Page 41 of Fated in A Time of War

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, needingsomethingto 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. Butthe 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.