From orbit, Zorhros looked dead.

​

Most of its oceans had vanished beneath the sand. Its red sun was burning low, and its nights held fewer stars than the old stories promised. But the planet was not empty. Life had simply learned to hide, in caverns, beneath dunes, and inside settlements built from the bones of ships that would never fly again.

​

Seventeen-year-old Kailum Boone belonged to that hidden world.

​

At the moment, he was tearing across its desert like a bad decision somebody had forgotten to stop.

​

His delighted scream shattered the Solthar morning as his skiv skimmed barely a handspan above the sand. The narrow halo-board rode atop a shimmering grav-flux field, cutting across the dunes at a speed most sensible people would have considered fatal.

​

Kailum leaned forward, scarf snapping behind him. The first dune came fast.

​

He took it too sharply on purpose.

​

The skiv answered with a rising harmonic pitch, its grav-flux field straining against the violent angle as the board launched into open air.

​

For one glorious instant, gravity forgot about him.

​

The dunes fell away beneath his boots. Wind tore through his dark hair, and the bright copper-gold light of Zorhros’s red sun flashed across the blowing sand and the bronze of his skin. Then the skiv crested, tipped toward the ground, and his stomach shot into his throat.

​

The universe stopped seeming so enormous and doomed and impossible.

​

This was why he rode. Not for the races. Not for the bragging rights in Hope Bay. Not even because his best friend, Tarak, insisted that girls liked Ridge Riders more.

​

It was this moment. The split second between falling and flying. The beautiful edge of stupid. The furious hope that the ground would still be there when he came back down.

​

Then gravity took him back.

​

The board slammed low over the dune face with a violent hiss of sand.

​

Its left side dropped.

​

Kailum’s boot slipped, and the desert rushed up to meet him.

​

He twisted hard against the sudden drag. For one breathless moment, the board fought him. Then the stabilizer caught, snapping it level beneath his boots.

“Frek!”
 
The damper chip. Again.
 
He had been promising himself for weeks that he would repair it properly. But there was always another recycler coughing its last breath, another order that had to be finished, and never enough usable parts. Convincing himself the old patch would hold had been easier than digging through the salvage bins for enough nano-circuits to rebuild the chip.
 
Not this time.

​

The moment he got home, he was fixing it. He would find the circuits. He would make the time. No excuses.
 
Kailum carved hard left, spraying glittering grit into the air as laughter ripped out of him across the empty desert.
 
He could have ridden like this forever.
 
Then reality buzzed in.
 
A sharp vibration pulsed against his wrist. His comm-band flickered awake, scattering blue light across his knuckles before projecting a hovering holo-image into the air above his arm.
 
Tarak snapped into focus in a shimmer of pale blue static. His blond mop stood in six directions, like electricity itself had given up trying to organize it, while his playful brown eyes and crooked grin filled the projection as though he had barged into reality without knocking.

 

“Happy O.D., Hitch!” Tarak crowed. “Seventeen orbits needs a special celebration. So how about Auren and I take you into the Circuit tonight?”
 
Kailum rolled his eyes. “You already volunteer her for this?”
 
Tarak shrugged inside the flickering hologram, his grin turning lopsided. “I think you both like it when I pretend I’m in charge.”
 
Kailum snorted. He liked the way Tarak said things like that, as though confidence were a joke they were both in on. It made everything feel lighter. Easier. Like rules were suggestions and trouble was a shared language.
 
“Need to run the Circuit by Aunt Lavinia first, but right now I’m out in Section Seven,” Kailum said, his breath still sharp from speed. “Looking for that pirate tender you told me about.”
 
Tarak groaned, his holo-image collapsing halfway out of frame, as though even projected light couldn’t sit still long enough to contain him.
 
“Crek, Kai! And you didn’t ask me? You shouldn’t be out there alone. Besides, it looked pretty picked over when Rennik and I went out there. We got a few data nodes, but didn’t see much else.”

​

“I’m just taking a look,” Kailum said. “In and out.”
 
Tarak’s mouth twisted, not quite a grin now. “That’s what people always say right before something explodes.”
 
“Comforting.”
 
“I try.”
 
For a brief moment, they simply looked at each other through the softly flickering holo, as though neither of them wanted to be the one to end the moment.
 
“Solthar winds are picking up out in Section Seven,” Tarak said, the joking edge thinning. “That thing could blow right over the gorge and take you with it.”
 
