Page 92 of The Huntmaster

Then nothing.

The sensation vanished so suddenly my knees nearly buckled. The connection had felt sluggish, terribly delayed—like her essence was desperately reaching out for me through a sea of thick mud, muffled and slowed by whatever oppressive, mechanical shields they had wrapped around their territory down here to block us out. It was a dying echo of a moment that had already passed, fighting through the iron crust just to find me.

Toren's hand shot out, gripping my shoulder tight.

"Kaelen?"

I dragged in a ragged breath. "She lives."

The certainty in my voice shattered the silence, startling even me. Mara stiffened, her posture turning razor-sharp. "You felt her?"

"Only for a moment." My jaw clenched, the greying ash on my face cracking under the tension of my expression. "But she is alive."

I knew very few of our kind who possessed red eyes like the flash that had just pierced our bond. The common dregs of the deep had milky, dead gazes, but the scavengers’ high bloodline was different. Geth and Sila came to mind. Cruel, venomous, and entirely devoid of honour.

"Geth..." I growled, the name a jagged, vibrating whisper-growl that tore past my fangs.

Toren's amber eyes narrowed instantly, his grip tightening on my shoulder. "The High Scavenger? He dares to lay a hand on an alpha's mate? Are you certain it is his horde?"

"I saw the scarlet eyes through the link," I spat. Under the suffocating pressure of my rage and absolute protectiveness, the markings across my chest and arms violently shifted, the brilliant white-gold flaring into a volatile, bleeding white-red that hummed with heat. "And whoever touched her will pray for death before I am finished with them."

"Geth has kept to the deepest trenches of the Deep Crust," Toren muttered, his voice dropping into a dark, calculating register. "He hasn't been seen above the bedrock in many sun-cycles. Some believed his faction had succumbed to the gas leaks or turned on one another. If he is rising now, if he is dragging his warriors to the surface edges, he is starving for something."

Beside him, Mara didn't look at either of us. A sudden, tense silence radiated from her, and I caught the precise moment her posture fractured. A quick, heavy shadow of guilt crossed her sharp features, her eyes dropping to the damp earth for a single beat before she forced her mask back into place. Guilt for what? Not protecting Lyra?

"He isn't starving for food," Mara said quietly, her voice unusually tight as she gripped her blades. "He wants leverage. He wants the canopy to bleed, and he knows what Lyra means to this clan. If Geth is out of the shadows, he will be entrenched deeper than before."

Driven by the residual echo of her terror and the burning heat in my skin, I wrenched myself from Toren's grip and lunged off the skymetal platform, my eyes scanning the lip of the vertical drop where the massive roots plunged into the black gulf below. If they went straight down, they had to leave a mark. A footprint. A broken fibre. Anything.

My gaze locked onto a thick, twisted root that plunged straight down into the central shaft.

There, freshly carved into the rough, weeping bark, was a shape. It was crude, serrated, and hacked into the wood with a dull blade.

A star.

I leaned down, my nostrils flaring as I pressed my face close to the fresh sap bleeding from the wound in the wood. Beneath the overpowering scent of the deep earth, a very faint, familiar scent clung to the carving. A washed-out, pale scent of fear and guilt.

Sky.

The boy had carved it. He had left a marker for the star-woman. I looked from the carving down into the sheer, treacherous drop of the vertical shaft. The heavy tracks of Geth's main guard didn't lead down this precipice—they had taken the wider, reinforced cargo paths to transport a high-value prisoner. This clearly wasn't the way they had taken Lyra. It was too steep, too narrow, and far too dangerous for a guarded escort. But it was a way into the subterranean city nonetheless, an unguarded back door into the scavenger's belly—and Sky knew it, too. The fledgling had given us a shortcut.

"Kaelen?" Toren asked, stepping down to the root beside me, his eyes following my gaze to the crude star.

"The fledgling left a path," I growled, a dangerous, predatory smile cutting across my face as the silver thread of the bond snapped taut in my chest, finally pointing northeast through the vertical shaft. "He marked the way to the star-woman."

I didn't wait for Toren or Mara to answer. I leapt onto the vertical root, my claws locking into the bark as I began the rapid, lethal descent into the sunless dark, the vanguard trailing behind us like a storm of red lightning.

Chapter 60

Lyra

The horrific scraping of Sila’s blackened claws against the iron bars sounded like a death knell in the cramped space of the cell. Every instinct I had—the survival instincts forged in the brutal canopy and the modern ones screamed by my civilised human brain—told me to shrink back into the shadows of the stone slab.

Instead, I gripped the freezing bars tighter, forcing myself to hold her piercing, blood-red gaze. My temple throbbed in time with the low hum of the alien wire, but the hot, defensive anger I’d felt while speaking to Tyler hadn't left me.

"My mouth is exactly as brave as it needs to be, Sila," I spat, my voice raw but steady. "You want to talk about pathetic? You're the ones hiding in the dirt, keeping people in cages because you're too terrified to face the canopy."

Sila’s smirk didn't fade, but her red eyes flared with a sudden, volatile heat. She leaned closer, the toxic, chemical scent of her skin washing over me through the gaps in the hull-plating.