Page 16 of Fated in A Time of War

KRALL

I don’t sleep.

My back’s pressed to the cracked wall, cloak wrapped tight, rifle laid across my chest like an iron heartbeat.

My eyes stay pinned on the jagged hole that used to be a doorway, the skeletal city stretching black beyond it.

Every groan of metal in the night, every whisper of wind through broken pipes, every distant pop of gunfire makes my finger twitch on the trigger.

But my mind isn’t on the watch.

It’s on her.

Alice.

Her voice. Her hands. The way she moves through wreckage like she’s not afraid of being cut. Like she’s already accepted the pain. She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met—enemy, ally, or ghost.

And that terrifies me more than the Kru. More than the Ataxians. More than death itself.

I close my eyes, but she’s still there. That calm face in the firelight. Those blue eyes cutting through me when I’m trying to stare her down. The way she touches broken stone with reverence, like even ruins deserve respect.

I tell myself she’s the enemy. A threat. A liability I should’ve gutted and left to rot days ago. My gut laughs at me. My gut tells me she’s something else.

And my gut’s never been wrong.

When dawn finally cracks open the sky, it’s painted in bloody hues—red streaks over ash clouds, the kind of sunrise that feels more like a wound than a beginning.

I roll to my feet, body stiff, every cut and bruise reminding me I’m not steel, not stone.

Just flesh. Flesh that bleeds. Flesh that fails.

“Up,” I grunt, nudging her boot with mine.

She stirs, blinking awake, pulling her blanket tighter before folding it neat. Always neat, even in hell. She doesn’t complain. Doesn’t whimper. Just gets moving.

We slip out into the city’s carcass, weaving through collapsed tenements and gutted transit lines. The air tastes of rust and smoke, gritty in my mouth. Every step crunches over glass and bone.

Ahead sprawls a corridor of fallen bridges and shattered grav-trams, piled like children’s toys hurled by some god in a tantrum. Steel beams jut out at impossible angles, the air heavy with the stink of burnt plastics and old oil.

I raise my hand, signaling her to hold, then scout a path forward, rifle up, eyes sweeping every shadow. Habit. Instinct. Survival.

When I glance back, she’s right there. Close. Not trailing like a prisoner. Not lagging like dead weight. Walking beside me. Step for step.

And she doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t slow. Her eyes stay forward, steady, like this nightmare of a world is just another path she’s chosen.

I should tell her to fall back. To stay behind me where I can watch her. But the words stick like barbed wire in my throat.

Because it doesn’t feel wrong.

It feels… inevitable.

I grit my teeth, forcing my gaze forward, scanning wreckage for motion. “Stay sharp,” I mutter.

“I always do,” she answers, voice calm, even.

It shouldn’t settle me. But it does.

We keep moving, climbing over the husks of grav-trams, ducking under twisted girders, the silence between us thick but not the same as before. Not distrust. Not hostility. Something heavier. Something I don’t dare name.

Her shoulder brushes mine when the path narrows. Just a brush. Flesh against flesh. But it’s enough to make the whole world tilt sideways.

I growl under my breath and push ahead faster, needing distance, needing space, needing something to cut through the storm brewing in my chest.

Because this—her beside me, her calm like a blade pressed to my throat—this is more dangerous than any Kru merc, any Ataxian priest, any war.

This could unmake me.

The depot reeks of old grease and mildew, the kind of smell that sticks to your tongue like spoiled rations. Shelves slump against broken walls, crates half-smashed open, their contents picked clean by scavvers or burned in some long-past skirmish.

I move through the wreckage, boots crunching over broken glass and cracked ration packs. Alice trails close, quiet, her eyes scanning just like mine. Always scanning. She’s learning.

We dig through the mess for anything useful—protein bars gone stale but edible, a medkit missing half its injectors, a half-canister of purifier tabs. Survival scraps. Nothing more.

Then I find it.

Half-buried under a toppled locker, I drag free a helmet—Alliance issue, blackened with scorch marks, visor cracked. But the weight’s wrong. Heavier. I pop it open, and sure enough, there’s a comm relay wired into the backplate.

My pulse kicks.

“Finally,” I mutter, thumbing the power switch. The thing wheezes to life, static howling like a sandstorm in my ears.

I adjust the dials. Static. Try another frequency. Static. I slam the casing with my fist.

“Come on,” I snarl, jaw tight. “Just one signal. One goddamn signal.”

