The smell of scorched hair drifted between them. Taze didn’t scream, but the twitch in his small chin drove a wedge of ice straight behind Bexari’s ribs.
"Don't look at him, imposter. Look at me," the enforcer said, his fingers loosely balancing the cutter. "Your little tech parasite wiped the registry logs, but he didn't wipe the treasury bonds. I want the payout transfer codes Raxen’s father locked behind the family seal. Give them to me, or the boy takes a bath in the intake turbine."
He gestured with his left hand. Twenty paces back, iron flooring gave way to a yawning abyss where an industrial exhaust rotor churned. Massive, notched carbon-alloy blades sheared through rising fumes with a rhythmic, bone-grinding howl. A drop down that funnel would turn flesh into mist before a body fell thirty feet.
Bexari swallowed, forcing her chin to tremble. She let her shoulders cave, shrinking inside the torn silk of her gala gown.
"I don't... I don't know them," she whimpered, raising her voice to that shrill, breathless pitch the debutantes used when their skiff-tenders brought the wrong brand of iced nectar. Tears welled in her eyes—raw, unvarnished salt born of sheer hatred, but framed by fluttering lashes. "Raxen never told me! Please, my father—my father will pay you ten times whatever the bond is worth! Just call house Vaylor!"
The enforcer chuckled, the sound dry as pumice. "Still reciting the dead girl's pedigree? You pathetic little guttersnipe. Nezara Vaylor was buried in a ditch three weeks ago, and you can't even play her corpse properly."
He leaned down, bringing his face inches from hers to savor the spectacle of an aristocrat coming undone. The plasma-torch hummed mere inches away, illuminating the pores of his waxen skin.
"Please," she sobbed, tilting her head back, exposing her throat like a cornered gazelle. "Look at my hands. I’m just a girl. I don't know anything about finance—"
She snapped her forehead into his face with every ounce of leverage in her neck.
The crack of forehead meeting nasal cartilage sounded like a rifle shot. The enforcer shrieked, stumbling back as blood sprayed across his pristine white lapels.
Bexari didn't wait. The chair's crude welds were old under-city zinc, brittle from sulfur corrosion. She snapped her spine backward against the frame, using the momentum to wedge her boot-heels beneath the crossbar. Metal sheared with a shrill screech. Her right wrist wrenched free, skin flaying against the iron cuff, but she didn't register the sting.
She snatched the dropped plasma-cutter before it hit the floor, swinging the roaring blue needle across Taze’s tether straps in a single clean sweep.
"Move, kid!" she barked.
Taze tumbled out of the frame, coughing, clutching her sleeve. "Bex—behind you!"
Two syndicate guards drew kinetic rifles from the gloom, but before their triggers clicked, the reinforced ferro-crete wall behind them detonated.
A roar split the subterranean air—not mechanical fans, but the feral, deafening scream of an overloaded twin-manifold engine. Chunks of masonry pulverized the guards as a crimson hull tore through the breach, trailing plumes of violet fire and pulverized mortar.
Raxen’s signature competition skiff slid sideways across the slick iron floor, sparks carving fiery ribbons in the soot. Dual nose-mounted rotary cannons coughed, chewing the remaining catwalk to shreds.
The cockpit canopy blew open with a violent hydraulic hiss.
Raxen was inside, his formal tuxedo shredded, blood dripping from a split across his cheekbone and matting his dark hair. His eyes swept the cavern, wild and unhinged, until they locked onto Bexari. The fury radiating from him was a living thing.
"Get in!" he roared over the engine's whine. "Both of you! Now!"
Bexari hoisted Taze by the scruff of his jacket, hurling him into the rear mechanic's bay before vaulting onto the pilot's bench. The moment she crossed the lip, Raxen’s gloved hand clamped around her waist, hauling her down so fiercely her ribs protested. He checked her face, his thumb smearing blood from her forehead with a roughness that barely disguised the tremor in his grip.
"You're alive," he snarled against her temple, possessive and furious. "If you ever get snatched again, I'll tear this entire sinkhole down to the core to find you."
"Love the enthusiasm, darling, but your driving lane is shrinking!" Bexari shouted back, pointing.
Across the shattered chamber, the enforcer dragged himself to an emergency pillar, his face masked in red. He slammed an iron lever downward. "Seal the lower conduit! Purge the whole sector!"
Klaxons wailed, drowning the fan noise. Heavy hydraulic groans echoed down the dark tunnel ahead as interlocking bulkheads began to descend, turning the drainage labyrinth into a sealed iron tomb.
Raxen shoved the throttle down, but a spray of hot coolant hit his chest. He gasped, his hands seizing on the yoke as his knuckles went gray; beneath his torn shirt, a jagged piece of shrapnel was embedded in his left flank, oozing dark red.
"I've got the sticks," Bexari said, shoving his bleeding hands away without hesitation.
"Bex—it's calibrated for full drift—"
"Shut up. I was drifting rust-buckets down these drains before you learned how to spend an allowance."
She seized the dual steering levers. Her palms recognized the feedback immediately: brutal, erratic, responding not to delicate touches but to raw muscle and kinetic momentum. She slammed the ventral thrusters, skipping the skiff off an angled drainage pipe to clear a closing blast gate by inches. The undercarriage screeched, shaving metal, but they burst into the primary vent chute.
The tunnel was a nightmare of blind corners, vertical pipe clusters, and boiling chemical discharge. Waterfalls of toxic sludge fell through the gloom, lit only by the sputtering red emergency beacons. Bexari pinned the accelerator pedal to the floorboards, her body moving on pure instinct. She cut the port stabilizer to whip the skiff around a ninety-degree pipe junction, the tail swinging wide, skimming the grime-encrusted walls.
Taze screamed from the back, bracing against the jump seat. "Pressure sensors tripping! Next chamber is sealed!"
Around the final bend, the primary exit to the lower canyon loomed.
It was a three-meter-thick security blast door, grinding downward like a guillotine. The opening was already half-shut, hydraulic pistons groaning under extreme load. In four seconds, it would be solid steel. At their current speed, braking was impossible; they would hit the slab and smear into paste.
Raxen leaned his weight against her shoulder, his breath ragged against her ear. "We can't clear the gap. It's too low."
"We aren't going under it," Bexari yelled, her vision tunneling on the spark-core housing between their seats.
She reached down and ripped off the safety cage protecting the volatile fuel cell. The core spun violently inside, a churning sphere of kinetic lightning and unstable plasma, its heat blistering the skin of her forearm.
"Bex, what are you doing?" Taze shrieked from behind.
"The manual release!" she yelled. "If I dump the core into the forward injector chute, the shockwave will blow the door off its tracks before we reach it!"
"It’ll blow us to atoms if the timing is off by a millisecond!" Raxen shouted, his bloody hand clamping over hers on the release pin. "Bexari, don't!"
The slab was twenty yards away, the remaining gap shrinking to five feet, then four.
Bexari looked into Raxen's wild, desperate gaze, her fingers tightening around the cold metal of the lever.
She pulled.