Chapter 3: Hollow under the fallen tree, dawn light barely piercing the canopy
The cold was a living thing in the hollow. It crept through the layers of leaves, through the fabric of Levi’s shirt, and settled deep in Sage’s bones with a permanence that felt like death. The pain was a constant, low thrum in her side, a sickening counter-rhythm to her heartbeat. But it was the silence that was worse. The immense, waiting silence of the giant forest, broken only by the faint, wet whisper of the tube in her chest with every exhale.
Levi hadn’t moved in hours. He was a statue beside her, his back against the root wall, eyes fixed on the sliver of night visible past the fallen trunk. She could feel the coiled tension in him, a spring wound too tight. It was in the rigid line of his shoulders, in the absolute stillness of his hands resting on his knees. He was holding everything at bay—the Titans, the cold, her own mortality.
She drifted in a grey place between sleep and waking, haunted by the feeling of the scalpel, the pop of her own rib cage, the look in his eyes when he’d said please. It was that look that swam to the surface now, not the pain. A crack in the fortress. It was more intimate than the surgery.
She shifted, a small sound of discomfort escaping her lips as the movement tugged at the packed wound.
“Stop moving,” he said, voice flat. He didn’t look at her.
“I’m freezing.”
“You’re alive. That’s better.”
A spark of her old self flickered. “Debatable at this exact moment.”
This time, his head turned. In the gloom, his eyes were like chips of flint. “You want to debate it? Fine. You have a punctured lung, maybe internal bleeding, and we’re twenty kilometers from the wall with no gear and at least two abnormals in the area. Your chances are shit. But they’re not zero. So shut up and conserve your energy.”
The bluntness was a slap. It was also, perversely, comforting. It was the Levi she knew. The one who didn’t deal in platitudes.
She stared back at him, her breath making faint plumes in the air. “Why did you kiss my forehead?”
He went perfectly still. The question hung between them, more dangerous than any Titan’s roar.
“I didn’t,” he said, too quickly.
“You did.”
He looked away, back to the night. “It was a mistake. A lapse in judgment. Forget it.”
But she couldn’t. The ghost of that dry, solemn touch was a brand. It was the first purely human contact she’d had that wasn’t about pain or practicality since this nightmare began. It echoed in the hollow of her chest, warmer than the pain.
Another shiver wracked her, violent and uncontrollable. The leaves rustled loudly.
“Goddamn it,” Levi muttered.
In one abrupt motion, he shifted. He didn’t ask. He simply lay down behind her on the bed of leaves, his front to her back. He pulled his jacket, which was still over her, around them both, then wrapped his arm around her waist, his hand splaying flat and careful over her stomach, well below the bandages. He pulled her tightly against the solid, unyielding heat of his body.
Every muscle in Sage’s body went taut. This wasn’t a rescue carry. This was something else entirely. His heat seeped into her immediately, a shocking, profound relief that made her want to weep.
“Relax,” he growled into her hair. His breath was warm on her neck. “It’s body heat. Nothing more. Don’t make it weird.”
But it was already weird. It was everything. The hard plane of his chest against her back, the press of his thighs behind hers. The faint, clean scent of him underneath the sweat and blood and forest decay. She could feel the steady, strong beat of his heart against her spine.
Minutes ticked by. The shivering subsided, replaced by a different kind of awareness. A low, pooling heat began to spread from her core, independent of the cold or the pain. It was instinct, stupid and primal. A reaction to the proximity of a living, breathing, powerfully alive body when death had been so close. Her skin felt hypersensitive. The rough fabric of his trousers against the back of her thighs. The slight movement of his hand on her stomach as he breathed.
She felt him tense. He’d noticed it too—the subtle change in her breathing, the slight arch she couldn’t suppress. His hand didn’t move away.
“Sage.” Her name was a warning.
She couldn’t help it. She pushed back against him, just a fraction. An answer. A question.
A low sound escaped him, almost a groan. His hand slid down from her stomach, fingers digging into the fabric of her trousers over her hip. “This is a bad idea.”
