Chapter 4 – The Stolen Years

Rook

The adrenaline crash always hits like a physical blow to the spine.

I make it through the security checkpoints of the senior cadet barracks purely on muscle memory and the sheer, terrifying force of will keeping my knees locked. The iron door of my quarters slides shut behind us, engaging the heavy magnetic seal with a dull clunk.

The second the lock engages, my vision swims. I stagger forward, one heavy hand slamming against the cold steel of the bulkhead to keep myself upright.

"Rook!" Mara’s voice is sharp, cutting through the sudden ringing in my ears. She is beside me in an instant, her hand gripping my bicep. Her touch is a jolt of pure, living heat in the freezing, sterile air of my quarters, but right now, that heat feels like a live wire laid against exposed nerve endings.

"I’m fine," I grit out, violently shrugging out of her grip. It takes everything I have not to lean into her.

I limp toward the small, dimly lit wash basin in the corner of the room. The pain radiating from my chest is absolute agony. It isn’t a mechanical injury from the wyvern flight; it is the necrotic backlash of the engine I used to keep us airborne. The Republic’s combat magic requires fuel. I pushed the beast past its physical limits to outrun the military telemetry and reach the observatory, and the engine took the deficit out of my own marrow.

I grip the edges of the metal sink, my knuckles turning white. I need to hide this from her. I need to get the heavy canvas undershirt off and apply the chemical sealants before she sees the spreading rot.

"You’re bleeding," Mara says. She hasn’t stayed by the door. She is right behind me, her presence a heavy, localized gravity. "There is blood soaking through the back of your uniform. You need a medic."

"No medics," I snarl, the gravel in my voice harsher than I intend. I turn the faucet, splashing freezing water over my face to clear the gray spots from my vision. "I just need a minute. Back up, Sol."

"Don’t give me orders," she snaps back. I can hear the rustle of her boots on the grating as she steps even closer. "The resonance bond is still active, Calder. I can feel your heart rate redlining from three feet away. Whatever you pulled through the tether to keep that bone construct flying is tearing you apart."

She reaches for the hem of my shirt.

I catch her wrist mid-air. My grip is tight, defensive. The ambient light of the quarters casts deep shadows across her face. Her dark eyes are wide, not with fear, but with a fierce, analytical intensity. She is a bone-speaker. She knows the scent of death better than anyone in this cursed canyon, and she smells it on me now.

"I said, I have it under control," I tell her, forcing my voice to level out.

"You’re lying," she whispers, her gaze dropping to my chest. "Let me see."

Before I can stop her, she twists her wrist out of my exhausted grip and hooks her fingers into the torn collar of my undershirt. With a sharp, ruthless pull, she rips the weakened fabric down the center.

Mara

The heavy canvas tears with a sickening sound, falling open to expose his chest.

I expected bruises from the flight harness. I expected burns from the wyvern’s necrotic engine. I did not expect this.

I suck in a sharp breath, taking an involuntary step back.

Branching across the heavy, corded muscle of his chest, radiating outward from his sternum, is a network of deep, jagged scars. But they aren’t healed tissue. They are raised, angry, and glowing with a faint, sickly violet light beneath the skin. They look like lightning strikes burned directly into his veins, pulsing with a sluggish, unnatural rhythm that is completely out of sync with his actual heartbeat.

And they are spreading.

"Don’t look at it," Rook says, his voice flat, deadened. He turns away, reaching for a metallic canister on the shelf above the sink.

I ignore him, stepping forward again. My bone-speaker instincts, heightened by the colossal presence of Ashwake slumbering in the bedrock miles below, scream at me. I know this signature. I felt it when I ran my hands over the bone ledgers in the Anatomy Archive.

I reach out, my bare fingertips hovering an inch over the largest, most violent scar over his heart. The air itself feels cold above the mark.

"These aren’t crash injuries," I say, my voice barely a whisper. The silence in the iron-walled room is suffocating. I press two fingers directly against the violet brand.

Rook flinches violently, a harsh hiss escaping his teeth, but he doesn’t pull away.

The moment my skin makes contact, a rush of sensory data floods my mind. It isn’t Rook’s memory. It is a fragmented, terrifying echo of someone else. I hear the screech of tearing metal. I taste blood and ash. I feel the absolute, paralyzing terror of a cadet realizing their flight-tether has been severed. Candidate Miller. Cycle Three.

I snatch my hand back as if I’ve been burned. My stomach violently heaves.

"What is this?" I demand, staring at him.

He sprays a foul-smelling chemical foam over the scars. The violet glow instantly dims, hissing as the flesh is forcefully numbed. "It’s the cost of doing business in the vanguard program."

"Don’t lie to me!" I shout, the sound echoing harshly off the metal bulkheads. I point a shaking finger at his chest. "I just heard a dead man in your skin. I heard a cadet from Cycle Three screaming."

