Page 34 of Fated in A Time of War
I stop dead.
Alliance insignia.
My throat locks. The crest is faded but I know it. Black iron triangles on crimson trim. The Forty-Seventh Vakutan Battalion. A unit I trained with before being reassigned. Brothers-in-arms. Dead here, choked in dust and silence, forgotten by the same Alliance that drilled loyalty into our bones.
I drop to one knee beside the nearest body, my claws trembling as I reach for the dog tag hanging loose around the desiccated throat. The chain snaps with a dry clink.
The name etched there is familiar.
“Kashir,” I rasp, voice barely more than breath. He taught me how to field-strip a rifle in the dark. He once pulled me out of a river when my armor weighed me down. Now he’s a husk on the floor of a rat tunnel.
My hands shake. Rage burns through my veins, acid sharp, clawing up my throat until I can taste it. My vision blurs, red seeping into the edges. I want to scream, to tear the walls down with my bare hands, to hunt every Ataxian alive and burn them to ash.
Instead, I bow my head.
The words come rough, guttural, in the old tongue of my people. A funerary phrase taught at the knee of my elders, whispered over pyres and graves.
“Varesh-kahn. Fire carry you, stone hold you. May the path beyond not be empty.”
The echo of it shudders through the chamber, swallowed by the bones and rust.
Behind me, Alice doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. Just stands in the shadows, watching. Her silence grates on me more than any sermon could.
“You think this is what your gods wanted?” I snarl suddenly, rounding on her, clutching the tag in my fist so hard the edges bite into my palm. “You think slaughter in the dark is holy?”
Her face doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t crack.
I bare my teeth, voice rising. “They were my kin. My brothers. Left to rot like animals in this pit. And you—your kind—call that sacrifice. Righteousness.”
Still nothing. Just those eyes, steady, infuriatingly calm, like she’s holding something I’ll never understand.
The rage boils higher, choking me. My claws flex on the rifle, itching to point it at her, to end that look.
But I don’t.
Instead, I turn back to the corpse, sliding the dog tag into my belt pouch. My chest heaves, my scales tight across my ribs, every breath like swallowing glass.
I whisper one more word to Kashir, low enough she can’t hear.
Then I rise and push forward into the dark, the taste of blood and fury thick in my mouth.
She follows. Silent still.
And I hate that her silence feels less like judgment… and more like understanding.
The city’s bones moan around us as we move, each step rattling old ferrocrete and rusted steel. My side throbs where shrapnel carved me open, but I keep the rifle high, eyes cutting every shadow like razors. Alice keeps pace—too close sometimes, too steady for someone who should be broken. I don’t call her out. I don’t need to. Her silence grates and steadies me in the same breath.
We push toward the shell of a police station, a squat bunker wedged between craters and shattered storefronts. I’ve heard the stories—Alliance whispers that the Tanuki enforcers kept a holonet terminal for “civic defense.” A backup line, buried deep, fireproof. If it’s still alive, it could get a signal through the jamming. Could mean extraction. Could mean vengeance.
Could mean hope.
I hate myself for thinking that.
The front doors are slagged, hanging like torn teeth. I motion her back, drop low, sweep the entry with the rifle’s underbarrel light. No movement. No heat signatures. Just the stink of charred plastics and long-rotted flesh.
“Stay put,” I grunt.
She doesn’t. Of course. While I clear the doorway, she kneels beside a collapsed sentry droid, the kind the enforcers left behind to police looters after the collapse. Its chest cavity is blackened, eyes dead. But she moves with sure hands, slipping wires free, pulling a core module.