“Everything is a bad idea,” she whispered, turning her head so her lips were near his jaw. “We’re going to die out here anyway.”
“Don’t say that.” His voice was rough. His other hand came up, not to push her away, but to fist in the hair at the nape of her neck. It wasn’t gentle.
“Then give me a reason not to think it.”
He moved. Suddenly, she was on her back, leaves crackling, his weight settling over her hips, his hands pinning her shoulders. The pain in her side flared, a bright, sharp protest, but it was swallowed by the intensity in his eyes. In the thin light, his face was all harsh angles and fury.
“You want a reason?” he snarled, his breath hot on her face. “You are a soldier. You don’t get to give up. You don’t get to use death as an excuse for this.”
“This isn’t giving up,” she gasped, meeting his glare. “This is feeling something that isn’t terror or pain. So either do it or get off me, Captain.”
For a long second, he stared down at her, his internal war visible in the tightening of his jaw. Then, with a curse, his mouth crashed down on hers.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a conquest. It was all teeth and desperation and shared breath. She tasted blood—his or hers, she didn’t know. She kissed him back just as fiercely, her hands tangling in his hair, pulling him closer. The world shrank to the crush of his lips, the scrape of his stubble, the overwhelming, consuming heat of him.
He broke the kiss, his mouth trailing down her jaw, her throat, biting at the junction of her neck and shoulder hard enough to make her cry out. The sound seemed to unleash something in him. He yanked at the fastenings of her trousers, his movements frantic, clumsy. She helped him, shoving the fabric down over her hips, kicking it away with a gasp as the cold air hit her skin.
His hand slid between her legs, and he found her wet, soaked for him. He let out a harsh, ragged breath against her neck.
“Fuck,” he muttered, his fingers sliding through her folds. “You’re a mess.”
“You did that,” she panted, bucking against his hand.
He pushed two fingers inside her without warning, a sharp, deep stretch that made her back arch off the leaves. She was tight, clenching around him instantly. He worked them in and out, a brutal, efficient rhythm, his thumb finding her clit and rubbing rough, demanding circles. It was too much, too rough, bordering on pain, but it was real. It was a feeling that blotted out everything else—the cold, the forest, the hissing tube in her side.
“Levi,” she begged, the word torn from her.
“What?” he bit out, his fingers driving deeper. “You wanted this. You wanted to feel something. So feel it.”
She was shaking, hurtling towards an edge. Just as the tension coiled to breaking point, he stopped. Pulled his hand away. She whimpered, a sound of pure frustration.
He shifted, fumbling with his own trousers. She heard the rustle of fabric, then the hot, heavy weight of his cock against her thigh. He was thick, hard, the skin velvety and fever-hot. He positioned himself at her entrance, his grey eyes locking onto hers in the dark.
“This is going to hurt,” he said, echoing his words from the battlement. It wasn’t an apology. It was a fact.
“I don’t care,” she breathed.
He pushed in.
The stretch was exquisite, a burning fullness that stole the air from her lungs. She cried out, her nails digging into his back through his shirt. He didn’t stop. He sheathed himself inside her in one relentless, deep thrust, burying himself to the hilt. He went still, his body trembling with the effort of control, his forehead dropping to hers.
“Fuck,” he breathed again, the word shuddering through both of them. She was impossibly tight, hot, and wet around him. He felt like he was being unmade.
Then he moved.
It was a hard, driving rhythm, born of desperation and a fury at the world. Each thrust jolted her body, making the leaves rustle loudly, sending fresh waves of pain from her wound. She didn’t care. She wrapped her legs around his hips, pulling him deeper, meeting him thrust for thrust. The slap of skin, their ragged breaths, the wet, filthy sound of him fucking her—it was the only music in the silent forest.
He shifted his angle, and the next thrust hit a spot inside her that made her see stars. A sharp, choked scream ripped from her throat. His hand clamped over her mouth.
“Quiet,” he hissed, but his own control was fraying. His thrusts became more erratic, deeper, his hips pounding against hers. The pleasure was a rising tsunami, fed by pain and the raw, animal truth of being alive. She came around him suddenly, a violent, convulsing wave that clenched his cock like a vise, milking him. She screamed into his hand, her body bowing off the ground.
