Page 6 of Fated in A Time of War

ALICE

I can feel every bruise, every scrape, like a map etched into my skin.

My wrists burn where the cable rubs, the chafing already warm with the first warning of a blister.

It’s crude, not military restraint—just scavenged cord, rough and unyielding—but it does the job.

My shoulders ache from being pinned too long in the same position.

I keep my breathing slow. Even. The Acolytes teach that stillness is a weapon, and patience its blade. My body wants to fidget, to twist for relief, but that would be surrender. I refuse to give him that.

Krall—the Vakutan—moves like a shadow made of iron. He’s not loud, but his presence fills the ruined bar the way a storm fills a sky. He assumes I’m a spy. Fine. Let him. Truth is too tangled to hand to a man like him, not when I don’t know whether he’d use it to free me or crush my skull.

I study him when he’s not looking. Red scales, matte where the light doesn’t catch them, glinting like embers where it does.

Black patterning down his arms and across his shoulders—predator’s markings.

Everything about him is built for the kill, from the claws he keeps flexing to the thickness of his neck.

I think back to the mech. The massacre. The split-second when the air turned white-hot, when steel screamed like dying animals.

I remember seeing him through the haze, cradling what was left of another Vakutan in his arms. His voice had been raw, tearing itself out of his throat in a way no performance could fake.

That grief was real.

And grief like that—rage like that—is easier to steer than suspicion. Anger blinds, and a blind man can be led anywhere.

Still… those eyes. I’d expected dull hatred, the kind born from propaganda, from years of being told what to think. But his burn like coals, fierce and alive, as though some deeper furnace is stoking them. He looks at me like I’m both the enemy and a puzzle he needs to smash open to understand.

And that—more than his strength, more than his claws—unsettles me.

I test the bindings the way I was taught—no tugging, no telegraphing.

A breath in, a breath out, tiny rotations of the wrists as if I’m just adjusting for comfort.

The cable bites the scabbed grooves on my skin and purrs with the faintest metallic rasp.

Whoever tied these knots knows what he’s doing.

Not just a straight cinch; there’s a locking hitch buried under a loop, and the tails are wrapped back and sealed with a strip of fusion-block tape warmed by his gauntlet until it cured into something like ceramic.

I flex, hunt for give. There is none. The pipe I’m tethered to is old but thick, cold sweating through the grime into my shoulder blade. Escape isn’t a plan.

So I watch.

The bar is a mausoleum that forgot to be quiet.

Wind sneaks through a crack near the ceiling and plays the broken beer signs like cheap chimes.

A fly throws itself at the cracked mirror in short, suicidal taps.

Dust motes drift in the slant of gray light from a hole in the roof, turning the air into a slow snowstorm of ash.

Everything here smells sour: mildew layered over smoke, over the iron tang of dried blood ground into the floor like old promises.

My jaw aches from where he had me gagged earlier; the cloth is around my neck now, slack and sweaty, tasting of salt and copper.

It slipped there while he was gone, sliding over my tongue with every shallow breath until it gave up and drooped to my collarbone.

I leave it. Better to look controlled than defiant. Better to look harmless than cornered.

Footsteps outside—heavy, then halting. The barricaded doorway complains. He shoulder-shoves it wider with a grunt and steps back in.

Krall looks worse than when he left, and somehow more alive.

There’s a new tear along his thigh plate, a blossom of heat-warped metal curling outward like a petal.

Blood—Vakutan-dark, almost black—is drying in streaks on his forearm.

He moves like a man who’s already spent today’s allotment of pain and has decided to borrow against tomorrow’s.

The room seems to cinch tight around him as he crosses it, all that mass and intent and grief dragged into one shape.

The air changes—hotter, louder, the way ocean feels when a wave is building that you can’t yet see.

He doesn’t look at me right away. He steps past, rifle in hand, scans the angles like he’s expecting the walls to develop teeth.

Then he stops in the middle of the floor and just…

stands. His breath saws, even through the helmet filters.

He presses his thumb against the edge of his gauntlet as if testing whether he’s still solid.

“Lakka,” he says.

The name hangs there a second, like a bell tone, finding every surface in the room and waking it.

“Guess you’re not answering, huh?”

He huffs a laugh—one note, flat and ugly. He isn’t talking to me. He’s talking to the air, to the memory that rode back in with him on his armor.

“You remember when they stuck us in the mud on Vech? You told me not to joke on the open channel because dignity mattered. Be dignified, Krall. It’s a war, Krall. Like the shells were gonna change trajectory out of respect.”

He rolls his shoulders, head tilted, as if listening for a response. The silence answers anyway.

“I should’ve been closer.” His voice drops, rumbles. “I know you’re going to say it’s not my fault. You always said that, even when it was. But I should’ve been closer.”

He doesn’t look at me when he says it. He’s somewhere else—the crater, the way the ground looked pulled inside out, the way one body looked smaller than another because it had been cut into fewer pieces.

I saw him there. I saw the way he folded around what remained and tried to bully the soul back into it.

The sound he made wasn’t language, and it wasn’t prayer.

It was the noise grief makes when it’s fresh and unashamed.

He drags in a breath that sounds like a torn canvas.

“And now I’m in a bar with a zealot who won’t talk,” he mutters. “You’d hate this. You’d tell me to slow down. To catalog. To be patient.” A humorless snort. “You’d have liked her patience. You always liked people who could shut up.”

He glances my way at last, a quick cut of gold irises through the helmet slit, and for an instant that furnace in his gaze licks up.

Then he looks away again. The hand not on the rifle opens and closes, claws tapping the knuckle plate.

Counting, maybe. Or measuring the distance between self-control and whatever comes after.

