Born of Sand (Tales of a Dying Star Book 5) Read online

  Contents

  Other Works

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I: The Wanderer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  BLANK

  Part II: The Freeman

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part III: The Shade

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  BOOKS BY

  DAVID KRISTOPH

  Tales of a Dying Star

  Siege of Praetar

  The Ancillary

  Sword of Blue

  Drowned by Fire

  Born of Sand

  Copyright © 2016 David Kristoph

  www.DavidKristoph.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior consent of the author.

  Cover design by Milan Jaram

  Editing by Briana Kirby

  Enjoyed this book? Please take the time to leave a review on Amazon.

  To C.R.

  For that thing that one time

  Part I: The Wanderer

  Chapter 1

  It was at the top of a sand dune, yellow haze blowing away in all directions, when the woman decided to die.

  She had wandered for three days. Aimlessly, up one dune and down another, into the endless expanse. Sweat still trickled down her back, though her mouth had long since gone dry. She didn't understand how the desert could be so hot. Hot enough to burn her bare feet until she ripped strips from her shirt and tied them around her soles. But that only left her shoulders to crisp instead. The skin there and on her neck flared in pain with every movement, unnaturally tight from the exposed burns.

  How can there be so much sand? she'd thought that first day as she entered the desert. At the edge of town it seemed diminutive. Now, among the rising mounds of orange and yellow, she felt like a fool. The dunes towered so large they blocked most of the sky, hundreds of feet high. It was like being in a strange forest. The dunes formed different shapes: sometimes round mounds, sometimes long crests like waves, the tops hazy and shifting from the strong wind above. The sand was omnipresent, in her ears and nose, toes and mouth. No matter how much she coughed or covered her face the fine particles invaded, coated, plastered. The sand seemed to suck away the moisture, accelerating her fate.

  She found a perrin root the first day. The wind shifted and blew enough sand off of an outcropping of rock to expose the hard, vine-like plant. She fell on it eagerly, using her hands to worry at the vine, trying to crack it open, careless of the thorns drawing blood. Eventually she used her teeth to puncture the vine, and guzzled the grey liquid inside as if her life depended on it.

  My life does depend on it, she thought afterwards, rising to resume her trek. Though it was not her life she cared for. My girls. I may be here, but they're on their way to safety. I did the best I could.

  The temperature dropped rapidly as the sun fell behind the dunes, casting long valleys of shadow. The wind picked up, blowing down into the low points of the desert. Soon she was shivering.

  Not sure of what else to do, she found an exposed section of rock, almost as long as her body and a few feet high. She used her hands like shovels to dig out the sand next to the rock. She laid down inside, scooping the sand back over her body, hoping it would provide insulation. She wiped at the freezing sweat covering her face. The only thing that accomplished was to smear sand across her face, clumping together from the moisture.

  The sand helped preserve her body heat, but laying there proved difficult. Walking gave her something on which she could focus, to keep her mind off everything else. Now every ache and annoyance bubbled to the surface of her attention. The burns on her shoulders and neck screamed at her, agitated by the sand now rubbing against her skin. Her knees and ankles stiffened from the day's journey, begging to be stretched. Sand had accumulated in the corners of her eyes, stinging with every blink. She tried to coax more moisture into them by blinking rapidly but the effort only seemed to make it worse.

  And then there was the rumbling noise underground.

  She thought she'd imagined it, at first. A low vibration, felt instead of heard. The sand shifting, she told herself. The dunes were practically mountains, the weight of which must sound like an avalanche whenever it cascaded down the side.

  But the sound returned, louder. And distinctly beneath her, not lateral.

  The sand beasts were just a myth. A story told to scare children at night when they were tucked away in the safety of their beds, or for ruthless slumlords to adopt as the symbol of their cruelty. There couldn't be actual sand beasts roaming the sand. Could there?

  The woman slept little as she remained perfectly still in her hole, listening. But she did forget about her other pains.

  She woke to an angry sun, heat smothering her oppressively. There was nothing for her to do but continue on.

  At midmorning she found another perrin root, with enough murky water to quench her thirst and wash the sand from her face. Her stomach growled, a reminder that she'd not eaten for two days. Her people were long used to hunger, their food rigorously controlled by the occupying Melisao, so it was a muted, distant feeling. But she would need to eat eventually. How long until I find something? she wondered.

  Does it even matter?

  She'd walked into the desert in a vague sense of escape. The Praetari often wandered into the desert to escape the city and the occupiers. Once she'd assured her children's safety, she'd fled this way because she hadn't known what else to do.

  Now she realized why her people chose this path. Not to live, but to die.

  She couldn't let the peacekeepers find her, wouldn't let them be her end. She'd lived nearly every day of her life without the freedom of choice. Forced to work. Forced to starve. Forced to despair. The method of her death was one decision she could make. A last expression of freedom.

  Then why did she still walk on, clinging to life?