The feeling of her pulsing around him broke him. With a guttural groan that was half her name, he followed her, spilling deep inside her with a series of ragged, shuddering thrusts. He collapsed on top of her, his full weight pressing her into the earth, his face buried in the curve of her neck.
For a long time, there was only the sound of their breathing, harsh and slowing in the cold air. The scent of sex and sweat and blood filled the small space.
Slowly, carefully, he pulled out of her. The aftermath was a sticky, intimate mess between her thighs. He shifted his weight off her, lying on his back beside her, staring up at the dark wood of their shelter.
Sage lay still, the aftershocks of her climax mixing with the returning, throbbing ache in her side. The tube hissed, a mundane and brutal reminder.
Without a word, Levi sat up. He found a clean-ish piece of cloth from his pack, dampened it with a little water from his canteen. Gently, with a clinical focus that was a return to the man she knew, he cleaned her up, wiping the evidence of their coupling from her skin. He pulled her trousers back up for her, his movements efficient, detached.
Then he lay back down, pulling the jacket over them once more. He didn’t touch her.
The silence returned, thicker now, loaded.
“That can’t happen again,” he said finally, his voice empty.
Sage stared at the root-twisted ceiling, feeling the ghost of him still inside her. “Okay.”
But they both knew it wasn’t okay. Something had been breached. A line crossed. In the crushing darkness before the dawn, it felt like the only solid thing either of them had to hold onto.
The cold seeped back in first, a slow invasion that made the sweat on their skin feel like ice. Then the pain, a deep, complaining throb in her side that had been momentarily forgotten. Levi lay beside her, a rigid line of silent warmth, the jacket pulled taut over them both. Sage stared into the blackness, feeling the phantom pressure of him between her legs, the ache that was both violation and gift.
Her mind was terrifyingly clear. The frantic heat had burned everything else away, leaving only cold facts.
“We’re stuck out here, aren’t we?” she asks afterwards. Her voice was flat, stripped.
He didn’t answer immediately. She heard him swallow. “I don’t know.”
It was the uncertainty that was worse. Levi always knew. He had a plan, even if it was a terrible one. This was new. This was hollow.
She turned her head on the leaves. She could barely see his profile. “You know I can’t survive out here.” She whispers it, a truth too heavy for volume.
The words hung, final as a sentence. The tube in her chest gave a wet, syncopated hiss, underlining the point. He moved then, rolling onto his side to face her. In the deep grey of pre-dawn, his eyes were dark pools, unreadable.
“Your lung is reinflated,” he said, his voice low and rough. “The bleeding is superficial. The tube is working.”
“For now. It’s a piece of your gear, Levi. It’s not sterile. It’s going to get infected. I’m already cold all the way through my bones.” She took a shaky breath. “You fixed one problem. You can’t fix the next five.”
“So what?” The words were sharp, a blade of frustration. “You just checked out? Gave up? After all that?”
“After all what?” She let out a brittle laugh that hurt her ribs. “That wasn’t a promise. That was just… noise. To drown out the quiet.”
He flinched, a minute twitch she only saw because she was looking for it. He sat up, pulling the jacket with him and draping it over her shoulders alone. The loss of his heat was immediate. He began checking her bandages with quick, professional touches, his fingers avoiding her skin.
“We move at first light,” he stated. His tone allowed no argument. “I’ll carry you if I have to.”
“You can’t carry me and fight.”
“I’ll figure it out.” He pulled the canteen, shook it. Nearly empty. He passed it to her. “Drink. All of it.”
She obeyed, the last of the warm water a scant blessing. The sky beyond their shelter was shifting from black to a deep, bruised purple. Shapes began to separate from the void—the twist of a root, the sag of a fern. Levi repacked his meager supplies, his movements precise, restoring order to the small chaos of their hideaway. He avoided the crushed leaves where they had lain.
