Chapter 35 · The Ultimate Sacrifice

"Get off me, Jace!" Vera drove her elbow into my ribs as the Maw ripped the floor out from under us.

I caught her wrist before she slid into the white crack opening beneath our feet. My claws punched through the metal grate. Her boots swung over the drop, scraping sparks from the edge.

"Stop fighting me!" I snarled.

"You are the one holding me like a damn cage!"

"Because if I let go, you die!"

"And if you keep holding me, we both die!"

The alarms above us changed pitch. That sharp, ugly scream meant the containment seals had failed. Behind Vera, the pit chamber split apart in jagged lines. Black vapor poured through the gaps. It climbed my arms, cold enough to make the grafted muscle under my hide lock up.

The Maw had opened.

Not the trap from the old lab. Not another feeding shaft. This was the thing beneath the farm, the buried engine that had been whispering through my skull since I first woke in a stitched body.

It wanted us.

A metal cable snapped somewhere in the dark. Vera dropped another inch.

"Jace!"

"I have you."

"No, you do not. Look at your hand!"