Chapter 10
MAUG
Ishould have run.
The moment the boy’s screams tore through the cave mouths—raw and wrong and very, very human—I should’ve vanished. Taken to the peaks and buried myself in wind and solitude until the ground forgot my shape. Until the humans forgot my name.
But I don’t.
I don’t run.
Something in me resists. Some old, bitter root winds tight around my bones and anchors me here, just close enough to the humans to feel their lights prick against my skin like thorns.
I crouch on a stone ledge overlooking their camp, and I watch. I breathe. I remember.
The boy’s scent still clings to me. Not blood.
Not fear. Blame. That’s the smell of it now—heavy and cloying, thick as smoke.
It wraps around me even though I wasn’t the one who tore his limbs from their sockets or left his belly open to the sun.
But that doesn’t matter to them. He’s dead.
And I’m still breathing. That’s all the evidence they need.
So I don’t run.
I circle.
There’s a rhythm to it now. Patrol lines etched like scars into the sand, timing loops programmed into the drones. I watch the marines as they pass, their footsteps brutal and too loud. They don’t walk like they belong here. They stomp, they curse, they challenge the land.
Tonight, they’ve doubled the perimeter. Each man wears ordnance I’ve only seen used on the deep-worms during the last great culling.
High-yield pulse launchers, body-mass reactive armor, ammo belts so thick they drag at the hips.
One of them drags a turret sled. It leaves a groove in the dirt as deep as a wound.
Their drones are worse.
Small, silent, and fast—like flies with teeth.
They hum through the dark, sensors twitching, red optics scanning for heat signatures.
They leave ribbons of ozone in the air, trails I can smell long after they’ve passed.
One buzzes too close to where I crouch, and I press back into the rock until I feel the mineral scrape my ribs. My claws twitch.
It veers off. Doesn’t see me.
Not yet.
I slink forward once it’s gone, always just outside the reach of their lights, tracing the edge of their desperation.
The humans are unraveling, but they’re trying to pretend it’s control.
Grady snaps orders with teeth bared, Ciampa wears a calm mask stretched too tight over panic, and the rest of them move like ghosts—silent, stricken, slow.
And still… she remains.
Jillian.
I don’t know why I watch her. I don’t know when it started, or what I think I’ll learn from the tilt of her shoulders or the rhythm of her steps. But she burns in my thoughts like coals, and no amount of wind seems able to smother it.
She’s quiet now.
The camp sleeps in uneasy fits, but she’s awake. Alone. I know her scent even before I hear her.
Salt. Metal. Grief.
I move closer, dragging my body low beneath a shale overhang. My skin itches with every heartbeat. The risk claws at me. But I go anyway.
I hear her before I see her.
Not words. No questions hurled into the dark like last time. No pleas. Just sound—raw and jagged. A sob. Then another.
She’s not calling for me.
She’s not calling at all.
She’s breaking.
The sound digs under my skin like bone slivers. Each inhale she takes is a stutter. Each exhale is a wound. It hurts. I don’t understand it—but it hurts.
I find her sitting on a flat slab of rock near the edge of the boundary lights, arms wound around her knees, shoulders trembling under the weight of everything she can’t say.
The light behind her pulses blue, casting her in silhouette.
Her hair is a mess of shadow and wind. Her face is hidden, but I don’t need to see it.
I can feel it in the air around her—dense, wet, heavy.
She doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
I crouch behind a mineral crest less than ten paces away, every muscle screaming to retreat. To run. But I stay.
I watch.
And I feel.
Her sobs are quiet, but they ripple through the ground, and I feel them in my chest like echoes from a war drum. There’s a rhythm to her pain, a cadence of sorrow I’ve never learned to read, but tonight it writes itself into my marrow whether I understand the words or not.
She gasps. A harsh, keening sound that rakes out of her like it’s been waiting too long to be free. Then she folds tighter, as if she could make herself disappear into her own arms.
The wind stirs. Brings her scent to me again.
I inhale, slow and careful.
She smells of old fear and fresher determination. But beneath it—beneath the dirt and fabric and sweat—there’s something softer. Something... human.
I don’t understand her grief. I never learned how.
But I feel it. And it settles into me like a stone.
I remember the boy again. Carson.
The way he stared at something—someone—just before he died. That look wasn’t for me. It was for the thing that took him. And yet here I crouch, painted as the villain, carrying blame like a brand carved into flesh.
I wonder if she believes it too.
But then I look at her—shaking, silent, alone—and I know she doesn’t.
Because she’s not weeping for a monster. She’s weeping for a friend.
A soul lost to the void between duty and truth.
I shift slightly, my foot brushing loose gravel. Her head jerks up.
I freeze.