“I’ll be fine,” Kailum said, shifting his weight as the skiv climbed another dune. “But if we’re celebrating tonight, then I need this haul fast.”
 
Tarak huffed, throwing up a hand in theatrical surrender. The motion sent his holo-image shimmering. “Fine, fine. Head to the end of Deadman’s Ravine. Be careful, Kai. Quick in, snag whatever shine you see, and then quick out.”
 

He tried to sound casual. Kailum heard the effort anyway.
 
For just a moment, Tarak’s eyes gave him away, worry slipping through before the grin could cover it. The sight did something quiet and warm to Kailum’s chest, a small brightening he hadn’t expected.
 
It was nice, realizing someone was watching out for him. Nice in a way that felt heavier than mere habit.
 
Then Tarak’s trademark grin snapped back into place, bright and entirely unearned.
 
“And Kai,” he added, leaning closer to the holo as though he were passing contraband through the air, “don’t poke anything that hisses.”
 
Kailum felt that grin. He opened his mouth with a comeback already loaded, something about Tarak being the only thing on Zorhros that hissed voluntarily, but the holo stretched, glitched, and dissolved with one last crooked smile.
 
Then it was just desert again.

​

The quiet came back too fast, as though it had been waiting politely behind Tarak’s voice. Kailum felt it settle on his shoulders while the dunes raced beneath him, empty in every direction.
 
Kailum leaned forward, and the skiv responded at once, surging toward the horizon with a hungry pull. The wind knifed past his ears as he narrowed his eyes, scanning the distant ridge line and chasing Tarak’s directions through the haze of memory.
 
Deadman’s Ravine lay ahead, half-buried in sand, jagged as an old scar carved into the crust of Zorhros.
 
His gaze swept every crease of rock and shadow. Dunes shifted like restless tides, sliding over themselves in slow, whispering waves. He searched for any sign of the tender, any glint of metal or wrong-angled silhouette the desert hadn’t swallowed yet.
 
But the desert offered nothing back. Only heat. Only silence. Only the patient, endless waiting of a world that kept its secrets deep.
 
Then, a flicker.

​

A blade of sunlight flashed to his left, sharp as a signal. For one breath, the world stilled. Even the wind seemed to lean in, pointing him straight toward the beacon in the distance.
 
“That has to be it,” he muttered, hope flaring so fast it almost hurt.
 
Relief hit first. Then urgency. Then the stupid, dangerous wish that this time, for once, the universe wasn’t messing with him.
 
He dropped his weight and carved hard toward the light. The skiv answered with a protesting whine, its flux field grinding against the grit as though the desert itself wanted him off its back. Sand rose in heaving sheets, alive and shifting, trying to swallow whatever secret it had briefly allowed him to see.
 
Kailum leaned in anyway.
 
Please, he thought without quite meaning to. Just let it be real.
 
He leaned deeper, chest tight. Not a click to waste.
 
The glint resolved, first into a smear of metal, then the jagged edge of a broken window, and finally the full shape of an old tender sprawled half-buried at the gorge’s lip.

​

Kailum brought the skiv to a controlled hover. The vessel’s frame lay cracked across the flats, its hull twisted, its stern teetering over Deadman’s Cut. One good storm and it would spill into the abyss, swallowed forever by the deep gorge below.
 
His boots sank into warm grit, the sand shifting softly around the treads. Behind him, the skiv held position, hovering like a machine on alert. Its flux stabilizers hummed at a tight, steady frequency, firing micro-corrections as they compensated for the uneven ground.
 
Ready.
 
As if it already knew he might need to run. As if escape were part of the plan, even when he pretended it wasn’t.
 
He looked over the cracked, torn wing.
 
“Careful where you step,” he muttered, remembering Tarak’s warning. “Quick in, snag the shine, quick out.”
 
He drew a steadying breath and placed his weight on the warped plating of what remained of a delta wing. The metal flexed beneath him with a long, groaning protest, as though the ship resented every intrusion. He tested another step. The wing sagged, sand whispering through ruptured seams.

​

His eyes traced the frame. Once, it had been a proud courier built to cross the void, sleek-lined and forged from reinforced alien alloys capable of surviving decades between systems. It had sailed the trade lanes of distant stars before finally dying here beneath the sands of Zorhros.
 
Now it was little more than rust and exposed ribs, a carcass slowly devoured by storms, time, and generations of scavengers picking through its remains for anything worth selling.
 
