Page 40 of Fated in A Time of War

He’s lying. To himself, if not to me.

I roll onto my side, pulling my thermal blanket tighter around me. The cold bites through, but I hardly notice. My thoughts are warmer than the night.

The Jalshagar isn’t a tale. I feel it in my bones, in the marrow-deep certainty that when our eyes met in that tunnel, something shifted. Fate doesn’t ask permission. Doesn’t wait for belief. It simply is.

There’s still a long road ahead. His walls are high, his anger higher. But the path has shifted. I can see it now, bright as starlight through ruin.

We’re no longer just enemies forced to survive side by side.

We’re something else.

Something inevitable.

CHAPTER 13

KRALL

Idon’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.