Page 33 of Fated in A Time of War
I blink, surprised, and before I can stop myself, I let out the smallest laugh.
His eyes cut to me, sharp, warning—but there’s no heat in it. Just… fragility.
He continues, slower, hesitant, like every word costs him blood. “He laughed too loud. You could hear him through the barracks walls. Always thought he was funny. Joked about the rations, the drills, the brass. Thought if you smiled through enough, it stopped mattering how bad it was.”
Krall’s hands curl, his claws scraping faintly against the broken floor. His voice drops lower.
“He believed in the regs. Followed ‘em like scripture. Drove me insane. I’d bend the rules, he’d haul me back. Said if one Vakutan cut corners, the whole line suffered. He never… never gave up on me. Even when I gave up on myself.”
The silence that follows is heavy. Not dead, not empty. Heavy with something alive. Something aching.
I keep my voice soft, steady. “He sounds like he loved you more than he loved the regs.”
Krall doesn’t answer. His throat works, his gaze locked on the far wall, but I see the muscle ticking in his jaw. He’s holding something back.
I let the quiet breathe before I speak again.
“I lost a child once.” The words scrape coming out, but I force them past the lump in my throat. “A boy, seven years old. Skin blistered from exposure, lungs drowning in his own blood. I did everything—medsprays, chants, even prayed to gods I don’t know if I believe in. He died in my arms.”
Krall’s eyes flick to me, sharp and searching. I don’t look away.
“I almost quit that night,” I whisper. “Almost walked out of the shelter and didn’t come back. But then I thought—if I quit, who’s left? Who fights for the ones nobody else sees? The ones too small, too broken, too inconvenient?”
Krall doesn’t look away.
Helooks at me.
Like… something else. Something raw.
The lamp between us pops, flares for a second, shadows stretching over his scarred face. His eyes catch the light, molten and unreadable. My chest tightens under the weight of his stare.
Then movement breaks the spell—small, clumsy, accidental. We both reach for the same thermopack lying between us. My hand grazes his. Warm, calloused, scaled.
For half a heartbeat, neither of us pulls back.
His skin is rough, mine trembling. The contact is nothing, everything.
I slip my fingers away, tucking them into my lap. He grips the pack, muttering something low, guttural, almost like a curse under his breath.
Neither of us mentions it.
But the air feels different now. Denser. Charged.
I stare into the flickering flame, heartbeat uneven. He sits across from me, chewing the ration in silence, but I feel it too strongly to ignore.
A connection. Fragile. Dangerous. Growing all the same.
CHAPTER 11
KRALL
The air down here is stale and wet, like something rotted and never left. Every breath tastes of metal and mildew, the subway walls sweating with condensation that drips onto my scales, cold as knives. My boots crunch on bone fragments and shattered ferroglass, the sound echoing too loud in the drowned tunnels. Alice follows a few paces behind, quiet as a shadow.
I keep the rifle up, sweeping corners, pulse hammering like a war drum. The silence of this place gnaws at me harder than gunfire would. At least with fire, with screams, you know where the enemy stands. Down here, it feels like the walls themselves are watching.
I still don’t trust her. Can’t. Every part of me screams she’s the enemy—Ataxian, acolyte, zealot. But gods help me, there’s something in her presence that settles me, like a stone in the hand. Solid. Real. And that calm of hers—it burrows under my armor, maddening in its quiet refusal to break.
We turn a corner and the stink hits harder, sour and old. The tunnel widens, the ferrocrete buckled inward by some ancient blast. The floor is littered with corpses—what’s left of them.Mummified in dust, flesh shrunken to brittle leather, uniforms stiff with time.
