Page 32 of Fated in A Time of War

KRALL

T he walk back feels longer than it should.

Not because of the distance. Because of the silence.

Not a soul stirs in the trees. No birds. No vermin. Just the wind, slithering low through the brush, dragging smoke behind it like a funeral train. The tower’s still burning behind us, staining the sky a dull orange. We don’t look back. Neither of us says a word.

Alice holds my arm like she might break if she lets go.

Her fingers, smudged with ash, clutch my bicep tight.

I keep my pace slow, steady, trying not to limp.

My ribs grind every time I breathe, and there’s a gash along my flank that hasn’t stopped bleeding.

Doesn’t matter. If she can walk, so can I.

When the camp finally crests into view, my gut goes cold.

Or what’s left of the camp.

The walls—those patchwork defenses of metal and sweat and desperation—are gone. Flattened. Twisted beams and burnt fabric flutter in the breeze. Where the north trench once zigzagged through the ground, there’s a crater the size of a dropship impact zone. Glassed earth, still warm, still smoking.

Orbital strike.

That’s what did this.

Not a battle. Not a fight.

Execution.

I feel Alice slow beside me, her breath catching sharp in her throat. Her hand tightens on my arm. I place mine over hers.

We move forward together, past blackened scaffolds, broken stretchers, and splintered crates. The med tent’s gone. The command post? Just a scorch mark. Every step feels like a punch to the chest.

Then I see it.

A coat.

Small. Torn. Burned around the hem, but I recognize the faded orange dye. It belonged to the boy who gave me that rusted screwdriver three days ago. He’d been missing his front teeth, smiled like he didn’t know how to be afraid.

Alice sees it too.

She lets go of my arm, steps forward slowly, like approaching a ghost. Her hands hover over the fabric, fingers trembling. Then she sinks to her knees.

There’s no blood. No bodies. Just remnants. A boot. A shattered communicator. Scorch lines where people used to stand.

The Kru didn’t just want to destroy the tower.

They wanted to make sure we had nothing left to come back to.

Alice bows her head.

Her lips move—no sound, just breath and rhythm. I know the cadence. I’ve heard it before, long ago, in Ataxian temples lit by blue flame and sand-baked incense. She’s praying.

I don’t know the words. Don’t need to. The weight of them is in her shoulders, in the way she curls forward like the air’s too heavy to carry. I kneel beside her.

We stay like that for a while. In the middle of wreckage, heads bowed, the wind howling soft through the ruins.

At last, she speaks.

“They were just—trying to live,” she says, voice cracking. “They weren’t fighters. Most of them didn’t even want to choose a side.”

I don’t know what to say. No words fit.

“They didn’t have to die like this.”

She turns to me, eyes red and wet and furious.

“This wasn’t a battle. It was a message.”

I nod once. “I know.”

“They were warning us.”

“Then let’s answer.”

She stares at me a moment longer, breathing hard. Then she rises, brushing soot off her knees. Her spine straightens.

I stand with her.

We move like ghosts through the wreckage.

No talking. No questions. Just the sound of rubble shifting under our boots, the brittle crunch of bones ground to ash, the occasional whine of wind slipping through crumpled metal.

The smell is the worst part—charred plastic, old blood, burnt flesh cooked into the dirt. I try to breathe through my mouth, but it doesn’t help. It’s in my throat, my eyes, caked in my scales. Every inch of this place stinks of death.

We don’t say what we’re looking for. We just... look. Like if we dig hard enough, we might find something still living under all this ruin.

And we do.

Near what’s left of the command shelter, half-buried in a pile of carbon-scored stone, I find it—Anderson’s ID tag. The metal is scorched, the nameplate bubbled and warped, but it’s still readable. “ARNOLD ANDERSON.” I brush soot off it with my thumb, then hold it up to the light.

Alice stops behind me. Doesn’t say anything.

“He didn’t run,” I mutter. “Could’ve. But he didn’t.”

I dig a shallow pit in the dirt with my claws, then wedge the tag beneath a jagged chunk of concrete. No marker. No words. Just something solid to keep it from blowing away. It’s not enough. Nothing would be.

When I stand, Alice’s face is pale, streaked with grime. She doesn’t meet my eyes.

She holds something in her hands—a worn satchel, the strap nearly torn through. Her satchel. She opens it, slowly, fingers trembling.

Inside, sealed packs of antibiotics. Burn ointments. Two auto-injectors. A wrapped surgical kit. All untouched. Untouched.

The breath rattles out of her lungs. A choked sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sob.

“Still good,” she whispers. “Still sealed.”

I look at the bag, then at the camp—what’s left of it. All those people. All that fighting. All for this. Medicine that survived when they didn’t.

“Cruel joke,” I mutter.

She doesn’t argue.

I step closer and lay a hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. She leans into the touch for half a second, then straightens, mouth set in a grim line.

I nod toward the hills beyond the cratered ridge. “We’re leaving.”

No argument. No delay.

She just nods back, silent, shoulders squared.

