Makrath closed his eyes.
He did not sleep. Sleep required trust in the silence, and his body no longer understood silence as safety. It understood silence as the moment before impact.
His mind did what it always did when he removed external stimulus: it walked the same paths until the ground wore thin.
Planets.
War.
Blood.
The jungle on Ythra after rain, when the canopy wept and the ground steamed, and everything living hid teeth behind leaves. The old battles where the air tasted of iron and sap. The sound of a throat opening under his hands. The moment of relief—always brief, always sharp—when the pressure inside him bled away and he could breathe like a normal creature again.
Normal.
The word had no meaning for a Kha’Ruun.
The Kha’Ruun were not raised. They wereharvested.
He remembered the taste of his first breath through a filtration mask as an infant, the sterile air of the caste nursery, the thick scent of antiseptic and metal. He did not remember his mother’s face. He did not remember a family unit, or the way civilians spoke softly to young. Those were stories he had heard, information delivered with the same tone as engineering specifications.
A Kha’Ruun birth was not guaranteed. It could not be predicted. The genes ran recessive through bloodlines theSael tracked with obsessive patience, waiting for the right convergence. When it happened, the infant was removed before the bond could form.
An inconvenience, for the civilian. A necessity, for the city.
A Kha’Ruun was a resource. A containment device. A blade that belonged to the district and the government caste that controlled it.
He had accepted that. He had never been given a choice.
What he had not accepted—what his body was refusing to accept now—was what came after.
When the regulation began to slip.
When the violence inside him stopped being an instrument and started becoming a hunger.
He let the memory shift forward, not by choice, but because it always did. He saw himself on the neutral station in the recent past, the moment restraint snapped and bodies folded under him like fabric. He saw the blood spread across polished flooring, too bright, too vivid. He saw the eyes of civilians—Hyrakki and not-Hyrakki—wide with terror, reflecting his silhouette.
He should have felt shame.
He felt relief. For a heartbeat, for two, for three—he had felt the pressure ease.
Then the relief had turned sour. The pressure returned. Stronger.
He opened his eyes.
The compartment was unchanged. The crew still spoke softly. Zhoren’s posture remained impeccable, as if his spine were cast from the same stone as Khar’s administrative buildings. The negotiator’s hands moved over a slate, preparing for an audience that would be decided in seconds.
Makrath’s tail twitched once, a precise contraction that would have gone unnoticed by anyone who was not trained to watch for the signs.
He tightened the coil again. Anchored himself.
He forced his mind away from blood and into biology, into the neutral ground of facts.
His genes were recessive. Rare. Valuable. That did not mean his bloodline would continue.
It was not merely that females rejected him.
They refused the Hunt.
