19. Kyle

CHAPTER 19

Kyle

I n a world without a sky or even the pretence of one, time did not hold meaning. They could have checked the clock on their runepads, but why should they, when everything outside of each other held the same unimportance as the passing of time?

When their mouths began to feel bruised, they kissed some more; when their lips moved from sore to shockingly numb, they settled for just holding each other instead. Exhilarated yet strangely exhausted, Kyle clung to Akira's suit jacket as if loosening his grip meant letting go of the man himself, and Akira's fingers had tangled in Kyle's Bon Jovi t-shirt with a single-minded fierceness that rivalled any he'd ever shown. They'd both been captured by the compelling force of each other's presence and now stood as willing victims, pressed together and unable to do so much as speak.

But as with all things, it had to end.

Something rustled at the end of their alley: the toppling of some discarded rubbish, perhaps, or one of the many stray and starving cats that roamed the city, but it brought reality crashing back down on them.

They stepped apart. Kyle immediately missed the warmth of the other man.

The power still hadn't returned, and he could only just make out Akira's face in the gloom, his black suit barely discernible from the wall behind him. "I...uh...I wanted to show you something?"

Kyle had never heard the Master of House Epsilon say ‘uh' in his life. And why had it been phrased as a question? It felt wrong for his usual self-assured confidence to be shadowed with such uncertainty, and yet also…gratifyingly right. A moment of private vulnerability, of intimacy , that he dared to share with Kyle and no one else.

"Then show me," said Kyle, injecting all of the authority into his voice that Akira's was missing, and he saw the tension drain from the other man's murky silhouette. He wanted direction and conviction.

Kyle could be that for him. He would be anything he needed.

"Yes, Sir," Akira murmured, sounding relieved and pleased all at once, and Kyle tried to hide his delight as he followed him further up the alley they'd gotten distracted in. A few more turns and they arrived at something Kyle would recognise however poor the light: the outer wall of Xerxes. It was made of tarnished steel, with huge rivets marking where the sheets of steel met to form lines of monotonous rusted lumps. Kyle had never been to this particular spot of the wall on Level C before, but you would encounter the same sight on any level if you walked in one direction for long enough. Not only was the wall hideously unsightly, but it was also a grim reminder of how Xerxes' Lowers – the inhabitants of the sub-surface levels, and if one listened to the Uppers, sub everything else too – were being kept in a metal box they'd never escape. At least not until after death, when their corpses would be dumped over the edge to decompose on the irradiated planet below.

Kyle had a knack for seeing half-filled glasses even if only a droplet of liquid could be spied within their depths, but some of that optimism was founded on staying far, far away from dreary and terrifying things.

The wall was one of those things. While Kyle wasn't standing next to it, he could cheerfully pretend it didn't exist and that his city was a boundless haven. With it looming over him, that was a tad more difficult.

Dazzling light suddenly seared his eyes and Kyle recoiled, bringing a hand up to cover his face as he reached blindly for Akira with his other. His fingers brushed soft, fine fabric; wool, cotton, whatever the fuck they made nice suits out of, and folded firmly around Akira's elbow to tug him away. Yet his efforts to pull his man to safety were thwarted by the Master's sheer immovableness.

When the stubborn bastard didn't want to budge, he didn't.

Which was what made it so exhilarating when he knelt for Kyle or let himself be pushed around. Knowing that the older man could stop him anytime he wished and yet had chosen to submit to him, to give his Dominant whatever he wanted, made Kyle unreasonably excited.

He lowered his arm, eyes closed to slits to protect them, to find a rectangle of impossible brightness staring back at him.

And a smirking House Master.

"Get your gorgeous ass through that door, Kyle," Akira said softly, and the touch of daring challenge in his voice had Kyle passing through the doorway before he'd even registered that was what it was.

In the long seconds it took for his eyes to adjust to the light, he was vaguely aware of Akira closing the door behind them. And then Kyle's entire world imploded and expanded again as the bright glare steadily came into focus around him.

By the stars.

