15. Sophie
SOPHIE
T he desert does not care about grief.
It doesn’t pause for it, doesn’t soften, doesn’t even acknowledge it exists. It just keeps being exactly what it is—hot, sharp, vast, and quietly lethal.
By the second day, I stop pretending I’m not scared.
The ravines open up like wounds in the land, jagged and deep, swallowing light and sound.
The crawler can’t take most of them, so we abandon it under a rock shelf that looks stable enough not to betray us immediately.
The engine ticks as it cools, metal popping like it’s arguing with itself.
The smell of burnt oil and dust coats my throat.
Ragon checks the perimeter while I strap on my pack. His movements are efficient, economical. No wasted motion. No flair. It’s different from the man I met in Sweetwater—the charming, sharp-tongued problem-solver. Out here, the charm is folded away like a blade sheathed for later.
“Water check,” he says.
I lift my pack. “Two full skins. Plus the purifier tabs.”
He nods. “Food.”
“Enough for four days if we’re careful. Three if we’re not.”
He snorts. “We’ll be careful.”
I don’t comment on the optimism.
We start down into the ravines just after dawn.
The sun hasn’t climbed high yet, but the heat is already pressing in, wrapping around my ribs like it wants to see how much pressure they can take.
Every step sends grit sliding under my boots.
The rock smells metallic, old, like something that’s been exposed to the same anger for centuries and never learned how to leave.
I slip once. Catch myself. My heart slams hard enough to hurt.
Ragon’s hand is on my elbow instantly.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
I nod, pull away gently. “I know.”
And I do. That’s the terrifying part.
The terrain gets worse the farther we go. The ravines twist, narrow, open again without warning. Wind howls through them, a low, hollow sound that crawls under my skin. Sometimes it smells like salt. Sometimes like ozone. Sometimes like nothing at all, which is somehow worse.
We don’t talk much at first. Breathing takes priority.
By midday, my legs are burning and my mouth tastes like copper. I force myself to drink even when I don’t want to. Rationing is a mental game as much as a physical one, and I refuse to lose it.
When we stop to rest in the thin shadow of an overhang, Ragon watches me with that unreadable, assessing look he wears when he thinks I’m about to do something stupid.
I take a protein bar out of my pack and bite into it. It tastes like compressed disappointment.
“What,” I say around a mouthful. “You going to tell me I’m doing it wrong?”
“No,” he replies. “You’re doing it right.”
I pause. “That sounded suspiciously like praise.”
He smirks faintly. “Don’t get used to it.”
We move again.
The danger doesn’t announce itself. It never does.
One moment I’m stepping over a cracked shelf of stone, the next it shifts under my weight, sliding loose with a sound like breaking teeth. I yelp as the rock gives way, my foot plunging down into empty space.
Ragon shouts my name.
I drop, slam hard against the ravine wall, skinning my forearm, the impact rattling my teeth. Pain flares white-hot, sharp and immediate. I scramble for purchase, fingers clawing into a narrow fissure, boots scraping uselessly.
“Don’t move,” Ragon snaps, already moving, his voice a taut line.
“Little late for that,” I grit out.
He anchors himself above me, muscles straining, and reaches down. His grip closes around my wrist, solid, sure. I feel the strength in it, the absolute refusal to let go.
“On three,” he says. “One?—”
“I know how counting works,” I snap, adrenaline making me sharp.
“Two—”
He hauls me up on three with a grunt, dragging me back onto solid ground. I collapse onto my knees, chest heaving, blood trickling warm down my arm.
For a second, neither of us speaks.
Then Ragon swears, quietly and viciously, and grabs my arm.
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“More still.”
He cleans the wound with practiced efficiency, his fingers gentle despite the blunt way he handles everything else. The antiseptic burns. I hiss.
“Sorry,” he mutters, and somehow manages to make it sound like he means it.
“I’ve had worse,” I say, because it’s true.
He glances up at me. “You shouldn’t have to.”
Something in his tone—low, rough—makes my throat tighten. I look away, focusing on the way the light catches on the rock, the way the air hums faintly, like the land itself is holding a secret just out of reach.
We keep going.
By the third day, the journey has stripped us down to essentials. Words matter. Movements matter. Mistakes are punished immediately.
I prove—to myself more than to Ragon—that I can adapt.
I find water seepage in a shaded cleft of stone by tracking lichen patterns.
I rig a windbreak from thermal foil and climbing line when a sudden storm barrels through the ravines, sand stinging my face like needles.
I reroute us around a collapsed shelf by reading the way dust settles and guessing where the ground is most likely to betray us next.
Ragon watches. Says nothing. But his eyes follow me differently now.
That night, we make camp in a narrow bowl of rock that muffles the wind. The sky above is a spill of stars so bright it hurts to look at them too long. I lie back against my pack, exhausted down to the bone.
Ragon sits opposite me, cleaning his blade.
“You think if you keep moving,” he says suddenly, “the grief can’t catch you.”
I stiffen.
“That’s not?—”
“It is,” he continues, not unkindly. “I’ve seen it before. People who run hard enough they think they’ll outrun the ache.”
I sit up, glare at him. “You don’t know what I think.”
He meets my gaze, steady. “Then tell me.”
I open my mouth. Close it again.
The truth is heavy. Ugly. Vulnerable.
“I think,” I say slowly, “that if I stop, it becomes real.”
He nods. “It’s real anyway.”
I laugh, sharp and humorless. “That’s comforting.”
“I’m not trying to comfort you,” he says. “I’m trying to keep you from breaking yourself open on the wrong idea.”
I pick up a stone and roll it between my fingers, feeling its weight. “If he’s dead,” I whisper, “then all of this?—”
“Means you loved him enough to look,” Ragon finishes. “Not that you wasted your time.”
I don’t answer. I’m not ready to accept that yet.
The next morning, the land changes again.
The ravines widen, the rock smoothed unnaturally in places, as if something large and deliberate carved through it long ago. My skin prickles. The air tastes faintly electric, like the moment before a storm breaks.
Ragon slows. “We’re close.”
“How can you tell?”
He gestures to the rock face. “Tool marks. Old. Precise.”
My heart starts to pound.
We round a bend, and there it is.
The wreck sits half-buried in the ravine floor, twisted metal jutting from sand and stone like broken bones. The hull is scorched, peeled back in places, the Alliance insignia long since sandblasted into anonymity.
I stop breathing.
“That’s—” My voice breaks. I clear my throat. “That’s his ship.”
Ragon stays silent.
I approach slowly, each step feeling unreal, like I’m walking through a memory instead of a place. The metal is cold under my fingers despite the heat. I recognize the curve of the hull, the configuration of the thrusters.
I climb inside through a jagged breach, heart hammering, senses overloaded.
The interior is wrecked but not obliterated. Panels torn out. Scorch marks along the walls. Emergency lights long dead.
And then I see it.
Data slates stacked carefully in a corner, protected beneath a makeshift shield of plating. Notes etched into metal. Equations. Diagrams.
Not escape plans.
Research.
My breath catches as I flip through them, hands shaking.
“He didn’t crash and die,” I whisper. “He studied this place.”
Behind me, Ragon exhales slowly.
I sink down onto the deck, surrounded by the ghosts of my father’s work, and for the first time since I was sixteen, hope doesn’t feel like a lie.
It feels like a promise.