"Why."
"Because you're covered in volcanicite powder and you just told me it has a pH of eleven point four and will strip skin. Your arm, Flynn."
He looks at his forearm. Grey dust caked into the creases of his scars, packed into the channels between runic lines, crusted along the shackle mark like ash on old iron. He's been so focused on the barrels he hasn't noticed.
Slowly, like a drawbridge lowering one chain at a time, he extends his arm.
I turn the hose on. Low pressure. The water runs cool and clear over my thumb as I test the flow, then I cup my hand under his wrist and guide the stream across his skin.
The dust runs off in grey rivulets. Underneath, the scars emerge clean. The runes catch the water and refract it, throwing tiny prismatic sparks across the garage walls, and his skin is warm under my palm, warmer than the water, warmer than any skin should be. My fingers trace the path of the hose stream without meaning to, following the channels, clearing the powder from each scar like an archaeologist brushing sediment from something ancient and worth keeping.
His hand trembles.
Barely. A vibration so slight I'd miss it if my fingers weren't pressed to his pulse point. But they are. And his pulse is hammering. Fast, hard, the beat of something caged hitting the bars.
I don't look up. He doesn't pull away.
Water pools in the hollow of his palm. Overflows. Runs between his fingers and drips onto the pristine concrete floor, and he lets it. This orc who counts aphids and labels his label maker and needs the world to hold still—he stands in hiscathedral of order and lets muddy water stain his floor because my hand is on his arm and neither of us is breathing right.
The hose stream catches the shackle scar.
My thumb follows. Press gently into the ridge.
He gasps. A single, sharp intake that echoes off the pegboard walls.
I look up.
His eyes are molten. Pupils blown so wide the amber is just a thin ring, and the serpent rune over his heart ignites—sudden, fierce, green-gold fire that throws our shadows against the garage ceiling in sharp relief. His lips part. My fingers tighten on his wrist.
The sky screams.
Not metaphorically. The actual sky outside the garage door opens its throat and produces a sound like sheet metal tearing, and something black and chitinous and horribly alive pours through the orange sunset in a writhing column.
Beetles.
Hundreds of them. Each fist-sized carapaces gleaming with an iridescent sheen that no natural insect produces, mandibles catching the dying light like paired scimitars. They spiral once—a tight, organized helix that speaks of magical breeding and deliberate intent—then dive.
Straight for my yard.
Straight for my orchids.
"No. No, no, no?—"
The first wave hits my prize Cattleya like a chainsaw hitting silk.
CHAPTER 6
FLYNN
The hose hits the concrete. Water fans across the floor in a sheet I'll have to squeegee later, and that thought fires and dies in the same synapse because Junia is already running, bare feet slapping the driveway, and the sound coming out of her mouth isn't a word. It's the sound a person makes when something they built with their hands is being eaten alive.
I shove the steel edging shears off peg fourteen.
Six pounds of carbon steel, thirty-two-inch handles, blades I sharpen every Sunday to a tolerance of point-three millimeters. They're hedge tools. Gardening implements. But the grip sits in my palm the way a waraxe used to, and muscle memory is a traitor that never sleeps.
The fence between our yards is six feet of cedar planking. Pressure-treated. Sunk eighteen inches into poured concrete footings because I don't do anything halfway. I planted that fence. I know its weight, its flex, its exact height down to the quarter inch.
I clear it in one vault.
