Chapter 4 Terms of Survival

The wind shifted, dragging a curtain of smoke between us and what remained of the ridge. Far off, something crashed—a weakened girder giving up, or the last of a tower collapsing. The air tasted metallic.

“You’re lying,” I said.

He shrugged, or tried to; the motion tugged the chain, dragging my arm an inch closer to him. Our marks pulsed in unison, a faint glow jumping between them.

“I don’t have to lie to you,” he said. “If you die, I die. If I die, you…” He looked me over slowly, gaze traveling from my bruised throat to my busted armor to the white-knuckled grip on my knife. “…become what the bond leaves behind. You wouldn’t enjoy it.”

I hated that my curiosity flared even as my stomach twisted. “What does it leave behind?”

He smiled without humor. “Fire.”

A short list of worse answers existed. Not many.

I dragged my gaze away from him and focused on something I could control: inventory.

I still had my sidearm, though the barrel was warped from the heat. The spare mags on my belt were intact. My knife, standard-issue, nicked but usable.

The small pack at my hip still held two vials of focus tonic, one minor healing capsule, and a cumbersome, palm-sized charm etched with emergency recall sigils.

The charm’s crystal inlay was cracked.

Perfect.

I picked it up anyway, thumb skating over the fracture, and whispered the activation phrase. For a second, the sigils flickered, trying to stir. Then the crack flared bright and the whole thing went dark.

Dead. Like our comms. Like our backup.

Like my chances of Rourke marching over the ridge right now and dragging Drake off on a leash while I explained why my spell had decided to be creative.

I sat back on my heels, the rock biting through my ruined trousers, and laughed once—a short, humorless sound.

Drake watched me in that unnerving, patient way. “You find something funny about this?”

“Only that if I get us killed,” I said, more to the air than to him, “they’ll still write it up as dereliction of duty.”

“‘They’ being?” he asked.

“The Syndicate,” I said automatically.

His mouth tightened in a way that told me he’d expected exactly that answer.

“I see,” he said. “So I’m not just your prisoner. I’m your redemption.”

“You’re my assignment,” I said. “You’re the last known dragon in Syndicate territory. They want you. I bring you in, they get their trophy, the war ends,

everybody goes home.”

“To what?” he asked.

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

Home.

The word conjured a cramped apartment two levels below street view, a cot that smelled faintly of disinfectant, a metal box where I kept my grandmother’s half-burned prayer book and my old, scorched medallion from the village that no longer existed. A place I passed through more often than I lived in.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Soldiers don’t ask what’s on the other side of the war. They just make sure there is one.”

Something flickered in his expression. Pity, maybe. Or contempt.

“You sound like the rest of them,” he murmured. “They took everything from you and taught you to thank them for the opportunity.”

I stiffened. “They took me in. They trained me. Without the Syndicate, I’d be a charred smear on a wall in a village no one remembers.”

He nodded slowly, like he’d expected that too. “And in return, they get to point you where they want and say, ‘Burn.’”

The mark on my wrist pulsed, hot and stinging, like it objected to his tone.

“Enough,” I snapped. “We’re wasting time. We need high ground, cover, and a functioning comms relay. There’s an outpost two klicks north with a backup array and med supplies. We go there. They’ll have a way to stabilize the bond until—”

“Until they find a way to cut a dragon into parts and stuff the pieces into weapons?” he interrupted mildly.

“Until better casters than me can untangle this,” I said through my teeth. “You’re coming with me. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

He looked around at the shattered valley, then back at me. “Witch, we are already well past the easy way.”

I pushed myself fully to my feet. My legs trembled, but they held. The world tilted left and then right, then settled. I tugged at the chain.

“Move, Varyn.”

He rose, unhurried as a tree deciding to stand. Up close, he was taller than I’d guessed—six and a half feet, maybe more, all lean muscle and coiled potential. Old scars crossed newer wounds along his chest and arms, some straight and clean like blade work, others jagged like claw marks.

