Chapter 28 – Sand and Silence
The desert swallowed sound.
Heat rose in sheets off the dunes, turning the horizon into a wavering mirage. John and Tamara kept to the lee of a ridge, heads down, faces wrapped in torn cloth. Every breath tasted of iron and salt. The sun pressed on the back of John's neck like a hand.
"Keep moving," he said, voice low. "We need shade before noon."
Tamara nodded, eyes narrowed against the glare. The wind dragged pale hair across her cheek; grains of sand glittered there like frost that refused to melt.
They crested the ridge. Nothing but more sand—rolled and ribbed, endless.
The voice did not return immediately. Only the hiss of wind over dunes, the rasp of their boots, the whisper of cloth. When it did, it didn't bother with comfort.
Walk the shadows of the dunes. Keep the sun at your left. The heat will break your mind before the beasts do.
John adjusted their line. He didn't ask who the voice belonged to. He wasn't sure he wanted the answer yet.
Tamara broke the silence. "Any sign of Blake?"
He scanned the slopes for drag lines, for the broad pads of Ember's paws, for anything. The desert gave them nothing.
"Not yet," he said. "But he's too noisy to die quietly."
A short breath that might have been a laugh escaped her. Then they kept walking.
They found shade midmorning: a broken fang of dark stone stabbing out of the sand. The rock was cool on its underside. John collapsed into it, rolling shoulders that felt full of gravel.
Tamara slid down the wall beside him and pulled off her glove. Tiny blister-cuts traced her knuckles where sand had chewed skin. He reached for his waterskin, counted heartbeats, forced himself to sip.
"We ration," he said. "Two swallows every hour."
"Two?" She lifted a brow.
"Until we find more."
She capped the skin without argument. That was something John liked about her—no whining, no theatrics. The world made a demand; Tamara paid it.
He closed his eyes and reached for the Light.
It rose, quick and hot as always, eager to surge where it was least useful—up into his head, down his arms, anywhere but his lungs. Leto's voice wasn't here, but the memory of it was: Invite, don't seize.
John bled the heat down into his core. The desert pressed harder. Sweat lifted and evaporated. His pulse slowed enough that the world clicked back into focus.
"Better?" Tamara asked, watching his hands.
"A little," he said. "Your turn."
She scooped a handful of sand and let it run through her fingers. At the last instant, it clung—grains locking into a delicate sheet of hoarfrost, cool and blue. She pressed that against the side of her neck. Steam fluttered. Some color returned to her mouth.
"Small tricks," she said. "Big desert."
He nodded. "They add up."
They waited until the sun tilted, then moved again. The dunes changed from white to brass to copper. Shadows lengthened, sharpening their edges. The wind carried a new smell—bitter, resinous, and faintly sweet, like sap scorched over coals.
John stopped, crouched, and brushed aside the top layer of sand. A shard of black chitin winked at him. He lifted it by the sting end and turned it in the light.
Tamara's jaw tightened. "Scorpion?"
"Too large." John angled the barb to show the channel running through it—hollow, polished, a needle for venom. The base held the ragged impression of a socket. "Something that sheds weapons."
He pocketed it.
They cut across a trough, footprints swallowed almost as soon as they made them. On the far slope, John knelt again and pointed over the crest. Tamara peered with him.
Tracks. Not random. A patrol's rhythm: five sets of prints, heavy, in a wedge. The stride was wrong for human. The toe marks were too narrow—like talons. Between them, faint grooves ran parallel, as if something dragged a weight low behind each step.
Tamara's fingers hovered over the prints without touching. "These are recent."
"Hours," John agreed. The wind hadn't had time to blur the edges. He weighed options, looked at the sun, looked at the long empty sweep of dunes. "We angle off," he said. "Parallel, not on their line."
They angled off.
By dusk, the heat loosened its grip. The sky bled into violet. The wind shifted, no longer scraping, almost gentle. In the east, the light thinned to nothing. The desert's second danger arrived with it: cold.
They built a screen of canvas behind a rock tooth and wedged it with a broken branch John had dragged out of the sand—a fossilized thing, silver and light as bone. Tamara drew the fabric tight. The makeshift shelter took shape: low, narrow, just enough to break the wind.
"Water," she said.
They set two bowls—thin glass saucers from John's ring, last relics of Revenak's markets—and stretched cloth over them, weighted around the rim with sand and a pebble in the center. At night the desert exhaled its stored heat; the air would bloom with what little moisture it held. The cloth would gather dew. The pebble would drip it into the bowls.
"Slow," John said. "But something."
Tamara nodded. They huddled in the shelter. The temperature dropped fast, and their breath became smoke. The stars blossomed—hard and cold, innumerable. Without the barrier's glow, the sky looked older, like it remembered things.
"Revenak felt… held," Tamara said quietly. "Like the world had walls."
"And this doesn't," John said.
"No."
They listened to the wind thread the dunes. Somewhere distant, something screamed—it might have been an animal. It might have been the wind.
"John," she said, after a while.