Scrap-yarders, they called themselves.
 
Scrap-rats, if you were rich enough to sneer while saying it.
 
Before him, the vessel’s name lay partially revealed beneath the dust.
 
Sand had flayed the name nearly smooth, leaving only fragments: Ori… IV.
 
Kailum brushed sand from the recessed registry panel near the ship’s nose. Its surface had been scoured nearly smooth by decades of storms, but the info-marker was still there—a narrow strip of quanta-glass fused directly into the hull.
 
Flawless despite the wreck around it.
 
Behind the ship, the ravine breathed.

​

A small crumble of stone slipped from somewhere beneath the shuttle’s broken belly and vanished into the darkness below. The whole craft answered with a tired groan, metal shifting against rock.
 
Kailum went still, remembering Tarak’s guidance.
 
Quick in, snag the shine, quick out.
 
There it was again, another moan from inside the ship, the reason Tarak and Rennik had not wasted time checking the registry.
 
They had seen the angle, same as he had. The vessel was not resting on the edge of Deadman’s Ravine. It was being held there by luck, old stone, and whatever stubborn piece of hull had wedged itself into the cliffside. One wrong pull, one bad shift, one heavy step in the wrong compartment, and the whole shuttle could tilt nose-first into the drop.
 
Tarak would have hated that.
 
Rennik would have called it stupid.
 
Both of them would have grabbed the obvious salvage and cleared out fast.

​

Kailum should have done the same.
 
Instead, he bent closer to the registry.
 
Most stripped ships went dark eventually. First the cabin lights failed. Then the internal systems gave out. Last of all, the registry glow faded—the silent signal every real scrap-yarder on Zorhros understood.
 
Dead registry meant dead wreck.
 
Dead registry meant picked clean.
 
But this panel still had light.
 
Not much.
 
Just a faint blue pulse beneath the quanta-glass, small as a sleeping indicator on an old machine. It brightened once, faded, then brightened again.
 
Monitoring.
 
Kailum’s mouth curved into a slow, satisfied smile.

 

There it was.
 
A living registry meant the ship was still watching something aboard. Hidden compartments. Forgotten tech. Sealed cargo. Untouched systems still connected to the vessel’s core network.
 
Which meant one thing.
 
Nobody had fully cleared this wreck yet.
 
The marker itself was worth taking. Quanta-glass like that could buy a week of food, maybe more if Lavinia found the right buyer. Old star-core standard. Blue-glass lattice. Radiation-hard. Built for reactor rooms, drive housings, and the ugly corners of ships where cheaper tech burned out fast.
 
Hope Bay still ran on pieces like that, buried engines, salvaged cores, old components tough enough to keep breathers, pumps, and heat-lines alive long after the machines around them had died.
 
Bel Hallow had moved on to cleaner systems. Deep-field wells. Quiet pylons. Sealed current-lines that drew heat and pressure from far beneath the Ridge and delivered it polished, measured, and safe.

 

Bel Hallow ran on refinement.
 
Hope Bay ran on everything Bel Hallow had learned to hide.
 
Kailum touched the edge of the marker with his thumb, feeling for the manual catch.
 
He stopped himself. Not yet.
 
If he pried it loose now, the registry would go blind. Whatever secret treasure the ship was still protecting might vanish with it.
 
He would come back for the glass.
 
Another pebble snapped loose beneath the hull.
 
This time, the sound took longer to fade.
 
Time was running out. Kailum raised his wrist.
 
The comm-band cast a narrow beam across the quanta-glass marker.
 
The marker blinked awake.

 

Silver glyphs rippled across the deep blue field, throwing faint holo-echoes through the fractured plating like ghosts of motion in a ship that would never fly again.
 
The registry unfolded in clean, clinical lines:
 
Registry: OR-47X-2219, Orious IV Shuttle Tender
Owner: Gventmach Freight Company, Fleet #12
Status: Decommissioned
Hazards: Structural Instability / Residual Radiation, Low
 
Kailum stared at the second line.
 
Fleet #12.
 
That was wrong.

 

Not wrong enough for a patrol scanner to care. Not wrong enough to trip an authority flag. But wrong enough for anyone who had spent half his life listening to old haulers argue over dead companies and bad luck.
 
Gventmach Freight had never run a Fleet Twelve.
 
