His pupils narrow. His breathing hitches.
“It reacts to you,” he says softly. “Look.”
A faint violet glow blooms where my fingers brushed the surface. My stomach flips.
“It is… reading me?” I whisper.
“Or recognizing,” Travnyk murmurs. “Stories tell of old tech that sometimes carries memory.”
“Whose memory?” Tomas chokes out.
The dunes around us go silent again. The wind dies. The world holds its breath. Rakkh leans closer, voice barely audible.
“Not yours,” he says. “Not mine. Not any species we know.”
A chill sweeps through me.
“We have to find the crash,” I breathe. “Before it gets worse.”
Rakkh looks up at the horizon—the endless dark dunes, the jagged rocks like broken teeth—and sets his jaw.
“We will.”
The violet glow fades into the metal again, dying completely. And as it does, the dune behind us shifts. Not quietly or slowly. Something enormous rises beneath the sand. Travnyk hisses. Tomas screams. Rakkh throws an arm across me and snarls?—
“Move!”
The dune explodes upward. Sand rains down. A shadow unfolds like a living nightmare.
I know this was not waiting for us. It was guarding something.
7
LIA
Sand hits my face like a thousand tiny knives.
I duck instinctively, arms up, blinking through the spray. The dune erupts, splitting open from within as something vast heaves its way out of the ground. A choked gasp tears from my chest as the whole world shakes.
Rakkh’s arm clamps around me before I can fall. Hard. Immovable. His body is between me and the rising monster without hesitation, wings flaring wide to shield me from the rain of sand.
“Do not run. Stay close,” he snarls, voice vibrating through his chest and into my bones.
As if I can do anything else. There is no part of me that is not anchored to him in this moment.
Travnyk’s tusks flash as he lunges sideways, blade drawn, stance low and ready. Tomas is not nearly as composed. He stumbles back, screaming, barely catching himself before he collapses completely.
And the thing—stars above. It rises from the sand like some ancient god climbing out of the underworld. Not a burrower like the one before. This is bigger. Broader. Its hide glistens with an oily shimmer in the moonlight, scales shifting like liquid metal. A ridge of spines flares along its back, glowing faintly with that same violet light that pulsed beneath my fingers on the metal panel.
My breath catches. It matches. The glow. The color. This creature is tied to the metal. To the crash. To the poison.
Its bellow is a deep, resonant sound that vibrates the ground and rattles the back of my teeth. Rakkh snarls in answer, low and lethal, claws digging into the dune until the sand compresses like stone under his feet.
“It’s a guardian,” I whisper, the realization striking so suddenly it burns. “It wasn’t hunting us. It is defending the source.”
Rakkh half-turns his head, eyes bright and blazing. “Then we destroy it.”
“Rakkh—” My voice cracks. “Wait.”
