Page 19 of Flashover

I retrieve the folded stack of clothes I left tucked behind a scorched crate. The fabric smells of smoke and steel, warm from where it rested near the forge. I dress slowly—pants first, then the soft charcoal t-shirt, boots laced with fingers still tingling from transformation. When I finally rise, fully clothed, the illusion of control settles over me again. But beneath the surface, the dragon still stirs, unwilling to sleep for long.

I find her outside just as my boots touch dirt and the last ember glow fades beneath my skin. The air here smells sharp—antiseptic laced with iron and smoke, a sterile promise layered over the chaos that clings to wildfire zones. Overhead, a busted floodlamp spits static hum and broken light, slicing her face into jagged slants of gold and shadow.

She doesn’t move as I approach, arms folded tight, posture taut like she’s holding herself back from either hitting me or hurling the questions carved deep behind her eyes. Chin tilted, mouth set, she watches me with a wariness I haven’t earned back yet—and the weight of what I haven’t told her sits heavy between us, sparking like live wire under bare feet.

“I thought you were avoiding me.”

“Just gathering intel.” I hold out the pendant. “Wear this under your shirt.”

She rolls it between her fingers, eyebrows lifting at the sigil. The metal feels warm, almost alive, thrumming with an energy she doesn't know how to name. A faint furrow creases her brow as her thumb brushes over the etched flame, the sigil's lines smooth but oddly resonant—as if they hum against her skin. She glances up, suspicion flickering behind her eyes. “Pretty. Little heavy-metal for my taste. Weird too. It almost feels like it has a heartbeat.”

“It’s tempered silver. Helps with radio interference.” Half-truth. I can feel it already, tugging at a place just behind my sternum—a steady pull, deep and undeniable. “Humor me.”

Her gaze narrows, reading secrets in the set of my shoulders. “You’re hiding something.”

“Not hiding. Timing.” I fasten the chain around her neck before she can protest. The metal settles against her collarbones, and the tracking rune hums warm against my senses—alive, tethered.

She shivers. “Feels like it’s buzzing.”

“Just a grounding current. Keeps static off your chest radio.” My fingers linger a breath too long. Want flares bright, but the moment fractures on her suspicion.

“Before this is over, I'll have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” she says with a small smile.

“You will.”

Only a partial lie by omission—because if she knows the truth of my dual nature and that I forged it with dragon fire, the trust we’ve built will scorch along with the rest.

She steps back, mouth pressed into a tight line, and turns away, her boots crunching against loose gravel. Her shoulders stay stiff, arms locked at her sides, but it’s the sway of her hips that draws my gaze—graceful, stubborn, defiant. I watch her go, each step pulling a little more warmth from the night. The distance between us stretches taut, heavy with everything unsaid, grinding like sand in a raw wound I keep pretending doesn’t bleed.

False dawn stretches over the ridge, painting the sky deep violet as slow, muted light seeps between the peaks like ink into gauze.The air is sharp with the tang of scorched metal and lingering smoke, a grim perfume that clings to the early wind. I stay low behind the berm, ears tuned to the distant rattle of a utility cart and the faint hiss of wind sliding over tarps. Every detail—every sound, scent, and shadow—feels sharpened to a blade's edge, pressing in as I double-check the sensor syncs by touch and instinct alone. The pendant’s heartbeat pings steady—north side of camp, Liv’s trailer. Safe. For now.

I clamp down on a snarl, muscle twitching along my jaw. Shadow-silent until the op—that’s the call. But instinct howls for release, snarling just beneath the surface, demanding I shatter protocol and drag her clear before the first torch ignites diesel and everything goes to hell. The need to protect her claws through me, raw and relentless, a heat I can’t bleed off no matter how tightly I grip the edge of restraint.

Behind me, the scorch crescents on the anvil still radiate faint warmth—blistered remnants of fire that refuse to fade. Heat ghosts off the steel in a whisper of defiance, a warning carved into iron and ash: secrets don’t stay buried when the forge remembers. The marks throb like phantom heartbeats, pulsing with the weight of choices made in dragon flame.

She’ll learn everything soon—truths I can’t bury forever, not with the forge still whispering them in waves of heat. I just have to keep her breathing long enough for ‘soon’ to arrive with answers instead of ashes and hope to hell it’s not already too late.

A low rumble rolls across the canyon—the first supply truck coming to stage for the drill...Showtime.

Ignis’s convoy headlights spear the gloaming, and my sensor grid lights up with twelve heat-blur signatures that shouldn’t exist—mercs already in position, foam-round rifles aimed toward Liv’s sector. I flip my radio to the private band shedoesn’t know I encoded into her pendant and breathe, “Dragon-girl, the predators are inside the fence.”

CHAPTER 8

LIV

The voice threads through my bones before I register the words—Kade’s, quiet but taut with urgency, vibrating through the pendant at my throat. I freeze mid-step, every instinct flaring.

“Dragon-girl, the predators are inside the fence," he says.

No sirens. No alarms. Just his voice, low and lethal, and the weight of what it means. I don’t wait for orders. I don’t ask questions. My pulse spikes. My breath shortens. I grab my gear and move fast, boots cracking over scorched debris. The trees around the burn line loom like charred sentinels, and if something’s coming, I’m damn well meeting it on my feet—with eyes open and fists ready.

The last flare-up left a plume of smoke clinging to the upper ridge, and now that the wind has shifted, the ash it carried begins to settle. It drifts down like black snow, slow and weightless, dusting the charred hillside in lazy spirals. The sky hasn’t fully lightened, and my skin still tingles from the buzz of the pendant. One moment I’m hearing Kade’s voice—warning me that the predators are already here—the next, and without any clear instructions to the contrary, I’m suiting up, too furious to breathe.

They can bench me, flag me, call me unstable. I don’t give a damn. My boots are already coated in soot, and my lungs burn with the bite of smoke. I can feel the heat of danger pulsing in the ground—alive, waiting, ready to pounce. The bastards are already inside the fence, slinking through the dark—ruin in motion—and I’ll be damned if I’m not out there when it all goes to hell. Not hiding. Not hesitating. Just me, the fire, and the fury in my blood.

My headlamp slices through the murk, a blade of light cutting across the ash-choked hillside. Smoke clings to the air in sticky strands, coiling low along the ground where stumps still seethe with ghost heat. The remnants of yesterday’s fire glow faintly, veins of ember simmering beneath cracked bark—dying stars on borrowed time. Outside, the air hangs heavy and sour with char. I’m leading the patrol—boots grinding through brittle root beds, sweat sliding down my back, every nerve strung tight against the gust that could turn ember to inferno. Again.

I find it buried in the bottom of my jacket—a strip of Nomex with a melted edge and half a name still legible in Sharpie. It used to be Lawson’s—my spotter. Always carried licorice in his back pocket, always complained about the radio static. He’d given me hell for not replacing my cracked face shield.

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