As the light grew, it revealed the aftermath on his face. A faint scratch from her nails along his jaw. A tightness around his mouth that hadn’t been there before. He looked like a man who had lost a battle he hadn’t known he was fighting.
He helped her sit up, then stand. Her legs were unsteady, her whole body felt loose and sore in strange new ways. He didn’t comment, just slid an arm around her, taking her weight. They emerged from under the log into a world of mist and long, cold shadows. The forest was a cathedral of grey silence.
“Which way?” she murmured.
He didn’t answer. He was looking at the ground, at the moss, at the way the lichen grew on the trees. Looking for signs she couldn’t see. His silence was more frightening than any wrong direction.
He chose a path. They began to walk, a slow, shuffling progress through the dew-soaked undergrowth. Every hundred meters, he would stop, listening, his eyes scanning the mist between the colossal trunks. The only sounds were their labored breathing and the squelch of their boots on damp earth.
Hours bled together, measured in pain and the slow climb of the sun. The mist burned away, replaced by a pale, sickly light that did nothing to warm them. Sage’s world narrowed to the next step, to the fire in her side, to the solid arm around her that was the only thing keeping her upright.
She didn’t see the stream until they were almost upon it. It was narrow, clear, cutting a shallow bed through the moss. Levi stopped.
“Water,” he said, the word a lifeline.
He lowered her to sit on a smooth rock. He refilled the canteen first, making her drink again. Then he knelt, splashing his face, scrubbing his hands and neck with a ferocity that was about more than cleanliness. He scrubbed until his skin was pink. She watched him, understanding. He was trying to erase the night. The feel, the smell.
He filled the canteen again and secured it. Then he looked at her, really looked, for the first time that morning. His gaze was a physical assessment. The pallor of her skin, the sweat on her brow despite the cold, the way she held her body stiffly to favor the wound.
“We need to change the dressing,” he said. It wasn’t a suggestion.
He worked with the same detached efficiency as before, unwinding the soiled bandages. The metal tube protruded, a grim, unnatural stem. The skin around it was an angry red, swollen. He cleaned it with the last antiseptic, his touch impersonal. He repacked the gauze, his lips a thin line.
“It’s warm,” she said quietly.
“I know.” He didn’t lie. He taped the new bandage in place. “We have to move faster.”
He helped her up. The sun was higher now, dappling the forest floor. They moved alongside the stream, the sound of water a companion. Her hope, a fragile, stupid thing, began to whisper. Then Levi froze.
His arm tightened like steel around her. He was staring upstream, his body coiled.
A shape resolved itself in the water, thirty meters ahead. It was large, rounded, pale. It wasn’t moving. It was caught on a fallen branch, bobbing gently in the current.
It was the swollen, waterlogged corpse of a soldier from their squad, the green cloak torn away, the face unrecognizable.
Levi didn’t make a sound. He simply turned, pulling her with him, stepping back into the deeper cover of the ferns. He changed their direction without a word, cutting away from the water at a sharp angle, his pace suddenly urgent, demanding.
Sage stumbled, a cry catching in her throat. The corpse was a bookmark. It told them exactly where they were, and how far they hadn’t come. The wall felt further away than ever.
He half-dragged her for another twenty minutes before slowing. They were in a thicket of younger trees, the canopy less dense. He let her sink to the ground against a trunk, his own breathing finally audible, sharp and controlled.
He crouched before her, his grey eyes holding hers. The detachment was gone, burned away by what they’d seen.
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice low and intense. “You are going to survive out here. Do you understand? You are not that body in the water.”
“Levi—”
“No.” He cut her off, his hand coming up to grip her chin, not gently. “You breathed when I cut you open. You fought when I fucked you. That’s not someone who checks out. So you walk until you can’t, and then I carry you. And if I have to cut another piece of my gear out of you to keep you alive, I will. Again and again.”
His words were brutal, an oath carved in stone. They vibrated through her. She saw it then, not in his words, but in the stark, furious fear in his eyes. He wasn’t just refusing her death. He was refusing to be the one left alone in this silent, giant forest.
She nodded, a short, sharp movement.