This isn’t just a soldier winding down after a sweep. This is a man clinging to a task because if he stops moving, the undertow will take him. Purpose as tourniquet. Duty as air.

My wrists throb where the cables bite. I flex my fingers, keep blood moving, and file away the knotwork. If I live long enough to need it, I’ll know where it will fail first. Not today.

Krall paces three steps to the left, three to the right, a penned animal refusing to believe in fences.

He checks the fused strip near the door with a glance, then swipes sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and smears blood across his temple without noticing.

The smell of him is heat and steel and that dark Vakutan scent like rain baking off red rock. It fills my head, thick as incense.

I hear my teachers in the orphanage chapel: wait until the heart is louder than the mind, then speak to the heart and the mind will listen. I never liked that lesson. Too tidy. But right now, his heart is a drum. His mind is drowning.

Timing is everything. I have one arrow to spend.

He mutters something too soft to catch—maybe another memory, maybe a curse—then sinks onto a bent stool. The metal complains under his weight. He lowers the rifle across his thighs, palm resting on the grip, finger off the trigger but close enough to kiss it.

I wait for his breath to settle into something like a rhythm. I keep my eyes down, not challenging. I let the room grow quiet enough that a single word will sound like mercy.

When I speak, it isn’t much. It isn’t a defense or a plea, not a sermon or a bargain. Just the only truth that matters right now, stripped to bone.

“I didn’t do it.”

My voice comes out softer than I intend, the words sliding over the raw places in my throat and finding their shape anyway.

He freezes.

The change is small, but inside small changes, whole worlds turn.

His jaw tightens, the hinge line sharpening.

A muscle jumps near his mouth. His hand curls around the pistol grip until the tendons show under scaled skin and the leather squeaks.

I can feel the room re-tilt, as if the planet has shifted its weight from one foot to the other and is deciding whether to step.

Then he exhales. Not a sigh. A letting go, as if something that had been coiled in him recognizes it can’t hold its shape forever.

His fingers loosen.

The spark in his eyes dims by a degree.

And there it is: the hairline fracture in the armor he’s been welding around himself since the blast. Not a crack big enough to crawl through. Not yet. But the beginning of one. The kind you tuck away for later, like a key you don’t show the guard.

I file it where it will be safe—under patience, beneath courage, far from hope.

Night comes in stages here. First, the gray drains from the sky leaking through the broken roof, replaced by a colorless absence that makes the edges of everything blur.

Then the wind changes—quieter, colder, carrying the smell of stone and old metal instead of smoke.

Finally, the darkness swallows even the glint off Krall’s armor, and the only light left is the memory of what the day did to us.

The bar has no power. No hum of refrigeration, no faint tick of wall-clocks.

Just the creak of the barricade in the doorway and the distant moan of air moving through dead buildings.

My breath fogs in the cold, turning my lips tacky with moisture.

I shift on the floor, the ache in my back sharpening with every minute.

Krall moves without sound—too much mass for stealth, yet he manages it anyway. A shadow peels from the wall, crouches beside me, and drops something in my lap.

A thermal blanket.

Thin, silver, crinkling under my fingers. It catches what little light there is and makes it look like I’m holding a shard of starlight. I glance up at him. He says nothing. Doesn’t linger. Just steps away, checks the fusion block tripwire he set earlier, and resumes his slow prowl of the room.

It’s not kindness. I know that. It’s strategy. Keeping me alive means keeping the chance of answers alive. The war machine doesn’t waste resources, even when they’re human. Especially when they’re human.

But it still tells me something: he doesn’t want me dead. Not yet.

The blanket is noisy, so I pull it over me carefully, making a tent of warmth over my knees. My fingers are already numb, and the heat blooms fast, crawling up my forearms, taking some of the ache with it.

I watch him as he circles the room. The constant checking, the weapon always a fraction away from ready.

He’s still bleeding from somewhere—there’s a new dark streak on his leg guard, glistening wet in the dim.

He hasn’t cleaned it. Maybe he can’t feel it.

Or maybe pain is just background noise for him now.

I could keep silent. Let the cold do its work on both of us until morning. But silence is a gamble, and I’ve already tested his patience. Better to drop another stone in the water, see where the ripples land.

“I’m a healer,” I say.

The words make his head turn, just slightly, like an animal catching the scent of something that doesn’t belong.

“I went out to find medicine.” I pause, letting the weight of it settle between us. “For a child. Bio-reactive exposure.”

I don’t lie. But I leave out everything else—the camp, Dr. Anderson, the refugee count. Let him think it was just me, moving through the ruins alone, chasing one small hope.

He doesn’t believe me. I can see it in the way his shoulders stay high, the way his gaze stays on me too long, like he’s reading the tremor in my breath for code.

“I would’ve said the same thing,” he mutters, finally. His voice is rough, low enough that it almost blends with the groan of the wind.

I smile—small, more to myself than to him. “I know.”

He huffs something that could almost be a laugh, if there were any humor left in him. But he doesn’t call me a liar. Doesn’t throw the blanket back in my face. That’s something. Not much. Not forgiveness. But progress.

I settle deeper under the crinkling silver. The cold is still here, just pushed to the edges for now. My wrists ache where the cable cuts into them, but the gag is gone. I can breathe without tasting fabric. I can talk without him forcing the words back down my throat.

Krall makes another lap around the room, checks the barricade one more time, then leans against the wall nearest the door. He doesn’t relax—just folds his arms, one boot crossed over the other, rifle propped within easy reach.

My eyes drift shut in the warmth.

I don’t let myself sleep easy. Even in dreams, I keep the picture of him close—how he moves, how he listens without admitting he’s listening, how that grief and rage keep twining together in his eyes.

I wonder what kind of man I’m tied to. And what will happen when he starts to listen.