The version of himself that could end this in one move had been waiting for weeks.
Quiet. Patient. Entirely unbothered by the concrete dust or Darius's screaming or the woman kneeling in the rubble with eyes the color of a dying sun. It sat at the back of Kazuki's mind with its hands folded, the way it always did, and it never asked for anything. That was the part that frightened him.
He had spent four months keeping it at arm's length.
He let it a little closer now. Not all the way. Just enough.
The depot went still.
Not silent. Still. The falling dust stopped falling, and Kenji's afterimages hung in the air like a photograph of a crowd. Kora, mid-stride, one cybernetic foot a hand's width off the ground, was a statue with a half-turned head. The only thing moving in the entire world was Kazuki, walking, actually walking, across ten feet of rubble that had never once been this slow.
He didn't feel fear. He noticed that distantly, the way you notice a stranger's face in a crowd. He noticed that he wasn't afraid, and that he should have been, and that the part of him that should have been afraid had gone somewhere very quiet and very far away.
He stopped in front of Kora and looked up at her optics, where he could see his own reflection. The blue ring around his left eye burned steady as a lit window.
Then he put his open palm against her chest plate and let the world start again.
The sound that followed was seven feet of plating discovering it could fly. Kora hit the far wall hard enough to leave a shape in it, folded around a pipe, and slid down in a rain of concrete. The arm she'd been reaching with hung wrong, its plating buckled at the elbow and hydraulic fluid pooling black beneath it.
She got up anyway. He gave her credit for that.
"That's new," she said, and for the first time the electronic doubling in her voice had a crack in it. Her optics refocused on his chest, on his heart, he realized. "Your pulse." A beat. "It didn't change. You crossed the room, broke my arm, and your pulse never changed."
"I'd stop looking," Kazuki said. His voice sounded fine. That was worse.
Kora studied him a long moment, weighing something behind those lenses, something Vaunt had built into her and was now measuring in real time.
"He'll want to hear that," she said. "Vaunt gets his data either way."
She stepped back through the hole she'd made and was gone into the dark, dragging her ruined arm behind her.
The silence that followed had a different texture than before. It had been earned, not stolen.
Aeva gasped like she'd been underwater, and the gold went out of her eyes all at once. She was left blinking and shaking, upright only because Elena had gotten an arm under her at some point during the fight. The disc dropped from her hand, rolled once, dark, and stopped against Kazuki's boot.
Darius had stopped seizing. He lay on the concrete breathing in a rhythm that finally resembled a person's, the black lightning reduced to a few thin threads along his collarbone, faint as hairline cracks in glass.
"Is he" Kazuki started.
"Alive," Elena said. "Stable, for now. I don't know for how long, and I don't know what she just did to buy him this." She looked at Aeva, and something in her expression had shifted in the last ten minutes from wariness to something closer to raw respect. "But it worked."
Aeva was staring at her own hand, turning it over slowly, like she was checking it still belonged to her.
"It's not gone," she said quietly. "The connection. I can still feel him. A thread, small, just sitting there." She looked up. "I don't think I gave him my strength. I think I gave him a place to put what was killing him. It's just somewhere else now. Mine, a little. His, a little less."
Nobody knew what to say to that.
Across the depot, propped against the wall where Rina had dragged him clear, Marcus's one working eye opened and found Aeva. For the first time since they'd pulled him out of the well, he smiled, small and broken and without a trace of malice.
"She found it," he rasped. "The thing Vaunt's been trying to build for eleven years. He never gets to know that."
Kazuki bent, picked up the dark disc, and pressed it into Aeva's palm, folding her fingers over it the way he had in the stairwell.
She didn't pull away. But she wasn't looking at the disc. She was looking at him.
"The disc showed me," she said, very softly. "Everything stopped. And you walked."
"Aeva—"
"You weren't scared." It wasn't an accusation, and he couldn't stand that. It was a person laying a fact on the table between them, carefully, the way you'd set down something that might go off. "Not even a little."
Kazuki opened his mouth to tell her it wasn't what she thought.
The honest answer was that she was right, and it was the one thing he couldn't say out loud.
[To Be Continued...]