The three dead scorpions changed the shape of the day.
Neo and Alice did not speak right away after finding them. They stood in the sand with the wind dragging grit around their boots, each one reading the same thing in the carcasses ahead. Other awakened had passed through here. Recently. The cuts were clean, the bodies not yet half-swallowed by the dunes, and one of them had been opened at the core with enough precision to say whoever killed it knew exactly what they were doing.
Neo broke the quiet first.
"So much for empty hunting grounds."
Alice kept her axe low and scanned the dunes ahead. "We were warned."
"Yeah. I preferred it as a rumor."
She turned toward the next rise. "Are we leaving?"
Neo almost laughed at that.
"No. We came all the way out here. I'm not going back because someone else had the same idea."
Alice gave a short nod.
They moved on.
