"No! No, no, no!" I screamed, slamming my fists against the smoking casing of the console.
The backup systems didn't engage. The entire terminal was dead, fried by the sheer intensity of my biological surge.
I grabbed the manual release levers beneath the console, pulling with all my strength. The durasteel levers bent and twisted in my superheated grip, the metal softening like warm wax under my hands, but the mechanical locks on the rails refused to budge. They were locked in a fail-secure state, requiring a direct electrical pulse to release.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped beast.
I looked at my left wrist. The bio-link screen had completely melted, the plastic casing bubbling and dripping down my arm. The fire inside me had reached a critical, irreversible threshold.
My scales were no longer just glowing; they were beginning to weep a thin, liquid plasma that dripped onto the durasteel floor beneath my feet, eating through the gray paint and pooling into tiny, sizzling craters. The air around me was so hot it was warping, distorting my vision in shimmering, liquid waves.
I looked back at the pod's viewport.
If I stayed here to try and manually tear the launch rails apart, I would kill her. My physical presence—the sheer, radiating heat of my Rebirth core—would soon exceed the thermal limits of the pod's titanium shielding. I would literally cook her alive inside her safe-haven.
To save her life, I had to leave. I had to get as far away from this bay, and from this resort, as my wings could carry me.
The agony of that realization was worse than the fire consuming my flesh. The mate bond screamed, a physical, tearing sensation that made me gasp for air, demanding that I rip the pod open and drag her back into my arms. But I had to run. I had to choose her survival over the biological demand to stay by her side.
"I will find a way back to you," I choked out, my eyes burning with a heat that had nothing to do with the caldera. "I promise."
I turned away from the viewport, forcing my legs to move, forcing myself to run.
I sprinted toward the far end of the pod bay, where the heavy pneumatic exhaust gate led out to the resort's exterior cliffs. The gate was designed to vent high-pressure launch gases into the ocean, but the electronic controls were dead, fried along with the rest of the grid.
I didn't care.
I gathered the remaining strength in my legs and leaped, slamming my shoulder against the manual override lever on the wall. The heavy iron lever sheared under my superheated weight, the internal pneumatic seals rupturing with a deafening, explosive hiss of steam.
The durasteel exhaust gate slowly slid upward, exposing a jagged sliver of the world outside.
A freezing, violent blast of the volcanic winter storm swept into the bay, howling like a pack of starving beasts. The airwas thick with falling black ash, freezing sleet, and the distant, terrifying glow of the erupting caldera.
I didn't hesitate.
I threw myself forward through the opening, my ash-dusted charcoal wings flaring to catch the freezing gale. A sharp, hot spike of pain flared in my left shoulder—the joint, though back in its socket, was stiff and tight, stubbornly resisting my attempt to open it to full flight capacity.
The moment the icy air hit my burning skin, it hissed violently, a dense cloud of white steam erupting around me as I plummeted toward the jagged black rocks below. Gritting my teeth against the rigid, protesting drag of my left wing, I forced it down, catching a powerful, superheated updraft rising from the fissures in the cliff face.
I soared upward into the dark, ash-choked sky, a streak of blinding, white-hot light cutting through the freezing winter storm. Behind me, deep in the dark, silent bunker, Tove was safe, sealed inside the armored pod.
Ahead of me lay the Dead Zone—the yawning, glowing mouth of the caldera.
I leaned into the wind, fighting the uneven, painful drag of my injured wing as I flew as fast as I could manage, desperate to reach the empty wasteland before the fire in my chest finally tore me apart.
Chapter 11
Tove
The darkness was absolute, heavy and suffocating.
I woke with a gasp, my lungs burning as if I had been underwater for minutes. My heart hammered against my ribs in a frantic, disjointed rhythm. I couldn’t see my hands. I couldn’t see the ceiling. There was only a pitch-black void, wrapping around me so tightly it felt like a physical weight pressing down on my chest.
I tried to sit up, but my limbs felt leaden, drained of all strength. As I moved, the thick, heavily insulated material of an emergency thermal blanket shifted over my shoulders. I clutched at the fabric, my fingers sinking into the padded, multi-layered weave. Even though it was standard gear, it carried the unmistakable scent of Kaen—the rich, smoky heat of a sun-baked forest, and the faint tang of singed feathers.
Then, a sudden, sharp spasm of pain ripped through the center of my chest.
It wasn't a physical injury. It was a violent, tearing ache that seized the space beneath my collarbone, a phantom fist grabbing hold of my lungs and pulling. Hard. The mate bond, locked and sealed in the heat of my ruined room, was no longer a warm,humming current in my veins. It was a taut, vibrating wire under immense tension, screaming with a desperate, pulsing agony.