Rook freezes, the canister suspended in his hand. He slowly turns to face me, his gray eyes guarded and exhausted.

My mind races, the analytical pieces I’ve gathered since I arrived at Red Meridian suddenly snapping together with horrifying clarity. The ledgers in the archive. The statistical impossibility of his survival. The rumors in the barracks about the death-rider who walks away from every fatal crash without a scratch.

"Six cycles," I say, the words falling from my lips like stones. "No one survives three. The necrotic engines burn the marrow of the constructs, but when the marrow runs out, they burn the pilot. That’s how the magic works. It consumes life."

I look at the branching, violet scars, counting the distinct anchor points. There are five main clusters.

"Five wingmen," I whisper, the horror fully blooming in my chest. "Every time you crashed, you didn’t just survive. You transferred the necrotic backlash through the tether. You let the engine consume them instead of you."

"That’s not how it works," Rook says, his jaw tight, his voice dangerously low.

"Then explain it!" I step into his space, my hands curling into fists at my sides. "Explain why your scars carry the death-rattles of five other cadets. You’re a leech, Calder. The academy isn’t just testing temporary wyverns. They are testing you. They are using human lives as batteries to see how long they can keep one pilot flying, and you let them do it."

Rook

Her words hit me harder than the canyon wall.

She looks at me with absolute, unfiltered disgust, and it strips the air right out of my lungs. In the dark of the archive, she looked at me like I was salvation. In the desert observatory, she touched me like I was the only real thing left in the world. Now, she is looking at a monster.

And the worst part is, she is right. The mechanics of her accusation are flawlessly deduced.

The distance between us feels like a chasm. I want to cross it. The lingering heat of the dragon-bond in my blood screams at me to pull her close, to bury my face in the curve of her neck and silence the accusation with the brutal, blinding intimacy we shared just hours ago.

I take half a step toward her, my hand instinctively reaching out.

"Don’t touch me," Mara says.

Her voice is completely devoid of heat. It is a wall of solid ice. She takes a deliberate step backward, putting undeniable distance between us. She raises a hand, pressing her palm flat against my chest to stop my forward momentum.

Her touch is no longer seeking or soft. It is a barrier.

"Whose heartbeat is that, Calder?" she asks, her dark eyes locking onto mine, ruthless and unyielding. "When you touched me in the observatory, whose stolen years was I feeling? Was it Miller’s? Was it the cadet from Cycle Four?"

I drop my hand. The rejection physically hollows me out, a cold ache settling beneath my ribs that the chemical numbing agent cannot reach.

"You think I wanted this?" I ask, my voice finally cracking under the weight of the silence. I rip the remaining shreds of the canvas shirt off and hurl it into the corner of the room. "You think I willingly traded the lives of my squad for a few more years in this slaughterhouse?"

"I think you are still breathing," she replies coldly, "and they are rotting in the marrow-chasms. You wear their deaths on your chest."

I let out a bitter, exhausted laugh, dragging a hand through my sweat-damped hair. The sheer, suffocating weight of the Republic’s secrets is finally breaking my spine. There is no point in hiding the mechanics of the horror anymore. She has already deduced the architecture of the crime; she just doesn’t understand the lock on the cage.

"I don’t siphon them, Mara," I say, leaning heavily against the steel bulkhead. I look away from her, staring at the brutalist, gray walls of my quarters. "I don’t pull the trigger."

I reach up and tap the heavy silver insignia pinned to my discarded flight jacket on the desk. The crossed marrow-blades of a senior vanguard.

"The Republic doesn’t ask for volunteers when they build a weapon," I tell her, my voice dropping into a hollow, mechanical cadence. "Three years ago, during my second cycle, my engine redlined over the Anvil. I should have burned out. I was ready to burn out. But the commandant had just discovered a new way to weave the necrotic tethers. A failsafe."

I turn my head to look at her. The fury in her eyes is slowly being replaced by a sickening realization.

"It’s called the Contract of Stolen Years," I say, forcing the words through the ash in my throat. "It is a biometric seal woven directly into my spine by the academy’s necromancers. When my vitals drop into the fatal zone, the contract automatically triggers. It seeks out the closest tethered heartbeat in my squad, severs their life-force, and funnels it into my engine to keep the prototype flying."

Mara stares at me, her face draining of color. "They wired you to murder your own wingmen without your consent."

"I am the Republic’s favorite battery," I whisper, the bitter truth finally laid bare. "They need data on how to handle the massive necrotic backlash of the sun artillery. So, they keep their best pilot alive by feeding him the rookies. And the best part? Every time the contract triggers, it doesn’t just steal their years. It anchors their death-agony into my flesh. It is killing me from the inside out, Sol. I don’t survive the crashes. I just die a little slower than the rest of them."