He released her chin. “Good.”
He stood, offering his hand. She took it. He pulled her up, and they began to move again, deeper into the unknown green, leaving the water and its silent message behind. The tube in her side hissed with every step, a relentless metronome counting down to something.
The tube in her side hissed with every step, a relentless metronome counting down to something. Her world had become a tunnel, the edges filmed with grey static, focusing only on the next placement of her boot. Levi’s arm was a bar of iron across her back, the only solid thing in a swaying universe. She tried to match his rhythm, to swallow the nausea rising with each jolt.
“Just a little further,” he muttered, not to her, but to the trees ahead. It was a lie he’d started telling the air.
Her lips were cracked. She tried to speak, to ask for water, but her throat was dust. The infection was a fire now, stoking itself deep behind her ribs, laughing at the antiseptic. She could smell it on herself—a sweet, rotten undertone beneath sweat and earth. He had to smell it too. His silence on the matter was its own diagnosis.
A root snagged her boot.
She didn’t trip so much as fold. Her leg simply ceased to hold weight. The static at the edges of her vision rushed in, consuming everything.
“Le–”
And then she collapsed.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was a complete and total surrender. One second she was upright, a burden he was hauling, and the next she was a heap of wool and fever on the moss, utterly still. The hissing stopped for a terrifying second, blocked.
“Sage.” Levi was on his knees beside her in an instant. He didn’t shake her. His hands went to her neck, fingers pressing for a pulse. It was there, a frantic, thin fluttering against his fingertips like a trapped bird. He rolled her onto her back, his touch clinical, but his breath hitched.
Her skin was the color of old ash, beaded with a cold sweat that had nothing to do with exertion. Her eyelids were half-open, showing slivers of white.
“No,” he said, the word flat. “No, you don’t.”
He checked the tube. It was clear. He tilted her head back, listening. A shallow, wet rasp. He slapped her cheek, not hard, but sharp. “Renn. Open your eyes.”
Nothing.
He leaned down, his ear near her mouth, his hand on her sternum. Breathing. But just barely. The collapse wasn’t cardiac. It was systemic. Her body, after days of pain and blood loss and mounting sepsis, had simply reached its limit and shut down non-essential operations. Consciousness was the first thing it had jettisoned.
He stood. For three long seconds, he stared down at her, his mind a blank, white sheet. Then it filled with a single, crystalline directive.
He stripped his gear. He unbuckled the harness, letting the empty canisters and sheaths drop to the moss with dull thuds. He kept only his blades, securing them to his thighs. He crouched, hooking his arms under her shoulders and knees. He lifted her.
She was lighter than she should have been. The realization was a cold stone in his gut. He adjusted his grip, settling her dead weight against his chest, her head lolling against his shoulder. The bandaged side of her ribcage was pressed to him; he could feel the unnatural heat of the infection seeping through both their clothes.
He began to walk.
There was no path. He picked a direction based on the faint gradient of the land, a barely perceptible slope he hoped led downward, towards the plains, towards the wall. His pace was a brutal, steady march. His shorter stature made the burden awkward, a physics problem he solved with sheer, dogged force.
Her breath tickled his neck, each inhalation a frail, rattling draw. “Don’t you stop,” he told her, his voice low and rough with effort. “You hear me? You keep doing that.”
He walked. The forest blurred into a green and brown smear. Time dissolved into the measure of his steps, the burn in his shoulders and legs, the persistent, damp sound of her breathing. He talked. He didn’t know what he was saying. Gripes about the poor construction of the standard-issue boots. A critique of the mess hall’s stew. The irrationality of Hange Zoe’s latest experiment.
“And you,” he said, his boots squelching through a patch of mud. “Your hair is a mess. Even now. It’s practically a hazard.”
He adjusted his grip, hiking her higher. A small groan escaped her lips.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he panted. “Complain about it. Wake up and complain.”
The sun climbed, then began its slow fall. He didn’t stop. When his arms screamed, he shifted her, heaving her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, the pressure on her wound making her cry out even in unconsciousness. He went back to cradling her soon after, unable to bear the sound.