"Mm?"
"You hugged me."
He stared into the dark, then huffed. "Thought you were going to call me an idiot for it."
"Not this time."
He smiled without showing teeth. "You okay?"
"No," she said, honest. "But I will be."
"Good." He shifted, the canvas crackling above them, the sand cold beneath. "We'll find them. Blake's too stubborn to stay lost, and Ember…" He trailed.
Tamara's hand found his in the dark, a brief squeeze. "We'll find them."
They slept in shifts. When it was John's turn, the voice came back—closer, as if it had settled into the bones of the dune with him.
You did not die. Accept the small miracle and move forward.
"Who are you?" John asked the night, a whisper smaller than the wind.
Silence. Then, almost indulgent: The thing you carry. The one that carried you back. Names later. Live first.
John swallowed and watched the stars burn.
They broke camp at graylight. The dew bowls had collected half a swallow each. They drank it like gold. Sand had blown over the patrol tracks in the night, but the groove-lines were still there if you knew where to look.
The sun rose. The same. Endless. But when they topped the third ridge of the day, a jagged line cut the horizon—low, dark, unlike rock. John shaded his eyes. The line broke into shapes: spires of stone braided with timber and bone, sun-cured hides stretched between them like sails. A village. A fortress. A nest.
Tamara breathed out. "Finally."
They didn't go straight toward it. John took them along a shallow arc to a viewpoint half a dune away, then flattened them behind the crest. He slid forward on elbows until only his eyes peered over.
Figures moved between the spires—dozens of them. From the waist up, human: shoulders broad, skin the color of warm stone, hair braided with rings. From the waist down, segmented bodies ending in barbed tails that flexed as easily as wrists. They carried spears grown from chitin and bows that glittered like polished shell. The air pulsed with a rhythm—low, steady. Drums.
A pen stood near the outer palisade. John's breath hitched. Not animals.
People. Chained. 10 huddled shapes with pale-blue glow to their eyes—Revenakians. A figure lay curled near the fence, the sand around them stamped by dozens of clawed feet.
"Rin?" Tamara whispered.
John squinted. The figure rolled, coughed, and pushed himself up on shaking arms. Even from here, the old man's posture looked familiar—spine straightening as if pride could trick the body back into place.
"Rin," John said, relief and anger grinding together. "Alive."
Tamara caught his shoulder when he shifted to stand. "Wait. We can't just—"
"I'm not charging," he said. "I'm—thinking."
He flattened again, breathing slowly until the urge to move like an idiot passed. Invite, don't seize. Leto in his head again when he needed him least. He stripped the command of the man and kept the meaning.
The voice that wasn't Leto unfolded like dusk in his skull.
Count. Patrols of four. Spear, bow, net, sting. The nets carry sap-light—resin that hardens on contact with cores. If it binds your chest, you drown in your own energy.
"Wonderful," John muttered.
Tamara's eyes flicked to him. He shook his head; later.
He traced routes on the sand with a finger: the dead zone behind the outer racks of cured hide, the blind point beneath the nearest tower's shadow, the rhythm of patrols breaking line to water their beasts. It was a plan stitched from guesswork and prayer. He'd made worse.
"We'll need a distraction," he said.
He looked at his empty hands. No spear. The loss was a bruise he'd been ignoring. He flexed his fingers until the ache felt like resolve.
She nodded once
They backed off the ridge and slid down the lee face on their sides, leaving no silhouette on the crest. At the base, John checked the wind, the sun, their distance to the spires. He could feel the pulse of the place now—structured, disciplined. Not beasts.
He tried not to imagine Blake somewhere inside, running his mouth until someone decided to staple it shut.
They moved. Slow. Careful. Sand sucked at their boots. Once, far to their right, the ground thumped with a heavy, subterranean rhythm—like a drum played under their feet. John froze. Tamara's hand hovered over her new sword.
The thumping drew nearer. Louder. The dune to their left quivered and bulged, a ripple running down its side. John reached for Tamara's wrist—
—and something exploded out of the sand and slammed him full in the chest, knocking him backward in a shower of grit.
John's elbow hit rock. He threw an arm up on instinct—
Soft heat crashed into his neck and held.
A golden face filled his vision, eyes like twin suns, breath hot and full of ozone.
"Ember," John croaked, laughter and relief blowing a hole in his composure. The Lumibear rumbled, pressing his head into John's shoulder so hard it almost hurt. Sand smoked where his claws dug in.
Tamara fell to her knees beside them, a grin breaking through the desert's hard shell. "Show-off," she whispered, scratching the thick ruff behind Ember's ear. He purred like thunder rolled low.
John wrapped both arms around the bear's neck and let himself have it—one breath, two—then pushed up, heart steadier than it had been since the portal.
"Okay," he said, wiping grit from his mouth, eyes cutting back toward the spires. "We found one of ours."
He looked at the bone-and-hide fortress where the chained figures waited, at the shadows moving along the palisade, at the nets that could drown a light core.
"Now we get the rest."