For ten seconds, the only sound in the lower chamber was the hum of the auxiliary ether lines and Liam’s uneven breathing as it slowly synced with the calm rhythm of Arik’s heart.

The dizziness then faded, to be replaced by a sharp, localized heat caused by the fact that he was being bundled into the crown prince of Agaron’s throat.

Liam’s brain, finally finishing its reboot, registered three things in rapid succession:

The room had stopped spinning.

He was clutching Arik’s expensive black coat with both hands.

The absolute gall of the man.

Liam shoved.

It wasn’t a weak push this time. It was a desperate, adrenaline-fueled heave that got him exactly four inches of personal space. Arik didn’t stumble, but he did loosen his grip, allowing Liam to pull his face away from the addictive warmth of the Alpha’s scent gland.

"Get—" Liam choked on the word, his face flushing a brilliant, furious red. "Get your hands off me."

Arik didn’t pull away immediately. His gold eyes remained fixed on Liam’s, dark and unreadable, as if he were still monitoring the frequency of Liam’s pulse through his fingertips. He let his hand slide slowly from the back of Liam’s neck, a trailing touch that had no business touching Liam’s scent gland.

"The dizziness has subsided," Arik noted, his voice a low, infuriatingly calm rumble.

"I don’t care about the dizziness!" Liam snapped, stumbling back until he hit a containment console. His lungs felt too big for his chest, and his skin was crawling with the ghost of Arik’s pheromones, which, to his absolute fury, were still making his knees feel like overcooked noodles. "You don’t just... grab people! You don’t use your scent as a chemical leash!"

"It was a stabilizer, not a leash," Arik said, stepping forward.

"I am an engineer! I stabilize myself!" Liam’s voice cracked slightly. He was shaking, and the fact that he was shaking because he was calm was what made him want to commit arson. His biology had betrayed his dignity. His dominant omega instincts had purred at a man who was essentially a walking diplomatic disaster.

Rex made a sharp sound that might have been a cough if anyone in the room had been charitable enough to pretend.

No one was.

Noah looked between Liam and Arik with the expression of a man watching a building catch fire and trying to decide whether the flames were politically significant or merely entertaining.

Mezos, worse, looked thoughtful.

Liam pointed at him without turning his head. "Do not look thoughtful."

"I was observing."

"That is worse."

Arik’s gaze did not leave Liam. "Your hands were cold. Your breathing was unstable. Your pheromones had spiked hard enough to interfere with the anchor mark."

"My pheromones did not interfere with the anchor mark."

"No," Rex said, unfortunately. "They did not. But they were unstable enough that if His Highness hadn’t intervened, you would probably be on the floor arguing with me from a horizontal position."

Liam whipped his head toward him. "Rex."

Rex folded his arms. "You said you stabilize yourself. I am providing data against that claim."

"Whose side are you on?"

"The side of not watching you die in a basement because you decided the elevator was beneath your personal narrative."

"It was literally beneath me."

Noah made a sound of appreciation. "That was good."

"Do not encourage him," Rex and Arik said at the same time.

The synchronized command was so offensive that Liam forgot, for one blinding second, that he had been furious at only one of them.

He raised a hand to stop all of them. "Let’s just finish what we were doing." Liam barely could keep his eyes snapping to Arik. His body was fucking lying to him just to have one more whiff of the alpha’s pheromones.

Liam turned with the stubbornness of a thousand gods to the console behind him. He pressed a button, and two gates made of lead, like the lab doors, opened.

The lead gates retracted with a heavy, pressurized hiss, revealing a bridge of transparent ether glass that spanned across an abyss.

They were standing at the edge of a geological wound. A chasm dropped away into absolute darkness, as if looking into the world’s throat. And there, suspended in the center of the void by massive, carbon-steel tension cables, sat the Vanguard-01 Turbine.

It was a titan of engineering, looking like an aerospace gas turbine that had been reimagined for a god. The housing was a matte, heat-resistant charcoal, but the gaps between the rotating blades flickered with a violent, beautiful energy.

Red flashed first.

Raw ether snapped between the outer gears in angry, unstable streaks, bright enough to stain the chasm walls the color of open flame. Then the turbine caught it. The intake rings shifted, brass ward lines flaring along their engraved grooves, and the red was compressed inward through layers of rotating blades until it broke into blue.

A second later, the blue became white.

Pure white ether surged through the inner chamber, clean and sharp and almost holy, before disappearing into the distribution conduits bolted into the stone around them.

For several seconds, no one spoke.

Even Noah seemed to understand that this was not a moment for commentary.

The turbine turned with a slow, impossible grace, its mass suspended over the abyss as if gravity had been consulted and overruled. Every rotation sent a low vibration through the bridge, up through Liam’s boots, into his bones. The sound was not loud exactly. It was too deep for that. It was the kind of sound that made the body remember it had been built from fragile things.

Rex moved first.

One step.

Then another.

Rex turned to Liam with the expression of a man one inconvenience away from bloodshed. "There is a chasm in your lab."

Liam rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah... It was in the documentation sent to you last year. Annex B, forty-five."

Rex stared at him.

Liam stared back.

The turbine continued to rotate in the abyss behind them with the grand indifference of a mechanical god, red ether flashing between its teeth before the inner rings crushed it down into blue and white.

Rex’s voice came out very calm, which was how Liam knew he had made things worse. "Annex B, forty-five."

"Yes."

"The annex about civilian redistribution loss?"

"Yes."

"The annex in which you described a supplementary conversion station feeding the lower eastern and south canal districts?"

"That would be the one."

Rex’s eyes moved, slowly, to the chasm. Then to the Vanguard-01 Turbine suspended above it. Then back to Liam.

"You called this a supplementary conversion station."

"It is supplementing."

Noah made a faint sound behind them.

Mezos, wisely, did not.

Rex took one step closer. "Liam."