  When she glanced at the sun to gauge the time of day, she noticed a bird circling, so high above that it appeared only as a fleck of black against the yellow sky. Sometime later one bird became two, then two became five. By the time night fell and she dropped into a makeshift sand hole a dozen of the carrion birds followed. They drifted from the sky to land atop a sand ridge, perched in a line, quiet silhouettes that watched her through the night.

  She walked with increased fervency the third day, as though she could outrun them. They followed unyieldingly, never appearing to truly move, always directly above. The woman forced herself to stare at the sand, to not look up at them. She felt their eyes on her burned and blistering back.

  The rumbling in the ground soon returned, louder and more violent than before, shifting the sand and unsettling her feet. Death waits above, death waits below. She wished she had a knife or a stick or something, anything, with which to protect herself. Her only defense was to continue moving, up one dune and down the other side, over and over. Every dune identical, every view the same.

  So it shocked her to crest a dune and see people.

  They appeared as minuscule specks in the distance, five shadows walking across a sandy ridge. "Hey!" she tried yelling, but it only came out as a raspy croak. "Hello
?" She waved her arms, jumping up and down.

  The people disappeared down the other side of the dune.

  With renewed hope the woman hobbled down her dune in their direction. The slope added dangerous speed to her stride, her thin clothes blown back behind her. The exhaustion in her joints threatened collapse at any moment. She kicked up a fountain of sand with each step, feeling it drift down onto her hair and back. Her breath came in ragged gasps, and sweat ran down into her eyes and stung like needles.

  She reached the low area between the dunes and began climbing up the other side. Her momentum shifted immediately. The sand gave way beneath her feet, halving each step. The grains closed in, burying her feet so she needed to kick the sand off with each lunge. The slope grew so steep that she fell forward and began using her hands in a sort of climb, fingers digging into the hot grains. Hope and desperation and eagerness pushed her forward, made her rush with all her strength, climbing the endless river of sand.

  Suddenly she fell forward on her face as the slope leveled out. The top! She stood and looked around.

  Endless mounds of sand filled her view, orange and unmarred.

  She whipped her head around, to the left and right. Nothing but the round hills of sand stretching toward the horizon. She didn't see any footprints. Where had they gone? They couldn't have traversed another dune in the time she had darted there. Could they?

  Taking only a few seconds to breathe deeply, she shambled down toward the next one.

  The same view greeted her there.

  By then her throat burned, constricted with exhaustion such that only a trickle of air entered her lungs. She fell to her hands and knees and began to cough, and clumps of sand fell out onto the ground, dark with moisture. Each spasm scratched her throat, like claws tearing her from the inside out. She crouched there, coughing and wheezing, for a long while.

  I must have imagined them, she finally accepted. A mirage, brought on by her state of exhausted desperation. The heat caused the air to behave strangely, coming off the sand in flickering waves that made the yellowish horizon waver unnaturally. That must be the explanation.

  Eventually she began moving again, but her constitution lay destroyed. There is no salvation out here. I am going to die. The birds screeched overhead in agreement.

  Her daughters were safe, traveling away from the terrible yellow planet with incredible speed. That gave her some measure of happiness, but it drifted away quickly. I am selfish, she realized. She didn't just want her daughters to be free, away from the clutches of an occupied planet. She wanted them safe with her. With their mother. How could a girl grow up without her mother there, to take care of her when she grew sick and to teach her how to be a woman?

  A stranger will do that for them, now. That comforted her when she shuffled her girls on the shuttle at the Station, but now the thought filled her with dread. At seven years old, Kaela would remember her mother fondly. But Ami, only four? Her memories would fade. Kaela could tell her sister about their true mother, the one who had sacrificed so much to save them, but it wouldn't be the same as a memory earned genuinely.

  I promised them I would come. A lie to bolster their fortitude, to ease the journey. When they reached Oasis, the space station orbiting between the two rocky planets of the Sarian system, how long would they wait? How long until they realized their mother would not come? And worse: how long until they resented her for abandoning them, for breaking her promise? They'd hate her, forgetting everything else, focusing on what they believed to be abandonment. Would their memories be tainted, replaced with bitterness and confusion?

  And with that in mind, at the top of a dune with yellow haze blowing away in all directions, the woman decided to die.

  She held strength in neither body nor mind, so she rolled onto her back, accepting the oppressive sun onto her skin. "I'm ready," she whispered to the sky, to the birds circling and screeching. The pain in her chest came from love, not exhaustion, and it grew until she could barely breathe. She cried for a while, though she'd long since become too dry for tears. Memories surrounded her, and she pushed away all but her daughters, pulling those thoughts close to envelope her like armor: Kaela learning to read by the single functioning streetlamp that illuminated their apartment window; sitting on the floor playing memorization games that required clapping and touching hands; Ami smiling bravely as she received the medicine that opened her lungs and allowed her to breathe.

  "Am I fixed, mama?"

