They walked through the night.
Not like travelers across an empty plain, not like explorers charting new land, but like ghosts that had been pushed out of the world they belonged to. Every step seemed to sink deeper into the sand, as though the desert itself was trying to drag them down and erase them from memory — and maybe that was what Orion wanted. A clean disappearance. A forgettable ending. Four specks swallowed by the wasteland.
The sky was a bruise — a sheet of gray-blue dimness stretching endlessly overhead. No stars dared shine. No constellations. Just a pale moon halo, so faint that sometimes Luke wondered if it was simply his imagination.
Their breaths scratched the back of their throats like sandpaper. Elias coughed every few hundred steps, short bursts of dryness. Reina pressed her hand close to her ribs when she walked, her injuries still healing after the fall from the wall. Silo's feet dragged behind them in uneven, scraping motions, and occasionally he muttered something that sounded like a prayer or a joke — maybe both.
But mostly, no one spoke.
Silence lasted so long that Luke wasn't sure if his voice would even work when he finally used it.
Foot after foot. Breath after breath. Their shadows stretched thin and long over dunes that all looked the same. They might as well have walked in circles. The horizon never grew closer; it only stared back like a distant beast with dull eyes.
Hours passed. The moon arched and began its slow descent.
That was when Luke finally forced himself to speak.
His throat hurt, but he cleared it anyway. "Alright," he said quietly, "you keep fidgeting."
Elias glanced at him from the corner of his eye, face pale, sweat dried like salt on his brow.
"What?" he rasped.
"You keep swinging back and forth." Luke gestured vaguely toward the horizon. "We should find the tessarect, we should go back to Orion, we should hand in the beacon, we should—" He shook his head. "Pick one, Elias."
Elias's mouth opened slightly. Behind his eyelids, something trembled — hope or fear. Luke couldn't tell.
"What I want," Elias repeated slowly, almost as though he'd forgotten the meaning of the word. He stared out over the dunes. His jaw tightened. "I… don't know."
He didn't shout. He didn't pace. He simply spoke, calm and exhausted, like someone who had finally run out of walls to punch.
"For so long, I thought I understood the world." He lifted his hand toward the sky. "We had rules. We had structure. We had the Nova. I thought… if we worked, we would be rewarded. If we proved ourselves, we would be seen."
His fingers curled.
"And then everything kept breaking."
He breathed in hard, sand entering his nose, making him choke once. He wiped his eyes.
"You asked what I want?" Elias shook his head. "I want the city we grew up in to make sense again. I want to wake up in the barracks, complain about the shifts, watch the supervisors yell at us because we broke something, and then work until my hands ache and sleep again. I want normal."
He laughed once — a bitter, broken sound.
"But that city doesn't exist anymore. Not for us."
Nobody interrupted him. Even Reina, who always had a retort on her tongue, stayed silent.
Elias kept going, voice shaking more than his steps.
"The Nova… the Nova was different. He was hope. All the stories said he was supposed to be our saviour, the one who protected Orion from the Omegas when the other Novas fell. The one who held the city back from chaos."
He swallowed again, bitter and dry.
"So I believed in him. All my life. I thought he was everything. I thought he saw us — the vermin — as part of his grand plan."
He looked down at his feet as though ashamed.
"And then… he smiled at us. He praised us for entering the tournament. He talked about hope… about inspiration… about pushing the other miners to work harder. He made it sound like a blessing."
His voice cracked.
"And then he sent us to die. Like trash."
Luke looked at him — truly looked — and for the first time saw something he had never noticed before: Elias was afraid. Not the adrenaline kind of afraid, not the tournament panic or fight-or-flight terror, but the kind that lingered quietly and ate at your mind until it hollowed you out.
Elias raised his head and asked, with surprising gentleness:
"If we go back, do you really think they would let us live? Do you think they would honor anything we say? 'Oh, Nova, hello, sorry we survived your firing squad, but we actually have something to deliver.'"
He grimaced.
"Maybe, maybe not."
No one responded.
Because none of them disagreed.
A gust of wind scraped across them. Sand hissed across the dunes like whispers.
Reina finally spoke, voice low. "The upper city always cleans its mistakes." She didn't turn to them. "We are mistakes."
They kept walking.
Minutes, maybe hours, slipped past. Their legs moved without thought. Their minds drifted like their steps. Everyone was too tired to fear, too dehydrated to cry.
A pale light crept over the dunes. Dawn. Not the golden dawn of old stories or murals in the Nexus dome — this was a gray dawn, thick and smoky, as if the sun had been injured long ago and never fully healed.
The horizon revealed scars. Broken rock. Scattered metal shards half buried in sand. Once, maybe decades or centuries ago, there had been civilization here. Now it was only debris.
Silo squinted, wiped sand from his face. "Something's there." His voice cracked on the last word. His eyes widened. "I'm serious — look. Something shiny."
They all froze.
At first Luke thought he was hallucinating from exhaustion — but no. There was a glimmer. A rippling shimmer tucked between two dunes. Like glass reflecting light… or water.
Water.
No one breathed for a heartbeat.
Then they ran.
Their bodies didn't decide. Their minds barely processed. Their legs simply moved on instinct — the kind born from desperation, from survival, from the simple knowledge that if they didn't reach it now, tonight might have been the last night they ever saw.
Luke nearly collapsed halfway down the dune, scrambling on hands and knees. Sand clung to his arms like wet clay. Elias staggered, falling and crawling without caring about pain. Reina slid down the slope, jaw trembling, her eyes wide with something raw — something almost childlike.
Silo was crying openly.
When they reached the bottom, they didn't speak. They didn't gasp. They simply stared.
It was a pool — perfectly still, perfectly clear, nestled in a cradle of smooth stone. It glowed faintly with reflected dawnlight. The surface was so calm that the world above it seemed frozen in its reflection — sky, broken dunes, their own shapes kneeling before it.
It was wrong. Beautiful. Impossible.
But none of them cared.
Reina collapsed first, hands trembling as she reached forward. Elias crawled beside her, sand streaking his cheeks. Silo pressed both palms into the earth like a prayer.
Luke knelt slowly at the edge.
His reflection began to take shape in the water.
He lifted his shaking hands to scoop even a single mouthful.
And just before he touched it—