We hike through the cracked remains of the valley, past burnt vehicles and fallen trees stripped bare by orbital heat. By midday, we reach the canal—the dry riverbed that used to carry runoff from the city’s ancient purification plants.

And there, like a carcass sprawled in a gully, is the Kru transport.

The same one that brought her in.

Half its armor is gone, peeled away like dead skin. One of the rear thrusters is melted into slag. But the frame’s intact. And if there’s a frame, there’s a chance.

I set to work without a word.

Alice watches me crawl under the engine block, claws scraping at rusted panels. I pop open a maintenance hatch and start tracing wires with the tip of my finger. The smell of singed polycarbon and stale coolant hits me like a punch. My eyes water, but I keep going.

Every connection I test, every fuse I flip, I do with one thing in mind—get her out of here.

She deserves out.

I’ve spent most of my life tearing things apart. Killing. Breaking. This... this is different. This is building. Repairing. And I don’t hate it.

She kneels beside me after a while, laying the satchel down. “Fuel cells?” she asks.

“Two of ‘em intact. Third’s leaking. If I bypass the secondary converter, we can get lift, maybe half a day’s worth.”

She nods. “I’ll patch the rupture in the coolant line. You’re still bleeding, by the way.”

I glance down. Sure enough, my shoulder’s slick with blood—dull red against soot-black scales. A jagged shard’s still embedded near the collarbone.

“Huh. Didn’t notice.”

“Lie still.”

She digs into the satchel, pulls out a pair of gloves and the surgical kit. Her hands are steady. Focused. She’s good at this—too good. You don’t get this precise without doing it too many times.

I watch her face as she works. Eyes narrowed. Brows furrowed. Lips pressed in a tight, determined line. The kind of face that belongs to someone who’s had enough taken from her and refuses to lose one more thing.

When the shard’s out and the wound’s stitched, she tapes it with industrial gauze and leans back.

“All set,” she mutters.

“Thanks,” I say, quieter than I mean to.

She nods and sits beside me, stretching out her legs. The canal wall’s behind us, half-collapsed, giving just enough shade. We sit in it, pressed shoulder to shoulder, and for a long minute, we don’t speak.

The world hums around us—wind whistling through the fractured plates, the faint buzz of a still-hot circuit, distant thunder that might be another strike or just a storm rolling in. Doesn’t matter.

Eventually, I say, “We get airborne, where do we go?”

She doesn’t answer right away.

Then: “Somewhere they’re not.”

“Long list.”

“Shorter than it used to be.”

I turn my head, watching the way the light catches in her hair—still streaked with dust, but beautiful all the same.

“Still with me?” I ask.

She turns too, meeting my gaze.

“Always.”

Night falls heavy over the canal’s edge, but inside the transport—our battered ship, half-buried, half-fired through the bones of Kru—there’s a hush unlike anything I’ve known. The engines quiet. The low hum of reactivated cells fades to a still heartbeat. We’re safe. For now.

My back aches with every breath, still tender from her needle and my landing on the mech.

I feel the faint grit of ash and dust on my skin, the lingering sting of sweat dried into salt.

When Alice slides in beside me on the narrow bunk, she presses close enough that I feel the heat of her body seep into mine.

Her hair, tangled and dusky with grime, rains warm shadow across my collarbone.

She doesn’t say anything at first. She just lets her head fall against my chest, and I lean into it. Her breath warms the scar there—a souvenir from Ornos Valley, where I nearly died for her. Just feeling her next to me, human and real, is more than comfort. It’s alive.

We stay tangled in that dark, cramped space—not from desperation, but from need.

A need to feel skin against skin, to know this isn’t a dream.

I carry every scar across my chest and arms, but in that moment, the only thing that matters is the softness of her curves pressed against me.

She slides against me, every motion reverent, every breath shared.

I have never been so gentle. Never felt more sure.

When my body tenses, a whisper in the dark—her name. Her name anchors me. And when I pull away, our breaths tangled, I see it in her eyes: recognition that we’re still more than fighters. We’re human. Still.

Her fingers trace the raised lines and scars across my ribcage—tales of war, of wounds, of survival written into flesh. I stiffen at each touch, but don’t pull away.

“North flank,” I murmur. “South ridge. Those were the first.” My voice echoes in the hush; I’m giving her pieces of my history I’ve never spoken aloud. “One in the charcoal fields. Another where we ambushed the supply convoy.”

She presses a kiss to the nearest nick of flesh. “You didn’t have to tell me,” she says.

I shake my head. “You earned it.”

She digs into the corner of her pack and pulls out the syringe from my armor—blood still dried on the tip. Her fingers brush mine.

“My turn.” She names the children she couldn’t save, not in detail, but with quiet dignity. She wraps each name around my heart like a lifeline. No tears fall. Just voices speaking truth.

We lie like that for a while, memories and heat tangled between us. Above us, the viewport is cracked—city dust dusting the outer glass. The sky is cold, gray with starlight filtered through smoke. But inside, warmth pulses between us like a living thing.

After everything, we’re still here. Together. Not doomed. Not broken. Just real. And that might be enough to carry us forward.