Chapter 10
DARUN
The canyon tastes like ash and old metal.
Sand grits in my teeth like powdered bone.
I feel it clinging to the sweat-slick hollows under my armor, coating my tongue, grinding against the backs of my eyes.
It's too quiet. Too still. The kind of still that means something's wrong, but nobody wants to say it.
Kanapa marches ahead like a goddamn statue with a fuse in his chest, trailing the stink of ozone and burnt oil from the servo in his cyber-hip.
He doesn't flinch when the wind howls through the ravine—just tilts his head like he's listening for blood. Behind him, the rest of the squad trudges with rifles low but fingers twitching. We’ve been through this dance enough times to know the tempo.
Another patrol. Another zone not on any tactical map.
A cluster of half-buried shelters nestled under the red stone cliffs, too far from any power grid to be strategic.
Kanapa called it a possible smuggling nest. I call it what it is—civilian.
No posted flags, no open coms, no guards.
Just the sound of tin roofing clattering in the wind and the faint reek of cooking grease clinging to the rocks.
“Movement, twelve o'clock,” Varr murmurs through comms. His voice tight, clipped. “Single contact. Small. Unarmed.”
I squint, adjust my sight filter. It’s a kid. A small one. Thin, limping, a dirty blanket dragging behind her like a second shadow. She vanishes behind a rusted transport hull before I can blink. Kanapa doesn’t slow.
Amy’s walking behind me. I don’t have to look to know she saw it too. Her breathing shifts—a little sharper, like she’s got words backed up in her throat. She's recording. I can hear the faint whir of the lens adjusting, the tiny click when it marks a timestamp. Damn it.
Kanapa stops.
“Perimeter clear,” he says to no one in particular.
His cybernetic fingers twitch. I’ve seen that twitch before. Right before a drone strike in the Kuvar trenches. Right before he executed a medic who hesitated. That twitch means something ugly’s about to happen.
"Scorched protocol," he announces. Flat. Final.
I step forward before I even think. “This is a neutral zone.”
“Nothing’s neutral out here,” he snaps without looking at me. “You’ve been out in the sun too long, Sergeant.”
I feel the squad tighten around us. Not physically. Just... tension. The kind that makes your spine lock and your fingers ache. Amy steps closer too, but quiet. Smart.
“Sir, there are no weapons. No hostiles. Just a couple prefab hovels and a kid. We scan and move. Standard recon.”
He turns. Slow. That mechanical arm gleams like it’s hungry.
“Are you disobeying a direct order?”
“I’m questioning the necessity of a war crime.”
Silence.
Even the wind stutters.
I feel the words hit like a punch in the gut—on everyone. Even Amy.
Kanapa’s smile is all teeth and venom. “Big words, Sergeant Darun. For someone who owes me his life.”
I grit my molars. “Don’t make me regret that.”
He steps closer. We’re nose to snout. I can smell the copper tang under his breath, the synthetic grease leaking from his wrist housing. His real eye twitches. The green one. The part of him that’s still Vakutan.
“You think I won’t put you down?” he hisses. “You think I won’t have the command's blessing to do it?”
Then Amy speaks. Calm. Clear. Like a scalpel sliding between ribs.
“You’ll want to say that again,” she says, “for the record.”
Kanapa freezes.
The tiny red light of her recorder winks from just above her shoulder. She’s holding it up like a weapon, and gods help me, it might be more dangerous than any plasma rifle on this dirtball planet.
He turns his head toward her. Slowly. “Turn that off.”
“No,” she replies, cool as the night side of a moonshell.
We stand in a triangle of hell. Dust circling our boots like vultures. Varr shifts. Sira mutters something under her breath. I don’t move. Amy doesn’t blink.
Then Kanapa laughs. A sharp, jagged sound that slices the tension in half but leaves the anger bleeding underneath.
“Stand down,” he growls. “Scan and move.”
He turns on his heel and storms toward the nearest outbuilding, barking orders. The squad scatters like kicked dogs, too relieved to look confused.
Amy lowers her recorder, but she doesn’t speak.
I don’t either—not until we’re out of earshot, behind the hull of a wrecked crawler where the wind dies just enough to make room for words.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” I say.
She turns to me, blue eyes hot. “Not if I have a seven-foot tank walking next to me.”
The laugh punches out of me before I can stop it. Short. Loud. Unwelcome. It echoes off the stone and makes her smile. I hate how much I don’t hate it.
“I’m not your shield,” I say, the laughter dying quick.
“No,” she says, stepping closer. “You’re my proof.”
I blink. “What the hell does that mean?”
She shakes her head, almost soft. “You’ll figure it out.”
The wind picks back up. Something stings behind my eye ridge. Not dust. Something deeper.
She’s still looking at me. Not like I’m a threat. Not like I’m some Alliance grunt in a meat suit. But like I’m something she can use. Not in the dirty way—though her gaze does linger. No, like I’m a tool in her truth-telling kit. A wedge to pry open the lie we’re all standing on.
I hate that I want to know what she sees when she looks at me.
A shout cuts through the air—Kanapa barking for a sweep team. The moment fractures.
Amy gives me a small nod, and then she's gone—vanishing into the haze with her recorder raised and her shoulders squared like she’s not afraid of getting her bones ground to powder by the gears of this goddamn war machine.
She should be afraid.
And maybe I should be too.
But right now, all I can think about is the way her voice didn’t shake.
And how, for one flicker of a moment, mine did.