Page 38 of Deserted

“I can feel you strategizing,” I said, pressing a hand to his back.

He glanced down at me, a hint of surprise in his eyes. “The bond is strengthening. You’re adapting to it quickly.”

“Is that unusual?”

“For non-Rodinians, yes.” His tail curled around my ankle in that now-familiar gesture of possession and comfort. “It suggests the compatibility between us is…exceptional.”

A surge of warmth flowed through our connection—pride, affection, something deeper I wasn’t ready to name. It momentarily eclipsed the danger surrounding us, reminding me that amid all this chaos, we’d found something rare and precious.

The moment shattered as a mechanical whirring sound passed by our hiding place. Through a crack in the rocks, I glimpsed a tracker unit sliding past, its sensors pulsing with blue light. It paused, rotating as if tasting the air, then continued onward.

“They’ll double back,” Rhaekar murmured, his voice barely audible. “We have minutes, not hours.”

I nodded, swallowing back fear. “What’s the plan?”

“We wait for the main search group to move northwest, then we head east.” He pointed toward where the twin moons hung low on the horizon. “There’s a dried riverbed two miles in that direction. If we follow it south, it will lead us toward the outpost.”

“And put us farther from the Legion tech?”

His expression tightened. “No. The entire region is honeycombed with buried systems. But it will take them timeto activate units in other sectors. Time we can use to reach the outpost.”

I processed this, looking for angles he might have missed. “What if we used the tech against itself?” I suggested. “Create false trails, mislead the trackers?”

Interest sparked through our bond. “What do you have in mind?”

“You said they track biochemical signatures. What if we leave some of mine going in the wrong direction? Hair, skin cells, maybe even...” I hesitated, then pushed forward. “Blood. A few drops on some rocks heading northwest.”

Rhaekar studied me with new appreciation, the tactical part of his mind immediately grasping the strategy. “It could work. Confuse their tracking algorithms long enough for us to gain distance.”

We quickly assembled a decoy kit—strands of my hair wrapped around small stones that could be thrown, a cloth wiped across my forehead to collect sweat, and yes, three precious drops of blood from a small cut on my finger, smeared on a piece of fabric.

“This,” Rhaekar said, pressing his forehead to mine in a gesture that sent warmth rushing through our bond, “is why fate brought us together. You see solutions where others see only threats.”

The compliment settled in my chest like a physical weight. No one had ever valued my mind quite this way—as an equal partner in survival, not just someone to be protected.

When the sentinel units had moved far enough northwest, we slipped from our hiding place. Rhaekar deployed our decoys with precise calculation, creating a false trail that led away from our actual route. We then headed east as planned, keeping to hard rock when possible to minimize footprints, moving swiftly but cautiously through the night.

The bond between us served as an early warning system—his heightened senses detecting dangers before they became visible, my intuition filling in gaps his military training might overlook. We functioned as a seamless unit, communicating without words, anticipating each other’s movements with uncanny precision.

As we crested a rise that revealed the silvery line of the dried riverbed below, I cast one last look behind us. In the distance, the desert glowed with unnatural blue light, expanding outward from where we’d been. The Legion tech was fully awake now, searching, hunting.

Hunting me.

“We’ll make it,” Rhaekar said, reading my fear through our connection. His hand found mine, fingers interlocking. “Together.”

I squeezed his hand, drawing strength from the certainty in his voice, in his soul that now brushed against mine. The danger hadn’t lessened. If anything, it had grown. But so had we—becoming something stronger, more resilient, more determined than either of us had been alone.

“Together,” I agreed, and we descended toward the riverbed, the first step of many on our journey to safety.

14 /RHAEKAR

It started with a whine—high-pitched,unnatural. The shard pulsed beneath the containment mesh where I’d buried it deep in the sand, but it wasn’t deep enough. I felt it through the soles of my boots. Like the desert itself was snarling awake. Jas was nearby, hunched over her datapad, trying to extract meaning from Legion archives I hadn’t exactly granted her clearance for. Her hair was up in that chaotic knot she twisted it into when she was focused. Sweat beaded at her brow from the midmorning heat.

She looked beautiful. She looked doomed.

Because the shard responded to her.

It had been dormant—dead tech, by all visible scans. But the second she’d stepped near it that first day, it had surged with color. Pale green—Swarm protocol. Now, it pulsed again. And this time, the desert answered.

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