Mereque stared at the girl, no, at the Fay, and felt the universe tilt a little farther off kilter.

  Fay. As in fairies. As in bedtime stories he read under Leopold’s flickering hab-lights when he was five. He laughed once, more of a snort really. The sound came out cracked inside the helmet.

  Grace just tilted her head, red curls bouncing like living fire, and waited for him to catch up with reality.

  He dragged in a breath that tasted of salt and impossibilities. The beach stretched away in both directions, all pale sand and loose rock. Gulls with feathers the colour of sunrise wheeled overhead, screaming at his presence.

  His suit shifted from bone-white to dappled grey-green without being asked, trying to hide him from a sky that already knew exactly where he was.

  Fairies were real. The dragon, beast, or whatever the hell it was, was real. That impossible wedge-machine with the golden eyes was real.

  And every single one of them wanted him dead or salvaged or both, and he still hadn’t decided which was worse.

  He rubbed the heel of his gauntlet across his visor like he could scrub the crazy out of his eyes.

  Two weeks ago, he’d been second in command on a state-of-the-art starship. Now he was standing on a beach talking to a storybook creature while his dead friends orbited the planet as shooting stars.

  Antoinette Hyderbrach’s face flashed behind his eyes, laughing, eyes full of life, telling him the glide-wing stabilizers were “mostly functional, stop worrying.” Then the pod crumpling against a mountain like tinfoil. He’d held her hand while the light left her eyes and promised the captain he’d bring the news himself.

  He still hadn’t found the captain. He still hadn’t found anyone.

  Grace watched him with those too-large eyes, patient as the tide.

  “Fay,” he muttered, shaking his head with half a smile. “Of course you’re Fay.”

  She beamed like he’d paid her a compliment.

  He exhaled, long and shaky. Mission first. Sanity later.

  First step: confirm this actually was Earth. Second step: find the others. Third step: figure out why that dragon was trying to kill him and what that machine had to do with it.

  He glanced at the endless water glittering between islands. His augmented bones and exomesh made him strong enough to punch through hull plating, but they also made him sink like a dropped anvil. He’d learned that the hard way, twice.

  Every island meant a new raft. Every raft meant chopping down trees with his bare hands because the crash had eaten his plasma cutter along with everything else.

  He started toward the tree line. Grace skipped after him, light as dandelion fluff.

  Mereque’s boots sank into warm sand with every step, each print deep enough to swallow a normal man’s ankle. He rolled the numbers in his head the way he used to roll ammunition counts: six trunks minimum, straight grain, no rot, eight to ten centimeters thick. Strip the bark for cordage. Lash the cross-braces tight enough that his two-hundred-and-twenty kilos of bone and exomesh wouldn’t flip the whole thing the second a wave hit.

  Fourth raft in nine days. He was getting disturbingly good at being a caveman.

  The first time he’d done this, his hands had shaken from adrenaline and grief. Now the motions were muscle memory: choose tree, test flex, line up the strike, exhale, hit. The smell of fresh resin and green wood was the only thing on this planet that didn’t carry blood or burning in it. He breathed it in like medicine.

  Grace danced ahead, humming something too soft to catch. He envied the way she moved, like gravity had personally decided to give her the day off.

  He flexed his right hand, felt the armor plates shift over knuckles that had punched through starship hulls in training. Galaxy’s most over-qualified lumberjack, reporting for duty.

  A humorless smile tugged at his mouth. At least this part he could control.

  He stopped under the first likely tree, rolled his stitched shoulder until the pain was processed away, and raised one gauntleted hand.

  “Tell me something, Grace,” he said, voice rough. “That thing with the golden eyes and the guns for arms, what the hell was it doing trying to kill the same monster that tried to roast me?”

  Grace opened her mouth to answer.

  He hit the tree with an open palm.

  The trunk exploded in a spray of splinters and sap. The entire thirty-meter giant toppled sideways and hit the sand with a thud that rattled his teeth.

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  Grace squeaked and jumped back, eyes wide as dinner plates.

  Mereque caught the trunk before it rolled, set it gently aside like it weighed nothing, and looked down at her.

  Sap dripped from his gauntlet in slow, amber tears. He followed her stare to the armor plating around his hand (scored, scorched, streaked with dried blood and swamp muck) and suddenly saw himself the way she must see him.

  A walking war memorial.

  With his cracked visor, pale complexion, eyes ringed red from two weeks of no real sleep. The insignia on his shoulder half melted into slag. He must have looked like something that had crawled out of a mass grave and kept walking.

  Congratulations, Ventrullis. You’re qualifying to be the monster in somebody else’s fairytale nightmare now.

  He almost laughed. Almost.

  Instead, he flexed his fingers, watched the exomesh ripple under the skin like living steel cable, and felt the old Zaxvoyan strength settle back into his bones. The same strength that had let him punch through bulkheads during training now reduced thirty-meter trees to firewood.

  Grace was still staring, mouth a perfect little “o” of wonder.

  “Sorry about your tree,” he said, voice rough but softer than he meant it to be.

  The apology broke her trance. She burst into bright, bell-like laughter that scattered gulls from the canopy.

  “You’re apologizing for the tree?” she managed between giggles. “I think you’ve got bigger things to be worrying about!”

