The thought was a raw, grinding stone in her gut. Jezra braced her boots against the slick, metal floor, a desperate groan escaping her lips as she pulled again. Ozan’s body was a dead weight, heavy as a fallen sky-rig lander. The ventilation shaft, a jagged maw in the wall, seemed to mock her with its narrow opening. The air thickened further, sweet as wilting nocturn-lilies, burning raw against her windpipe. Her lungs burned. Her vision began to swim at the edges, the vibrant neon of the ruined kitchen dimming to a sickly haze.
“Fine, you oversized ingot,” she wheezed, abandoning finesse. She hooked her arms under his armpits, digging her heels in, and dragged. The sound of his armor scraping against the durasteel deck was like a shriek in the encroaching silence. Every muscle in her body shrieked back. She saw, in the corner of her blurring vision, the black fluid still weeping from a wound near his temple, a viscous trail against his pale skin.
Her mind, despite the encroaching haze, conjured the image of Old Man Joric, her mentor, gasping for air in a dingy back alley while Syndicate collectors read out the biological lien on his failing kidneys. He'd owed Vex Munitions a paltry sum for a prosthetic leg. They took his organs, not his credit chit. He’d looked at her then, his eyes already glazing, and whispered, ‘Never trust a corp, Jezra. Your body is your last currency.’ The memory was a cold, hard ember, stoking a dying fire. If she failed, she would be Joric. Not just dead, but a biological failsafe, her very essence a commodity.
“No,” she croaked, the word a ragged sound torn from her chest. “Not me. Not us.” With a final, agonizing heave, she managed to pivot his torso, angling him toward the shaft. His head lolled, his face slack and unnervingly peaceful. She squeezed her eyes shut against the blossoming spots in her vision, then forced them open. One arm, then the other. It was a brutal, inch-by-agonizing-inch battle against physics and a paralyzing neurotoxin. Finally, with a desperate surge of adrenaline, she pushed his bulk through the opening, scrambling in after him.
The maintenance shaft was a labyrinth of dark conduits and humming power lines, reeking of ozone and recycled air. Jezra coughed, the confined space making the toxin feel even more concentrated. She dragged Ozan deeper, away from the kitchen, until the faint light from the blast doors was swallowed by the gloom. She slumped against a thick pipe, her body trembling, every breath a shallow, painful gasp. Ozan lay inert beside her, his chest rising and falling imperceptibly.
From a hidden mesh-comm embedded in her ear, Zekal’s voice crackled, distorted but urgent. “Jezra! You there? The bio-engineer—his comms are open! Sabina just gave the order. Code name ‘Sol-Burn.’ She’s initiating a kinetic bombardment on the Spire.”
Jezra’s head snapped up, the haze in her brain momentarily clearing. “A kinetic what now?”
“Bombardment! To ‘sanitize’ the situation. Wipe the whole damn structure off the sky-line. If she can’t have the cure, no one can. She thinks you’re both too much of a liability now. Says it’ll look like an ‘unfortunate system malfunction’.” Zekal’s voice was grim. “You have approximately... eight minutes until impact.”
Four hundred eighty seconds left. She looked down at Ozan, his dark uniform blending into the conduit shadows. Four hundred eighty seconds to salvage a dying billionaire, her unborn ticket out, and the entire spire. She let out a humorless bark of laughter. “Just another Tuesday in Mekara, right, Zekal?”
Before Zekal could respond, Ozan stirred. A low moan, a guttural sound, escaped his lips. His eyes, hazy and unfocused, snapped open. He lunged, a sudden, terrifying burst of primal force, pinning Jezra against the cold metal grating of the shaft wall. His hands, like clamps of steel, were around her biceps, his weight pressing the air from her lungs. His eyes, usually sharp and discerning, were wild, gleaming with a terrifying, animalistic fury.
“Assassin!” he rasped, his voice raw, laced with the metallic tang of his own degradation and the neurotoxin. “Another one of Sabina’s pets. Come to finish the job, have you?” He pressed harder, his face inches from hers, the black blood around his temple stark against his skin. His breath was hot and shallow on her face.
Panic, cold and sharp, cut through Jezra’s exhaustion. This wasn’t Ozan. This was a cornered beast, delirious and dangerous. His grip was immense, threatening to crush her bones. “Ease up, Ozan!” she gasped, struggling against him. “It’s me! Your favorite folate-deficient incubator!”
The absurd insult, the familiar, mocking tone, seemed to lance through the fog in his brain. His eyes, still wide and dilated, lost some of their feral glint. He stared at her, then at his own hands clamped around her, then at the cramped, grimy confines of the maintenance shaft. The wildness receded, replaced by a slow, dawning comprehension. His grip loosened, his breath still ragged, but the fury gone. He pulled back slightly, releasing her. The faintest tremor ran through his body.
“Jezra?” His voice was a mere whisper now, laced with confusion, then something else. Something akin to awe. He looked around the confined space, the grime on his uniform, the dark trail of his own blood. “You… you saved me.” It wasn't a question. It was a realization, stark and profound. The cold, calculating CEO, the man who saw her as a biological vessel, now looked at her with a simmering adoration that made her stomach clench. He searched her face, the predatory calculation drained entirely from his stare.
“Barely,” she huffed, rubbing her bruised arm. Her attempt at nonchalance didn’t quite mask the tremor in her own voice. “Now, unless you want to become a very expensive splatter pattern on the sky-line, we have about seven minutes to figure out how to stop your mother from erasing us from existence.”
Ozan’s eyes narrowed, the delirium finally giving way to his usual sharp intellect. “The bombardment. Sol-Burn. She wouldn’t dare…” His voice trailed off as he saw the conviction in her gaze. “Zekal, where is the comms uplink for the external defense grid? The master server for orbital interception protocols?”
Zekal’s voice returned, heavy with static. “Found it. Central Comms Terminal, Level N-4. But it’s behind an external firewall, buried deep. And it’s heavily guarded by a new wave of Sabina’s Enforcers. Not zero-G assassins this time, but heavy-grade armor units. The bio-engineer must have patched them in after the last breach.”
“Heavy armor, great,” Jezra muttered, trying to push herself up. Her legs wobbled. “So, we fight our way through a platoon of mercs, crack a firewall, and hope we can stop a satellite cannon in under seven ticks. Piece of void-cake.”
“No,” Zekal corrected, his voice sounding grim. “That’s not it. The exterior comms array itself needs a manual reboot to override the strike sequence. The main server can’t push the cancel command through the firewall alone. It’s a physical kill-switch.”
Jezra frowned. “A physical kill-switch? What does that even mean?”
“It means,” Zekal’s voice was bleak, “someone has to spacewalk. Right outside the Spire. In Mekara’s upper atmosphere. To hit the reset.”
Jezra stared into the dark shaft, the hum of the power lines suddenly louder, more ominous. Spacewalk. Her, pregnant, in the vacuum of space, with incoming planetary ordnance bearing down. The universe, it seemed, had a twisted sense of humor.