Page 14 of Fated in A Time of War
I keep my breathing slow. Even. The Acolytes teach that stillness is a weapon, and patience its blade. My body wants to fidget, to twist for relief, but that would be surrender. I refuse to give him that.
Krall—the Vakutan—moves like a shadow made of iron. He’s not loud, but his presence fills the ruined bar the way a storm fills a sky. He assumes I’m a spy. Fine. Let him. Truth is too tangled to hand to a man like him, not when I don’t know whether he’d use it to free me or crush my skull.
I study him when he’s not looking. Red scales, matte where the light doesn’t catch them, glinting like embers where it does. Black patterning down his arms and across his shoulders—predator’s markings. Everything about him is built for the kill, from the claws he keeps flexing to the thickness of his neck.
I think back to the mech. The massacre. The split-second when the air turned white-hot, when steel screamed like dying animals. I remember seeing him through the haze, cradling what was left of another Vakutan in his arms. His voice had been raw, tearing itself out of his throat in a way no performance could fake.
That grief was real.
And grief like that—rage like that—is easier to steer than suspicion. Anger blinds, and a blind man can be led anywhere.
Still… those eyes. I’d expected dull hatred, the kind born from propaganda, from years of being told what to think. But his burn like coals, fierce and alive, as though some deeper furnace is stoking them. He looks at me like I’m both the enemy and a puzzle he needs to smash open to understand.
And that—more than his strength, more than his claws—unsettles me.
I test the bindings the way I was taught—no tugging, no telegraphing. A breath in, a breath out, tiny rotations of the wrists as if I’m just adjusting for comfort. The cable bites the scabbed grooves on my skin and purrs with the faintest metallic rasp. Whoever tied these knots knows what he’s doing. Not just a straight cinch; there’s a locking hitch buried under a loop, and the tails are wrapped back and sealed with a strip of fusion-block tape warmed by his gauntlet until it cured into something like ceramic. I flex, hunt for give. There is none. The pipe I’m tethered to is old but thick, cold sweating through the grime into my shoulder blade. Escape isn’t a plan.
So I watch.
The bar is a mausoleum that forgot to be quiet. Wind sneaks through a crack near the ceiling and plays the broken beer signs like cheap chimes. A fly throws itself at the cracked mirror in short, suicidal taps. Dust motes drift in the slant of gray light from a hole in the roof, turning the air into a slow snowstormof ash. Everything here smells sour: mildew layered over smoke, over the iron tang of dried blood ground into the floor like old promises.
My jaw aches from where he had me gagged earlier; the cloth is around my neck now, slack and sweaty, tasting of salt and copper. It slipped there while he was gone, sliding over my tongue with every shallow breath until it gave up and drooped to my collarbone. I leave it. Better to look controlled than defiant. Better to look harmless than cornered.
Footsteps outside—heavy, then halting. The barricaded doorway complains. He shoulder-shoves it wider with a grunt and steps back in.
Krall looks worse than when he left, and somehow more alive.
There’s a new tear along his thigh plate, a blossom of heat-warped metal curling outward like a petal. Blood—Vakutan-dark, almost black—is drying in streaks on his forearm. He moves like a man who’s already spent today’s allotment of pain and has decided to borrow against tomorrow’s. The room seems to cinch tight around him as he crosses it, all that mass and intent and grief dragged into one shape. The air changes—hotter, louder, the way ocean feels when a wave is building that you can’t yet see.
He doesn’t look at me right away. He steps past, rifle in hand, scans the angles like he’s expecting the walls to develop teeth. Then he stops in the middle of the floor and just… stands. His breath saws, even through the helmet filters. He presses his thumb against the edge of his gauntlet as if testing whether he’s still solid.
“Lakka,” he says.
The name hangs there a second, like a bell tone, finding every surface in the room and waking it.
“Guess you’re not answering, huh?”
He huffs a laugh—one note, flat and ugly. He isn’t talking to me. He’s talking to the air, to the memory that rode back in with him on his armor.
“You remember when they stuck us in the mud on Vech? You told me not to joke on the open channel because dignity mattered. Be dignified, Krall. It’s a war, Krall. Like the shells were gonna change trajectory out of respect.”
He rolls his shoulders, head tilted, as if listening for a response. The silence answers anyway.
“I should’ve been closer.” His voice drops, rumbles. “I know you’re going to say it’s not my fault. You always said that, even when it was. But I should’ve been closer.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says it. He’s somewhere else—the crater, the way the ground looked pulled inside out, the way one body looked smaller than another because it had been cut into fewer pieces. I saw him there. I saw the way he folded around what remained and tried to bully the soul back into it. The sound he made wasn’t language, and it wasn’t prayer. It was the noise grief makes when it’s fresh and unashamed.
He drags in a breath that sounds like a torn canvas.
“And now I’m in a bar with a zealot who won’t talk,” he mutters. “You’d hate this. You’d tell me to slow down. To catalog. To be patient.” A humorless snort. “You’d have liked her patience. You always liked people who could shut up.”
He glances my way at last, a quick cut of gold irises through the helmet slit, and for an instant that furnace in his gaze licks up. Then he looks away again. The hand not on the rifle opens and closes, claws tapping the knuckle plate. Counting, maybe. Or measuring the distance between self-control and whatever comes after.
This isn’t just a soldier winding down after a sweep. This is a man clinging to a task because if he stops moving, the undertow will take him. Purpose as tourniquet. Duty as air.
My wrists throb where the cables bite. I flex my fingers, keep blood moving, and file away the knotwork. If I live long enough to need it, I’ll know where it will fail first. Not today.
Krall paces three steps to the left, three to the right, a penned animal refusing to believe in fences. He checks the fused strip near the door with a glance, then swipes sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and smears blood across his temple without noticing. The smell of him is heat and steel and that dark Vakutan scent like rain baking off red rock. It fills my head, thick as incense.
