Chapter 4
LIA
The words strike hard because it is not dominance or arrogance. It is fear. Fear for me.
His hearts beat louder when I am close. I hear them—feel them—two steady drums calling to something buried so deep inside me I do not have a name for it. Travnyk clears his throat quietly.
“He is right. Humans do not handle the desert nights.”
“And you?” I ask him.
“We Urr’ki sleep on stone,” he says, shrugging.
“It is fine. I will sleep anywhere,” Tomas says, lifting both hands.
Rakkh steps past me, positioning his massive body across the entrance of the alcove, blocking the wind—blocking everything.
“You sleep inside,” he says again. “I will guard the opening.”
“I am not helpless,” I whisper.
“I know.” His voice softens unexpectedly. “That is why you are worth guarding.”
Heat blooms beneath my ribs. It is too much, too fast. I look away as my cheeks warm, hoping he will not notice. I crawl into the alcove and settle onto the packed sand. It is warmer than I expect.
Outside, Travnyk and Tomas settle against the outer rocks.
Rakkh lowers himself to sit across the entrance, wings folded, arms resting loosely over his knees.
He looks carved from the stone itself—unmoving, alert.
The predator scent drifts through the wind again, and Rakkh’s growl turns low and lethal.
“Keep your distance,” he snaps—not at me, but at Tomas and Travnyk.
Travnyk stiffens. Tomas mutters a curse. But neither argues. Because Rakkh’s growl is not just a warning. It is a claim.
I pull my knees up to my chest, heart thundering, breath unsteady. Why does that sound… affect me like this? Why does it feel protective instead of possessive? Why does it feel… good?
I try to focus on anything else. The metal shard in my pocket. The dying plants. The sick carok, to no avail. My gaze keeps drifting to him.
The others drift to sleep, but it eludes me.
I watch him. The moons catch on his scales, painting them gold and silver.
His profile is sharp. His wings shift with the wind.
His tail curls toward the alcove, the tip resting just inches from my foot.
Protective. Does he sleep? He has not closed his eyes once. I lower my voice.
“Rakkh.”
He responds instantly. “Yes.”
“You do not have to stay awake all night.”
A long pause.
“Yes. I must.”
I swallow. “Why?”
His head tilts slightly toward me. His voice drops to a near-whisper, meant only for my ears.
“Because something hunts these dunes.” He inhales. “And it is not the only thing.”
A shiver rolls down my spine. Before I respond, something sharp and metallic glints at the far corner of the alcove. It is half-buried in the sand, but I spot the shape—too straight and smooth. My breath catches. Rakkh senses my shift instantly.
“What is it?” he asks.
Slowly, I reach toward it, brushing sand away to reveal a metal plate. Curved, blackened on one side like it was burned.
“Rakkh,” I whisper. “I think I found another piece.”
His claws flex. His pupils narrow. And the night around us goes very, very still.
The metal is cold.
Not night-cold—Tajss never really cools all the way, not even at night—but wrong. It bites through the pads of my fingers, thin and precise, like the chill of a med scanner pressed to bare skin.
I turn it over carefully. It is curved, no bigger than my palm.
The edges are warped and blistered, scorched into twisted waves.
The surface is a dull, burned gray, but under the soot there is a faint sheen—smooth, uniform, engineered.
This is not Zmaj forging or Urr’ki. It is not like any human scrap I have ever seen.
“Do not touch it,” Rakkh growls.
A little late for that…
His hand closes around my wrist, not hard, but with a force that says he could crush bone with less effort than it takes to breathe. Heat sears my skin where his claws brush, a sharp contrast to the bitter chill of the metal.
“I am fine,” I say, even though my pulse has spiked hard enough to make me lightheaded.
His slit pupils narrow. “You do not know what it carries.”
He is not wrong. I do not. But…
“If it is poisoning the plants, I need to know how.”
I try to twist my wrist free, but he does not let go. His grip gentles instead, thumb pressing against the inside of my pulse point, feeling the frantic flutter there. His voice drops lower.
“You are more important than the answer.”
My breath snags. The shard suddenly feels heavier. Travnyk shifts outside, tusks catching moonlight as he leans around the side of the alcove.
“What have you found?” Travnyk asks.
“A piece of metal,” I answer, before Rakkh can shut me down.
Rakkh huffs, a rough exhale through his nose, but he releases my wrist slowly. His hand lingers a moment longer than necessary, claws tracing the air above my skin as if reluctant to let go.
“Show me,” Travnyk says.
I hold the shard where the Urr’ki can see it, careful not to let it drift too close to Rakkh. Travnyk’s brows draw together, his nostrils flaring as he inhales.
“It smells… wrong,” he murmurs. “Like burning stone and sour blood.”
“Comforting,” Tomas mutters from his perch on the outer rock. “Let’s just carry around a chunk of wrong.”