  He shook his head, half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth despite everything and reached for the next trunk.

  “Well?” he asked. “You were saying?”

  She recovered fast. “Sentinels of the Stone. Some call them protectors. Others say they’re demons in steel that bring terror wherever their shadows fall. That red brute hates our kind, feelin’ is mutual. The Sentinel usually ignores us, which we like just fine. Scares us worse than the beast, truth be.”

  Demons? Maybe. Sentinels? Hardly. More like cadaver factories was the impression he was left with.

  He nodded once, already reaching for the next tree.

  Crack. Thud. Another giant down.

  He stripped branches with his bare hands while she talked.

  “I saw you wash up,” she continued, twirling in a circle around him. “Never seen a man like you before. Tall as a sapling giant. Shiny torn clothes, not even Blanched Knights have anything like that! Had to know what you were.”

  He snorted. “So, I’m a giant now?”

  “Nearly! Most folk are two, maybe three times my height. You’re twice any man I ever laid eyes on. And stronger than all of ‘em put together. No one walks away from that red brute. No one.”

  He cinched the last cord on his raft and stood, wiping sap on his thigh plate.

  “Blanched Knights,” he said. “You mentioned them. Are they people? Should I be worried?”

  “Worshippers of the Weepin’ Wyrm,” Grace whispered, and the sunshine in her voice guttered like a candle in wind.

  She stepped closer, small hand brushing the edge of his gauntlet as if to anchor herself.

  “Men once, aye. Long ago. They kneel in the Wyrm’s tears until every color bleeds out of them (skin, eyes, hair, even the light inside). What comes up from that pool isn’t human anymore. They wear pure white, white so clean it hurts to look at, and on every banner a single tear… red as fresh slaughter.”

  Her gaze flicked out to sea, toward something unknown, then back to him.

  “They don’t dance. They don’t laugh. They don’t smile. They’re slow and patient, they want the world to be as empty as them. Some say the Wyrm weeps because it’s lonely. Some say it weeps because it’s still hungry.”

  A gull cried overhead and she flinched.

  “If you see that banner wavin’ lazy in the breeze, Mereque… don’t fight. Don’t talk. Don’t even breathe loud. Turn and run till yer lungs burn and the ground is a blur under yer feet. Because the Blanched don’t chase. They follow. And they never, ever stop.”

  The air itself felt colder, as though something vast and sorrowful had leaned in to listen.

  Mereque filed the warning beside every other nightmare this planet had handed him, but this one settled deeper, like frost under the skin.

  He gave her a slow nod. Message received.

  Raft finished, he dragged it one-handed to the water’s edge. His shadow stretched long across the sand, two point six meters of battered armor and bad decisions.

  He pulled off his helmet, tucked it under one arm. First time he’d shown his face to anyone on this planet.

  Short-cropped pale hair, clean jaw, eyes older than his years.

  Grace’s cheeks pinked. She dipped a curtsy to hide it.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I could use you.”

  She grinned, wicked and fond. “You won’t get far unless someone distracts those two.”

  He opened his mouth. Closed it.

  “You’re seriously going to bait a fire-breathing monster and a murder-machine for me?”

  “Easy,” she shrugged. “They’re not half as clever as they think. And I’m not fond of water.”

  He looked at her, really looked, and felt something in his chest crack.

  “I owe you a debt I can’t repay, Grace.”

  “Pay it by stayin’ alive, Mereque. Be nice to meet again one day.”

  She skipped forward, hugged his leg like it was the most natural thing in the world, then danced away into the trees.

  “Two hundred years under these feet,” she called back, laughing. “Didn’t happen by accident!”

  He stood there long after she vanished, trying to wrap his head around the idea that the child-shaped creature who’d just saved his life was old enough to be his great-great-grandmother.

  The beach felt suddenly too big.

  The ghost-pressure of her tiny arms still clung to his armor-covered thigh, warm through layers of alloy and insulation. He stared down at the faint scuff marks her bare feet had left in the sand (already half washed away by the tide) and felt something crack open in his chest, something he’d kept welded shut since the Cazues died.

  Warmth. Real, ridiculous, impossible warmth.

  For the first time in two weeks he wasn’t cataloguing threats, rationing oxygen, or calculating how many more days until the next monster tried to eat him. He was just… standing on a beach, missing a fairy who’d hugged his leg like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “I’m going to miss you, you impossible little ancient,” he muttered to the empty air.

  The words tasted strange. Soft. Human.

  He closed his eyes for one heartbeat and let himself imagine coming back here one day (helmet off, armor patched, clean, maybe even smiling) just to hear that laugh again.

  Then the wind shifted, carrying the distant roar of something crimson and angry.

  Time to move.

  He slid the helmet back on, waded out until the raft floated, and flung himself aboard. Face down, arms paddling like a madman, he struck north, toward the biggest landmass he’d seen from orbit.

  Only when the island shrank behind him did he let himself replay the Sentinel’s blinking lights.

  Short-long-short. Pause. Long-short-long.

  His ocular chip translated it twice to be sure.

  IF THE PROPHECY IS TRUE, THAT IS THE ONE.

  Mereque stared at the empty horizon and felt the universe laugh at him all over again.