I have to choose.
Let them burn.
Or break my exile.
Again.
The decision is taken from me.
I don't get to weigh it. Don’t get to stand there pacing over heat cracks and second-guessing my damn conscience. Because the universe doesn't wait for me to figure my heart out—it justrips.
It starts with the scream.
Faint. Fractured. Human. Carried down from the upper ridges by the pressure-shift wind that always tastes like copper and regret. I stop dead mid-step—one clawed foot half-sunk in the soft gravel near the cave’s mouth—because the pitch of it... gods, the pitch. Not terror. Agony. Raw, ruptured-throat kind of pain.
Then silence.
Then another scream—shorter this time. Gurgled. Final.
“Damn it,” I mutter, already sprinting.
The rocks blur past as I claw and bound over boulders slick with mineral sweat, each footfall a thundercrack in my bones. I move fast—too fast for a human eye to track. My breath is molten in my chest, a furnace stoked by panic I pretend is just adrenaline. But Iknow—know—something's gone wrong. Not just predator-wrong. Not animal-hunt-wrong.Foulwrong.
By the time I smell the blood, I’m too late.
It coats the rocks. Spattered. Soaked. Clotted.
Thick in the air like rust and ruin.
Carson.It says on his clothes.
He’s—what’sleftof him—is slumped against a jagged rise of obsidian, half-draped in his own entrails. One arm is missing, and his face is a ruin of wet pulp. His chest is torn open like a snapped crate, and one boot still twitches, like nerves haven’t gotten the memo.
I stop short. Breath catching.
Not sorrow. I barely knew the boy. I don’t mourn what I didn’t hold.
But rage?
Oh. That I feel.
Because this isn’t my kill.
This wasn’t me.
And Iknowwhat it looks like.
The claw marks are deep. Messy. But they’rewrong. Too narrow. Too hooked. Odex claws don’t curve that way. The tearing’s all upward, as if something small but strong latched on from below. There’s a melt pattern, too—around the wounds. Acid traces. Like something spat on him, then chewed through the rest.
Not me.
But they won’t care.
I kneel, fast. Just long enough to dip a claw into the blood, sniff the edges. Burnt meat, bile, and something fungal. Spore-threaded. I catch the faintest trace of decay—activerot, not decomposition. Parasite work. Maybe fungus. Maybe somethingworse.
But it won’t matter.
They’ll come. They’ll see. They’ll scream “Odex!” and raise rifles, and there won’t be time for words—not that they’d hear ‘em from me anyhow. My face, my body, my damnexistencewill be enough to confirm their fears.
