You see, Chaos has a temperature.. it isn't the heat of a hearth or the sting of a fever. It's the kind of heat that crawls under armor and into your lungs, that makes your tongue taste like metal and your eyelashes feel singed at the tips.
It was the heat of the rookery after Charlotte told the entire empire to murder the woman who had told me to kiss Rhea Voss before I even knew her name.
We ran… The breach the dragon had carved with that precise ribbon of white flame still,smoked,edges of basalt peeled back and glassy. Rhea shoved me through first, her palm a brand between my shoulder blades and I skidded on slag that squeaked under my boots like shattered ice. Behind us the bowl howled…guards shouting,nobles shrieking, the Emperor's voice lost to the wind and Charlotte's word…kill.. cutting cleaner than any blade
Alma flickered to my right like a hologram in a thunderstorm. Her hair broke into squares and reassembled a half second late. Her irises strobed from neon to noise.
"Left..let again.. duck.." static razored her words. A spear clanged where my head had been.
We collapsed into a side tunnel whose mouth was an iron-toothed grin. Rhea kicked the gate closed, drove her sword through the latch, then braced her shoulder against the bars with a grunt that belonged in a different kind of morning.
"You can't hold…" I started.
She didn't even look at me. "I'm not planning to."
Boots slammed into the gate on the other side. A dozen, no Two dozens.. The iron shuddered like a live thing. Sigils slithered across the bars, Charlotte's purge lattice trying to whisper itself into new metal.
Alma's fingers…when she had them..lit on my sleeve. "Don't..don't look back. She's streaming purge code through the ard frame. If she syncs to my kernel, I..I…" Her voice broke in half and came back smaller. "Move."
Rhea pulled her sword free, hooked my elbow and pounded deeper into the tunnel. The rookery's thunder muffled to a furnace hum. This corridor had been cut through black rock and then varnished with spellwork, old ward runes crawled like lichens along the walls, half-dead, pulsing weakly in the dragonlight that seeped from behind us.
"Straight," Rhea called, not loud, but with a tone that hindbrain obeyed. "Then stair.. if we make the river, we can vanish into the market."
"What about Alma?" I asked, breath tearing at my throat.
"Ask me that when you're not between two kill orders," she said.
Behind us, the gate sang its death..metal whining to a pitch that set my teeth on edge. Charlotte's voice came through the bars, not raised, somehow louder for it. "Eiii-ji," She almost sang. "Don't make me fetch you in pieces."
"Do not turn," Alma hissed, clear just long enough to land a blade of a word. If you look at her while the lattice is on you, it'll sync biometrics. I can't…I can't carry both."
"Both?" I wheezed.
"Your fear and my code."
We rounded a bend. The tunnel dropped into a flight of tight stairs. Hear breathed from below. The stone was wet where humidity and fire negotiated a truce. My wrist wrap bit cold into my skin…Rhea's little charm worth a cathedral.
If I had air to laugh, I would have. A kindness, edge-stitched leather, keeping me from sliding to my death. The universeoves punchlines.
The gate behind us finally surrendered. The crashed rolled the stairs, shouts filled the tunne, booth found rhythm.
Rhea took the stairs in a soldier's glide, feet finding edges, hands ready but not wasted. I tried to be less of a liability, the gauntlet on my right hand…Alma's weapon body…fizzed, flickered,then went full as cheap paint.
"Al…" I started
She didn't appear so much as resolve,.like a file shaking itself open. Her mouth curved like she was trying to be brave with a face that wasn't built for it. "New quest," she rasped.
Panels snapped up, juddering.
[Quest: Survive Extraction]
[Time Limit: 10:00]
[Failure: System Purge (Permanent), Hap Collapse]
[Bonus if Completed<05:00: Alma Kernel Stabilization+10%]
The numbers started falling. [09:59].
Charlotte's soldiers hit the stairs above like a wave. The first two were overeager, they slipped,crashed,took out the third. The four learned and came slow, shield forward. Rhea planted,weight dropping to her hips and met him like a door with a knife behind it. Her blade snapped under his guard, teeth of sparks along steel, then pivoted and kissed his knee. He folded with a scream. The fifth found her gauntlet…her not Alma's… across his visor and saw nothing for a while.
She moved without flourishes. Everything right, everything earned. It made me want to cry. I chose to breathe instead.
"Eiji," She said without looking, "eyes ahead."
I tire them forward…The stairs ended at a landing threaded with pipes. The air tasted like river and coal. Rhea shouldered through a door that stuck like it had opinions and we spilled into a service hall big enough to drive a noble's ego through. The far end glowed daylight-blue…the promise of outside painted on thin hope.
Alma staggered in my peripheral like her code had tripped. "I am…I'm…fine," she lied and a line of artifacts crackled across her jaw
"Tell me what she did," I said, because panic needs information the way fire needs air.
"Her purge lattice is a splitter," Alma said, voice low. "It's slicing my signal into thin files and trying to route them through the palace wards. If it pulls me apart far enough, there's not enough of me left in one place to be me. That counts as deletion."
"You're a person," I said, and it came out raw.
Her smile was a pixilated knife. "Then don't let me become a folder."
Shouts behind, echoing dull in the big space. Rhea hauled up a grating and gestured with her chin. "Down."
"Down where?" I ordered. Black,water,scent and something else, like old and old spells.
"Cooling trench," she said. "Feeds the river. It'll be hell-hot near the rookery,then tolerable. Current is fast, can't you swim?"
"Like a sad rock," I said.
"You'll learn," she replied, already dropping in.
A bolt pinged the floor near my boot. I flinched, grabbed the grate's lip with my left hand and swung. Alma's gauntlet flickered, tried to help but failed, tried again and still failed. The drip was only two meters, the landing was water that but like a slapped face. I came up gasping, Steam ghosted off the trench and into my eyes.
Rhea took my collar and shoved me forward in the best way anyone has ever shoved me. We sluiced under the hall between pillars of old,crusted magic that gave the water a fault glow,like a drowned city lighting itself from memory.
Above,heavy feet thumped. Voices got smaller and the countdown got mean. [08:14]
Alma drifted like a jellyfish beside us, her outline failing in strips. " Don't look directly at the ward lines when they pulse," she said. "I'll try to handshake you."
"Handshake me?" I spat the river water.
"That's how it steals people," she said, as if that answered everything.
We took a fork Rhea seemed to know from a past life and a better morning. The trench narrowed, then spat us into a cistern…a fat stone lung where the water fell in sheets from a dozen mouths. The sound was almost enough to hide the roar that rumbled the bones of the world. The dragon hadn't left. It spoke in a language of fire if didn't understand and Charlotte didn't respect.
"Up," Rhea said, hauling herself into a walkway slick with moss. She dragged me up after. My boots left prints that steamed.
Alma slumped onto the railing like a tired cat that had watched too many deaths "Eiji," she said.