The creature’s mandibles scraped against my boot. I felt one of my shoelaces part, the tension snapping against my ankle. I kicked upward, found another handhold, pulled, and kept moving through the burn in my shoulders and the screaming in my ribs and the general sense that my body had filed a formal complaint about the past twelve hours.

Forty feet up. Fifty. The crevasse narrowed as we climbed, the walls squeezing closer until my shoulders brushed stone on both sides. Blair moved above me, her burned tactical suit catching on jagged outcroppings, the remains of her uniform leaving little to imagination where the material had torn.

Sixty feet. The centipede’s attacks grew more desperate below, the creature trying to dig through the rock itself to reach us. Each impact sent tremors through the stone that made my grip slip and my heart stop and my internal monologue descend into creative profanity that would have made Addison proud.

Seventy feet. The gap narrowed further. Blair stopped climbing and I nearly collided with her legs.

"Problem."

"What kind of problem?"

"The kind where the passage gets too tight to continue but opening up again about fifteen feet higher."

I craned my neck, trying to see past the torn fabric barely clinging to Blair’s frame. The rock face above her pinched inward, the gap where her fingers had stopped narrowing to maybe half a foot before the passage opened up again into actual breathing room. Physics and human anatomy weren’t going to cooperate unless one of us figured out how to dislocate every major joint simultaneously.

The centipede’s shriek echoed up from the darkness below. The walls turned the sound into something worse than horror, something that vibrated in my bones and made every vertebra in my spine want to file for immediate separation and relocate to a different body entirely. Preferably one that made better life decisions.

"We have to try."

"Monroe, I physically cannot fit through that gap. I have breasts."

"I noticed."

"This is not the time."

"It’s never the time with you. Move."

I climbed up alongside her, our bodies pressing together in the cramped space. The crevasse at this height was maybe three feet wide, just enough room for two people if they were very friendly or very desperate or ideally both. Blair’s back was against one wall and mine was against the other, our legs tangled together on the narrow ledge we’d found.

The gap above us really was impossibly tight. Blair had understated the problem. The rock pinched together like someone had squeezed the mountain in a giant fist, leaving a passage that might admit a house cat if the cat was willing to hold its breath.

"Okay." I ran through options in my head while trying not to focus on the fact that Blair’s thigh was pressing against my hip and her breathing was warm against my jaw and her ruined tactical suit left approximately nothing to imagination from this angle. "Okay. We make the gap bigger."

"With what? My good looks?"

"With your Hellflame. Focused heat, like you did to dry your suit. Hot enough to weaken the stone without bringing the whole thing down on our heads."

Blair’s ice-blue eyes found mine in the darkness. The only light came from the distant glow of the dying forest fire above the canyon rim, filtering down through the crevasse in thin shafts that caught the red in her hair and made her look like something out of a renaissance painting. A very dirty, very battered, very attractive renaissance painting of a woman who wanted me dead approximately eighty percent of the time.

"That’s insane. If I destabilize the structural integrity of this formation, the entire passage collapses."

"So don’t destabilize the structural integrity."

"Oh, wonderful advice. I’ll just violate basic geology on your say-so."

The centipede hit the canyon wall again. The impact sent cracks spider-webbing through the stone around us, and a chunk of rock the size of my fist broke free and tumbled into the darkness below. We had maybe two minutes before the creature either dug through or brought the whole crevasse down trying.

"Blair. Look at me."

She did. Her face was inches from mine, close enough that I could count the individual freckles scattered across her nose and cheekbones, close enough that her breath mingled with my own in the cramped space, warm and shaky and carrying traces of smoke from her own fire.

"You controlled your flames at the molecular level to dry waterlogged fabric without singeing a single thread. You hit that alpha with beams narrow enough to thread through wounds I’d already opened. You are the most precisely dangerous person I have ever met, and that includes a Platinum-tier hunter who has been trying to kill me during training for three weeks."

Something flickered in Blair’s expression. Not the anger I expected or the dismissal I’d grown accustomed to. Something raw and surprised and dangerously close to the look she’d given me after I explained how death mana and fire had combined.

"You’re asking me to trust myself."

"I’m asking you to be yourself. The version you actually are, not the version you perform for your father’s business partners."

The centipede screamed below us. Closer now. The attacks were having an effect on the lower portion of the crevasse, and I could hear stone shifting in ways that suggested structural failure was imminent.

Blair’s hands came up between us, palms facing the gap overhead. Blue-white light began to gather in her palms, not the inferno she’d unleashed in the forest but something smaller and more controlled. The heat built gradually, warming the air between us until it felt like standing near an open oven.

She focused the flames into a single point, a concentrated beam no wider than a pencil. The beam touched the stone above us and the rock began to glow cherry-red at the point of contact.

"Slower," I said. "Let the heat spread before you push deeper."

"I know how to use my own ability."

"Then use it better."