Not all of those were from us.

Heat radiated off him in a steady halo. When he stepped closer, the bond humming between us, some of that warmth seeped into my chilled bones.

Annoying.

He took one step forward, then another, testing the limit of the chain. The light-band stretched, shimmering, but never more than a few feet long.

“So.” His tone was conversational, but his eyes never stopped scanning our surroundings. “If you decide to run, I’m dragged with you. If I fly, you burn from the inside out. If one of us falls into a ravine—”

“I get the picture,” I said. “We stay upright. We stay alive. We work around it.”

He gave a soft, amused huff. “Practical. I appreciate that in someone I’m doomed to die with.”

“You’re not doomed,” I said. “Not if we’re smart.”

“You mean if you are,” he corrected.

My hand twitched toward my knife. The chain brightened, as if sensing the spark of violence.

“I mean exactly what I said,” I replied.

We started walking.

The first few steps were a lesson in unwanted intimacy. The bond transmitted more than just heartbeat. It carried the subtle shifts of his balance, the way his stride lengthened when the ground sloped, the moment his muscles tensed just before stepping over debris I hadn’t yet seen.

By the time we climbed back to the ridge line, I knew three things:

One, my left knee hurt more than I’d realized. Two, he was favoring his right side, though he hid it well. Three, every time he winced, my chest tightened like something inside me hated seeing him in pain.

That third thing made me want to punch the bond in the face. If it had one.

The ridge offered a grim panorama. The Syndicate staging camp, where we’d eaten breakfast under gray skies and bad coffee just hours before, was mostly gone. Tents reduced to black curls, vehicles overturned, comms towers melted down to skeletal frames.

A few figures moved among the wreckage. Survivors. Wounded. I caught sight of Rourke’s broad silhouette at one point, limping between two medics, yelling at someone to get the backup shield arrays online before the next wave.

Relief hit me so hard I almost staggered.

Drake tilted his head. “Friends of yours?”

“Co-workers,” I said. “And if they see you, they’ll shoot first and ask questions when you’re a lab sample.”

“And if they see you chained to me?” he asked.

I hesitated.

Rourke’s face flashed behind my eyes—not as he’d been this morning, confident, giving orders, but as he’d be if he saw this. If he saw the bond. The Syndicate didn’t like rogue magic. They liked control. Discipline. Predictable weapons.

There was nothing predictable about this.

“They won’t see us,” I decided. “We skirt the ridge, drop behind the eastern outcropping, and head for the outpost from the back side of the canyon.”

“That’s away from your people,” Drake said.

“And away from you being turned into dragon jerky,” I shot back. “You’re not useful to the Syndicate if you’re already carved into souvenirs.”

His expression shifted, just a fraction. “Interesting.”

“What is?”

“You still speak of them as if you care what’s useful to them,” he said.

I tightened my jaw and started moving along the ridge’s shadowed edge. He fell into step beside me, the tether humming between us, our pace forced into a compromise.

As we moved, the murmur of voices and crackle of fires faded behind rock. The further we got from the camp, the more the landscape turned from battlefield to wild country—jagged stone, sparse scrub, the occasional twisted tree clinging to cracks like it didn’t know how to let go.

“Did your kind always talk this much?” I asked at one point, more to break the pressure in my chest than because I cared.

“Only when someone threatens to drag us into enemy territory,” he said mildly. “I’m evaluating my options.”

“You don’t have options,” I said. “You’re chained to me. I’m chained to you. We move together or we bleed together. That’s how this works.”

“Chains can be broken,” he said.

“Not without killing us both, you said.”

He glanced sideways at me. “There are more graceful words for what happens when fire consumes what’s left in its path. But yes.”

“You’re a real comfort, you know that?”

“Dragons aren’t known for their bedside manner.”

I snorted despite myself. It came out half a cough.

My chest hurt. My lungs burned. I chalked it up to smoke and exertion and definitely not to the way my body kept trying to synchronize with his.