The smoke followed them.

  She could taste it in the back of her throat, thick and bitter, and every time the wind shifted it got worse. The fire behind them was still loud, a deep continuous roar that rose and fell with the gusts, and she kept her eyes forward and her feet moving and tried not to think about Napoleon.

  One thing at a time.

  It didn't work.

  Reth ran beside her in silence. His breathing was steady and controlled in a way hers wasn't. Her lungs still burned from the smoke and her shoulder ached where the blast had caught her and she was running on no sleep and the dregs of an adrenaline crash.

  You can fix him.

  She'd taken Napoleon apart before, mapped sections, understood pieces of him. This was different. Harren hadn't removed a part. He'd cut him in half, and she didn't know yet what that meant for everything running through the middle of him.

  Working on weapons for the kids was one thing. This is something else entirely.

  A branch caught her across the forearm and she pushed it aside without breaking stride.

  Find somewhere safe first. Look at the damage. Then decide.

  The trees thickened and the roar of the fire dropped behind them. She used the silence to breathe and after a few minutes had something close to a normal heart rate again.

  "Hey." She kept her voice low. "Can I ask you something."

  Reth glanced at her.

  "Your old group." She watched where she stepped. "I never asked because it felt like it wasn't my business. But I can't make the logic work." A root, she cleared it. "They wanted me dead. I assumed it was the tiger."

  "The Rathen Apex."

  "Right." A pause. "But killing an animal... I don't see why that gets a whole group hunting me. Unless it was sacred or something."

  Reth was quiet for a few strides. Something moved through his face and was gone.

  "The Apex was bonded to Jonen. Lady Aram's son.

  "A life bond. When the Apex died..." His voice dropped. "Jonen died with it."

  She ran with that for a few seconds.

  When the Apex died... Jonen died with it.

  She waited for it to make sense. It didn't.

  Two separate living things. One dies, the other dies. Through what, exactly. A biological connection? Some kind of shared nervous system? That's not how organisms work. That's not how anything works.

  She glanced at Reth. He wasn't elaborating. He said it like it was simply true, the way you'd say water runs downhill.

  I've seen a spider rebuild my body. I've seen a man lift objects with his mind. I've been shot with nanobots that rewrote my biology.

  Maybe I need to stop using the word impossible.

  "Okay," she said. "So the bond is real. I believe you." She watched where she stepped. "I just don't understand it."

  "That's a massive vulnerability," she said. "Tying your life to an animal that hunts and fights."

  "Yes."

  "So why would anyone do it?"

  He was quiet long enough that she thought he wasn't going to answer.

  "The bond doesn't just share death," he said. "It shares strength. The Apex's physical power transfers to the bonded person. Its abilities. And none of the Apex's weaknesses pass to the human. None of the human's weaknesses pass to the Apex either."

  She turned that over while she ran.

  So you get everything and give up nothing. Except your life.

  "Okay," she said. "But everyone would know. If a leader's Apex dies, the leader dies. That's a weakness anyone could exploit."

  "Nobody knew," Reth said.

  She glanced at him.

  "The Apex never left the fortress," he said. "Not once in thousands of years. Each one lived and died inside. Anyone who saw the leaders saw strength, power, control. Nobody saw what was behind it. That's why they were feared the way they were. Nobody knew the vulnerability existed."

  Thousands of years. An entire group hiding the same secret for thousands of years.

  "And now they're here," she said.

  "The opening of this place." He ducked under a branch. "First time the Apex were ever allowed outside. Because this is what everything was for. Centuries of the leaders making that bond, living with that risk, waiting for this zone to activate." Something in his voice shifted, just slightly. "Jonen grew up knowing he would make that bond one day. Same as his mother. Same as her mother before her."

  She didn't say anything for a moment.

  He knew Jonen. Not just as a name.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "About Jonen."

  Reth said nothing. Something crossed his face and was gone.

  They kept running.

  Reth slowed and pointed east, toward older trees where the canopy was dense enough that the light dropped to something grey and flat underneath. She followed him in. The ground was soft under her boots, years of dead leaves packed down, and the noise from the fire faded behind them.

  They found a spot where two large roots had grown together into a natural wall. Reth sat against them and pulled food from his pack without a word. She sat across from him and did the same. Dried rations, water. She was hungry enough that it didn't matter.

  For a minute neither of them spoke.

  She looked at him. "Tell me the rest."

  Reth looked up.

