Buzz hit the floor first, skidding across the slick surface, air knocked from his chest in a broken choke. Zza slammed down a second later, her shell ringing, vision swimming, the afterburn of the forge still flickering through her limbs like sparks that refused to die.
She pushed herself up slow, jaw tight, breath shaky. The chamber around them stretched wider than it first looked, curving into the dark in ways that felt wrong for something built inside a city. Columns rose from the ground like ribs, half-grown, half-broken. Gold veins crawled across them like cracks.
Buzz groaned beside her, rolling onto his side. "Zza… please tell me the forge broke."
She wiped blood from her mandible with the back of her hand. "I don't think it broke. I think it spat us out."
"Why?"
A pulse rolled through the floor.
Zza didn't answer.
Buzz didn't ask again.