For the first time in his entire life, he stood outside the confines of Xerxes' walls. A landscape of swirling pink lay before him, the colours of the morning sky – the sky! – so rich and varied that it would be impossible to capture each individual shade. Clouds, ruffled and stretched, appeared close enough that he could have leant over the flimsy metal railing and pulled them into hugs. And a warm glow emanated from his right, half blocked by the wall as it curved back around the city, but even the part he could see hurt his eyes.

No one had ever told Kyle the sun could cause pain like that.

But he should have expected it. It had been the rays of a distant star that had destroyed their planet, after all.

The planet. Earth .

Kyle darted eagerly forward to the railings that were all that remained between him and his hereditary home, thousands of metres below. The sky seemed endless, stretching entirely across his periphery, but when he peered over the fence he saw ground far below. Vague shapes of blue and green and brown and white.

"Epsilon," Kyle breathed, forgetting, for a moment, who he was truly with. The minor marvel of getting to be outside had temporarily eclipsed the larger miracle of what had happened between them.

Akira moved to his side, his smile small and pleased, but it wasn't the planet he was looking at.

It was Kyle.

"I thought you might like this."

"How did you..."

"Shady underworld dealings," Akira informed him so sombrely that Kyle knew he was being teased. "Don't ask me what I paid to purchase a passcard from one of the Engineers."

So perhaps Indira might stand here in this very spot one day, filled with the same marvelling wonder as he was now. Kyle hoped so. His cousin deserved more light in her life.

"Imagine!" said Kyle excitedly, barely able to keep still. The metal catwalk creaked in half-hearted protest beneath his boots as he spun on the spot and tried to take everything in at once. There were other maintenance catwalks above and below them, each connected to their own level within Xerxes, but sky was visible through the thin grating. "Seven billion people used to live down there! And they had forests and lakes and mountains and deserts and…"

He tried to remember what else his teacher had mentioned at school, all those years ago.

"…and cities that weren't cities, because they were tiny, and you could walk across them in minutes instead of hours, but I've forgotten what they were called…"

"Towns," Akira offered softly, glancing out at the view for the first time. "Villages. Quiet places with not many people."

It all sounded very lonely to Kyle.

"I suppose we can't see any of that from ten thousand metres up?" he said wistfully, hoping Akira would tell him he'd supposed wrongly.

The Master did indeed correct him, but not in the way he'd expected.

"Five thousand," the man murmured.

"Hmm?"

"We're only five thousand metres up. Not ten."

He met Kyle's eyes with an expression that looked…resigned. Far too miserable for the wondrous experience Kyle was currently enjoying, and he disliked the way it tempered his joy.

"Five?" He frowned, wondering how he'd remembered his lessons so badly. "Oh. I thought we were higher than that."

"We were, once," said Akira. He trailed a finger along the railing. "When I was accepted into the Coterie, I became privy to some of the secrets this city holds. That was…one of the more terrifying."

"Because we're falling," Kyle said hollowly, realising what he meant. Horror flashed through him. "Xerxes is falling from the sky?"

Akira sighed, long and weary. "Yes. The city's engines are steadily losing their eternal fight with gravity, and with the increase in runic failures that we're experiencing…it's estimated that we have just under six years before we collide with the ground."

"We can land." The suggestion was a stubbornly optimistic one, Kyle knew, but he voiced it anyway.

The way the other man grimaced reaffirmed how impossible it was. "We can't. Xerxes isn't built to manoeuvre like that. And even if it were…" Another sigh. "Gravity increases the closer we get to the planet. The science – and the magic – says the only way the city ever touches the Earth again is at a velocity that will smash it to pieces."

"Fuck."

"Indeed."

They stood together in silence for a long time, staring at the clouds and the way they drifted lazily across the sky as if no revelations of destruction had been uttered.

Kyle wondered what Xerxes might look like, if anyone had been still on Earth to see it falling towards them. The slow descent of humanity's last hope, seemingly frozen in the sky yet hurtling towards its extinction.

"It's still a beautiful view," admitted Kyle.

"With the company I'm in, I find it only adequate," Akira murmured.

Kyle shot him and the compliment a wry smile, and reached out for his elbow again. This time, Akira let himself be pulled close, resting his head on Kyle's shoulder as they watched the sun rise over a dead planet and its one remaining, doomed city.