  "You were never broken, sweet girl."

  No one would ever know. No one would remember. But her daughters would live, even if they resented her their entire lives.

  The woman took a deep breath of the scalding air, exhaling slowly. "I am ready."

  A shadow blocked the sun, and a man's voice asked, "Ready for what?"

  Chapter 2

  The sound alarmed her so much that she jumped, leaning forward on her elbows.

  "Don't move," the man warned in a muffled, low voice. He stood over her, a silhouette, featureless, with a rifle held lazily across his body. Not aimed directly at her but in her general direction.

  They've come for me.

  She leaned back on the sand and closed her eyes. The desert was supposed to be her escape, her path away from the clutches of the Melisao who occupied the planet. No. I can't let them take me.

  "Not safe at the top of the dunes," the man said. "Shit's dangerous."

  A bounty hunter, she decided. She'd stolen the credits from the foreman's office to help her daughters. She needed them, and he had plenty, more than one man ought to have. One hundred and fifty credits wasn't much. Why would they send someone to find her just for that? Why couldn't they let her die?

  "What's your name?" the man asked.

  "Mira," she whispered, defeated. There was no use lying. He knew who she was, what she'd done. He would take her back regardless.

  "Mira," he said in that muffled voice. The sun reappeared as he crouched down to get a closer look. He wore a long coat despite the heat, with two bags strapped over the opposite shoulder as his gun. Straw-colored hair mixed with sand, and sharp, green eyes. A dirty cloth covered his mouth. "The shit are you doing out here, Mira?"

  "Leave me alone," she begged. "Let me die."

  He cocked his head, considering her words. "Why are you here?"

  "Please. All I want is to die." She knew begging was useless, but the words came anyways.

  He rose and took a few steps away, looking around. He stared to the south, then the east, as if searching for something. Then he returned to Mira and said, "Get up. Let's go."

  "Go where?"

  "I'm taking you back."

  Mira said, "No. Leave me. Please. Nobody would ever know."

  "Get up." He aimed his rifle. The wind flapped his coat around his ankles as he stood, waiting.

  No. You cannot make me. I'm ready to die, I've decided.

  Finally he cursed. He bent to grab her arm, pulling her roughly to her feet. Mira's legs held her upright of their own accord. The ground swayed in her vision from the sudden rush of blood away from her head. With one hand he patted her down, feeling underneath her armpits, down her back, in between her thighs. Quick and thorough. I have nothing, she wanted to tell him. Nothing but my life. And that's not truly mine at all.

  He gestured to the south with his rifle. "March."

  Mira stood in place, pleading with her eyes. I was ready. This was the place. I've decided!

  He jabbed her forward with the barrel of his gun. Mira began moving. She didn't have the energy to fight or resist, so her legs carried her forward, slow and shambling.

  "How long were you out here?" he asked as they descended the dune in slow, careful steps.

  "Three days," she said.

  "Three days," he repeated. "Shit. A long time for someone who claims all they want is to die. You could have done that back in the city. Thrown from a building, or cut with a blade."

  "I thought if I walked far enough nobody would fin
d me."

  "Why would it matter if anyone found your shitting body?" he asked.

  "It just would," she said. Someone loyal to the Melisao Empire couldn't understand what she was feeling.

  "You don't need to lie," he said. "All I want's the truth."

  "It is the truth."

  "You must have made some sort of exchange," he said in a sudden change of subject. "What did they give you? What shit did they promise you?"

  He cares about the stolen credits. He probably wanted them for himself, so he could turn her in for a reward and collect what she had taken. "A journey for my daughters," she said. "Safety for their futures, away from this wretched planet. That's what I bought. It wasn't promised, it was given."

  "And now you are here fulfilling your end of the bargain."

  What? He wasn't making any sense. "And now I am here to die."

  He sighed in what sounded like frustration. They walked in silence for a while.

  "Where are we going?" Mira eventually asked.

  "I'm taking you back," he said. "There will be questions."

  "I don't want to go back," she said.

  "Shit if I care."

  "Please..."

  "Sorry."

  She whirled toward him. "You aren't sorry. You're a bounty hunter. How many innocent women have you hauled away to be tortured?"

  For some reason that made the man laugh. "We don't torture anybody. And shit, you are far from innocent. You know what you've done, what you intended."

  "Everything I've done, I've done for the safety of those I love."

  The man put a hand on his chest in mock surprise. "Why, that is curious. I have done exactly the same." He glanced at a device on his wrist and then gestured with the rifle. "Shit. Keep moving. We have a while to go, yet."

  Mira continued marching through the sand.

  The sun rolled across the yellow sky. The birds continued circling, until the man aimed and fired a beam, plucking one of them from the sky and scattering the others. He led them over to the beast, which had a stooped back and hunched shoulders, and a long neck that stretched away from its yellow-grey wings like a worm. The man tied a cord around its neck and slung it over his shoulder before they moved on.