Old Man Gventmach was famous for it. Superstitious as a tunnel rat and twice as stubborn. He skipped twelve on everything, fleet numbers, dock bays, cargo rows, invoice ledgers. Said twelve scattered a man’s fortune in too many directions and left nothing whole enough to bring home.
 
So why would one of his shuttle tenders carry it?
 
Kailum’s smile faded.
 
The number was not a mistake. It was a marker. A quiet little wrongness buried in a line no one important would bother reading twice.

​

Something aboard the tender had been filed under a number that was never supposed to exist.
 
The ship groaned beneath him.
 
Kailum looked toward the ravine. Then back at the registry.
 
Whatever Fleet Twelve meant, someone had wanted it hidden in plain sight.
 
The ship groaned again.
 
Kailum scanned the horizon.
 
No dust plumes. No skivs cutting low across the flats. No scavengers circling for scraps.
 
Today, this one craft was his, for however long it stayed on the edge.
 
He drew a steady breath, ducked low, and slipped through a jagged seam in the hull.

​

Inside was ruin. Dark. Vast. Silent.
 
Ribs of metal arched over him like the bones of a broken cathedral. Shafts of light speared through cracked seams overhead, turning the drifting dust into slow, suspended galaxies, as though even the air had grown tired of moving.
 
He stepped forward carefully. The wreck was balanced so precariously on the ridge that each footfall sent a soft thrum through the warped decking. One careless step, one sudden shift of his weight, might be all gravity needed to tear it loose and send the entire ship over the edge with him trapped inside.
 
The silence pressed close, thick and listening. Every groan of the hull echoed like a dying giant shifting in its sleep.
 
To the right, the cockpit was nothing but a hollowed shell, panels stripped, consoles gutted, wires hanging like exposed nerves. The air still carried the faint sting of ion burn and old insulation, ghosts of a fire long smothered by sand and time.
 
To the left: worse, just as Tarak had described.

​

Scrap-yarders had already picked it over. Consoles torn out, bots stripped for parts, plating pried loose in long, ugly scars. Kailum barely spared it a glance. He wasn’t after the obvious. He had studied enough wrecks to know better. Smugglers and pirates hid their best work in places most salvagers never bothered to look.
 
Kailum had made a habit of looking.
 
His boots cracked over glass and brittle circuit boards, each step loud in the hollow space. Cables dangled from the ceiling like dead vines, swaying in the draft, shadows twitching across the walls as though the ship still breathed in shallow, broken pulses.
 
He kept one eye on the exits, heart ticking fast, ears tuned to the slow, painful groans traveling through the metal. The whole tender felt precarious, suspended between choices, as if deciding whether to cling to the ledge or finally surrender to the ravine waiting below.
 
Then he stopped.

​

Ahead, a section of bulkhead had buckled inward, but something about it felt wrong. Not storm damage. Not scavenger work.
 
Something else.
 
Kailum crouched, his thumb tracing the jagged seam along the warped metal, then froze.
 
The surface shimmered beneath his touch.
 
Not much. Just a faint liquid ripple sliding across the alloy like water over stone before vanishing again.
 
Kailum’s pulse kicked hard against his ribs.
 
For one impossible second, the entire wreck seemed to fall silent around him.
 
His eyes widened. “Holo-lining,” he whispered.
 
A slow grin spread across his face, sharp and disbelieving all at once.

 

Not scrap.
 
Not another picked-clean transport with stripped wiring and empty compartments.
 
A hidden compartment.
 
His mind ignited instantly with possibilities, contraband, lost tech, forgotten credits, maybe even pre-collapse hardware worth enough to keep Aunt Lavinia’s shop running for an entire orbit.
 
Someone had gone to tremendous trouble to hide this panel in plain sight. Most people would have seen nothing more than collapsed plating and storm-warped metal. But the shimmer gave it away.
 
Only for a heartbeat. Only if you were paying attention.
 
And judging by the untouched dust and undisturbed seams, Kailum Boone was probably the first person to find it.
 
A quiet laugh escaped him as he shook his head.
 
“Oh, Tarak is never hearing the end of this.”

 

His grin widened.
 
Tarak, best reflexes in Hope Bay. Worst eyesight on all of Zorhros.
 
The ship groaned, long, low, shifting.
 
Kailum froze, breath locked in his chest.
 
He waited. Listened.
 
The groaning stopped.
 
Only then did he move.
 
He dug eagerly into his satchel and pulled free a scavenger’s key, nothing elegant, just a pronged emitter welded onto a scorched power cell, its casing pitted and its seams burned from too many bad fixes. Crude, ugly, half-ready to fall apart. But in hands that knew how to use it?