“You will not touch it,” Rakkh says without looking at him.
Tomas raises both hands. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I drag my focus back to the shard, forcing my thoughts into Calista-mode, Jolie-mode—observe, categorize, do not panic.
Small. Curved. Exterior plating, maybe. The scorch patterns radiate from the inside, like an explosion blew outward, blistering the surface, not something burning from the outside in.
A faint residue crusts the edges—black and crystalline, like dried sap crossed with ash.
I scrape a bit with my nail. It flakes away easily, and the smell makes my eyes water.
“Definitely synthetic,” I manage. “There is nothing on Tajss that smells like that.”
“Human?” Rakkh asks, leaning in, eyes narrowing.
I shake my head, throat burning.
“I do not think so. Human alloys have a different feel. More… grain to them. Calista showed me samples from the generation ship wreckage. This is smoother. Denser. And the burn pattern—” I swallow hard.
“It is not like what we saw in the Bunker, or the old ship fragments I have handled. This is something else.”
“Something new,” Travnyk says quietly.
“Or something old that’s finally close enough to kill us,” Tomas mutters.
Rakkh’s tail lashes once against the stone, sending grit over Tomas’s boots.
“Enough,” he growls. “Fear is loud. Do not feed it.”
I curl my fingers tighter around the shard, ignoring the cold biting my skin.
“If the plants are absorbing whatever this leached into the soil, the carok might have, too,” I say, thinking out loud.
“The pattern fits—systemic decay, internal burns, neurological disruption. If we find the main wreck, we might be able to stop the spread. Or at least warn everyone how far it has reached.”
“And if the main wreck leaks more than this?” Travnyk asks. “If the air itself becomes poison?”
Rakkh goes still. For a long moment, he says nothing. His gaze fixes on the shard, then lifts to meet mine, and there is no giving ground in the dark of his eyes.
“Then we move our people,” he says. “Again.” His jaw flexes. “But not until we know.”
He says our like it includes humans, Zmaj, Urr’ki—all of us. The word hits me harder than the cold metal.
Our.
I tuck the shard into my pack, wrapping it in a scrap of cloth so it does not touch my skin directly. I do not know why, but it feels like I am carrying a piece of someone else’s nightmare.
“How far do you think the wreck is?” Tomas asks, voice quieter now.
I think of the dying vine. The blackened bushes. The carok.
“Farther than this,” I say. “But not by much. The contamination is too concentrated to be random.”
“The ground feels… thinner. As if something huge sleeps beneath it,” Travnyk agrees, nodding.
Rakkh’s gaze cuts to him sharply.
“Nothing sleeps out here.”
The wind chooses that moment to pick up, sliding a breath of cold air through the alcove. It carries the faint, unmistakable scent we have been dancing around all night.
Predator.
Rakkh is on his feet in an instant.
He moves so fast I barely track it—one heartbeat he is seated, the next his wings unfurl to block most of the opening. His claws sink into the sand. His tail curves protectively inward, brushing my ankle like a living barrier.
“Stay behind me,” he says, voice gone low and deadly.
My hand goes to my knife automatically, though I know it is laughable against whatever is out there. Still. I grip it tight. My world has narrowed to four things: the cold weight in my pocket, the warm press of his tail, the rasp of my own breath, and the whisper of shifting sand outside.
Travnyk rises without a word, sliding along the outer rock. Tomas rolls to his knees, eyes wide, trying to peer past Rakkh’s bulk.
The dunes beyond the alcove look empty. They always look empty, right before something decides you are prey. The sand to our right twitches. Just a little. Just enough.
Rakkh’s entire body tenses, every muscle going taut at once. His wings flare wider, shielding more of the opening, forcing me back until my shoulders hit the cool stone wall.
“Lia.” He does not look at me, but his voice reaches me like a physical touch. “If it breaches, you run behind the rocks. You do not look back.”
“I am not leaving you,” I whisper.
His growl rumbles through the stone.
“You will live,” he says. “That is not a request.”
The sand bulges again. Higher this time.
A line ripples across the dune like something huge dragging its spine just beneath the surface. It circles once, twice, testing, then stops directly in front of our narrow shelter.
The shard in my pocket throbs with cold. I press a hand against it, heart hammering. Poison in the ground. Metal in the sand. Something new and something ancient, hunting us in the space between.
The dune swells. Sand pours down in a silent cascade as something enormous begins to rise.
“We are close,” I breathe. “Too close.”
Rakkh bares his teeth, lochaber sliding into his hand with a sound like a promise.
“Good,” he says, voice like stone breaking. “Then we kill what guards it.”
And as the first hint of something vast and slick breaks the dune’s surface, I have the strangest feeling that the poison source we are hunting does not want to be found. That somehow it brought its own monster to make sure we do not live long enough to tell anyone.