Chapter 38 · Ashes Remember

The warframe went dark around them.

Not quiet. Never quiet.

Eli heard the machine breathing through the walls, a slow metallic drag that vibrated in his teeth. Emergency lights pulsed beneath the cockpit floor, staining Sera’s blood-slick face red, then black, then red again. Somewhere beyond the armored shell, cooling systems hissed. Something deep inside the core clicked once.

Then a voice whispered through the dead speakers.

You began the fire.

Eli’s hands tightened around the control yoke. Pain flashed from his ribs to his shoulder, hot enough to turn his vision white. The ember beneath his skin answered with a faint scarlet glow, threading up his wrists like cracks in porcelain.

“No,” he said.

The word fell into the cockpit and died there.

Sera stood beside the auxiliary console, one hand pressed against the wound beneath her ribs. Blood had soaked through her torn jacket and gathered at her fingertips. She looked pale, but her eyes remained hard and awake.

“Eli.”

The voice came from the rear station. Marlow’s fingers danced across a panel whose screens kept collapsing into static. “I’m losing the backup network. The core is overriding every external channel.