off the gear housing above them, showering rust. The skiffs were in the structure.
The moment broke. They shoved apart, the world of danger rushing back in. But something had shifted. The trust was no longer just spoken or felt through resonance. It was etched into their muscles, into the memory of a grip that would not yield, into the taste of a kiss born not of desire, but of deliverance.
"Move!" Liam barked, the commander's mask snapping back into place, but his eyes held Kai's for a split-second longer—a silent, fierce promise.
Kai nodded, a ghost of that desperate gratitude still in his eyes. Then they were running again, a synchronized unit, fleeing across the corpse of the dead god, the Echo of the embrace on the wire thrumming between them like a newly forged bond of steel.