The three hunters dropped from the ceiling without kicking up a single speck of calcite.
"Kivrai, north ledge! Move!" I barked, hauling Dalakh up by his armpits before his boots could slip on the slick lichen. He weighed less than an adult male ought to—ribs sharp against my forearms, tendons taut as braided wire. The insulated tarp trailed behind him like an undignified wedding train.
"Right behind you! Or slightly ahead, depending on which way gravity decides to tilt this miserable crust!" Kivrai yelled back, unhooking a brass-toothed piton and slamming it into a fault line.
I kept my grip on Dalakh’s right hand. My palm locked over his cold, calloused knuckles, skin sticky with dried lymph and moss sap. The metric was simple: seventy-two beats per minute indicated baseline stability, but his pulse hammered against his radial artery at one-hundred-and-forty. Cortisol spikes degraded motor function by thirty percent. Prolonged sensory deprivation exacerbated sympathetic nervous overload.
"Let go of me, foolish woman," Dalakh rasped through split lips, trying to wrench his knuckles free. He had no sight, but his ears twitched toward the whisper of approaching boots behind us. "They will cut you open from groin to gullet just to reach my throat."
"Thirty minutes," I told him flatly, dragging him across a precarious natural bridge that spanned a four-hundred-foot drop into sulfur mist. "Direct cutaneous contact lowers systemic cortisol by twenty-two percent. You are at an extreme statistical deficit of human warmth. Keep walking or I will carry you over my shoulder like a sack of turnips."
His head jerked toward me, sightless milky eyes wide with sheer, affronted incredulity. "You are entirely deranged."
"I am mathematically thorough. Left foot up. There is a two-inch crack in the gneiss. Step over it."
He stepped over it cleanly. He quivered, though whether from blood loss or baffled rage mattered little. As long as he stayed close, he would not transform into the architect of universal rupture described in the ancient archive. An unloved stray became a rabid wolf; an intensely coddled stray stayed on the porch.
Behind us, the first Nadir tracker touched down on our spur. The obsidian plate of his greaves clinked once against stone.
"Veshni!" Kivrai shouted from fifty paces ahead, where the suspension cables of the outer Chasm of Qyzil groaned against iron anchors. "The rope bridge is rotted through on the starboard side! Only cross on the center braids!"
"Wait here," I ordered Dalakh, shoving him gently against a hollowed pocket of basalt. "Do not move. I need to clear the anchor line."
"Do not leave my side," he whispered. The tone was pathetic, thin, rattling with an invalid's terror. "I... I cannot hear where the ledge drops off. The wind in the canyon is masking their steps."
"I will be six paces away. Hold the tarp around your chest." I squeezed his hand once, hard, deliberately grounding him before turning my back to scramble toward the suspension anchor.
I pulled my copper pry-bar from my belt, ducking behind a rib of calcified rock to test the bridge's tension. The shadow of the closest Nadir tracker flickered across the quartz veins near the path.
Behind me, there was no whistle of air. No cry of exertion.
Just a wet, dull *crack*, like a dry branch snapping under a heavy boot.
I spun around.
The lead assassin lay crumpled in a heap against the basalt wall. His head was twisted at an impossible, grotesque ninety-degree angle, his throat caved in from a single, blunt crush. Beside the corpse, Dalakh sat huddled against the floor, his knees drawn up, both hands clutching his chest while the thermal tarp slipped pathetically from his thin frame.
He let out a strangled, pathetic cough, coughing up a spatter of pale saliva, his head lolling sideways against the stone.
"Veshni...?" his voice drifted out, faint, reeking of helplessness, trembling like a child abandoned in the dark. "Something... something fell from the overhang. I tripped... did it strike me? My ribs burn... I can barely draw air..."
I bolted back to him, dropping the pry-bar.
"Hey. Hey, keep your head up," I said, sliding an arm behind his narrow back and pulling his torso against my collarbone. His skin was burning hot beneath the dirt. He leaned into my chest with immediate, desperate obedience, his face burying itself into the crook of my neck, his breath shivering against my collar.
He had just broken an elite killer's neck with his bare hands in under two seconds. The body was still twitching.
Yet here he was, melting against my sternum like spun sugar, his palms clutching fistfuls of my flannel shirt as if I were the only solid anchor in a falling world.
*He knows,* I realized with sudden, crystalline clarity. *The little bastard knows exactly what gets him held.*
"You're safe," I muttered anyway, tightening my grip around his shoulders because the equation still demanded it. If weaponizing his own helplessness kept him docile and attached to me, I would pay the dividend. "You did fine. The overhang crushed him. You took no blow."
He let out a soft, shuddering exhale against my throat, his hands relaxing their grip on my shirt just enough to stroke the seam, entirely content to let me bear his full body weight.
"Uh, guys?" Kivrai called out, his boots crunching rapidly over the gravel as he trotted back down the ledge, crossbow lowered. "The other two trackers turned back when they saw this one drop. They refuse to fight without the element of surprise. But... Veshni, look at this."
Kivrai knelt beside the dead man. He wasn't smiling anymore. His usual round, sunny face was pinched with an intense, sharp curiosity that didn't fit his easygoing persona.
With two fingers, Kivrai flipped the dead assassin's right wrist. Bound to the forearm with blackened sinew was a narrow, double-edged combat dagger.
It looked alien to Othir.
The blades of the Shattered Caldera were jagged, hand-chiseled from volcanic glass, soft copper, or brittle meteoric iron quenched in tallow. This blade was matte gray. Seamless. It had machine-milled fullers, an aerodynamic balance groove, and an edge ground down to microscopic perfection.
"That isn't geode ore," Kivrai murmured, prodding the flat of the metal with the tip of an iron bolt. "No smelting pit in the lower rings cast this. It made no sound when his body hit the basalt. It absorbed the shock. Look at the grain."
"Titanium," I whispered.
My grip slipped from Dalakh’s collar. He immediately stiffened, his sightless face tilting toward the shift in my posture, his brow furrowing at the loss of contact, but I could not look at him.
Grade-5 aerospace titanium alloy.
It held no place in Othir. It had no right to exist here. The metallurgy required high-vacuum arc furnaces and computerized refining infrastructure that this world had never possessed in five thousand years of recorded history.
I leaned over the corpse, my hands steadying as I reached down and gripped the hilt. The balance was sickeningly familiar. A combat utility knife, tactical issue, weighted for zero-gravity atmospheric deployment.
I spat on my thumb and dragged it across the blackened grime crusting the base of the ricasso.
The grit wiped away, revealing laser-etched capital letters beneath a stylized crest of an interlocking double orbit.
*AETHEL-DYNE LOGISTICS // SECTOR 4 EXTRACTION.*