Page 59 of Zenith Tower

I reached the torn edge and stopped.

Pain drove up both arms. My shoulders locked, and the taste of copper flooded my mouth. I held on.

“Astra.” Caspian’s voice came from somewhere behind me. “Can you hear me?”

I tried to answer. No sound came.

The unfinished line at my wrist pressed against the broken Mark. It could reach Kieran, but it could not cross the final distance alone. I felt the open end of it searching through the dark beyond the break.

A faint warmth answered. The contact was weakened by pain, but I knew the quick, restless energy I had felt in every Pull since the clock tower. Kieran was still there.

Kieran.

His presence moved toward mine. Relief struck so hard that my hands slipped against his chest.

I pressed them down again.

The break opened wider. Cold poured through the gap, draining what remained of the green-gold light. I pushed my own strength against it, trying to hold the edges together.

The pain deepened. Heat ran from my wrist to my elbow, then across my ribs. In the room, my body folded over Kieran’s. Hands caught my shoulders and kept me from falling away.

Hale said something I could not understand.

I thought of the word my mother had left beneath the table at Zenith Hall.

Survive.

I pressed harder.

For an instant, the break narrowed. Green-gold light moved into the darkened channels and failed there. The damaged Mark could not hold what I gave it. It needed somewhere else for the strain to go.

The unfinished line tightened around my wrist, and some of the strain shifted into it.

For the first time, the failing light held. The line could carry what Kieran’s damaged Mark could not, but only if we completed it.

The realization frightened me enough to break my concentration. The split tore wider, and Kieran’s presence dimmed.

No.

I found him again.

The open green-gold line lay between us. Caspian’s emotions had lived beside mine since our bond formed, untouched by locked doors or distance. Completing Kieran’s line would bring him into me with the same permanence. It would last beyond this room and the Tower, if any of us made it out.

I brought the open line to the edge of Kieran’s presence and held it there. He would have to cross the remaining distance himself.

Kieran touched it.

He recognized me. Fear moved through the contact, followed by a tenderness so familiar that my throat closed. He understood what I was offering and what accepting it would mean.

Before he crossed the remaining distance, his question reached me.

Are you sure?

Even here, with his Mark breaking and his body silent beneath mine, he waited for me.

Yes.

I opened the line to him.