Chapter 13
JAELA
Iwake up with dirt in my mouth and blood in my ears.
Everything hurts. My ribs grind like broken tiles. My left eye’s swollen half-shut, and there’s a taste on my tongue like old metal and bile. Something warm trickles down the side of my neck. Not sweat.
I open my eyes.
Regret.
The ground’s black tarp, greasy with engine oil and gods-know-what else.
Smells like piss and exhaust. The tent above me groans in the wind, pieced together from stitched-together polyfiber sails and bone lattice—ribs and femurs lashed tight with wire and sinew.
Real bones. I count six different species without even trying.
“Unngh…”
That was me. Big mistake.
A boot nudges my ribs. I don’t move. Play dead.
Voices mumble nearby. Not proper speech—more like gutter code run through broken throat chips and old war slang.
“—caught her slippin’—crash dust still hot—”
“—smelled clean. Earthskin. Tender—”
A laugh. Wet. Ugly.
“Gonna break easy, that one.”
Something coils in my gut. Not fear. Not yet. Just the rage before the panic.
I keep breathing shallow, let my eyelids flutter just enough to see shapes. Four of them. One big—massive, really. The others hang back like mutts waiting for scraps.
The big one’s the chief. You can tell by the skulls wired into his chest plate and the extra set of cyber-jaws fused to his real ones. Glitching open and shut like a busted bear trap.
He’s looking at me like I’m meat he’s not sure how to cook yet.
My fingers twitch. Bad idea.
He crouches. His breath hits my face—smells like rot and motor grease.
“Awake now, little squeal?”
I don’t answer.
He grabs a fistful of my hair and jerks my head up. My neck screams. I bite my lip hard enough to draw blood and don’t give him the sound he wants.
“Feisty,” he grunts. “Bet that mouth’ll sing after we gut them shiny parts outta you.”
I see it then—the glint of salvage in his eyes. Not just lust. He sees my black-market implants, my subdermal ports, the barely-hidden neural linkages.
He sees profit.
And pain.
He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.
They bind my wrists with some kind of rust-wire tech—old repurposed cuffs running on a closed-loop spark battery. Enough to fry a lesser nerve stem. Too bad mine’s fried already.
They leave me in the tent. Two guards outside. One chewing bones. One asleep standing up.
Idiots.
I fish the hairpin from the lining of my boot with my tongue—thank the stars Vira taught me that trick—and angle my arms until I can wedge it into the override slot of the wrist shackle.
Pop.
Static jolts up my arm like a slap from hell, but the lock gives. My fingers are half-numb, but I still got one elbow and a chip on my shoulder.
I move fast.
One guard doesn’t even see it coming. My elbow catches him under the chin—bone crunches, teeth spray, his body folds like laundry. The second whirls, gun halfway up, but I slam my shoulder into his gut and drive him into the tent pole. The whole thing collapses.
Screams go up.
Too late.
I’m already running.
The desert hits me like a wall.
Wind like sandpaper. Heat like a furnace vent.
I stagger, eyes squinting against the glare, lungs burning.
The whole Slag Rider camp is moving—dozens of bikes, half-tracks, war machines stitched from scrap and sin, all mounted by ferals in rust-colored armor screaming like they’re born from war itself.
And right in the middle?
A fucking war parade.
Two mutant beasts dragging a fighting cage. Inside it, two warriors are hacking each other to pieces while the crowd chants in static-scrambled code.
“RAH-ZA! RAH-ZA!”
I bolt into the melee like a madwoman.
Slag Riders scream, point. One grabs for me. I duck under a swinging chain mace, leap over a pile of weapon crates, nearly get clipped by a skimmer with exhaust pipes belching blue flame.
“STOP HER!”
“FRACTURE THE LEGS!”
I slam into a merchant cart, knock it over, scatter engine parts across the dust. A gunshot whizzes past my ear. Too close.
Suddenly—bam!—I hit the edge of the convoy.
I’m pinned between two grinding machines, engines growling, sweat pouring, heart trying to punch out of my chest. A Rider spots me, grins like a hyena.
His blade is up before I can move.
I backpedal.
Trip.
He lunges.
And then the sky screams.
A roar like nothing I’ve ever heard tears across the canyon. Not an engine. Not a beast.
Both.
A blast of hot wind slams into us, and out of the smoke comes a monster.
Massive.
Black.
Belching fire.
A land engine three stories tall, all jagged armor and molten exhaust vents. Barbed wheels churn dust into a cyclone. Plasma horns slash the air. And mounted on top—
Golden scales.
Red cybernetic eye.
Him.
Kyldak.
My heart stops.
Not figuratively. Not romantically.
Literally.
I forget how to breathe.
He looks like a nightmare carved from myth—armored to the gods, twin axes strapped to his back, hair wild, expression like a thunder god on a vendetta.
Riders scream and scatter.
One of them drops to his knees.
“Red Eye…”
The one about to gut me turns—too slow.
Everything happens too fast.
The moment I blink, the world goes feral.
Kyldak moves like he’s been waiting for this fight his whole damn life—like the air’s too thin and violence is the only way he remembers how to breathe. One heartbeat, he’s ten meters away. The next, he’s on the chief—his axe arcs through the air in a gold-and-black blur.
There’s no pause.
No speech.
Just the wet thunk of metal through bone.
The Slag Rider’s head hits the ground before the body realizes it’s dead.
I barely have time to gasp before Kyldak turns—his red cybernetic eye flaring like a furnace—and grabs me.
