Chapter 3 #2
The third inmate limps behind, but he’s closer than he should be, that metal shard flashing in his hand.
I hit the lip of the dry wash and drop down hard, boots skidding on loose gravel. Pain lances up my knees. I scramble, palms scraping rock, and sprint along the narrow channel.
For half a second, I think it’s working.
Then the first inmate drops in behind me with a heavy thud and surges forward.
Too close.
So close I can hear the wet click of his teeth as he pants.
I whirl, backpedaling, and shove my compad out like it’s a shield.
“Back off!” I snarl.
He swipes at it, fingers clawing, and the compad flies from my grip, skittering across the rocks.
“No—!”
I lunge for it.
A hand clamps onto the back of my jacket.
The inmate yanks.
I slam back into him, his breath hot and chemical against my neck, and something inside me snaps from panic into fury so sudden it’s almost clarifying.
I drive my elbow backward.
It connects with ribs. He grunts but doesn’t let go.
The second inmate drops into the wash from above, landing ahead of me, cutting off escape. His eyes are wild. His lips peel back from his teeth.
The third one limps into view, shard raised.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I spit, voice shaking.
I twist, trying to break the first inmate’s grip, and for a moment it feels like I might—
A blur of black and scarlet drops into the wash from the ridge above, silent as a falling shadow.
The air changes when he lands, the way it does when something large enters your space and your body registers it before your brain catches up. The ground trembles. Dust lifts.
The first inmate’s grip falters.
I look up—
And see him.
Seven feet of scaled muscle, black with scarlet striping that catches the light like fresh blood. Broad shoulders. Thick tail sweeping behind him with controlled balance. His posture is relaxed in a way that makes my skin go cold, because relaxed means he is not worried.
His eyes are deep crimson.
Clear.
Not glassy. Not blown. Not drugged.
Focused.
The first inmate snarls and lunges at him like a rabid dog.
The big Grolgath moves with terrifying economy.
One hand catches the inmate’s wrist mid-swing. The other drives a blade—some crude, brutal knife—up under the inmate’s jaw in a motion so smooth it looks rehearsed. There’s a wet sound, sharp and final, and the inmate collapses like his bones forgot how to hold him up.
I freeze, breath lodged in my throat.
The second inmate yelps—actually yelps, like the sight jolts something human back into him—and tries to scramble backward.
The Grolgath pivots, tail sweeping low.
It knocks the inmate’s legs out from under him.
The inmate hits the ground hard, skull cracking against rock with a sickening sound.
The third inmate, shard raised, charges with a broken scream.
The Grolgath steps forward and meets him with a backhand that sends him spinning into the wash wall. The shard flies from his hand. The inmate crumples, twitching, and then tries to crawl away on his elbows.
The Grolgath plants one heavy foot on the inmate’s back, pinning him.
He doesn’t kill him.
He looks at me instead.
And in that moment, with the dust still settling and the smell of blood thick in the air, my brain catches up enough to register what my body already knows:
I should be terrified of him.
I am.
But I’m also—ridiculously—relieved.
I swallow hard, forcing air into my lungs. My voice comes out hoarse.
“Who the hell are you?”
He regards me for a beat too long, like he’s deciding whether my question deserves an answer.
Then he says, in a voice low and rough and oddly amused, “You’re welcome.”
I blink.
“That’s not an answer.”
He shifts his weight slightly, and I hear the faint scrape of scales against leather, the soft clink of something—gear—at his hip. He looks me up and down like I’m a problem he’s assessing, not a person he’s rescuing.
“You’re not one of them,” he says.
“No,” I snap. “I’m not one of anyone. I’m a contractor.”
“A contractor,” he repeats, like the word tastes funny.
I glance down at the inmate pinned under his foot. The man’s eyes roll, unfocused, mouth working silently.
“He’s drugged,” I say, because it’s obvious and because I need to anchor myself to facts.
“They all are,” the Grolgath replies. “If they eat.”
I stare at him.
His eyes stay clear.
“You’re not,” I say slowly.
One corner of his mouth lifts—not quite a smile, more like a private joke he’s not sharing.
“I don’t eat their food.”
A chill skates down my spine, not from the air but from the implication. Five years, according to the outline my brain is rapidly trying to stitch together from scraps: a convict surviving out here by refusing the rations that keep everyone else docile and feral.
I force myself to move, to retrieve my compad where it lies cracked against a rock. The screen still works—barely—holographic projection flickering like a dying candle.
