Marcus charged towards Lokki. The scholarly Draug saw him coming and raised the same psionic barrier he'd been employing. "Skugga Hindrun!"

  But Marcus hit it shield-first at a full sprint. Solar-charged steel met Void energy and the barrier cracked. Lokki stumbled backward, red eyes wide.

  "Impudent Covenant dog—"

  Justice's edge reached Lokki's cheek, drawing a line of black fluid. The professor Draug scrambled back, joints popping grotesquely as he retreated.

  On the other side of the corridor, Xin was on his feet, shouting out in in Devavā?ī. "Bheda Atisīmā!"

  Jade fired twice, both shots Void-enhanced from his earlier casting, the rounds glowing emerald, punching through a blinded Draug's throat.

  From Xin's shoulder, H?kon launched another spell "K?ld Keila!"

  The frost cone catching the creature's legs. Iron Roach stepped in and finished it with a point-blank blast that took the Draug's head apart.

  Two enemies down. One Draug left, held by Roach's relentless pressure and another Eclipse spell. The cyborg man growled before chanting, his crimson sunglasses reflecting the ambient light. "Agni ?ūla Hana!"

  A crescent of crimson flame formed to sear across the creature's chest.

  But Sigrun was down. Járn lay three meters from her hand. She tried to rise and her arms buckled.

  Marcus broke from Lokki and sprinted back, sliding to a knee beside her.

  "Scutum Solis!"

  The psionic barrier in a hue resembling the Sun's flared to life, golden energy spreading from Bulwark in a dome that covered Sigrun's fallen body. Brynhild's symbiote had recovered, and the first retaliatory strike—a lashing appendage—bounced off the barrier with a shower of sparks.

  "Xin!" Marcus called over his shoulder. "Do what you Riggers do! Tell me what we're fighting!"

  Xin was already there. He dropped beside Sigrun, adjusting his tilted glasses. "H?kon, keep Sky Lady stable!"

  "Hjarta Kyrr!" The little Diabolisk pressed both tiny paws against Sigrun's arm. Pale blue light seeped through her clothes, into her skin.

  "Hold on for me, hold on…" Xin's slender fingers moved across his green Nucleus Watch's dial, accessing its mini-computer, the device's heat venting visibly in the corridor air that was now growing cold. Bryn's influence, perhaps? The Rigger said out loud what sounded like some technical prefixes before the incantation. "Probe for vulnerability to amplify damage. K?ati Vardhana!"

  The Nucleus Watch on the skinny man's wrist glowed, resplendent verdant glow shooting out from its dial to envelop the ambient space.

  Looking at it, Marcus nodded grimly. He held his shield.

  "So many men protecting you, Siggi! I wish I had that…" Brynhild's strikes came fast—two appendages, then three, testing the barrier from different angles. Each hit cost Marcus Aether he couldn't spare. His arms shook, his throat feeling dry.

  "A proper man…must be unbreakable." He muttered Zori's teaching. When Marcus Thorne planted his feet, nothing moved him. Not even with the weakening he'd had just a few minutes ago.

  "Done!" Xin's voice cracked with urgency. "The symbiote's root feeds through her lower body. The weakest point is..." He paused, his face reddening despite the circumstances. "…between her legs. Beneath the gown. The symbiote grafts into her body. The chitin plating is thinnest there 'cause the symbiote needs constant contact with her..." The man blushed saying it. "…biological processes."

  "You're telling me the weak point is between her legs." Marcus looked at Xin like the man had just told him to punch the sun. "Bloody hell."

  The blush on Xin's olive countenance was undeniable now. "Her vulva, yes. A gap in the chitin where the symbiote meets her body."

  "Right. Sigrun!" Marcus looked down at the woman beneath his shield. "Can you stand?"

  Her breathing was ragged, but her eyes were open. Focused. She didn't answer with words. Her right hand moved to her belt, fingers finding the hilt that always waited there. "Baldr, VIRK-yah-duh!"

