The Pursuit Intensifies

# Chapter 14: The Pursuit Intensifies

The stairs did not forgive.

Each riser was a negotiation between cracked ribs and the weight Chen Yunfei had sworn to keep—human weight, perishable, not to be traded for speed the way the Sovereign had traded company for sky. The seam door had closed behind him without sound. Above, the ruin's breath thinned until stone gave way to root-choked earth and then to forest air that tasted of wet bark and hawk-scoured dawn. Light came in strips through a collapsed section of the upper vault, grey and cold, the color of a blade before it is drawn.