​

Perfect enough to crack a holo-lining.
 
Kailum pressed it to the bulkhead.
 
The seam hissed. Light rippled outward like liquid fire.
 
Then the key snapped hot in his hand.
 
“Crek!” Kailum hissed through his teeth and shook the sting from his fingers.
 
“Fine,” he muttered. “Be difficult.”
 
He shoved the smoking key under his arm and dug back into his satchel, this time pulling free a homemade seam-pick, three bent sensor needles, a thumb trigger, and a strip of copper wire wound tightly around a cracked charge bead.
 
Ugly as a bent skiv rail.
 
But it worked.
 
He set the needles into the broken shimmer and tapped the trigger.
 
The charge clicked once.

​

​

The false front peeled away in thin blue threads.
 
Behind it, the real bulkhead glinted back at him at last, smooth, untouched, the metal clean and flawless, as though it had been installed only a cycle ago, not buried beneath a ship left to rot on a ravine’s edge.
 
Kailum depressed the panel, and it popped open with a weary metallic click.
 
His mind leapt ahead, imagining gleaming nodes, untouched data cores, maybe even a sealed cache of credits the pirates had forgotten to take during a quick escape from authority drones.
 
His eyes narrowed, and a long, tight sigh escaped his chest.
 
“Crek,” he muttered as he peered through the open door.
 
Instead of treasure, scorched wires tumbled free, followed by melted circuit boards and a couple of charred nodes pulsing weakly like dying fireflies, the kind of rubbish scrap-rats always left behind after ripping out the real prizes.
 
He reached deeper, pushing aside parts with sharp, clattering taps. Every scrape echoed through the hollow tender as though the ship were laughing at him.
 

His chest tightened.
 
Treasure was supposed to be here.
 
“Worthless slag,” he sighed, leaning back.
 
A metal beam groaned in the forward galley, reminding him of Tarak’s warning: Quick in, snag the shine, quick out.
 
He reached deeper into the vault when his fingers snagged on something thin—a cord. He tugged, and a whole tangle of debris slid out, clattering across the deck in a heap of scorched metal and wire.
 
Grimacing, he sifted through the mess until the cord came free: leather, worn soft with age, with a polished black disk dangling from its end.
 
It swung once in the half-light.
 
Onyx. Plain. Unmarked.
 

He snorted. Tarak’s grandfather had once worn a good-luck charm something like this. Called it a Hope Stone. Said it kept evil away.
 
Old superstition.
 
Maybe it had once mattered. Here, in a smuggler’s cache, it was nothing.
 
Kailum turned the stone over one last time. No glyphs. No prayers scratched into its surface. Just a smooth, round black stone swallowing the light and giving nothing back.
 
With a shake of his head, he let the cord slip from his fingers. The pendant clattered into the junk at his knees as he bent forward and began scooping the remaining material from inside the safe.
 
Surely there had to be one thing of value. Just one thing to make this trip worthwhile.
 
His eyes strained into the dim recess of the vault.
 
Nothing left.
 
No hidden compartment. No forgotten stash.
 

Just shadows and disappointment.
 
His gaze settled without much hope on the pile of material spilling around his knees.
 
His hands swept through the heap, shoving aside scorched panels and brittle cabling. Metal scraped. Circuits cracked under his fingers. Dust rose in faint, gritty puffs that hung in the stale air like an accusation.
 
Then his fingers brushed something different.
 
Cool.
 
Smooth.
 
Wrong for scrap.
 
Kailum’s breath hitched.

​

He pulled it free.
 
A shard of crystal, clear as water, its inner veins flickering silver and blue, as though starlight had been trapped inside and forced to burn its way out.
 
It felt alive in his palm.
 
Eyes wide with disbelief, he whispered, “Stellarite!”
 
His chest tightened. Even a shard this small could power a full shed for cycles, maybe longer. Scavengers—or anyone else who rushed in and grabbed whatever glittered first—had missed this completely. Even Tarak and Rennik, two seasoned scrap-yarders, had blown right past it.
 
A grin spread across his face.
 
Of course.
 
That was why the cache had been stuffed with junk. The pirate, smuggler, or whoever had flown this tender knew exactly what they were doing. If anyone ever found the vault, scavengers would pry it open, sift through a handful of slag, curse the worthless scrap, and walk away.
 

