The Kaleid-One emerged from drift space like a ghost stepping into moonlight.
Lu'Ka barely felt the transition. Just a soft shift beneath his boots and a quiet recalibration hum in the bridge walls. Outside the viewport, the stars regained their order—and beneath them, a planet rolled into view like a forgotten secret dragged back from myth.
Dakun.
He exhaled slowly, locking his eyes on the world below.
No rings. No satellites. No orbital debris. Just golden dunes scarred with deep tectonic ridges, churning dust storms crawling across the atmosphere like living things. Dakun wasn't dead.
It was untouched.
"AI," he said, keeping his voice steady, "confirm coordinates."
"Confirmed. Entry vector matches Council override. Planet status: Unregistered. Classification: Anomalous Zone. No active telemetry."
The ship slipped into a quiet orbit, systems adjusting for a wide-angle sweep. Lu'Ka watched the terrain as it scrolled beneath the ship—endless wind-scoured emptiness.
Then—something broke the rhythm.
A structure. Crooked. Metal. Half-swallowed by the desert.
He zoomed in.
It wasn't a building. It wasn't a ship. It was a rusted tower of twisted metal, leaning like a wounded tree, the base buried deep in curling dunes. Steel ribs jutted at odd angles. Time and storms had eaten its shape, but something of it remained.
A shelter. A ruin. A grave.
Then he saw it.
A patch of disturbed sand. A form—small, motionless—was partially buried beneath the edge of the tower.
It was hard to make out at first, but the thermal overlay blinked confirmation.
"AI, analyze heat signature."
"Warm-blooded. Lifeform partially concealed. Surface activity minimal. Breathing detected."
Lu'Ka leaned forward.
There was a girl under that sand.
Face barely exposed. Wrapped in scavenged rags. Black hair clumped with grit. She didn't move. Not out of fear—out of habit. Out of practice.
She had buried herself like a creature evolved for ambush.
"Species ID?" he whispered.
"No match in database. Subject is untagged. Movement pattern: intentional concealment."
His heart beat slower now. Sharper.
"She's not just hiding," he murmured.
"She's waiting."
The drone feed held steady, its silent camera circling above the half-buried tower. Lu'Ka watched the girl—her figure barely visible beneath the sand. Not panicked. Not struggling.
Just… still.
Then the seismic alert flashed red.
"Warning: tectonic anomaly. Proximity breach. Origin: sub-surface."
"What?" Lu'Ka muttered, already dragging the image feed outward.
In the distance, something bulged beneath the dunes.
A ridge of sand lifted.
Twisted.
Then erupted.
A deafening pulse rolled across the sensors as a massive segmented worm burst free from the earth. Its body, thick as a star freighter, shimmered in layers of hardened scale. Dust exploded around it, caught in the updraft of its emergence. Dozens of spines spiraled along its hide, vibrating like tuning forks as it let out a roar that wasn't a sound—it was a frequency.
Low. Deep. Bone-shaking.
The kind of noise meant to make prey run.
Lu'Ka didn't move.
Neither did the girl.
He flicked the visual back to her thermal feed.
Still buried. Still breathing slow and even. Eyes closed. Muscles relaxed.
As if she'd done this before.
"AI," he said, voice low, "threat distance?"
"Current distance: 4.6 kilometers and closing. Trajectory not yet intersecting."
But Lu'Ka had already seen it.
That thing was sweeping. Listening. And if it adjusted course...
"Override passive scan," he ordered. "If the worm approaches within two kilometers, initiate decoy interference. No exposure. No contact."
"Override confirmed. Drone will deploy interference pulse upon proximity breach."
He leaned back, hands trembling slightly. Not from fear.
From awe.
This girl—whoever she was—had not run. She had not trembled.
She had disappeared into the desert like she was part of it. Like the sand welcomed her.
Lu'Ka's blue skin pulsed pale along his jawline.
This wasn't training.
This wasn't instinct.
This was something else.
He kept watching. Unable to look away.
And for the first time since he left the Academy, he whispered aloud—more to himself than the ship:
"…what in all the stars are you?"
The seismic tremors hadn't stopped.
Lu'Ka gripped the console, staring at the scan as the first leviathan undulated across the dune ridge, throwing up storms of sand with every movement. The drone circled, silent and high, its cameras fixed.
Then—
Another alert. Briefer. Sharper.
"Second anomaly detected. Vector: eastern approach. Subterranean breach imminent."
His eyes widened. "Another?"
Before he could react, the feed jumped.
The desert ruptured again.
A second worm exploded from below, trailing spines like razors, its mouth a gnashing spiral of fanged rings. It met the first creature mid-air with a crash so violent it cracked the ground beneath them.
Sand detonated in every direction.
The two beasts tore into each other with primal fury—snapping, coiling, crashing against one another like titans beneath a burning sky. The sheer vibration shook the drone's stabilization field. Lu'Ka's monitor trembled. The Kaleid-One's inertial dampeners blinked red.
And beneath it all—the tower groaned.
Cracks split along its warped skeleton.
Lu'Ka's eyes flew to the thermal overlay—Niri's form still buried at the base, seconds from impact.
"No—AI, initiate diversion protocol! Full pulse burst!"
"Engaging."
The drone dropped low, releasing a flickering pattern of decoy lights and static pulses. But the worms didn't notice. Didn't care. Their rage was ancient, blind, territorial.
Predators of the planet. And she was just dust beneath them.
The tower collapsed with a sound like metal screaming.
Lu'Ka flinched.
But when the dust cleared—she was moving.
A streak of cloth and blood darted from the debris cloud. Niri limped—her leg dragging, her shoulder gashed—but her movements still fluid, still controlled. She moved away from the collapse and the chaos, using a zigzag pattern through the dunes to avoid tremor trails.
She wasn't running blindly. She was evading.
Lu'Ka stared in disbelief.
His skin had gone pale again, the blue of his face paling beneath his outer membranes.
She shouldn't be alive. She shouldn't be that fast. That precise. Injured, bleeding, in open terrain—and she was moving like the desert had taught her personally how to run from gods.
"Keep her in view," he whispered. "Track her. Don't lose her."
The AI complied, recalibrating the drone's pattern to follow her at distance.
He watched as the two worms crashed again in the background, their massive bodies tearing craters into the landscape.
And in the middle of it all, a lone girl sprinted across the dunes, wounded and silent—like she belonged there more than any species ever had.
Lu'Ka's voice trembled with awe.
"She's surviving this."...