I grit my teeth. “You don’t have to come.”
He grabs my wrist, not rough, but firm. “Yeah. I do. Because if you walk into that desert alone, youdie.And if that’s how this ends, I want to see it with my own damn eyes.”
I yank free. “Then suit up, warlord. We ride at dawn.”
He stares at me for a long time.
He nods. One sharp jerk of the chin.
“Let’s go find your fantasy machine,” he growls. “And maybe I’ll find the truth you keep burying.”
The wind’s already rising by the time we start assembling the team.
I watch the storm building over the Black Glass, a molten smear across the edge of the world. It pulses red and green, like it’s breathing. Like it’s waiting for us.
Kyldak doesn’t flinch. He never does.
He’s barking orders in Vakutan, his voice like gravel scraped through steel. Two lieutenants run off toward the crawler bays, and three others haul out crates of old weaponry and desert survival gear. He’s only bringing five.
The ones he trusts with his life. Which means none of them trustme.
That’s fine. I don’t need their loyalty. I just need their engines.
I move toward the central nav rig, the rusted-out transport hull we’ve been cannibalizing for weeks. I wired my cracked tablet into the central feed, patched old map code through Kyldak’s pulse-tracker, and overclocked a satellite core I bartered from a black-market drifter with a cybernetic jaw. It’s not pretty.
But it’s working.
The coordinates glimmer steady now. That Precursor site’s locked in like a beacon. All we have to do is reach it alive.
Kyldak strides over to where I’m hunkered down next to the nav hub. His armor’s half-on, the scarred plating catching moonlight. His shoulder joint, though, is still exposed. Frayed wire. Burned servo.
I nod at it. “You want that thing locking up in the middle of a sandquake?”
He grunts. “I’ll survive.”
I dig through my pouch and pull out a splice kit. “Let me look.”
He kneels, silent.
The moment his body shifts beside me, the air changes. It’s like the gravity in the room tilts. His heat, the scent of sweat and iron and somethingwildfills my nose. I ignore the way my breath skips.
He says nothing as I peel the scorched panel off his shoulder and start cleaning the connection points.
We work in silence for a while. The camp thumps in the background—metal-on-metal, shouted orders, low rumbles of engines being prepped for chaos. The kind of noise that makes your ribs feel hollow.
And still, it’s quiet between us.
Too quiet.
I glance up at him. “You don’t have to do this.”
He snorts. “Thought I made myself clear.”
“I mean the whole death march into legend thing,” I say, more softly. “You could… not.”
He doesn’t look at me. Just stares at the firelight flickering in the sand beyond.
I adjust a wire. The connector sparks, and he winces slightly. Not much. Just a twitch.
