Page 47 of Fated in A Time of War
The first thing I know is silence.
Not the battlefield kind, heavy with smoke and blood and the static hiss of comms. Not the haunted silence of after, when the guns stop but the screaming inside doesn’t. This one’s different. Softer. Almost… dangerous in its gentleness.
I blink awake to the fractured light filtering through the jagged ceiling of the mag-train husk. Dust motes drift like lazy embers, spinning in a shaft of pale morning glow. My weapon’s still across my chest, my claws flexed against the grip even in sleep. But the pressure at my side isn’t steel.
It’s her.
Alice.
She’s curled in close, head tilted against my shoulder, her body wrapped small as if the whole war outside could be kept at bay by the cage of my arm. Her breath comes slow, even, brushing faint warmth against my throat.
Something inside me stirs in response. A thing I thought I buried with Lakka in the mud.
Protectiveness, yes. That I know. It’s instinct, drilled deep: guard your flank, cover your squad. But this isn’t that. It’s notduty. Not obligation. It’s heavier. Stranger. A pull that feels less like choice and more like gravity.
Longing.
Not just for her body—though the closeness of it sets my blood thrumming—but for something more dangerous. Something existential.
I want her here.
The thought alone makes me grind my teeth. I force my gaze away, staring at the fractured walls, the corroded steel ribs overhead. I can’t let softness take root. Not here. Not now. Softness gets you killed. Softness gets her killed.
Slowly, I ease my arm out from around her. She shifts in her sleep, frowning for half a second before settling again, and the look of it nearly undoes me. I stand, pulling my rifle into ready position, because motion is safer than stillness. Duty safer than longing.
The wreckage creaks as I slip outside, boots crunching over brittle glass and warped ferrocrete. Morning hits me with a dry slap—sun glaring through the smoke-haze, painting the horizon in bruised reds and sulfur yellows. The air tastes like rust and burnt wires.
I climb a bent strut and scan the city’s corpse. Ahead, the path winds toward Tanuki’s industrial core, a stretch the locals once called the Graveworks. From here, I can already see the silhouettes—mountains of rusted mech frames stacked like bones, spires of half-collapsed cranes clawing at the sky. It looks like the skeleton yard of dead gods, frozen mid-battle and left to rot.
Perfect place to vanish. Perfect place to be hunted.
Either way, that’s where we’re going.
I drop back into the shadows of the mag-train, eyes flicking once more to her. She’s waking now, rubbing at her face, blinking against the light like some half-starved creature findingwarmth for the first time. And gods help me, I want to tell her not to move. Not yet.
But instead, I growl, low and practical.
“Up. We move. Graveworks by nightfall.”
She nods without question, gathering her pack, quiet as a shadow. No argument or resistance. Just that strange calm that gnaws at me worse than defiance ever could.
I check the rifle’s mag, sweep the chamber, and take point. The Graveworks await, and with them—whether salvation or slaughter—I don’t yet know.
But I do know this, the danger I feel at my side isn’t just from Kru mercs or scavenger gangs.
The Graveworks stretch out like the carcass of a dead civilization, rust gnawing every surface, silence pressing heavy on the lungs. The air’s thick with the taste of copper and old ozone, like the ghosts of a thousand battlefields breathed out and settled here to rot. We move slow, careful, boots crunching on brittle slag and twisted steel. Every step echoes too loud in my ears.
Alice walks beside me, light on her feet, almost too light. She moves through the wreckage with this strange kind of reverence, like she’s gliding through a graveyard instead of crawling over the bones of dead machines. She pauses by the husk of a walker—its legs snapped clean, its cockpit ripped open—and lays her hand against the rusted hull.
She whispers.
Just one word. A name. I can’t catch all of it, but the sound of it cuts deeper than I expect. Not a prayer. Not supplication. It’s… respect. For the dead, the machine or whatever poor bastard got torn out of that cockpit when it fell.
Something in my chest shifts sideways, hard enough to make me growl under my breath. She’s the enemy. She shouldn’t care about our wrecks. Shouldn’t touch them like they meansomething. But she does. And it gets under my scales worse than shrapnel.
I keep moving, rifle up, sweeping the heaps for motion. The Graveworks are a labyrinth of steel corpses—walkers piled on grav-trams, bombed-out haulers slumped against each other like drunkards. Shadows coil in the hollows, too many places for mercs or gangs to hole up. Every gust of wind sets some loose panel clattering, a sound sharp as a blade in this silence. My claws twitch against the trigger.
By late afternoon, the haze thickens, smoke-stained sun hanging low. My gut says we need cover before night falls. Too exposed here, too many sightlines. That’s when I see it—a collapsed drop tank, half-sunk into slag, its cannon sheared off and its hull cracked open like a ribcage.