The Grolgath watches me do it.
“What’s your name?” I ask, more carefully now.
He hesitates, and the hesitation is interesting. Not fear. Calculation.
“Lonari,” he says finally. “Kaijen.”
The name means nothing to me yet, but the way he says it—flat, unornamented—makes it sound like it should.
“Jordan,” I say. “Jordan James.”
“Okay, Jordan,” he replies, and the way he says it lands in my chest like a weight. “Why are you running into the wilderness instead of the station’s safe zones?”
I laugh once, sharp and humorless.
“Because the ‘safe zones’ are full of people getting executed.”
His gaze flicks toward the distant glow of the station.
“You saw?”
“I saw enough,” I say, and my throat tightens with the memory—blood on white floors, bodies dropping like they were nothing. “They’re wearing Vakutan armor, but the HUD biometric tags glitch. It’s a costume. They’re not Alliance.”
Lonari’s expression doesn’t change, but something in his eyes sharpens like a blade turning.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “I know.”
The broadcast tone swells again, louder now that the field is down and the sound carries. The station’s external speakers are pushing a message across the open terrain.
We both hear it.
A voice, amplified, crisp, authoritative, declaring in formal cadence that Coalition prisoners are to be surrendered for summary execution, that the Alliance will cleanse Yatori of “enemy contamination,” that anyone interfering will be treated as hostile.
It’s meant to inflame.
It’s meant to be recorded.
I lift my compad, thumb shaking, and try to pull the transmission header data.
Lonari watches me.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Listening,” I say, voice tight. “And checking.”
The compad protests, interface lagging under suppression, but the broadcast is coming through on open-band—designed to. I access the packet info and bring up the header.
My eyes scan the encryption tags.
And my stomach twists.
“No,” I whisper.
“What?” Lonari asks, stepping closer.
I angle the projection so he can see, though I don’t know if he can read it.
“This header,” I say, tapping the hovering string of code with a trembling finger.
“It’s wrong. The syntax is… off. The encryption chain is trying too hard to look like Alliance-military standard, but it’s…
stitched. Like counterfeit currency. Like somebody copied the pattern without understanding the material. ”
Lonari’s gaze holds steady on my face, not the code.
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” I snap, then soften because my panic is clawing up my throat again. “I— I pulled logs. Docking clearance rewrites. Biometric scans. Transmission records. I got a partial archive out before they blew the door off the server room.”
His eyes flick briefly to my chest, where the drive is hidden.
“That’s what you’re carrying,” he says.
“Yes,” I breathe. “And they jammed everything. Holonet, entanglement, emergency transponders. Someone doesn’t want this leaving the moon.”
Lonari’s jaw tightens, and for the first time I see something emotional crack through his control—anger, sharp and hot, but contained like a fist wrapped in velvet.
“Then we don’t go back,” he says.
“What?” I bark, startled. “We have to— I have to get this to IHC space. To someone who’ll listen.”
He stares at me like I’m adorable in the way a child is adorable when they think rules matter.
“You go back to IHC space,” he says, voice low, “and you die. Or you disappear. Or they take that drive and you become a footnote.”
I step closer, face heating with frustration and fear.
“You don’t know that.”
Lonari leans in just enough that I can smell him—dust, leather, something faintly metallic like old blood that never fully washes out. His voice drops even lower, intimate without being kind.
“I know exactly that.”
The inmate pinned under his foot groans weakly.
Lonari shifts his weight, pressing down just enough to remind the man he’s not going anywhere.
I clutch my compad tighter, knuckles white.
“Okay,” I say, forcing my voice to steady, forcing my mind to stay technical because emotion is a luxury I can’t afford. “Then what? We just… run? Until we starve?”
Lonari’s eyes stay on mine, clear and unreadable.
“We move,” he says. “We survive the next hour. Then we talk.”
Behind us, the broadcast continues to blare its manufactured declaration into the dust-choked air, and somewhere far away the station keeps screaming.
I swallow, tasting blood and ozone and fear.
“Fine,” I say, because I don’t have a better option. “But if you’re planning to kill me and take the drive, I’m going to make your life extremely annoying first.”
For the first time, Lonari’s mouth actually twitches into something like a smile.
“Yeah?” he says. “You already are.”
And despite everything—the bodies, the jamming, the lies wearing Alliance armor—I feel a thin, dangerous thread of something like momentum tighten between us, the kind that only forms when two people realize they might be the only sane beings left in a collapsing world.
“Move,” he says.
I move.