  Baldr ignited.

  Quantum blue light filled the corridor, cold and steady. The Psytum Sword hummed with a frequency that Marcus felt in his molars. Sigrun rose on shaking legs, the blade painting her face in light the color of moonrise.

  "Go," she said. Just that.

  Marcus dropped the Sun Shield and charged Brynhild head-on. Bulwark raised, Justice swinging. The symbiote met him with everything it had—appendages crashing against his shield, the eyeless head snapping toward his exposed arm. He didn't care about landing blows. He just needed her attention.

  He got it.

  Brynhild's eyes locked on him. Every appendage pivoted to address the Stalwart hammering against her defenses. The symbiote's head lunged at his shield arm, jaws gaping—

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  And Sigrun moved.

  She came in low, Baldr held point-forward in a fencer's thrust. Beneath the gown. Past the coiling chitin. Toward the gap Xin had identified.

  The symbiote sensed it. Too late for the appendages to redirect, tangled as they were in Marcus's assault, but the eyeless head—still lunging at Marcus—wrenched itself sideways. It threw its own body into Baldr's path, the only thing left that could intercept.

  Sigrun didn't stop.

  Baldr punched through the symbiote's neck. The quantum-blue blade sheared through chitin and bioluminescent flesh, and the eyeless head separated from the body in a spray of black fluid and dying cyan light.

  The head hit the deck with a wet thud, jaws still snapping.

  The headless stump of the symbiote spasmed violently. Brynhild gasped—the first uncontrolled sound she'd made—and the floating woman lurched backward, carried by the symbiote's panicked retreat.

  Marcus stepped forward, shield still raised, and for one moment—one breath, one heartbeat—his eyes met Brynhild's.

  She was looking at him. Not at Sigrun, not at the decapitated remains of her symbiote's head, not at the corridor full of black blood and fallen Draugs.

  At him.

  Her blue eyes held something that made his chest ache. Under the fury, under the cold imperial mask, there was something raw. Something hungry. A want so naked it burned through every layer of Draug transformation and Fenris conditioning and royal composure, hitting him square in the center of his newly rearranged soul.

  He recognized it because he felt it too.

  Sister Deirdre. The memory surfaced without permission. Last autumn, kneeling beside the aging nun in Edinburgh's Chapel of First Light, the divination candles guttering between them. He'd asked the question that had gnawed at him for months: whether Deirdre and he were an Advisable Match, whether Zori blessed their union.

  Zori's answer had come swift and absolute. NO.

  But then the candles had flared, and Deirdre had seized his hand, her eyes gone milky with prophetic trance. Zori's voice, through her cracked lips:

  "The woman of your life will find you in the first week of March, in the year 2295. Approximately four years before the Day of Oblivion."

  March 2, 2295. The first week of March.

  Marcus stared at the floating horror before him—the beautiful face, the monstrous body, the want in her eyes that mirrored his own—and felt the ground shift beneath his certainties. "Is it you, then?"

  Then Lokki's voice shattered the moment.

  "Kyrre Ginnungagaps!"

  Silence of the Void. The J?turmál words carved reality open. A wall of absolute darkness erupted between the two sides, a barrier that swallowed light and sound alike. Marcus's next step forward met nothing—no resistance, no surface, just the absence of anything his senses could register.

  Through the barrier, fading, he heard Lokki's lecturing tone: "A tactical withdrawal, Your Highness. The symbiote requires time to regenerate. We shall continue this lesson at a more convenient date."

  Then silence.

  Real silence. Not the spell's void, but the quiet of a corridor after violence. Dripping. Groaning metal. Someone's ragged breathing.

  Behind him, Sigrun collapsed.

  She dropped like her strings had been cut, Baldr's blade winking out as the Psytum Sword's energy demand caught up with her body. She hit the deck on her knees, one hand clutching her chest, the other still gripping the hilt.

