CHAPTER 3 — First Blood

Twenty-seven percent. Rijan had been sitting with that number for what felt like an hour, though he had no way to measure time here. The sky hadn't changed. The light hadn't shifted. The grey dunes continued their slow, indifferent breathing — ash rising and falling with the wind like the chest of something enormous and asleep. He'd moved after the interface appeared. Instinct, not strategy. Something in him had refused to remain standing in the open with that number floating in front of his face, so he'd backed toward the nearest collapsed tree and crouched behind its bulk, pressing his shoulder against bark that crumbled slightly under the pressure. Dry as bone. Dead for a long time. The interface had followed him, hovering at the same distance regardless of where he positioned himself. He'd tried ignoring it. That hadn't worked either. *Twenty-seven.* He'd calculated worse odds. He'd spent three years watching his mother navigate a diagnosis that came with a twelve percent five-year survival rate, and she was still here. Numbers were not verdicts. Numbers were current assessments based on available information, and available information was always incomplete. *So improve the information.* He needed water before anything else — the heat wasn't killing him yet, but it would. He needed to understand what the creature he'd seen was capable of. He needed shelter before whatever passed for night arrived, assuming night arrived at all. He was cataloguing resource priorities when he heard the sound. Footsteps. Running. Not the slow, rhythmic gait of the thing he'd observed earlier. These were frantic — the uneven, stumbling percussion of someone moving at the edge of their physical limit, each footfall slightly desperate, slightly off-balance. Human. Unmistakably human. Rijan went completely still. The runner came over a dune crest to his left, maybe eighty meters out. A man — older than Rijan by at least a decade, broad-shouldered but moving badly, one arm held close to his torso in a way that suggested injury. He was wearing what looked like office clothes, a pale shirt dark with sweat and ash, trousers torn at one knee. His face, even at this distance, was a portrait of absolute terror. Rijan's first impulse was to stand. To call out. To offer something. He didn't move. *Because something is chasing him.* The thought arrived with cold precision, and on its heels came the rest of it — *if I reveal myself, whatever is behind him knows where I am* — and he hated himself a little for how quickly the calculation had come, but he stayed down and kept watching. The man ran. The grey sand pulled at his feet. He was slowing. Then Rijan saw what was behind him. It came over the same dune crest fifteen seconds later, and the word *lizard* arrived in his mind and immediately felt insufficient. It moved on four legs, low-slung and long, its body stretched between head and tail in a way that made it look like something designed for speed rather than assembled by accident. The scales were the same grey as the sand — camouflage, or coincidence, or just the color of everything in this ruined place. Its head was wide and flat, tapering to a narrow snout, and it moved with an economy of motion that was deeply, fundamentally wrong. Nothing that size should move that quietly. It wasn't running. It was *gliding*. And it was faster than the man. Much faster. It simply wasn't closing the distance yet. *It's playing with him.* The realization settled in Rijan's chest like cold water. The creature could have closed the gap at any point. It was maintaining distance deliberately, keeping the man running, wearing him down. He didn't know if that indicated intelligence or instinct, and the distinction felt important in a way he couldn't fully articulate. He pressed harder against the dead tree and controlled his breathing — slow, nasal, silent. The man stumbled. Not a trip — his leg buckled, the right one, as though it had simply stopped cooperating. He went down hard into the ash, both hands catching him, and the sound he made when he hit the ground was involuntary and animal. He scrambled immediately, trying to rise, but his right leg wasn't working correctly. He got upright for a moment, lurched two steps, and fell again. This time he didn't try to stand. He turned around. Even from eighty meters, Rijan could hear what he said. The wind had died momentarily, and the words crossed the grey distance with horrible clarity. "Please — *please* — I have — I won't fight, I won't — please, I'm not—" The creature stopped. It stood roughly ten meters from the man and regarded him with the flat patience of something that had never needed to hurry. Its tail moved once, a slow side-to-side sweep that left a clean arc in the ash. It made no sound that Rijan could hear. The man kept talking. His voice had dropped to something Rijan could no longer parse — a continuous, desperate murmur directed at a thing that gave no indication of receiving it. Rijan's hands had found the bark of the dead tree and were pressing into it hard enough to hurt. He didn't look away. He understood, with a clarity that felt almost clinical, that looking away would be a form of cowardice he couldn't afford. He needed to see this. He needed to know what this world did to people. The creature moved. It was fast — not the measured glide from before, but something else entirely, a sudden compression and release of its body that covered the ten meters in less time than Rijan's mind could properly track. There was a single sharp sound. Then silence. Then the wind came back. Rijan stayed behind the tree for a long time. He measured his own reactions with detached attention — elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, a faint tremor in his left hand that he stilled by pressing it flat against his thigh. Nausea, manageable. No tears. He wasn't sure what the absence of tears meant about him. *He was a person. He had a name. He had someone.* The thought arrived and he let it sit there, unburied, giving it its weight. He didn't push it away. Pushing it away would make him something he didn't want to be. Then he filed it, because he was still alive and needed to remain that way. The creature was feeding now. He could see the shape of it against the grey sand, unhurried, methodical. It hadn't moved far from where the man had fallen. *Territorial or transient. If territorial, I need to know the range. If transient, it will move on. Either way — don't move until it does.* He was still building the calculus when something in the creature's posture changed. The feeding stopped. The flat, wide head rose slowly, tilting at an angle that suggested attention redirected. Not toward the dune. Not toward the distant curtains of blowing ash. Toward the collapsed tree. Toward him. The creature's eyes — pale gold, nearly colourless — found him across the grey distance with an ease that made it clear distance had never been the obstacle. It had known he was there.