He had kept digging. He had pushed past the debris.
 
And now he had found the real prize.
 
Treasure, hidden and waiting, now his.
 
He dropped lower beside the heap, pulse quickening as his fingers moved through the jagged debris. Twisted wire. Burned plating. Melted circuitry. He pushed it all aside carefully, searching by feel for that same smooth, glass-like texture.
 
There.
 
Another piece of Stellarite.
 
Then another.
 
His breathing sharpened with excitement.

​

By the feel of it, there were more buried somewhere beneath the rubble, maybe a dozen fragments tangled inside the wreckage like hidden coins forgotten beneath ash.
 
Kailum pulled them free one at a time, lifting each shard toward the thin shaft of crimson sunlight spilling through a cracked bulkhead overhead. The dark mineral gleamed softly in the light, veins of blue and silver shimmering beneath the surface like trapped electricity.
 
Untouched by heat.
 
Untouched by time.
 
His grin spread wider with every piece.
 
Stellarite.
 
Real Stellarite.
 
Not synthetic refinery scraps or low-grade industrial dust like most traders tried to pass off in Hope Bay, but genuine refined Stellarite pulled from an old pre-collapse vessel. The stuff sold fast if you knew the right buyers.
 

Aunt Lavinia was going to lose her mind.
 
Maybe she wouldn’t even yell at him for being late to work today.
 
Running a salvage shop in Hope Bay wasn’t easy. Keeping it afloat? Even harder. But this haul, this find, would buy them breathing room. Enough credits to ease the constant strain. Enough to keep the shop’s doors open for quite a few more cycles.
 
Maybe more than that.
 
He leaned in again, and metal shifted somewhere deeper in the wreck.
 
Kailum jolted upright and listened.
 
The sound was sharp and hollow, its echo ricocheting through the tender’s ribs like a warning shot.
 
The hull answered with a long, groaning shudder, as though the ship had suddenly remembered it was perched over a ravine and did not appreciate being disturbed.

 

Kailum froze.
 
Then came the scream of tearing metal.
 
A beam twisted loose in the forward compartment and crashed down in a violent spray of rust and dust. The impact slammed through the tender from nose to tail.
 
The floor lurched beneath Kailum’s boots.
 
Slowly, terribly, the ship began to slide.
 
“Frek.”
 
Dust poured from the ceiling as the wreck shifted toward the lip of Deadman’s Ravine.
 
Kailum scooped everything gathered around his knees into his satchel, Stellarite shards, slag, cracked nodes, melted conduit, anything that might sell.
 
If he made it out alive.
 
Another crack thundered through the corridor.
 

The ship was going.
 
And if he stayed any longer, it would take him with it.
 
“Cruk!”
 
Adrenaline detonated through him.
 
Kailum bolted.
 
He ducked through a narrow hatch just as the bulkhead behind him collapsed with a metallic scream, sealing off the hidden vault.
 
Sparks rained across his shoulders. The corridor twisted beneath his boots, littered with snarled cabling and shifting debris.
 
Overhead, a support beam snapped loose with a crack like thunder.
 
Kailum dove.
 
Rolled.
 
Came up running.

 

The second chamber was worse.
 
Walls bowed inward as though the tender were exhaling its final breath.
 
A coolant pipe ruptured beside him in a shriek of white vapor. Heat burned his eyes.
 
Somewhere behind him, something massive gave way with a deep, shuddering boom.
 
He didn’t look back.
 
Ahead, pale desert light spilled through a ragged tear in the hull.
 
Freedom.
 
Kailum sprinted for it as the ship wailed around him, supports snapping one after another.
 
The deck pitched violently.
 
He stumbled hard.
 

Ahead, the opening began collapsing inward.
 
No.
 
Kailum hurled himself forward just as jagged metal snapped shut around his boot.
 
The entire tender lurched toward the ravine, dragging him with it.
 
“CRUK!”
 
Panic exploded through him.
 
He kicked wildly against the twisted steel.
 
Once.
 
Twice.

 

Again.
 
Nothing.
 
Sand slid beneath him in thin rivers as the wreck dragged him inch by inch toward the drop.
 
On the fourth kick, the metal finally screamed apart.
 
Kailum tore free and hit the sand, sprawling.
 
The slope beneath him collapsed instantly.
 
His hands clawed desperately for purchase as gravel and dust poured toward the ravine below. His boots slipped, caught, slipped again, then finally held.
 