  "About the bond. All of it." She pulled a piece of dried food apart with her fingers. "I need to understand what we're dealing with."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He chewed, swallowed, looked at the ground between them.

  "The Vaekk leaders trained differently from the rest of us. No combat. No physical training at all.

  "Their entire lives were philosophy, strategy, emotional control, mastery of the mind. That's what produces a Kinetic. You can't split focus between the body and what a Kinetic needs to become."

  She kept her eyes on him. "So they gave up being warriors."

  "Completely. Lady Aram spent her life studying combat, analyzing it, understanding it better than most fighters ever will. But she never trained her body for it. Never could. That's the sacrifice the role demanded." He looked at the ground. "The bond gave her what she couldn't have. The Apex's strength, its speed, its physical power. Everything she understood but could never use, she can use now."

  She remembered what the one she'd fought had felt like. The weight of it. The speed. She'd barely survived that, and she'd had Napoleon.

  "The one I fought," she said. "How old was it."

  "Young," Reth said. "Lady Aram's Apex is fully grown."

  She didn't say anything for a moment.

  "And it evolves here too," she said. "Same as everything else inside the dome."

  "Yes."

  The food in her hand lost all taste.

  A grieving mother. Kinetic abilities. The strength of a fully evolved adult Apex. And she wants me dead.

  She set the ration down and picked it back up again and made herself eat.

  "You okay telling me all this," she said. "Feels like Vaekk business."

  Something moved through his face. Brief and real.

  "No," he said. "I'm not fully okay with it." He looked at the ground. "But this information keeps us alive if we run into them. And when I measure everything..." A silence. "You're my ally now. So I told you."

  He hates that he did it. And he did it anyway.

  "Thank you," she said.

  He nodded once. Then he looked at the pack on her back. "The spider."

  "Deactivated." She put her hand on the pack. "I'll explain everything later, Harren and all of it. Right now I need to figure out where we're going."

  She reached into her jacket and pulled out the folded map. Reth looked at it and then at her.

  "I took it from Harren," she said.

  His expression didn't change.

  "I've been trying to decide if that makes me a bad person," she said. "That dungeon was supposed to be theirs. Their mission. Everything they came here for." She turned the map over in her hands. "And I just took it."

  "I want to feel bad," she said. "But every time I get close I think about the uniform. A poison trap. In clothes they gave me to wear." She looked at the map. "If Master Vael hadn't decided not to arm it that day I would have died and never known why. And they're children who already think that's normal. Who calculate whether your life is worth more than a secret." She looked up at him. "I don't know what they turn into if they evolve. I don't want to find out from inside a dungeon with them."

  Reth was quiet for a moment.

  "I don't see anything wrong with what you did," he said.

  She blinked. "You're always talking about honor."

  "It's simple," he said. "They allowed an enemy to take those documents. You defeated that enemy. The documents belong to you now by right." He said it without any weight behind it, just fact. "That's how it works."

  That's the entire calculation for him. No guilt. No gray area. Just arithmetic.

  She almost laughed.

  At least someone in this zone makes sense.

  "One more thing," she said. "What actually is a dungeon. I hear about it constantly and I still don't have a clear picture."

  "The historical texts say very little." He thought for a moment. "What's known is that the advantages inside are greater than anything out here. Resources. Evolution. Things that can't be found above ground. Prince Carin was willing to kill for that location. Nobody knows exactly what's inside."

  "Then let's use it," she said. "The dungeon. Both of us go in."

  Reth looked at her for a moment, then opened the map between them. He studied the instructions, traced the route with one finger, and was quiet for longer than she expected.

  "We're here," he said. "The entrance is practically on the other side of the zone."

  She stared at it.

  "On foot," she said.

  "Yes." He folded the map. "And between here and there, every group in this zone. The prince alone had thirty, maybe thirty-five people. He mentioned his father. No idea how many that group has. And the Vaekk are out there somewhere. We're two people at low levels. We can't fight any of them."

  Two people at low levels. Any group we run into, we lose. Against Lady Aram we don't even last long enough to matter.

  "We can't walk it," she said.

  "No."

  She shifted her weight and felt the hammer against her hip, solid under the jacket.

  Wait.

  "The flying machines," she said. "From the prince's camp. I saw at least two that looked intact." She thought through it as she spoke. "The fire had to reach his camp by now. Everyone there is dealing with that. If we move in the next hour we have a window."

