Father Desmond Crane knelt beside a mound of sand studded with rusted scrap and dug with his fingers. He was hunting Vael tech again. Five years ago, before the wasteland cracked open, he had preached from a pulpit under a rose window. Then came the vision: wings of colored glass, huge, letting light through. He wrote it down that same night. Now he built those wings piece by piece from alien salvage, and he called every lucky find a nudge from God. His spear lay in the dirt beside him. His hands, brown and grey-haired at the knuckles, moved fast through the sand. His fingers struck something smooth. He brushed the grit away and found a shard of Vael glass, violet, warm, humming under his thumb. His hands began to shake. He had traded three days of food for his first cracked panel and studied it two weeks before he dared touch it. This shard was better. This shard would fit the left wing. He whispered thanks and slipped it into his coat. A shadow moved on the ridge above him. Desmond froze. He looked up slow, one hand closing on the spear. A Vael scout stood against the pale sky, purple-scaled, big black eyes, a curved antenna twitching over its helmet. It had already seen him. It raised a small device to its mouth and clicked something into it. Desmond understood. The scout was not here to fight him. The scout was here to mark him. He threw the spear anyway. The scout stepped aside, calm, and the spear clanged off stone. Then it turned and ran along the ridge, fast, low, gone before Desmond could climb. He stood alone in the sand with the shard warm against his ribs and his spear ten yards downslope. He knew what the click meant. More of them would come, and they would follow the trail he had cut through the wasteland to reach this place. He picked up the spear and started for a wind-hollowed cavern he had passed at dawn, a mouth of layered stone deep enough to hide a man. He would reach it before dark. He had the shard. He had his wings to finish. And now he had the Vael behind him.

Desmond reached the cavern mouth as the sun cut low across the rocks. He ducked inside and pressed his back to cold stone. His breath came fast. He touched the shard through his coat, still warm, still humming. Then he heard the click again, close this time, from the ridge behind him. He looked down at his sleeve and saw a small black bead stuck to the cloth near his elbow. The scout had tagged him when he threw the spear. The bead pulsed once, soft red. Every second he wore it, the others could find him. He tore at the sleeve with his teeth and pulled the bead free. It stuck to his thumb like sap. He scraped it on the rock and it clung. He heard boots on gravel outside, two sets, coming fast. He ran deeper into the cavern, one hand on the wall, the shard banging his ribs. The passage bent and opened into a narrow slot where water trickled down a canyon wall in thin lines, pooling at the base among tufts of grass. Desmond knelt at a pool and shoved his thumb under the water. The bead did not come off. He grabbed a flat stone and scraped harder. It split, then peeled, and floated free on the surface, still blinking. He heard the two Vael enter the slot behind him, their scaled armor scraping stone, antennae ticking. He picked up the blinking bead on the stone and hurled it upstream into a deeper pool where the trickle ran loud. Then he pressed himself flat behind a shelf of rock. The two scouts came through with weapons raised. One stopped at the pool where the bead pulsed under the water. It clicked to the other and pointed. They crouched at the pool, backs to Desmond, and began to fish the signal out. Desmond did not move to fight them. He slid along the wall in the other direction, out through the slot, back to the cavern mouth, and up onto the ridge above. He walked until the rocks hid him and then he ran. The bead was gone. The shard was still warm at his ribs. His sleeve was torn and his thumb bled where the stone had cut him. He did not know how long it would take the Vael to understand the pool was empty of him. He knew only that the trail he had cut was still there in the sand, and that he had bought himself hours, not days. He turned toward the far wastes and the workbench where his wings waited, and he kept moving while the light held.

Desmond ran until the ridge fell away and the ground cracked open into a second cavern he did not know. He took it because the wastes above lay flat and bare and the light was failing. He went in fast, spear low, shard warm at his ribs. The passage narrowed, then narrowed again. He turned a corner and his hand met stone. A wall. No slot, no gap, no seam. He backed up and swept the walls with his palms and found only rock. Then he heard them behind him. Two sets of boots, then a third, moving without hurry now, because they knew. He had left a trail in the sand and they had followed it, and the pool trick did not work twice. He set his back to the dead-end wall and lowered the spear. His hands shook. He made them stop. The first scout came around the bend with its weapon raised, purple plates catching what light there was, antenna twitching above its helm. Desmond did not wait. He drove the spear into the gap under its jaw where the armor thinned, and the shaft went in and the scout dropped. The second was already firing. A bolt burned across Desmond's shoulder and he felt the coat scorch. He tore the spear free and swung the butt into the second scout's knee and it buckled. He put the point through its throat before it could click a warning to the third. The last one came in low, hands out, no weapon drawn, reaching for his coat, reaching for the shard. Desmond let it come. He stepped inside its arms and drove the spear up under the chest plate with both hands and his weight behind it. The scout folded around the shaft. Its black eyes held him a moment. Then it slid down the spear and lay still. Desmond stood in the dead-end with three bodies at his boots and his breath loud in his ears. His shoulder bled. His hands would not stop shaking. He knelt beside the last scout and pulled a small square panel from its belt, cracked at one corner, humming faintly under his thumb. He put it in his coat next to the shard. Then he wiped the spear on the scout's leg, stepped over the bodies, and walked back the way he had come. The wastes were dark now. The workbench was still hours off. He had killed three of them, and more would come for what he carried, and he had one more piece for the wings.