My feet leave the ground. My lungs forget how to function.
He’s got an arm under my legs and one locked tight around my back, hauling me up like I weigh nothing, like I’m a weapon he’s reclaiming, not a person.
His armor burns against my skin. His scent—metal, smoke, and that low, animal musk that once lived in my sheets—hits me like a drug.
“Kyld—” I choke on his name, half a sob, half disbelief.
“Don’t,” he growls, voice rough and low enough to make the air vibrate. “Don’t talk.”
It’s not cruel. It’s raw. Like he’s afraid the sound of me will break whatever spell brought me here.
Like he doesn’t trust reality not to rip me away again.
His fingers tighten at my waist, trembling—not from effort, but from restraint.
I feel the hitch in his breathing when he looks down at me, eyes wild, jaw locked. For a second, I see something break behind that scarred face. Something real.
Then the sound of gunfire snaps the moment in half.
“MOVE!” someone yells—Raxl, maybe.
Kyldak throws me up onto his engine beast like I’m weightless. The saddle burns through my jeans, and I barely catch the edge of the handle before the monster lurches forward. He vaults up behind me, one hand locking the throttle, the other around my waist.
The cruiser roars.
The dunes explode behind us.
We tear through the chaos in a storm of sand and fire. I can hear engines exploding, screams cutting off mid-breath, the metallic hiss of weapons discharging. His men follow—dozens of them, shadows on bikes, shooting and shouting and laughing like devils set loose.
Kyldak doesn’t look back once.
I glance up at him. His jaw’s clenched so tight the tendons twitch. Sweat drips down his temple, running along the seam of his cybernetic eye. His skin’s streaked with blood—some his, most not.
And still, somehow, he’s the most alive thing I’ve ever seen.
“Let me go,” I rasp, shouting over the wind.
He doesn’t answer.
“I said let me—”
He growls low in his chest—so deep I feel it through my spine. “Stop fighting me, Jaela.”
That voice.
The one that once whispered my name like a prayer. The one I thought I’d only ever hear again in dreams.
I twist in his hold, elbow him hard in the ribs. “I don’t take orders from warlords.”
“Then stop getting yourself captured,” he snaps, throttling harder. “You’re lucky I got here before they—”
“Before they what?” I shoot back. “Before they did to me what this planet did to you?”
That hits. His shoulders go rigid. His hand tightens reflexively around my waist until my breath catches.
Neither of us says another word until the warcamp looms into view.
His camp is chaos pretending to be order—half-mad and half-miracle, like him.
Engines circle massive tents stitched from Alliance sails, bonfires throwing light across rusted armor and weapons piled like bones. Men cheer when they see him, shouting his name—Red Eye, Red Eye!—but they shut up quick when they see me.
He ignores them. Doesn’t even glance sideways. He dismounts, then turns, grabs me by the arm, and drags me into the largest tent before I can catch my balance.
Inside, it’s dim. The air smells like oil and heat and leather.
He lets me go so suddenly I stumble into a crate.
“You’re real,” he says, almost to himself. “You’re actually here.”
I straighten, brushing sand off my torn shirt. “Yeah, thanks for the rescue. Next time, maybe lead with that instead of a kidnapping.”
His head jerks up. “You think I’d just let you run back into that wasteland?”
“I didn’t ask you to save me.”
“Then who the fuck were you screaming for when I found you?” he roars, slamming a fist into the metal table between us. The surface warps with the impact.
I flinch, instinctively stepping back—but not far enough to miss the way his eyes flicker. Regret. Then fury again.
“Why are you here, Jaela?” His voice is low now. Dangerous. “You shouldn’t be here. This place eats people like you.”
“I can see that.”
“Answer me.”
“Why do you care?” I throw it back at him like a blade. “You made your choice, remember? You’re the great Red Eye now. King of the corpses. Congratulations.”
He closes the distance between us in two steps. His hand slams down beside my head, pinning me to the wall. His other fist curls tight at his side. He’s shaking.
“I buried you,” he grinds out. “I mourned you every night I was chained to a wall in this hellhole. And now you just—what? Crash a shuttle into my territory like some kind of ghost?”
I meet his glare, jaw trembling. “I didn’t come for you.”
His breath stops. His eyes go sharp—predator-sharp.
“Liar,” he says, voice cracking like thunder. “You came for me. You always did.”
I slap him.
The sound cracks the air between us.
For a heartbeat, neither of us moves.
Then he laughs—a short, broken sound that’s closer to pain than amusement. “Still got fire,” he mutters. “Stars, I missed that.”
“Don’t you dare,” I snap, shoving him. “Don’t you dare act like this is some kind of twisted reunion. I didn’t risk my life for nostalgia.”
“Then why, Jaela?!” His voice splinters on my name. “Why here? Why now?”
My throat tightens. My chest aches. I want to scream, to tell him everything—but the words choke.
I look up, meet his eyes, and what I see there unravels me.
The same man. The same fire. The same unbearable ache.
But colder now. Harder. Wrapped in armor and blood.
I shake my head, whisper, “You wouldn’t understand.”
He leans in, just enough that I can feel the heat of him, the static hum of his implants under his skin. “Try me.”
The words tremble out of me before I can stop them. “I didn’t come for you.”
He stares at me, expression carved from stone.
Then, quieter than a prayer, he says it again.
“Liar.”
The sound of it breaks something inside me.
And I realize—I’m still his weakness.
And he’s still mine.