  Reth looked at her. "Those machines don't function here. The zone blocks anything that comes from outside the dome."

  "What if I can make one work."

  He studied her face. "Can you?"

  "I think so."

  He was quiet. He looked at the map, then back at her.

  "Think about it," she said. "We walk across the zone, two people, and sooner or later we run into a group that uses us as evolution points. Or we take that window and we fly over all of it."

  "If you can't make it work," he said.

  "Then we're back to walking." She held his eyes. "But I think I can."

  He looked at the map one more time.

  "I know the prince's model," he said. "I can fly it."

  "Then we have a plan."

  She opened her HUD.

  [LEVEL 6 EVOLUTION AVAILABLE]

  She closed it.

  Reth activated his own HUD and looked at it for a moment. "Have you seen the ranking."

  "No. Never had time."

  He nodded toward her. She opened her HUD again and found the ranking option. The list populated and she scrolled slowly.

  Numbers at the top she didn't recognize. Level 17. Level 18. Names attached to each one. She kept scrolling. Found Reth at level 7. Found her own name near the bottom, role listed, level listed.

  Then Reth said quietly, "Find Aram."

  She scrolled until she found it.

  ARAM: Level 15

  ARAM'S BONDED ANIMAL: Level 15

  She stared at it.

  The person hunting me is level fifteen. Her Apex is level fifteen.

  The number sat there in her HUD, and somehow that made it worse than everything Reth had described. A number she could see. A number she could compare to her own.

  "Under no circumstances," Reth said, "can we run into them."

  "Lady Aram may not be the highest level in this zone. But she is the most dangerous. The soldiers I fought from the church, their levels were low. The church probably focused everything on pushing Harren's level up and left the rest behind."

  He looked at her.

  "We were lucky."

  She closed the HUD.

  I need to not think about that right now.

  "Before we move," she said. "I need a few minutes."

  "The level."

  "Yes," she said. "Every time I evolve it feels like someone driving a nail through my skull."

  He looked at her. "It has never hurt me."

  Of course it hasn't.

  Son of a bitch.

  "Keep watch," she said.

  He moved to the edge of the trees without another word.

  She found a low root and sat with her back against the trunk. Before she opened the HUD she spoke low.

  "Tera, when I leveled up in Harren's camp, did anything actually change? I didn't feel anything."

  Your brain changed. Same as level one. The nanobots flagged the modifications. You were a little busy to notice.

  "What kind of change?"

  Cognitive Overclocking. Mark II. Your Machine Reading sessions can run longer now without hitting the ceiling you kept hitting before. Hard to say exactly how long. Twenty minutes, maybe. You'd have to test it.

  That's actually useful.

  "Good," she said quietly.

  You're welcome.

  She opened the HUD and pressed yes.

  She had time to take one breath before it hit.

  The church camp was burning.

  Flames moved through the tents and wooden frames, spreading across the clearing as cloth and rope caught fire. Some tents had already collapsed, their supports broken and blackened. Smoke drifted low across the ground, mixing with the smell of burned wood and melted metal.

  The fire was still spreading when something large stepped into the clearing.

  Branches cracked somewhere beyond the burning edge of the camp. A moment later a massive shape pushed through the trees and into the light of the fire.

  A Rathen Apex walked into the camp.

  The creature moved slowly, stepping across the burning ground without hesitation. Its body was enormous, larger than any normal beast, its thick hide reflecting the orange light of the flames around it. Fire curled around its legs as it walked, but the animal didn’t react to it.

  Seated on its back was Lady Aram.

  She looked over the ruined camp without speaking. Her eyes moved across the burned tents, the scattered equipment, and the bodies left behind after the fighting.

  Two Vaekk warriors approached and lowered their heads.

  “Commander.”

  Aram kept watching the destruction for another moment before she spoke.

  “Put out the fire.”

  The warriors moved immediately.

  Both of them broke into a run, circling the camp at incredible speed, their bodies blurring as they passed. The air moved with them, building into wind with each pass, and the flames bent under it, shrinking and breaking apart.

  The fire died, section by section, until only smoke remained.

  Aram had not moved during any of it.

  She remained seated on the Rathen Apex, one hand resting against the creature’s neck as it slowly lifted its head and looked across the camp.

  The beast lowered its head and breathed deeply, its nose moving as it searched the air.

  “Search the area.”

  Her eyes moved toward the dark forest beyond the camp.

  “Find the traitor.”