The ridge slid away under Lachlan’s boots, dust coughing up with each step.
The world below still smoked, thin and gold in the fixed afternoon. The fire lines burned themselves down to colorless heat.
He kept his rifle slung and his head low, body moving on the rhythm of need more than plan. The creature purred, pleased with direction.
There you go. She’s down there. Every step’s a prayer.
"Not a prayer," he muttered. "Just ground."
Sa thing when you’re moving toward her.
The path bent between dead juniper and rusted fence.
The scent of burned fuel clung to everything. Far off, he could see the Humr parked behind a half-collapsed sign, Sera’s shape beside it—still as stone, hair stirred by the hot wind.
His chest tightened. He hadn’t realized how loud the world had been until the mont she ca into focus.
Noise fell off him in strips. Breath went quiet. Joints loosened one by one like sobody had backed the screws out a half turn.
Closer, the creature urged. Faster. She steadies you. You steady her.
Lachlan didn’t run. He made himself keep a patrol pace, heel to toe, weight even.
Zubair always rode him for stomping, for being too loud. Alexei never had to be told; that man floated, like a blade through water. Lachlan had learned to float only when the thing under his ribs wanted to sprint. It wanted to sprint now.
The radio cracked once. Zubair’s voice, faint: "Periter holding. Alexei’s on west line. Don’t get stupid."
"Define stupid," Lachlan answered, but the channel was already dead. Typical. Orders when the work was already half done.
He kept going downhill.
The guntal taste in his mouth faded as her outline sharpened. He made himself count small things so he didn’t blow past her like a kid.
Things like the scratches on the Humr’s passenger door from the pallet stack, two new bubbles under the hood paint from the flare line, Elias’s bag half open on the gravel with a clamp hanging out, Zubair’s boot prints deeper on the left foot because his ankle had never healed right.
You sll her yet? the creature pressed.
"Fuel and dust," he said.
And her. Under it. You know it.
It wasn’t perfu. It wasn’t anything a store would sell. It was warm skin under dry air. It was clean water on tal. He didn’t have a word for it, and he didn’t need one. His hands stopped shaking.
He climbed the last run, boots finding traction where the dust turned hard. The Humr lood—sun-bleached, dented, smoke-licked. Elias knelt near the front tire, checking the coolant bleed. Zubair stood ten paces off, scanning the southern field through glass.
And Sera... she was leaned against the driver’s door, quiet, eyes on the horizon that never changed.
Lachlan stopped a few feet short.
She turned before he spoke, like she’d felt him coming. "You okay?"
Her voice landed soft. Not command. Not test. Just weight shared.
He smiled, small and rough. "You keep asking that."
"Because you keep sounding like you might not be."
He laughed once, low. "You’d know first."
"I always do."
The wind pressed around them, thick with heat.
Sowhere far back, tal popped as it cooled. The Humr’s fan cycled down, clicked once, then held steady. He counted that click like it belonged to his pulse.
He ant to stay where he was. He didn’t. His feet closed the distance until her reflection blurred in the Humr’s glass.
The creature inside him stirred, louder now, a rumble under his ribs.
Touch her. Claim the air between you. Make the others rember whose pulse she holds.
"Easy," he whispered.
You call easy? You’re shaking. Look at your hands.
They weren’t shaking anymore. That was the point. The tremor he pretended was humor had always been a lack of air. Standing in her shadow fixed it.
Sera’s eyes lifted to et his. Whatever she saw in him, it didn’t make her step back. "They’ll move again before dusk," she told him.
"Then we move first."
"Zubair’s planning it."
"Of course he is." His mouth twisted around the edge of a grin. "You trust him too much."
"I trust all of you the sa amount."
Not enough. Not the way you should.
The creature wanted competition. It wanted blood on knuckles and a line drawn in dirt. It wanted a circle with him standing closer than the rest.
Her gaze softened. "You think I don’t see you, Lachlan?"
He froze.
"I see how hard you try to be loud enough to be heard."
He couldn’t find a joke. The creature went silent, listening.
"You don’t have to fight for space," she said quietly. "You’re already here, you already have my attention. You have all the space you need."
Sothing uncoiled in him, sharp and bright.
For the first ti since the gunfire, he breathed without tasting iron. The grip he kept on the mask—smile, noise, spark—loosened a fraction. He didn’t need it with her.
Elias cleared his throat near the engine, pretending not to listen. Zubair murmured into comms, steady and distant. The world kept working, unaware that sothing in Lachlan had just shifted.
He lowered his head. "That’s dangerous talk, sweetheart."
Sera’s lips curved—not a smile, not quite. "Then it fits the world."
The creature sighed, content.
Told you. She’s your air.
He didn’t answer it. He didn’t need to.
He let himself look at the small things that ant they were still a unit.
Elias’s fingers were clean again; he’d wiped them before touching her truck.
Zubair’s notepad lived in the front pocket like always; the top page already had a fuel hose diagram sketched clean, two arrows, no cross-outs.
Alexei’s voice lived on the channel like a wire pulled tight across a street: there, almost invisible, waiting for a foot to catch.
Jealousy flicked through him anyway. Short. an. And so very stupid.
Zubair with her shoulder to shoulder. Alexei with her on the edge of a roof in another city back when there were still roofs that weren’t half gone. Elias with his hands on a wound and her eyes on his hands.
A hundred images that never mattered to her the way they mattered to him.
Say it, the creature pushed. Tell her you need. Make it a rule.
"No," he breathed. "She already knows."
Good. Then show the others.
"Later."
That’s a weak word.
"It’s a necessary word."
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