Chapter 5 · Cane, your face

He didn't answer immediately. He stayed hunched over, his shoulders shaking. When he finally turned to look at her, Lyra stopped dead.

His eyes weren't the color they had been. The pupils had bled out, filling the iris with a shimmering, abyssal violet light. Small, vein-like cracks of the same color were beginning to spiderweb across his cheekbones, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn't his own.

"Cane, your face..." Lyra reached out, her fingers hovering just inches from his skin. She could feel the heat coming off him—not a human warmth, but something like a furnace, smelling of deep-sea salt and ancient ozone.

Cane blinked, and for a second, the light flickered. He looked down at his hands, staring at the black veins tracing their way up his wrists. "What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything!" Lyra cried. "The pact... it must have triggered when you fought back. You took too much of it, Cane. You absorbed the void to get the strength to hit him."

Cane let out a low, guttural laugh that sounded more like a growl. He stepped closer, his presence suddenly overwhelming. He didn't stop until he was inches from her, his height looming over her. The air between them crackled. Lyra could feel the magnetic pull of the bond, a desperate, hungry tension that made her breath hitch.

He reached out, his thumb brushing a smudge of dirt off her cheek. His skin was searing. The contact sent a jolt of electricity through her, a spark that felt like a warning and a promise all at once.

"We need to move," Cane whispered, his voice rasping. "Silas isn't dead. He's just drowned for a minute. He'll be back, and he'll bring everyone else in the fleet with him."

"Where do we go?" Lyra asked, her voice small, her gaze locked onto those glowing eyes. "The ruins are collapsing."

"There's a safehouse. A pocket of air in the old sector," Cane said, his grip on her arm tightening—not to hurt her, but to anchor himself. "But we can't go back the way we came."

He looked back at the water. Silas was gone, but the ripples were still spreading, and something was moving in the depths below the platform. Something huge.

"Hold onto me," Cane commanded. "And don't let go. No matter what you see down there."

Lyra wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing her face into his wet gear. She could hear his heart thundering, a wild, irregular rhythm. As he leaped from the platform into the black water, she felt the world tilt.

They sank fast, the pressure mounting, the darkness swallowing them whole. But as they dove deeper, Lyra felt a sudden, sharp prickle on her own skin. She looked down at her wrist, where the blood pact mark sat.

A tiny, jagged black crack had appeared in the center of the mark. It wasn't a scar. It was a leak.

And then, a voice whispered in her mind—not Cane's, not Silas's, but something ancient and cold.

*The price must be paid.*

Cane pulled her toward a shimmering fissure in the rock wall, the entrance to the safehouse. They scrambled inside, slamming the heavy iron hatch shut behind them. The silence of the small room was deafening.

Cane leaned against the door, gasping for air, the violet light in his eyes slowly fading. He looked at Lyra, his expression softening for the first time since they'd met. "We made it."

Lyra didn't answer. She was staring at her arm. The black crack had grown. It was now a thin line, stretching toward her elbow, and it was beginning to bleed a thick, ink-like shadow that wouldn't stop flowing.