“No,” Rakkh agrees quietly.
“Or Zmaj?”
“No,” he says. “I do not think so.”
“Or Urr’ki.”
“No,” Travnyk agrees. “This is not ours.”
“Lia,” Rakkh says, his voice tight—gentle but warning. “Do not touch it.”
A breath. A heartbeat. I try not to. But I can’t.
I press one fingertip to the metal. It’s warm. Warmer than sunbaked sand should be. And beneath that warmth, something pulses. Slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat buried far below the ground. I jerk back, breath catching in my throat.
“Stars,” I whisper. “It’s alive?”
Travnyk tilts his head. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to his tusks. Every time I look at him, they pull my attention—ivory,curving out of his lower jaw. How do they kiss? Don’t they get in the way?
“Not alive,” Travnyk says thoughtfully. “But not dead. It is sleeping.”
“Why does everything out here have to move or glow or breathe?” Tomas complains. “Why can’t it just be normal sand?”
Rakkh ignores him. He crouches beside me, one hand braced in the sand, claws digging in as he leans closer—too close, so close his shoulder brushes mine.
“What did you feel?” he asks.
I force my breathing to steady despite the way my heart races and my stomach tightens.
“Heat, yes—but also a pulse. Like something beneath us is powering this. Or reacting to us.”
His pupils narrow. His nostrils flare once as he draws in the scent of metal, sand… me.
“It reacted,” he murmurs. “Like when you touched the shard.”
My breath stutters. “You think it’s responding to?—”
“You,” he finishes.
The word sends a dizzy pressure through my chest. I look down at my hands, at the grains of sand clinging to my fingers, and wish I could say they aren’t trembling. Fear, yes. But more than fear.
“Why me?” I ask.
“That is the question I do not like,” Rakkh says, jaw tightening as his horns angle down, catching the suns and throwing off fractured rainbows.
Tomas steps closer, nervously hugging his pack.
“Could it be… I don’t know… DNA recognition? Tech that scans for?—”
“No,” Travnyk cuts in. “This is older than human science. Older than Zmaj. This is Star People construction.”
Star People.
The Urr’ki term not just for humans, but for the alien races that predated what we called the Invaders—the four-armed beings that drove humans and Zmaj underground and led us to the Urr’ki in the first place.
A chill knifes down my spine despite the heat.
I stand abruptly, brushing my hands on my thighs.
