Not night-cold—Tajss never really cools all the way, not even at night—but wrong. It bites through the pads of my fingers, thin and precise, like the chill of a med scanner pressed to bare skin.
I turn it over carefully. It is curved, no bigger than my palm. The edges are warped and blistered, scorched into twisted waves. The surface is a dull, burned gray, but under the soot there is a faint sheen—smooth, uniform, engineered. This is not Zmaj forging or Urr’ki. It is not like any human scrap I have ever seen.
“Do not touch it,” Rakkh growls.
A little late for that…
His hand closes around my wrist, not hard, but with a force that says he could crush bone with less effort than it takes to breathe. Heat sears my skin where his claws brush, a sharp contrast to the bitter chill of the metal.
“I am fine,” I say, even though my pulse has spiked hard enough to make me lightheaded.
His slit pupils narrow. “You do not know what it carries.”
He is not wrong. I do not. But…
“If it is poisoning the plants, I need to know how.”
I try to twist my wrist free, but he does not let go. His grip gentles instead, thumb pressing against the inside of my pulse point, feeling the frantic flutter there. His voice drops lower.
“You are more important than the answer.”
My breath snags. The shard suddenly feels heavier. Travnyk shifts outside, tusks catching moonlight as he leans around the side of the alcove.
“What have you found?” Travnyk asks.
“A piece of metal,” I answer, before Rakkh can shut me down.
Rakkh huffs, a rough exhale through his nose, but he releases my wrist slowly. His hand lingers a moment longer than necessary, claws tracing the air above my skin as if reluctant to let go.
“Show me,” Travnyk says.
I hold the shard where the Urr’ki can see it, careful not to let it drift too close to Rakkh. Travnyk’s brows draw together, his nostrils flaring as he inhales.
“It smells… wrong,” he murmurs. “Like burning stone and sour blood.”
“Comforting,” Tomas mutters from his perch on the outer rock. “Let’s just carry around a chunk of wrong.”
“You will not touch it,” Rakkh says without looking at him.
Tomas raises both hands. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I drag my focus back to the shard, forcing my thoughts into Calista-mode, Jolie-mode—observe, categorize, do not panic.
Small. Curved. Exterior plating, maybe. The scorch patterns radiate from the inside, like an explosion blew outward, blistering the surface, not something burning from the outside in. A faint residue crusts the edges—black and crystalline, like dried sap crossed with ash. I scrape a bit with my nail. It flakes away easily, and the smell makes my eyes water.
“Definitely synthetic,” I manage. “There is nothing on Tajss that smells like that.”
“Human?” Rakkh asks, leaning in, eyes narrowing.
I shake my head, throat burning.
“I do not think so. Human alloys have a different feel. More… grain to them. Calista showed me samples from the generation ship wreckage. This is smoother. Denser. And the burn pattern—” I swallow hard. “It is not like what we saw in the Bunker, or the old ship fragments I have handled. This is something else.”
“Something new,” Travnyk says quietly.
“Or something old that’s finally close enough to kill us,” Tomas mutters.
Rakkh’s tail lashes once against the stone, sending grit over Tomas’s boots.