Behind him, the tender split in two. The section he had just escaped from gave one final, tortured scream before rolling forward and vanishing into Deadman’s Ravine.
 
For one breath, there was only silence.
 
Kailum sat frozen, his lungs dragging in air. The ship was gone, but he was still there. Still breathing. Somehow, impossibly, he had made it.
 
A shaky laugh escaped him, breathless and almost giddy.
 
He was alive.
 
Then the desert spoke again.
 
A crack like thunder tore through the hillside. Kailum spun as the slope behind him collapsed, releasing a towering wall of sand and shattered stone.
 
The wreck had been holding it back.
 
Now the ship was gone.
 
And the entire desert was coming down.
 
“FREK!”
 
Run.

 

Kailum threw himself forward as the ground dissolved beneath his boots. Sand swallowed his ankles, then surged toward his knees. He tore one leg free, stumbled, and nearly went down. Something struck his shoulder and spun him halfway around.
 
Stone. Hull plating. He couldn’t tell.
 
Didn’t matter.
 
Move.
 
The roar filled his skull. Sand poured around him in violent currents, dragging at his legs and pulling him toward the ravine.
 
An uprooted bwanja branch whipped across his path. He hurdled it badly, caught one boot, and slammed into the ground hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.
 
No. No, get up.
 
He shoved himself upright, but his hands sank to the wrists. The whole hillside was moving now, carrying him with it.
 
The edge rushed closer.

 

Ten strides.
 
Eight.
 
Six.
 
His skiv hovered ahead, its grav-flux field flickering beneath the rising current of sand.
 
Kailum lunged for the board.
 
He didn’t look back.
 
Three strides.
 
Two.
 
He jumped.
 
His boots slammed onto the skiv. The impact jolted through the board and momentarily disrupted its grav-flux field. Instead of rising, the skiv struck the sliding sand and shot forward.

 

Straight toward the edge.
 
“No, no, no!”
 
Kailum threw his weight back, but there was nothing beneath the board to grip. Sand, stone, and shattered branches swept him toward the ravine.
 
The skiv reached the lip.
 
Tipped forward.
 
And sailed into open air.
 
Kailum’s stomach dropped as the gorge opened beneath him, vast and waiting.
 
Then the grav-flux field caught.
 
A harmonic surge shuddered through the board, snapping it level above the canyon. Kailum clung to it, breath locked in his chest.
 
He was flying.
 
He was safe.

 

The harmonic stuttered.
 
The left side dropped.
 
The damper chip.
 
“Frek.”
 
The field went out.
 
The skiv skidded across loose grit, its nose veering sickeningly toward the ravine’s edge. The left stabilizer stuttered, the damper chip again, then caught.
 
For one terrible instant, the world dropped away beneath him.
 
Weightless.
 
Falling.
 
Then the skiv’s phase-generators roared awake. A flickering magnetic sheath caught the board mid-slide just as the ground crumbled into the abyss below.
 

A ragged breath tore loose from his chest.
 
Alive.
 
He leaned hard left, and the skiv answered instantly, slicing across the collapsing sand as the desert thundered behind him.
 
Kailum risked a glance back just as the tender’s remaining stern tilted, shuddered, and vanished beneath a waterfall of sand and dust, swept whole into Deadman’s Ravine.
 
His heart slammed once, then seemed to stop.
 
Breath locked in his throat.
 
He could only stare at the dust boiling up from the ravine.
 
That could have been him.
 
His foot trapped inside.
 
His body dragged over the edge with the tender.

 

“Frek…”
 
The word slipped out on a thin, shaking breath.
 
Then the shock cracked open. Heat burst through his aching ribs, surged up his throat, and demanded release.
 
The desert had tried to take him.
 
It hadn’t.
 
Kailum thrust a fist into the air.
 
“FREK YOU, ZORHROS!”
 
His voice cracked beneath the force of it. He swallowed against the sudden knot in his throat as a tear broke loose and streaked across his dust-covered cheek.
 
He didn’t wipe it away.
 
He shouted again, louder this time, pouring every ounce of terror, fury, relief, and triumph into the cry.
 

Then, breathless and trembling, Kailum swung the skiv toward Hope Bay.
 
His cry chased him across the dunes, spilled into Deadman’s Ravine, and thundered back from its walls, larger than his own voice, as though Zorhros itself were acknowledging the boy who had defied its grip…and lived.
 

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