Real Heroes

Kade reached for Vera and found only the taste of burned copper.

The absence struck harder than the blast that had thrown him across the transit platform. For one impossible second, he lay beneath a rain of glass and sparks, palm pressed to the black floor, waiting for her answer to rise through him - the sharp flare of her fear, the warmth that always followed when she found him, the invisible pull that had guided him through fire, flood, and the broken underlevels of Neo-Meridian.

Nothing came.

Above him, the Spire’s emergency sirens changed pitch. The tower had survived the collapse of the bond array below the city, but its service levels were waking around him in layers: shutters slamming down, drones unfolding from ceiling recesses, security glyphs blooming red across the walls. Beyond the platform’s fractured windows, Neo-Meridian staggered beneath a bruised dawn. The lower tiers flashed with power failures. The Spire rose through the storm like a needle driven into the clouds.

Vera was inside it.

Kade pushed himself upright. Blood slid from his temple into his eye. He wiped it away and looked at the dead bond interface embedded beneath his wrist.

The thin silver lines had once lit whenever Vera was near - or in danger, or angry with him, or trying very hard not to be any of those things. Now they were dull as old wire.

“Vera,” he said.

His voice vanished beneath the alarms.

He tried again, silently this time. He pictured her face: the defiant angle of her chin, the loose strand of dark hair she tucked behind one ear when she was pretending not to be frightened. He pictured the way she had looked at him before the array detonated, one hand reaching through the collapsing light.

Come back to me.

The thought went nowhere.

A security drone dropped through the smoke.

Kade rolled as its pulse round tore through the platform. Heat scraped his shoulder. He came up behind a maintenance pillar, drew the short blade from his belt, and listened.

The drone hummed overhead, searching. Its lens clicked from thermal to motion. Kade held still, breathing through the pain in his ribs. Without Vera, the silence inside him was not peaceful. It was a locked room with no door.

The drone drifted closer.

Kade tore a loose cable from the pillar and flung it toward the opposite stairwell. The machine snapped toward the sound. He moved before it could correct, sprinting across the platform and driving his blade into the joint beneath its lens. Blue fire spat across his knuckles. The drone struck him in the chest with enough force to crack bone, but he twisted with it, used its momentum, and sent both of them through the service door.

He landed hard on a grated walkway.

The door sealed behind him. On the other side, the drone battered the metal, shrieking in electronic outrage.

Kade crouched in darkness smelling of coolant, wet steel, and the bitter smoke rising from his own sleeve. The service level stretched ahead in narrow gantries wrapped around the Spire’s inner machinery. Pipes shuddered behind the walls. Far below, turbines turned with the slow, enormous rhythm of a sleeping beast.

He touched the comm at his throat.

“Ryn. Sable. Report.”

Static answered first. Then Sable’s voice, clipped and breathless. “We’re three levels below you. Security just sealed the east shafts.”

“Can you open them?”

“We can make them worse,” Ryn said. His voice carried the familiar edge of a smile that never reached his eyes. “Opening is a generous term.”

Kade glanced at the sealed door. “I need a route to the holding floors.”

A pause.

“You don’t have the bond,” Sable said.

It was not a question.

Kade’s fingers tightened around the comm. “I know.”

“We could pull you back,” Ryn said. “The lower access tunnels are still clear.”

“I’m not going back.”

“Vera may not be on the holding floors.”

“Then I’ll find where she is.”

The silence that followed had weight. Ryn and Sable had once been impossible to separate, their bond so intense it had turned every distance into an injury. Kade had watched them cling to that connection until care became surveillance, until fear dressed itself as devotion. They had helped him in the collapse below, but help from them always came with a hook buried somewhere inside.

Sable spoke first. “The Spire is scanning every active bond signature.”

Kade looked at his wrist. “Mine’s inactive.”

“That may be why you’re still alive.”

A red beam slid beneath the service door.

Kade flattened himself against the wall. “Send me the route.”

“You’re walking blind,” Ryn said.

Kade thought of Vera’s hand reaching for him through the white rupture. “Then stop telling me to turn around.”

He cut the comm before either of them could answer.

The door unlocked with a soft mechanical click.

Kade moved.

The corridor beyond was narrow enough that his shoulders brushed both walls. Maintenance lights flickered overhead, bathing the pipes in sickly violet....