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“Not again,” Kalindora whispers.
A dark smudge rolls across the desert behind the stampede.
“Sandstorm!” Cicero shouts. “Damn that man! Damn him! Everyone, to the bomber! That sand will shred us to the bone! Hurry!”
We bolt to our feet and run east toward the wreckage, but the Grays and I are falling behind. Kalindora tries to help me along, but with me weighing her down, she’ll never make it.
Uninjured, Cicero and his Golds chew up the kilometers with their rangy legs. They don’t even bother looking back for us. The wall of sand is close enough now that it seems to scrape the sky.
It swallows a dozen horses whole. I shove Kalindora away. “Go!” She bats my arms out of the way and lunges to try and pick me up with one arm. I back away from her. “Go!”
She glances at the encroaching wall, then back at me, with real fear in her eyes. For a moment, I think she will stay. Then she turns and sprints away, long strides making her bounce like a jackrabbit in the low gravity. I am left alone.
I face the wall, and grip Cassius’s razor as if it will save me. Everything has darkened. Dust obscures the sky. The Grays continue to try to make it to the bomber. They won’t. I search for some hiding place. Some boulder or wreckage to shelter behind. There is nothing. Nothing.
A cool certainty slides over me.
I race back the way we came and see dirt swirling over the hydra burrow’s entrance. It is wide enough for a Red, but not for me. Flattening my thumb against the shape sensor, I form the razor into a wide-mouthed falchion and chop furiously at the ground, expanding the hole’s circumference.
The wall is nearly upon me. I dive into the burrow at the last second. My shoulders clear, my hips stick. Ripping skin from my sides, I crawl into the darkness just as the wall hits.
THERE IS A MONSTER sharing the darkness with me. A dread creature I cannot see or hear for the howling darkness of the storm outside. I can sense it moving, judging the creature that has invaded its home.
I have never seen a hydra with my own eyes. Five hundred years ago, the Votum commissioned a sect of Lunese carvers to create them so that they might have something challenging to hunt. Some say the carvers were far too ambitious in their designs.
I lie trembling on my back, with my razor rigid and pointed outward from my belly as the hours creep past. They are the longest hours of my life. Especially when a mass of scales rested against my leg. The Hydra is digesting another meal.
When the storm finally passes, I hear a faint hissing, like dry skin dragged over tin. Very carefully, I slide backward out of the hydra’s burrow, keeping my razor pointed downward in case it decides to make a last-minute meal of me.
When I finally see the sun again, I stumble away from the hole and almost vomit from tension. Only when I am far enough away do I fall on my back and start to laugh and cry.
I never knew I’d be so happy to not be a hydra’s lunch.
After a half a minute, the sun begins to burn my face. I sit up and squint into the waste.
The playa is cleansed. Cacti sway like leftover shish-kebab sticks. No life stirs. No debris can be seen. The Grays have been swallowed by the desert. I make my way over to the bomber, now just a hump of sand, and call for Kalindora. There is no answer. Nor is there when I call for Cicero.
I dig through the sand and find nothing but two decaying Blue pilots, half-eaten by predators. They wear no insignia but a child’s face wreathed in serpents. Gorgons. This was one of Atlas’s bombers.
The hold is empty. The magazines have ruptured inward. Unfired missiles lie in the hold. A ration bar wrapper lies on the floor. One of ours. Outside the bomber, I find indentations in the sand, indicating the passage of a shuttle. A spent railgun battery lies on the ground.
Not one of ours. Sun Industries tech.
I squint south and see the shuttle as a dot racing for Heliopolis. Kalindora must be on it. Another captive for the Rising.
I go back inside the bomber and collapse in the hold amongst the unfired missiles. I lie there forlorn until I fall asleep. When I wake, my loneliness in the silence is absolute.
Pytha knew this was coming.
But I believed the myth of war.
Worse, I thought myself special. Immune to the horrors lesser men face.
Diomedes was right. All men are tiny before the storm.
There is nothing but pain from my ruined face and deep, indescribable exhaustion. Seraphina is dead. The alliance may be broken because of it. My Praetorians rotting or captured. The tears sting my wounds as I weep. Why did I betray Cassius? For this? Why did I return to this horrible place?
My hopes of a united Gold, of peace, now seem so laughable.