She doesn’t see me. Her gaze sweeps the dark but never finds my eyes.
Still... I hold my breath.
She sniffles. Rubs at her face. Her shoulders sag.
Then, slowly, she leans back against the rock, eyes unfocused, blinking against tears that still haven’t finished falling. Her lips part, but no sound comes out.
She’s beyond words now.
So am I.
I retreat, inch by inch, until the night swallows me again. The drones hum in the distance. The marines mutter in their sleep. The world spins onward, indifferent.
But I carry her sobs in my chest like a second heartbeat.
And for once... I don’t want to forget them.
I find it just past dusk.
A dry breeze chases my steps as I skulk beneath a fractured ridge, the rock still warm from the sun but cooling fast now. That’s when the scent hits me—faint, brittle sugar and human oil. Familiar. Too familiar. My claws scrape as I pivot low, scanning the path near the base of her rock.
There.
A cookie.
Old. Cracked down the middle, the soft center hardened and graying at the edges. It’s the same kind she left before—offered like some ritual or truce. But this one… this one is different.
It was left before the boy died.
The dirt around it has been shifted by the wind and the camp's tremors, but I see the trace beneath—her name. Faint. Almost gone. Etched with careful hands. Jillian.
I stare at the letters. The shape of them. Human lines—fragile, thin, soft. Like her voice. Like the look she gave the dark the last time she cried.
This one was meant for me.
Before the blood. Before the screams. Before her grief cracked the night wide open.
My chest aches.
I crouch and lift the cookie gently, my claw slicing the stale thing clean in two. The inside crumbles, too dry to be soft anymore. It’s useless now, but something in me needs to do it anyway.
I place one half down beside the faint letters. Press it there with slow precision, like it matters. Like ritual. The other half, I crumble in my hand and let it fall beside the first.
I don’t eat it.
I don’t deserve to.
My mouth is dry anyway. Not with hunger—though that gnaws at me constantly now—but with shame. With something heavier than stone and twice as sharp.
I stare a moment longer, then back away, slinking toward the eastern shadows where the rock splits and the cave mouths begin.
That night, the sting tails return.
I hear them before I smell them—clattering movement like hammered sheet metal, scraping across the distant rocks. Their migration isn’t supposed to begin for another six cycles, but the thermal vents have been shifting, spewing out sulfur and heat like wounds reopening.
The sting tails know. They always know.
One skitters too close to the camp’s edge.
I crouch beneath a stone outcrop just beyond the beacon field, breath low, muscles coiled. The beast’s legs click like tapping claws on crystal. Its armor reflects the blue camp lights in jagged slices, and I swear its mandibles twitch toward the sleeping tents.
My claws flex.
It takes another step.
Then another.
I don’t think. I move.
I launch from the shadows, every ounce of me bent toward silence. No roar. No clash. Just precision.
I slam into it from the side, jaws locking around its primary leg joint.
The thing shrieks—high and metallic—but only for a second before I twist and crack bone through chitin.
Its body thrashes. It’s bigger than I expected.
Older. But slow. I hook my claws beneath its underbelly, find the seam near its heart-sac, and push.
The light in its eyes flickers out.
I drag the carcass into the dark, blood and ichor pooling behind me, slick and steaming. I pull it all the way to the ravine, where the ground swallows sound. There, I eat.
Not fast. Not greedy. Methodical.
I peel back the shell, break through the muscle, bite deep into the core tissue where the nutrients are strongest. I need strength. My body demands it. The hunt burns through my veins like fire.
But the taste is ash.
My mind is elsewhere. On the girl. On the name she wrote. On the sound of her sobbing when she thought she was alone.
I chew slowly, letting the warmth settle into me. It doesn’t help. Not really.
The more I feed, the more I feel emptied.
When did this happen?
When did she become more than a curiosity? When did her pain start feeling like a wound I couldn’t heal? Why does the memory of her scent cling to the back of my throat like smoke?
I crouch in the shadow of the dead sting tail, its form already cooling. My claws drip with its blood, but it’s her voice I hear. Not words. Just the shape of her. The way she sits. The way she weeps.
I close my eyes.
The thought slithers in before I can stop it.
What would she say if I spoke to her?
The question hits me harder than any blow. It’s absurd. Dangerous. She’s human. She’s them. And yet…
I imagine it.
Her turning slowly. Not with fear, but with knowing.
Me, emerging from the dark—not a predator, not a phantom. Just me.
My voice, harsh and broken from disuse. The words foreign on my tongue.
“Jillian.”
Would she run?
Would she scream?
Would she stay?
I shudder.
The idea terrifies me more than any sting tail ever has.
Because if she speaks back—if she sees me, truly sees me—I don’t know what I’ll become.
And I’m not sure I’ll survive it.