“Perfect. Let’s go.”
We sync.
And this time, it’s different.
Not flawless.
Not frictionless.
But... right.
The tether connects like a groove in muscle memory. I feel her heartbeat sync with mine, our breath patterns aligning as we fall into that space between thoughts. It’s not soft. It’s not safe. But it’s ours now. A territory we’ve carved out of shared blood and stubbornness.
The launch clamps disengage. Whiplash shudders once and blasts forward into the mouth of the storm.
The Rhavadaz night has no business being this alive.
Lightning splits the sky in crooked veins—purple, orange, something sickly green. Dust claws at our sensors like wild animals. Every step forward is a grind against time, against friction, against the planet itself.
We’re moving fast, but not reckless. The mech’s joints hum with precision, servos compensating for the wind shear, gyros rebalancing every other second. I drive forward through the hellscape, Aria feeding me readouts, adjusting sync levels in microbursts.
She doesn’t try to override.
I don’t try to command.
We just move.
Together.
“Signal’s faint,” she says, scanning the ridge. “IFF tag’s active but fluctuating. Could be power drain, or something jamming the feed.”
“Could be someone alive,” I say, jaw tight. “That’s all I care about.”
Her response is a quiet click of confirmation. That’s it.
We crest the ridge and—there it is.
The dropship looks like a broken tooth jammed into the sand. One wing’s sheared clean off, half-buried under crushed dunes. The hull’s scorched and pockmarked with impact fractures, coolant bleeding into the soil in fluorescent streaks.
And that’s not the worst part.
There’smovement.
Not human.
Not anything good.
“Contact,” I mutter, eyes narrowing.
From under the sand, something massive shifts. The earth ripples, dunes sliding sideways like silk under tension. Then—BOOM—a shadow lunges.
It’s huge. More than huge.
Massive.
One of Rhavadaz’s apex predators, armored and coiled like a cross between a centipede and a kaiju nightmare. Chitin glints like obsidian under the lightning. Mandibles the size of mechs.
Aria barely breathes. “That’s not in the database.”