His world became a narrow lane of agony. The muscles in his back knitted themselves into solid knots. His vision spotted. He drank the last of the water without stopping, letting it spill down his chin.
It was the change in light that finally broke through the haze. The deep, filtered green of the forest began to brighten, the trunks growing thinner, farther apart. He saw sky—actual, uninterrupted sky, pale and wide.
He broke into a staggering run.
The trees fell away. He stumbled out of the treeline and onto rocky, open scrubland. The wind hit him, a vast, unimpeded slap that tasted of dirt and freedom. And there, in the distance, a dark, horizontal line seaming the earth from the sky.
Wall Rose.
It was a mirage. It had to be. He blinked, swaying on his feet. It remained. A sob, harsh and unfamiliar, clawed at his throat. He choked it down.
“See?” he rasped, looking at her limp face. Her eyelashes were dark against her ashen cheeks. “Told you.”
He walked. The plain was cruelly vast. Each step towards the wall seemed to make it recede. The sun was at his back now, casting their long, fused shadow ahead of them like a desperate, stretching plea.
An hour. Maybe two. His legs were mechanical pistons, shot through with rust. The wall loomed, a curved cliff of grey stone, impossibly high. He scanned the base, his eyes gummed with exhaustion. There—a speck, a vertical line. A gate. The Karanes District gate.
He fixed on it. He didn’t allow himself to hope. Hope was a weight he couldn’t carry. He just moved.
A hundred meters from the gate, he saw the problem. It was sealed. The immense gear-work was still, the portcullis down. No guard patrols were visible on the battlements. A quiet, civilian hour.
He stopped. He had no flare. No gear to scale it. He had nothing but his voice and a dying woman in his arms.
He tipped his head back. The wall’s sheer face blotted out the sky. He drew the deepest breath his burning lungs would allow, and he shouted. It was not a captain’s command. It was a raw, animal sound, torn from the core of him.
“HELP!”
The word echoed feebly against the stone and was swallowed by the wind. He screamed it again, the veins in his neck standing out. “OPEN THE GATE!”
He stood there, legs braced, Sage a dead weight against him, and roared her name into the uncaring stone. “SAGE RENN! SOLDIER DOWN! OPEN THIS GODDAMN GATE!”
A lifetime passed in the silence that followed. Then, a tiny head appeared over the distant battlements. A speck, peering down. Levi didn’t stop. He kept shouting, his voice growing hoarse, until it was a scraped whisper.
The head disappeared. Minutes bled by. Just as the last of his strength began to tremble, a sound cut through the wind—the deep, metallic shriek of ancient gears grinding to life. The portcullis began to rise, inch by inch, a sliver of dark opening at the base of the wall.
Levi didn’t wait for it to fully open. He stumbled towards the growing opening, towards the dim light of the interior district, towards the vague shapes of people gathering. His job wasn’t finished. He had to hand her off. He had to make them see.
He crossed the threshold into shadow, the clang and roar of the gate machinery deafening. Figures in uniform rushed towards him. He locked his buckling knees.
“She has a tension pneumothorax,” he heard himself say, his voice strangely calm and clear over the din. “Field thoracostomy with an ODM valve. The wound is infected. Sepsis is likely. She’s been unconscious for approximately six hours.”
Hands reached for her. He relinquished her weight, the sudden absence of her so profound it felt like falling. He watched as they laid her on a stretcher, as her red hair spilled over the edge, stark against the white cloth.
He took a step to follow, and the world tilted. A strong hand caught his arm.
“Captain! You’re hurt—”
Levi shook it off. His eyes were only on the stretcher as it was carried away into the depths of the district, towards the medical wing. He took one step after it. Then another.
Then his legs, having finally received the order that the mission was complete, gave out beneath him. He didn’t collapse so much as settle, sinking to his knees on the hard cobblestones of the gate yard, in the shadow of the wall he’d thought he’d never see again. He stayed there, head bowed, listening as the giant gate behind him clanged shut with a final, resonant boom that sealed the forest away.