Kira's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Kira knelt in the sand and pried another dead scale from her cooling suit's spine. The suit had to run cold enough to carry her across the wasteland to the green horizon, but every scale she loaded ran flat in an hour. Sweat stung her eyes. Without steady power, the suit was just heavy junk, and the heat would kill her before she crossed a mile. She knew where more scales fell. The old white lab squatted a day's walk out, its metal skin unbroken, its sealed doors humming faint against her palm. Dwellers whispered that the sky-folk dropped their scales here, that the ground around it glittered. Kira didn't care where the scales came from. She only needed enough. She dug through the night. By dawn her sack bulged with them: blue ones that pulsed cold, orange ones veined with heat, gray and green and violet, some bright, some spent. Enough to run the suit for days. Her hands shook. She fed a live blue scale into the suit's core. The suit woke. Cold air breathed against her neck. The frost held. For the first time, it held. A fox trotted from the lab's shadow and sat watching her, ears sharp, coat pale as the sand. It didn't run. It studied her sack like it understood. "Those aren't yours to take." The voice came from above. A woman stood on the lab's ledge, and Kira's breath caught. She was too clean for the desert. White hair, no dust on her boots. Her eyes caught the light gold and narrow, like a lizard's. A long scaled tail curled behind her heels. Sky-folk. Kira had never seen one this close. The woman climbed down without effort, quick and smooth. "I'm Lyra. I watch this place." She looked at the fallen scales in the sand, then at Kira's sack, and something crossed her face. "We're taught these come down as a gift. From us. From the sky." She picked one up and turned it over. "Why are they in the ground?" Kira gripped her sack tighter. "They don't fall from anywhere. They come from here. This lab. Whatever's sealed inside it." Lyra went still. The gold in her eyes flickered. "That's a lie. It can't be." "Then why are you digging them up too?" Lyra had no answer. She stared at the scale in her hand like it had burned her. The fox stood and pressed against Kira's leg, choosing a side. Kira backed toward the open desert, suit humming, sack full. She had her power now. But she'd been seen. The sky-folk knew a dweller was gathering scales by the sackful, and the one who knew had just learned her whole world was built on a lie. Kira turned and ran, the fox at her heels, Lyra watching her go.