Page 31 of Kavan

I clench around him deliberately.

His whole body locks. A sound escapes his throat, fractured and feral, and every piece of his composure goes with it.

He moves.

The first thrust is measured. The second isn't. By the third he has lost the rhythm entirely, driving into me with a desperation that matches the frantic beat of my heart. The wet, obscene slap of his hips meeting the backs of my thighs echoes off the terraced walls. The rain hushes down the shaft, swallowing the sharp, broken gasps torn from both of us.

"I can't—" My nails bite into the sweat-slicked muscle of his back, dragging five stinging arcs across his shoulder blades. "Kavan, I can't⁠—"

"Yes you can." His voice is a ragged command. "You can. Take it. Take all of it."

The double assault is too much. It's everything. I'm falling apart under him with my heels digging into the cold glass, my head thrown back, my mouth open on a sound that has no shape.

The tension splinters.

Everything in me clamps down on him at once, in deep drowning pulses I have no say in. The release goes through me like heat through metal, blinding and physical, locking my joints and my jaw and taking every scrap of air I had, and for a long white moment there is nothing in the world at all.

Above me, he follows.

The pulse of him flooding deep inside me is scalding, hot and relentless, and I feel it in the roots of my teeth. His hips stutter, drive once, twice, and then he collapses, not on me, never on me, onto his forearms, his forehead dropping to the stone beside my ear. His breath comes in a hammering rhythm against my throat.

We lie tangled and sweat-soaked on dark glass, eight hundred meters beneath a rainy autumn sky, and for a long time nobody says anything at all.

Then: "That was⁠—"

"Don't." I laugh, and it comes out in pieces, and it hurts, and it's perfect. "Don't try to be articulate. You'll ruin it."

His laugh is quieter, but it's there.

He rolls us, pulling me onto his chest. I go willingly, my cheek pressed to the steady thud of his heart. The glass under us isn't cold anymore. The rain still hushes, high above. The storm turns over the island. I'm held by the weight of him, by the heat of him, by the impossible fact that we're both still alive.

"Stay," he says.

It isn't a question, it's a demand, and I don't argue.

I press my ear to his chest and listen to the rhythm of him slow. I fall asleep to the sound of the rain and his heartbeat. Somewhere in the next two hours the rhythm under my ear changes, slower and deeper, the unmistakable cadence of a Vakutan who has finally allowed himself to stop. He sleeps, and I'm the one holding him when he does.

The alarm wakes us at 0410.

It comes from everywhere at once. It isn't a klaxon. It's a tone, low and enormous, pulsing up through the observatory floor and into the shaft and away into the storm. On the wall of the bowl, every dormant glyph strip lights in a white that has no amber in it at all.

I'm upright before I'm awake, scrambling for my trousers. Kavan already has his weapon up, and I watch the change go through him, the raw vulnerability folding away, the marshal returning like armor sliding into place. He's already moving, already calling Vesk.

But before he goes, he looks back at me.

One second. Just one. His gaze drops to my mouth, to the flush still fading from my throat, to the hand I have pressed to my chest. Something raw passes between us and neither of us has time for it.

Then Zuri is at the terrace edge with the reader in both hands.

"Sophie." She holds it out. "It jumped. It didn't step, it jumped."

Four-twelfths on the platform at Convergence. Eight-twelfths on the spire last night.

"Eleven," she says. "It's at eleven-twelfths."

Somebody has reached the command core.

Kavan is already moving down the terraces, already turning twenty exhausted people into a column. At the trench door, he stops.