The godstorm left scars that weren't visible.
days after weathering it, Kael could still feel the phantom press of foreign memories against his thoughts—ghosts of lives he'd never lived, bleeding through the edges of his own consciousness like colors running together. A woman's hands kneading bread dough. The metallic taste of fear before a battle. The slow, grinding ache of disease eating someone from the inside out.
He'd learned to push them away, mostly. His father had taught him that, back when the dust-memories first started.
"Build walls in your mind", Marcus Ardren had said. "Make rooms for what's yours and what's not. Don't let the dead crowd out the living".
Good advice, when the dead stayed quiet, but these memories weren't quiet. They insisted, pressed against those mental walls with a persistence that spoke of intelligence, of purpose, as though something on the other side was testing the barriers, looking for weaknesses.
Kael sat on the edge of the lead wagon's running board, watching the pre-dawn landscape resolve from shadow into bone-white detail. They were four days south of where they'd met Ilara now, deep enough into the Expanse that the god-bones grew thicker. Ribs gave way to shoulder blades the size of buildings, to fragments of skull half-buried in salt, to the massive curve of a titan's collarbone rising like a bridge across the horizon.
The air here tasted different. It felt heavier, charged with latent energy that made his skin prickle and his teeth ache with resonance.
"You're up early."
He turned. Ilara climbed up beside him, wrapped in one of Cors's spare coats—too large for her, sleeves rolled up three times. Her hair was getting longer, he noticed. No longer the cropped institutional cut from the orphanage, but growing out unevenly, dark and wild.
"Couldn't sleep," he said.
"Me neither." She settled next to him, close enough that their shoulders touched. They'd been doing that more often since the storm—seeking physical proximity, as if the contact helped ground them both. "The dreams are getting worse."
"What kind of dreams?"
"The same one, over and over. I'm standing in a place made entirely of bone—not fragments, but whole structures. There are archways and pillars and stairs that spiral up into darkness, and there's something at the center. Something that's been waiting."
Kael's stomach tightened. "Waiting for what?"
"For me. For us." She pulled the coat tighter around herself despite the warming air. "It speaks, in the dream. Not in words, exactly. More like… concepts. Feelings. It shows me things it wants me to understand."
"Like what?"
"Like why it died. Or rather, why it chose to die." Ilara's voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "Kael, what if the gods didn't lose the war? What if they surrendered? Chose to become corpses because it was the only way to—
. "I don't know. It won't show me that part yet. It just keeps saying soon. That I'll understand soon." She was quiet for a long moment, and then she spoke.
How long have you been able to hear it?" Ilara asked.
"The resonance? "Since I was twelve. Mine collapse." Kael kept his answer short, hoping she wouldn't press. She did.
"Just from a collapse? I thought—I mean, everyone who works the mines is exposed to god-dust. Why aren't they all—"
"Because they breathe the processed kind. Rendered down in the forges until most of the divine frequency is burned away. What's left is just…" He gestured vaguely. "Bone. Dead bone. It doesn't sing anymore.
"But yours did.
"Chamber 19 had a sealed pocket. Unprocessed material, concentrated. The kind of exposure that—" He stopped, not wanting to think about the seventeen they'd pulled out after him. "Most people can't survive it. Their bodies try to adapt and just… break. I got lucky.
"That almost feels to fortuitous to be luck," Ilara said quietly. "That's something else.
She was right, but Kael didn't want to examine what that something else might be. Didn't want to think about his father and how he had falsified the records to keep the higher ups from shipping him off as an imperial asset. His father's passing had been ruled as a suicide, which only made him angrier and confused whenever he crossed his m bodies ind."
"How about you?" He asked, to even the conversation."
I didn't know I could do it," Ilara said. "Not consciously. I just sang sometimes, in the orphanage, when I thought no one could hear. But it felt different than normal singing. Like the air was listening.
"Did other people sing? In the orphanage?"
"Of course. We all did—hymns, work songs, whatever Prelate Sorin required." She frowned. "But they never complained about headaches after I sang. Never said the walls hummed. I thought I was imagining it."
"You weren't."
" I know that now." She pulled her knees up. "The imperial woman—Administrator Voss—she said voice resonance is extremely rare. Hereditary, usually, but I never knew my parents could do it. The records said they were archivists. There was no nothing about abilities.
"Records can be falsified." Kael knew that better than most.
"Maybe. Or maybe they did something else, changed something before they died." Ilara's voice dropped. "The physician who examined me after my parents' execution, she collected my blood in a number of vials, and took them into a room. At the time I didn't understand but I later realized she'd done so, to know if I had any special abilities.
A few days later, she came with other imperial physicians. They stood at the doorway to my ward, and they all stared at me like I was some novel curiosity just discovered by the empire. It felt like they'd seen something impossible as they whispered among themselves."
Ilara met his eyes. "I think my parents made me this way. And I think the empire knew but couldn't prove it.
The sun crested the eastern horizon, spilling golden light across the salt flats. In the distance, a herd of bone-crawlers skittered across a vertebra half-buried in sediment—six-legged creatures that had evolved to feed on god-dust, their carapaces gleaming like mother-of-pearl. Normal sights, ordinary Expanse wildlife. But Kael couldn't shake the feeling that everything had changed, that the world they'd known was a skin stretched thin over something vast and terrible, and they'd just torn a hole in it.
"We could turn back," he said, not really believing it even as the words left his mouth. "Find a different route. Head west to the coast, get on a ship—"
"And go where?" Ilara's smile was sad. "We're marked now. The empire knows what we can do. What we are. And Tharos…" She pressed a hand to her chest. "I can feel it calling. Getting louder every day. If we don't answer, if we try to run, I think it'll just keep pulling until something breaks."
"Then we make sure nothing breaks."
"Always the optimist."
"I learned from Joren."
That drew a genuine laugh from her, bright and unexpected in the cold morning air. The sound made something in Kael's chest tighten with an emotion he wasn't quite ready to name.
Behind them, the camp was beginning to stir. Cors calling out morning assignments, the Sohm sisters already tending to wagon wheels that needed grease. Young Petran hauled water from the portable cisterns, moving with more confidence than he'd had a week ago.
The caravan had adapted to its new reality with remarkable speed—two god-touched passengers, imperial forces hunting them, and a destination that might get them all killed. And yet, Kael felt calm, with a peace that he hadn't known, in almost a decade. For now, for just a few stolen moments more, they could pretend the world was nothing but dawn and silence and the simple comfort of not being alone.