“You’re going to get yourself killed,” I say.
She turns to me, blue eyes hot. “Not if I have a seven-foot tank walking next to me.”
The laugh punches out of me before I can stop it. Short. Loud. Unwelcome. It echoes off the stone and makes her smile. I hate how much I don’t hate it.
“I’m not your shield,” I say, the laughter dying quick.
“No,” she says, stepping closer. “You’re my proof.”
I blink. “What the hell does that mean?”
She shakes her head, almost soft. “You’ll figure it out.”
The wind picks back up. Something stings behind my eye ridge. Not dust. Something deeper.
She’s still looking at me. Not like I’m a threat. Not like I’m some Alliance grunt in a meat suit. But like I’m something she can use. Not in the dirty way—though her gaze does linger. No, like I’m a tool in her truth-telling kit. A wedge to pry open the lie we’re all standing on.
I hate that I want to know what she sees when she looks at me.
A shout cuts through the air—Kanapa barking for a sweep team. The moment fractures.
Amy gives me a small nod, and then she's gone—vanishing into the haze with her recorder raised and her shoulders squared like she’s not afraid of getting her bones ground to powder by the gears of this goddamn war machine.
She should be afraid.
And maybe I should be too.
But right now, all I can think about is the way her voice didn’t shake.
And how, for one flicker of a moment, mine did.
CHAPTER 11
AMY
This was supposed to be routine.
Just a godsdamned patrol. Same dusty canyon. Rust-pitted ridges and wind like a blade across your face. I was already drafting the headline in my head—“Another Day in the Alliance’s Backyard.”Snappy. Hollow. Safe.
Then the world exploded.
The first shot whines past my ear so close it feels like a kiss from death. The second tears a hole in the air where Sira had been walking, and she’s gone—just gone, like the wind swallowed her whole.
“AMBUSH!” someone shouts. Probably Varr.
I hit the ground hard enough to taste metal in my mouth. My recorder flies from my hands and clatters into the dust like a dying beetle, its lens cracked and blinking at me like an injured eye. The canyon becomes a cacophony—screams, energy discharges, rocks raining from above. The ground kicks beneath me, a dirty tantrum of shockwaves and shrapnel.
Something slams into my back—body, maybe debris—I don’t know. I’m rolled in dirt and adrenaline, vision strobing with flashes of blue fire and red mist.
Move, Amy. Get up. Get the hell up.
My limbs feel like they belong to someone else. Someone softer. Someone stupider. I crawl, scraping hands and knees on shattered stone, gravel biting deep into the skin through my synth-weave jacket.
“Matthews!” a voice roars. Not my name—my whole spine.
Darun.
I turn my head and there he is—cutting through the smoke like a god of war, his bulk swallowing light, plasma rifle barking death. His mouth moves—orders I can’t hear over the blood thudding in my ears—but I see the panic in his eyes. Not for himself. For me.