But it’s nothing. Empty. Dead air screaming at me louder than any enemy fire.

I rip the helmet off and hurl it against the ferrocrete wall. The visor shatters, shards skittering across the floor. The relay clatters apart in a tangle of fried wires.

“Useless,” I growl, chest heaving.

Alice doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t scold. She just crouches, picks up the pieces with her slender hands, and lays them out on the floor like bones for some ritual.

I watch her a moment, heat burning my chest. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Fixing it,” she says, calm as a winter stream.

“Fixing it?” I bark a laugh, bitter and sharp. “That thing’s fried. You’d need a full kit and a miracle.”

She doesn’t look up. Her fingers move quick, precise, stripping wires with a shard of glass, threading connections like she’s done this a thousand times.

I scowl. “What are you now, some kind of tech-gnome?”

She glances at me, eyes steady, voice quiet but cutting. “No one else would do it. So I learned.”

I freeze.

She goes back to work, matter-of-fact, as if she just said the sky was blue. But the words hit like shrapnel.

No one else would do it.

I think of the orphanage she spoke of before. Cold halls. Empty hands. A girl mending broken gear because nobody else gave a damn if it worked or not.

And suddenly, my own rage feels small. Petty.

Because I’ve been alone since Lakka died. Alone since his laugh cut off in smoke and fire.

But her?

She’s been alone since before she could walk.

The realization twists something inside me, raw and ugly. I wrap my cloak tighter, but it doesn’t stop the cold crawling up my spine.

“Here,” she murmurs after a long silence, holding up the relay. Rewired. Reassembled. She’s smeared with grease and blood, but her hands are steady.

I take it, rougher than I mean to, and slip it over my ear. Static floods through again—but beneath it, faint, there’s a pulse. A ghost of a frequency, like a heartbeat buried under sand.

Not clear. Not strong. But real.

I look at her.

She just wipes her hands on her torn trousers and shrugs. “Told you.”

I grunt, turning away, but my chest feels too tight. Too full.

Because the war hasn’t given me much.

But it’s given me her .

The city feels wrong tonight. Too still, too empty. No wind in the canyons of steel, no chatter of vermin skittering through the rubble. Just the kind of silence that makes your teeth ache, like the world is holding its breath.

We keep to the high ground, moving across a string of broken rooftops that once crowned a row of grav-tram depots.

The air tastes of dust and old ozone, that burnt tang left over from bombardments.

I keep my rifle raised, eyes on the horizon, ears straining for anything but the hollow slap of our boots.

Alice walks a pace behind me. Always there. Always steady.

The sky cracks open.

A deafening roar splits the air, and the heavens flare white as some forgotten artillery round finally finds its fuse. The blast slams into the far end of the rooftop, hurling debris and fire into the sky. The shockwave punches through me like a hammer.

Alice stumbles, her feet skidding on loose gravel. She teeters too close to the edge.

I don’t think. My hand shoots out.

I grab her wrist and yank her back, hard enough that she slams into me, her chest colliding with mine. My claws dig into the fabric of her sleeve as I hold her steady, both of us half-breathless from the blast.

We don’t move.

Her heartbeat is drumming against my chest, fast and light, like the patter of rain on steel. Her breath brushes my throat. My arm stays locked around her waist, pulling her closer than I mean to.

Her eyes meet mine.

Blue fire. Unflinching. Unrelenting. And for the second time in too short a span, the ground tilts beneath me in ways I can’t blame on artillery.

A strand of her hair’s fallen across her cheek, dusty gold in the fractured moonlight. My hand moves without my permission, rough fingers brushing it back, lingering a fraction too long against her temple.

“This is a bad idea,” I mutter, voice low, raw.

Her lips curve—just a little. “Most things worth doing are.”

I should shove her away. I should turn back to the war, to vengeance, to the duty that’s burned every other part of me hollow.

Instead…

I don’t let go.

Her hand comes up, slow, uncertain, settling against the line of my jaw. Warm. Steady. Terrifying.

And then she leans in.

The kiss is soft. Tentative. But gods, it’s electric. Sparks crawl through my nerves, setting every scar, every wound alight. It’s not hunger, not yet. It’s not surrender either. It’s something else. A truce carved in silence and breath. A fragile thing with teeth.

Her lips linger against mine, just long enough for me to know I’ll never forget the shape of them. Just long enough for the world to tilt, the stars to spin, and the weight of everything I’ve lost to feel… bearable.