Then, slowly, she leans back against the rock, eyes unfocused, blinking against tears that still haven’t finished falling. Her lips part, but no sound comes out.
She’s beyond words now.
So am I.
I retreat, inch by inch, until the night swallows me again. The drones hum in the distance. The marines mutter in their sleep. The world spins onward, indifferent.
But I carry her sobs in my chest like a second heartbeat.
And for once... I don’t want to forget them.
I findit just past dusk.
A dry breeze chases my steps as I skulk beneath a fractured ridge, the rock still warm from the sun but cooling fast now. That’s when the scent hits me—faint, brittle sugar and human oil. Familiar. Too familiar. My claws scrape as I pivot low, scanning the path near the base of her rock.
There.
A cookie.
Old. Cracked down the middle, the soft center hardened and graying at the edges. It’s the same kind she left before—offered like some ritual or truce. But this one… this one is different.
It was left before the boy died.
The dirt around it has been shifted by the wind and the camp's tremors, but I see the trace beneath—her name. Faint. Almost gone. Etched with careful hands.Jillian.
I stare at the letters. The shape of them. Human lines—fragile, thin, soft. Like her voice. Like the look she gave the dark the last time she cried.
This one was meant for me.
Before the blood. Before the screams. Before her grief cracked the night wide open.
My chest aches.
I crouch and lift the cookie gently, my claw slicing the stale thing clean in two. The inside crumbles, too dry to be soft anymore. It’s useless now, but something in me needs to do it anyway.
I place one half down beside the faint letters. Press it there with slow precision, like it matters. Like ritual. The other half, I crumble in my hand and let it fall beside the first.
I don’t eat it.
I don’t deserve to.
My mouth is dry anyway. Not with hunger—though that gnaws at me constantly now—but with shame. With something heavier than stone and twice as sharp.
I stare a moment longer, then back away, slinking toward the eastern shadows where the rock splits and the cave mouths begin.
That night, the sting tails return.
I hear them before I smell them—clattering movement like hammered sheet metal, scraping across the distant rocks. Their migration isn’t supposed to begin for another six cycles, but the thermal vents have been shifting, spewing out sulfur and heat like wounds reopening.
The sting tails know. They always know.
One skitters too close to the camp’s edge.
I crouch beneath a stone outcrop just beyond the beacon field, breath low, muscles coiled. The beast’s legs click like tapping claws on crystal. Its armor reflects the blue camp lights in jagged slices, and I swear its mandibles twitch toward the sleeping tents.
My claws flex.
It takes another step.
