Page 97 of GlitchBorn Heart

Ash fills the threshold, damp leather jacket dripping on my carpet. He stops abruptly when he sees the sword, throwing both hands up in surrender. He squints to look in my eyes. “Shit, Kael!” He ducks as if I’m going to remove his head in one fatal blow.

“Ash,” I reply flatly, my voice not my own, just a sound coming from a vessel. I lower the sword like a broken man going through the motions.

Ash steps forward without flinching. “You planning to re-enact samurai porn, or are you going to put that thing down, put a shirt on, and talk like a functional adult?”

Right back to humor. How nice for him.

Numbness.

I can only stare at him, adrenaline still flooding my system. It freezes me in place. My head doesn’t move, but I squeeze the katana just to feel something.

He grins as he slowly walks toward me, snapping his fingers. “Hey! You in there?” A wave of his hand. I feel the air hit my face, but I remain stoic. “Use your words, Kael.” He plows right in and throws his wet jacket over my leather sofa. “You always did like a dramatic entrance.” He looks at the sword, then at me. “Looks heavy.”

If I were a program, I would be stuck in a virtual loop. He casually strolls over to my corner office and whistles at the shards of monitor and heaps of broken glass. “Damn, boy. You need to get laid. That’s some serious sexual frustration.”

I’m still paralyzed from the rush of cortisol. My arm twitches, and just because I feel like being a dick, I arc the blade in a clean, dangerous line. Ash, who’s been in alleys with knives in his face, coolly leans and dips, like he trusts me not to touch him.

“Careful, mall ninja.” A half a second later, I realize he’s close enough that the tip of my sword is an inch from his throat. He’s casual but frozen in place. I remain still, calm.

He places both hands on my forearms. “Snap out of it, Kaze.” He quietly steadies the weapon. “Put it away.”

My voice still doesn’t sound like my own. It comes out deep and clipped. “What do you want?”

Ash lets the silence grow until it becomes a thing you can’t ignore. Without his usual swagger, he responds. “I think we both know who did this.” He motions to the windows, half the city still dark. “Eli’s location. When he did this, I found him.”

My body goes taut. “Where exactly?”

His eyes flick to my broken monitor and back to me. “Top-east corner of the tower. Some sort of lab hidden at the end of a maintenance hallway. I’ll need a schematic of the building.” He lowers his voice, deliberately. “I kind of knew a general location earlier but couldn’t really be exact.” He shrugs. “But I’m not stupid. Vikktor’s ears are everywhere in that lab. I sure wasn’t going to do a big reveal there. Duh.”

He flops down on my sofa, soggy boots resting on my coffee table. Heathen.

I finally feel like I can move. I place the sword neatly back on the rack and grab a crumpled T-shirt from the floor of my makeshift dojo. “You knew. Why didn’t you tell me?” I slide into the sleeves, the scent of fresh ocean and amber sun wafting. Lyra.

Ash shrugs again, the motion casual and unbothered. “Because I wanted to be sure. I had to be sure it was definite before I put you into another war you couldn’t come back from. Because you’re reckless when you’re challenged, dangerous even.” He motions to the wall of weapons. “Stabby.” He shivers dramatically.

The word hits like a stone. “I promised her.” I sit next to him, arms resting on my knees.

“And you meant it.” His voice softens in a way that makes my skin crawl. “Which is why I’m here. Not to lecture, not to hassle you, but to help.” He leans forward, a move that’s both familiar and intimate. He taps my temple gently. “This up here? It’s powerful. You promised a girl something, Ryudon. You can’t keep that vow with violence. You keep it with a plan from that supercomputer brain of yours.”

I pull back, smoldering. “You think we can get to him? Rescue him?” I really don’t want to. I was taught to do the right thing, but if I stay true to myself, my gut reaction is to erase the anomaly with a swift call to the CIC.

Ash’s grin returns amid the seriousness. “I locked in on Eli’s resonance right before he surged. He’s weak but near hardware; maybe some type of magic containment. He’s bleeding into system partitions, exactly where you don’t want him going or Vikktor looking. I can get us to him, but it’s going to be messy.” He leans back, helping himself to last night’s glass of whiskey from the coffee table. He winces at the burn. “I have no idea what we’ll find, but I do know we can’t just cruise out the door with him like we’re going to lunch.”

He walks over to my bar and pours two more vintage whiskeys into crystal glasses. He hands me the glass and continues, “When you get everything back online, we’ll need LINK to do a threat assessment and come up with a jailbreak for whatever Vikktor is doing to hold Eli.” We both toss back the glass. “But there’s a cost.”

I swallow. The familiar burn travels down my throat, finally bringing my own body systems online. “There’s always a cost.” My laugh is humorless.

“Yeah.” Ash’s face is serious for a change. “Bro, I get it, he’s trashing your hard work, your reputation. You probably want to kill him right now. I won’t stop you. But if you want to bring him back alive, or alive-ish, to Lyra and fulfill that promise, then you need me. And you need Ember. You need to let me do what I do.” He cocks his head. “And you need to admit you can’t do this alone.”

I get up and pour another, the brown liquid flowing into the glass like the last of a dying sunset. How apropos.

“We need some serious fucking Scooby Gang energy!” He smacks the tops of his thighs excitedly.

Not the vintage cartoons again. Ash seriously needs to do something besides watch one-hundred-twenty-year-old shows for kids in his spare time. I roll my eyes.

My voice is whiskey rough. “Why? Other than Lyra, why should we help him?”

His gaze goes distant for a second, synapses flickering under his eyes. “Because we were there, Kaze. Because he’s a kid with a giant hole of magic where his heart should be. Because you didn’t learn how to keep people close, and neither did I, and I don’t want you to lose her because of it.” He steps back the last few feet, freeing the air between us. “Pick your poison: Let them kill him and sleep tight alone in your elite penthouse, or save him, get the girl, sleep with her in your elite penthouse”—he raises his glass, gesturing for me to refill it—“but wake to a war. It’s your call, Brother.”