Chapter 76: Second Expansion
The things in the shadows aren’t attacking.
Jacob said they rode hard to reach us. He didn’t say why they bothered with the animals when they could have just walked. Now I know.
They’re sizing us up. Deciding if we’re worth the effort. That calculation won’t take long.
Behind , I feel Rhayne shift—the specific, small contraction of soone trying to take up less space.
I glance back for exactly one second. Long enough. Not longer.
She straightens slightly.
Jacob’s companion speaks first, addressing all of us but not singling out anyone in particular.
"So. Divers or Drowneds?"
He looks us over with the casual assessnt of soone who’s made this evaluation enough tis to not need long.
"By the sll—Divers."
"Lex." Jacob’s voice carries the particular flatness of a correction he’s made before. "Don’t."
"It’s a practical question—"
"We don’t make distinctions here." Jacob doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. "Nobody leaves Lost Ark regardless. The classification stops mattering quickly."
Lex shrugs. The argunt isn’t new to him either.
"You never told
your na," Jacob says, looking at
over the shoulder.
"Dryden." I point down the line without ceremony. "Dryden Sands. That’s Lola. Rhayne. Oliver."
I pause at the thug.
He clears his throat for the first ti in what feels like days.
"Brendon," he says.
About ti soone introduced himself without a blade at his throat.
Lex isn’t looking at Brendon. He’s looking at . Not at my face—into it. The specific, drilling focus of soone who just heard a word land wrong and is running it back.
"Sands," he says. Slow. Like tasting it.
His mouth pulls into a sideways smile that doesn’t reach anything above his cheekbones.
I don’t like that smile. There’s an entire conversation happening inside it that I’m not invited to yet.
"How long have you been here?" I ask Jacob. Not because I care. Because I need the data.
Jacob thinks.
He actually thinks of the kind of pause that isn’t performance, just genuine arithtic against a tiline that probably stopped feeling real years ago.
"Nine years, I think. I ca during the first great expansion." He tilts his head toward Lex. "He arrived a year ago. Second expansion."
The second great expansion.
Sothing shifts in my chest.
Not dramatically. Not the way it would in soone who hadn’t spent a decade learning to keep their reactions below the waterline. Just a small, dense weight dropping from one shelf to another.
My father ran the second expansion.
Alden Sands. The man whose na I inherited and whose shadow I’ve been navigating around in two separate lifetis without ever quite admitting that’s what I was doing.
He led the second great push into the Deep. Lex arrived during it.
Lex knew my father.
I look at him. The sideways smile makes more sense now. And less.
"Second expansion," I say, keeping my voice flat. "Did you know Alden, Lex?"
I already know the answer. I’m fishing for the shape of what he knows.
Lex’s smile holds for exactly one more second. Then sothing moves behind his eyes—not grief, not guilt, sothing harder to na—and the words start and stop before they form.
"Alden Sands..." He exhales through his nose. "Yeah. I knew him."
That’s all he says.
The rest dies in his mouth with the specific silence of soone who has decided that a dirt road outside a city wall is not the right place for this conversation.
Jacob glances between us with the practiced discretion of a man who has learned when not to speak.
"We’re almost at the gates," he says. "Boris can fill you in better than either of us."
Boris.
The na lands with the faint echo of sothing I should be able to place. A frequency I recognize without a signal. I reach for it—dead man’s mories, old archive, sothing from the Deep, personal—
The sound tears through the air like a blade through wet canvas.
A shriek. Then a second. Low, guttural, the specific register of sothing that hunts by closing distance fast.
Jacob doesn’t hesitate. "Reef Sand Sharks. Company."
Lex is already pulling from behind the saddle—rolls of hard leather, thick and curved, each one tied to a rope with a loop handle at the top. He tosses them behind without looking. Jacob does the sa.
Four sliders hit the road.
Five people.
I do the math instantly. "Rhayne. Sit. Lola on your lap." I point at the board. "You two count as one."
Rhayne grabs Lola without arguing. Lola lands in her lap with the Lullaby with the unbothered weight of soone who has not registered that this situation is urgent.
I barely have my grip on the handle before the Ferredons accelerate.
[Mount: Dune Slider—Ferredon]
First a train that tries to kill us. Now a surfboard pulled by a ferret-cal. Thirstfall’s transit system is a joke.
The leather board skims across the packed sand at a speed that makes my teeth rattle. Dust kicks up behind us in a dense wall that I can barely see Brendon two sliders back.
Oliver is already sideways, chest pressed flat against his board, legs dragging twin furrows in the fine sand.
Rhayne has both arms locked around Lola, struggling to hold the handler while her eyes are closed.
Lola has both arms raised above her head and is laughing.
The hair on my forearm goes up before my eyes find the reason. Eventide is in my hand before the thought finishes forming.
The shark hits the space between us like a dropped stone—ten feet of a shark-like fra topped with a flat, wide head packed with teeth, erupting out of the sand mid-breach.
I move my head. Only as much as I have to.
The teeth pass close enough that I feel the displaced air against my nose. I catch a lungful of sothing rancid, like rotting at baked in desert heat, and then it lands on the other side of the road. Folds back into the sand like a swimr going under.
The fin traces its path beneath the surface, parallel to us.
It’ll focus on the slowest target dragging behind the mounts, That’s how they hunt.
I watch the fin.
The Ferredon’s rhythm shifts. One hitch, a half-stride shorter than the rest. My peripheral vision catches the rock a fraction before the slider does.
I stand up.
One hand on the rope. Eventide in the other.
The board hits the rock, and the impact sends
airborne—not fighting the montum, using it, letting the launch carry
up and into a lateral flip.
Below , mid-rotation, the shark clears the sand.
I cut downward through the arc without calculation, just weight and edge and the angle that’s there. Eventide catches it sowhere along the upper body. The thing crashes back into the sand with a sound like a heavy door slamming.
I land. Hard. My bones register the impact all the way up to my back molars.
I don’t fall.
Jacob and Lex are staring at
with wide eyes that they’re trying to make look narrow again.
I face backward.
Another fin. Behind Oliver.
He’s still fighting to sit upright, his slider crabbing left and right with no stability, legs kicking at empty air.
The shark rises. Slower this ti, circling first. Testing.
Oliver kicks at it. Twice. Nothing.
Up ahead are iron gates, cast and enormous, swinging inward with the groan of sothing that hasn’t moved quickly in a long ti. A siren cuts through the desert air, sharp and chanical.
"WE DON’T HAVE A ZONE SHIELD." Jacob’s voice, raw now, stripped of the easy cadence. "BRACE."
I look at Oliver.
His slider is completely unstable. The shark is close enough that I can see its eyes, flat and pale. The specific blankness of sothing that has never been outrun.
It’s not going to work.
Oliver opens his mouth to say sothing.
The shark’s jaw closes.
The scream cos out instead.
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