  "Sigrun!" Xin was beside her in two strides, catching her before she fell face-first into the pooling black fluid. He lowered her gently, pulling her against his chest. Her eyes were half-closed, breath coming in short, pained gasps. The Psytum Sword's toll—it drew power from the wielder's heartbeat. And Sigrun's heart had just given everything it had.

  Marcus knelt on her other side, pressing his palm flat against Bulwark's surface. Warm light gathered beneath his hand.

  "Hjarta Kyrr. Hjarta Kyrr." H?kon repeated the Lunar healing incantation from Xin's shoulder, the little Diabolisk's scales glowing a deep, steady blue. The words felt too large for his small mandibles, but they came out clear. Pale light washed from his paws and settled over Sigrun's chest like a blanket.

  Marcus added his own. Not a spell. He didn't know Solar healing incantations like that. Just his Aether, channeled through the shield and his open palm, golden warmth flowing into Sigrun's body alongside H?kon's lunar light. He'd seen Covenant field medics do this. It wasn't elegant. But it was something.

  Iron Roach moved to the corridor's mouth, reloading his double-barrel with practiced efficiency. The remaining Draug was down—Roach had put it on the ground while Marcus wasn't looking. The old man stood watch, smoke rising from his weapon, scanning the darkness beyond the fading Void barrier.

  "Clear," Roach growled. "For now."

  Jabari limped over, a spent Medi-Vap cartridge between his teeth. The wound on his shoulder was already closing, the nanobots doing their work. He'd retrieved Járn from the deck—Sigrun's Thermal Axe looked small in his larger hands, the core cooled and dormant.

  "You know, where I come from," Jabari said, setting it down beside Sigrun. His voice was casual, but his eyes weren't. "We usually wait until the second date before giving a girl her weapon back."

  Nobody laughed. But Sigrun's breathing was steadier now, her color returning. Xin held her against his chest, one hand on her back, H?kon pressing his tiny body against her arm with his scales shifting from anxious brown to soft silver.

  "Sky Lady okay?" H?kon whispered. "HAW-koon make Sky Lady better?"

  Sigrun's hand found the Diabolisk. Her fingers trembled, but they were gentle.

  "Yeah," she managed. "Yeah, you did good."

  Diego's voice returned over their Nucleus Watches, the static clearing as the Void barrier dissolved. "I don't know what you people just did, but the Kraken's releasing the ship. Repeat—Kraken is releasing the Polaris. We're free."

  Marcus felt the ship shudder beneath him. The groaning of stressed metal shifted pitch, becoming the familiar hum of engines reasserting control. The amber emergency lighting flickered once, twice—and then white light returned, flooding the corridor with something that almost felt like mercy.

  "Decks 2, 3 and 5 confirmed clear!" Diego continued. "We've got wounded and damage, but we're flying. Continuing course for Venus!"

  Marcus looked down at Sigrun, held by Xin, healed by H?kon, guarded by a Griot and a barkeep with Eclipse magic and a Stalwart whose body had just betrayed him in the most fundamental way the Covenant could imagine.

  He flexed his hand. It felt weaker than it should. Everything did.

  His Nucleus Watch pulsed again, that quiet warning he kept dismissing. The numbers hadn't changed back.

  [Power: 5 | Resilience: 8 | Libido: 5] [Status: Stable | Aether: 13%]

  [NOTE: PRIMAL redistribution appears permanent. Consult medical—]

  He closed the display.

  Somewhere ahead of them, past whatever darkness Lokki had opened, Brynhild Fjeld was drifting through the Polaris's breached hull. Her symbiote was already regenerating—Marcus had seen the stump twitch before the barrier fell, new tissue budding from the severed neck.

  "She will heal. She will come back." He said to no one in particular.

  And when she did, Marcus Thorne would be weaker than he was today.

  He bowed his head and prayed for understanding. Only that. Nothing else seemed worth asking for.

  Because Zori had said the first week of March, and it was the second day, and the woman of his life had just looked at him with eyes that held more longing than any human gaze he'd known prior.

  Even when that gaze sat above a monster.