Chapter 9 Lia #2
The breeze shifts, and the faint hum thrums through the dunes. It’s too steady to be natural—clearly coming from the object itself. My heart kicks, and my breath hitches.
“Rakkh… do you feel that?”
“I feel everything in these sands,” he says, voice low, close behind me. “But this… yes. It is wrong.”
I reach the exposed metal and kneel. My hands shake as I brush sand aside.
The surface looks like liquid metal frozen mid-flow, but stranger than its construction are the branching lines that run through it.
They’re faintly iridescent under the suns—not carved, but integral, as if grown into the metal itself.
Like leaf veins.
I shift, studying it from another angle, and my stomach twists.
“This wasn’t made by human technology.”
“No,” Rakkh agrees quietly.
“Or Zmaj?”
“No,” he says. “I do not think so.”
“Or Urr’ki.”
“No,” Travnyk agrees. “This is not ours.”
“Lia,” Rakkh says, his voice tight—gentle but warning. “Do not touch it.”
A breath. A heartbeat. I try not to. But I can’t.
I press one fingertip to the metal. It’s warm. Warmer than sunbaked sand should be. And beneath that warmth, something pulses. Slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat buried far below the ground. I jerk back, breath catching in my throat.
“Stars,” I whisper. “It’s alive?”
Travnyk tilts his head. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to his tusks. Every time I look at him, they pull my attention—ivory, curving out of his lower jaw. How do they kiss? Don’t they get in the way?
“Not alive,” Travnyk says thoughtfully. “But not dead. It is sleeping.”
“Why does everything out here have to move or glow or breathe?” Tomas complains. “Why can’t it just be normal sand?”
Rakkh ignores him. He crouches beside me, one hand braced in the sand, claws digging in as he leans closer—too close, so close his shoulder brushes mine.
“What did you feel?” he asks.
I force my breathing to steady despite the way my heart races and my stomach tightens.
“Heat, yes—but also a pulse. Like something beneath us is powering this. Or reacting to us.”
His pupils narrow. His nostrils flare once as he draws in the scent of metal, sand… me.
“It reacted,” he murmurs. “Like when you touched the shard.”
My breath stutters. “You think it’s responding to—”
“You,” he finishes.
The word sends a dizzy pressure through my chest. I look down at my hands, at the grains of sand clinging to my fingers, and wish I could say they aren’t trembling. Fear, yes. But more than fear.
“Why me?” I ask.
“That is the question I do not like,” Rakkh says, jaw tightening as his horns angle down, catching the suns and throwing off fractured rainbows.
Tomas steps closer, nervously hugging his pack.
“Could it be… I don’t know… DNA recognition? Tech that scans for—”
“No,” Travnyk cuts in. “This is older than human science. Older than Zmaj. This is Star People construction.”
Star People.
The Urr’ki term not just for humans, but for the alien races that predated what we called the Invaders—the four-armed beings that drove humans and Zmaj underground and led us to the Urr’ki in the first place.
A chill knifes down my spine despite the heat.
I stand abruptly, brushing my hands on my thighs.
“We need to find the rest. If this is only one piece—”
“I do not think it is a piece,” Travnyk says, stepping back. “It is the edge.”
“The edge of what?” Tomas asks.
Rakkh rises to his full height, eyes fixed on the dune ahead.
“A structure.”
I look again. Really look.
The dune in front of us isn’t shaped like the others. Its slope is too smooth. Too uniform. And near the crest—barely visible beneath the rippling sand—lies another curve of metal, faintly gleaming.
“Oh stars,” I breathe. “It’s buried.”
Travnyk nods once. “A crash does not always scatter. Sometimes it sinks.”
A buried ship. Or something worse.
My heart slams against my ribs. Rakkh steps closer, his presence settling around me like armor.
“We must move carefully,” he says. “If that creature was defending this place, more may be bound to it.”
“We found the source, right?” Tomas squeaks. “Doesn’t that mean… are we still going?”
I turn to face him. My hands shake, but my voice doesn’t.
“How many times do I need to say it for you to understand, Tomas? If we don’t figure out what crashed here, the sickness will keep spreading. More creatures will mutate. More plants will die. More predators will rise. And very soon, there will be nothing left for us to eat.”
Tomas goes pale. “I hate when you make sense.”
Rakkh almost smiles. Almost.
He gestures toward the dune. “We approach from the side. Quietly. No sudden steps.”
Travnyk nods, already shifting his weight to minimize sand movement. I follow Rakkh’s steps exactly, his footprints deep enough for my boots to sink into.
Halfway up the dune, the ground trembles. Not violently. Not like a beast lunging. More like a heartbeat. My breath freezes.
“Did you feel that?”
Rakkh snaps into a defensive stance, wings flaring slightly.
“Yes,” he murmurs. “And so did the desert.”
The sand around us seems to exhale, like shifting lungs. Tomas lets out a strangled sound.
“Nope. No. Absolutely not. We are walking on something. Something alive.”
“Not alive,” Travnyk says, lifting his chin. “But waking.”
The tremor comes again—stronger this time. Deep. Resonant. Too rhythmic to be random.
“The metal. The creatures. The rot. It’s all connected,” I say, swallowing hard.
Rakkh curls his tail around the backs of my legs, protective and instinctive as it brushes my knees. My breath catches at the touch.
“Lia,” he murmurs, his voice thick. “Stay close.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
A third tremor shakes the sand—sharper now, sending the dune shifting. Travnyk leaps back. Tomas stumbles forward with a yelp. Rakkh grabs my arm and yanks me against him as the ground drops several inches beneath our feet.
A low rumble echoes from below. Not a creature. Not wind. Metal. Yawning open after centuries. The buried structure is waking.
Rakkh’s breath brushes my ear, warm and steady even as the dune vibrates beneath us.
“We should not be standing on this,” he whispers.
“No,” I breathe. “We shouldn’t.”
But we can’t turn back now. Not when the ground itself is telling us we’re close.
Too close.