Chapter 205: We’ve Done This Before. Haven’t We.

Nova was running across the sand.

The Moonfire arena rose around her in broken tiers, and Derek had her by the wrist, hauling her forward, his other arm clamped across his own ribs where the blood came through dark between his fingers. The sand dragged at her boots.

The déjà vu landed so hard her knees buckled.

She went down. He caught her before she hit the ground, both hands closing around her arms, and pulled her upright against him. When she looked up, his face was inches from hers, and it was a face she had seen before. Exactly this close. Exactly this expression, the one that lived somewhere between terror and tenderness, the one that belonged to a moment she could not reach.

She had dreamed this before. She knew that the way you know things inside a dream, without proof, without memory, a certainty that arrived whole. She couldn’t recall a single one of the other times. They had happened. They were gone the second she woke, every time, swallowed. But standing here with his blood warm against her forearm, she felt the shape of all of them stacked behind this one, a hallway of identical rooms she kept walking into and forgetting.

It was the kind of dream where she knew she was dreaming and it changed nothing. The sand was still real under her boots. His grip was still real. This was real and she was trapped inside of it, aware and powerless in equal measure.

She searched his face, and the words came out of her slow, the way you say something you already know is true.

"Derek. We’ve done this before. Haven’t we."

Derek didn’t answer. His grip tightened and they kept running, boots tearing through sand that pulled at every step.

"We’ve been here, Derek." The words came faster now, climbing. "I’ve run through this sand before. With you. Exactly like this. Your ribs bleeding. Your hand on my arm. This has already happened. Answer me."

His head came around, and something moved across his face that she recognized because she had put it there before. Recognition. And underneath it, the startled look of a man hearing a thing he hadn’t expected the dreamer to know.

"Yes." His voice came out rough. "We have."

"I die here. Don’t I." She heard herself say it the way you report a fact you’ve made peace with. "You and your brother don’t make it out because of me. That’s why we keep doing this."

"No." He wrenched her forward, closer to his side, closer to the tunnel mouth bleeding light at the far end of the sand. "You are not dying today, Nova. Not this time. Let me get you out of here."

They broke into a full sprint. Ahead and to the left, across the churned sand, Alpha Thunderfang moved at a speed the dream smeared into streaks, and a spear left his hand and buried itself in Kai Starborne’s chest, the body folding around it.

Alpha Thunderfang turned toward them without slowing.

"I owe you an apology," he called across the sand to Derek.

"Save it." Derek didn’t break stride. "You can grovel when we’re not actively on fire. Put it in a card."

Alpha Thunderfang pulled even with them, matching their sprint, and without a word scooped Nova up out of Derek’s grip and carried her against his chest, the ground eating itself beneath his boots.

"Derek, we’re going the wrong way." She twisted toward the tunnel mouth shrinking behind them. "The exit’s back there."

"The tunnel’s collapsed that way, Nova." Derek wiped blood off his palm onto his thigh without slowing. "This is the only route left."

"Derek." Her certainty arrived cold and total. "There’s an explosion this way."

Derek stopped.

Alpha Thunderfang stopped a half-stride later, Nova still locked against his chest.

"Nova." Derek turned fully to face her, and every trace of the smart-ass had drained out of him. "Do you remember this for sure?"

"It’s a feeling." She held his eyes. "You died at this one, Derek. There are at least four."

"What in the hell is she talking about?" Alpha Thunderfang looked between the two of them, Nova still cradled in his arms.

Derek didn’t answer his brother. He kept his attention nailed to her face.

"That’s more than a feeling, Nova." He stepped in close. "Tell me exactly where."

She didn’t hesitate. The answer was already waiting in her mouth.

"Twenty meters ahead, behind the north column."

"We go to the collapsed tunnel, then." Derek was already pivoting, waving his brother off the path. "Dig it out with our hands if we have to. Move."

Both men turned and ran the opposite direction, hard.

Too late.

BOOM.

The bomb went off where they’d been standing.

The blast threw all three of them backward, bodies lifting off the sand and slamming down in the opposite direction. Nova’s ears filled with a high, drowning whine that ate every other sound. Rubble rained down through the smoke, chunks of stone column cracking against the ground around them.

Alpha Thunderfang had her. He’d twisted mid-air and curled his whole body around her as they fell, one broad hand cupped over the back of her skull, caging her against his chest so the debris found his spine instead of her head. His chest heaved under her cheek, each breath dragging.

A figure came through the broken wall on the far side of the rubble, stepping over fallen stone, unhurried where everything else was chaos. The mask swallowed its face. When it spoke, the voice came out wrong, flattened and scrambled, scraped of anything human.

"Moon Princess. You know too much."

The figure started toward her.

She didn’t know what it was. She knew, with a certainty that bypassed her mind entirely and seized her by the spine, that she was terrified of it.

Alpha Thunderfang’s arms went slack around her. A piece of column had caught him across the back of the head and his eyes had rolled, his body folding sideways into the sand, out cold, his hand sliding off her skull.

"Get away from her." Derek got one arm under himself and shoved, trying to rise, blood sheeting down his side, his legs refusing the order. He dragged himself a foot across the sand toward her and no further.

The figure crossed the last of the distance in a blur that the dream couldn’t track, there and then closer and then on top of her.

Nova screamed.

BOOM.

The second blast took everything. Orange flooded her vision, heat and pressure slammed into her all at once, the figure and the sand and Derek’s outstretched hand vanishing into white, and then—

Nova surfaced gasping for air.

She was lying on a couch against a chest. A cool cloth was pressed to her forehead, and arms were wrapped around her so tightly she could feel his heartbeat hammering against her back.

"Nova, hey. You’re okay. It’s just me."