She stared at the notebook, its pages trembling in her hands. The words-precise, but personal-blurred for a moment, the print swimming in the heat haze that shimmered above the sand. The compass on her wrist, a gauntlet of unfamiliar origins, caught the sun and flashed, but she ignored it, determined to follow the instructions exactly. She trusted the book. She always had, whether it was a manual, a recipe, or the battered school texts she'd sold mangoes to buy for Camilla in Bucaramanga. Methodical, careful, she traced each line with her finger, lips moving as she matched the Spanish to the landscape. The Sinai, though, refused to cooperate.
The desert was not the Brecon Beacons, nor was it the Andes either. Here, the ground shifted beneath her boots, a soft treachery. What looked close on the map-an outcrop, a shadow-became an endless trudge, the horizon always receding. The light changed by the hour, gold to white to a bruised violet, confusing her sense of direction. She checked the notebook again, then the compass, then the notebook, her hands shaking now, sweat pooling in the creases of her palms. She was late to the checkpoint. She knew it, felt it in the gnawing pit below her ribs.
The pack-twenty-five kilos, fifty-five pounds-had started as a challenge, an adversary she could outlast. After an hour, it was a fact of life: a child clinging to her back, a memory of burdens carried in another country. Four hours in, it was everything. The straps dug into her shoulders, muscles unused to such punishment screaming with every step. Her gait, once measured and upright, had collapsed into a shuffle. Sweat traced new patterns down her spine, salt stinging the raw places where the pack rubbed her skin raw. Her breath came ragged, lips cracked and dry, tongue thick as she tried to swallow.
She remembered the streets of Bucaramanga, the weight of mango crates on her head, the scramble for coins, the long afternoons drifting from one job to the next. There, resilience was survival, improvisation a necessity. Here, the rules were different. This army demanded precision, punctuality, a kind of order that felt alien. She was late. She was off course. She knew it before the notebook confirmed it, the landmarks refusing to match the careful diagrams. Her fingers fumbled with the compass, the dial spinning, sweat-slick and uncooperative.
Yet, muscle memory from kyokushin flickered through her body-how to breathe through pain, how to move when every fiber screamed to stop. But the dojo was a world of seconds and bursts, not hours of attrition. The desert did not care for technique. It asked only endurance.
By evening, she limped, squinting at the notebook, the pack now a living thing, a person clinging to her back, whispering doubts in her ear. The Sinai watched her, impassive, shifting its face with every step. It offered no comfort, only the promise that the next ridge, the next shadow, might be the one that finally broke her-or, perhaps, the one that let her through.
Above the surface, she moved: checking, walking, sweating, enduring. Beneath, the old fears and stubborn hopes churned, unseen, as vast as the desert itself.
The checkpoint materialized like a mirage—tents stark against twilight, military precision amid chaos. The compass in her gauntlet hummed faintly against her skin, the needle unwavering in its certainty. Had it been pointing here all along?
Her feet moved without conscious direction now, each step a negotiation with pain. Blisters had formed, burst, and formed again beneath her boots, the skin raw and weeping. Her legs were machinery, pistons firing on muscle memory alone, the mind disconnected from this broken vessel.
"Soldier approaching", someone called out.
"Negative. Civilian trainee. The late one."
Captain Zara stood silhouetted against the camp lights, tablet in hand, face impassive as stone. The officer didn't move to help as she staggered the final twenty meters, didn't offer encouragement as others might have. The military observed; it did not intervene.
"Echo-Seven-Niner. Twelve hours, forty-three minutes.
The words cut through her exhaustion—a pronouncement, a judgment.
"Checkpoint target was five hours, fifteen minutes, Vega. You've failed the time parameters."
Fiona's mouth opened but nothing emerged except a harsh exhale. Her knees buckled, not dramatically but with the simple inevitability of systems shutting down. The earth rose to meet her, or she met it, the distinction meaningless now.
"But you reached it anyway."
This acknowledgment, delivered in the same tone as the criticism, somehow penetrated the fog of her fatigue. Captain Zara made a notation on the tablet.
"Two-thirds of civilian trainees never find the first checkpoint. Take note of that."
Two soldiers moved beside her, their movements efficient, impersonal. Without comment, they unfastened her backpack straps, the sudden absence of weight causing her to pitch forward. One caught her shoulder, steadying her without gentleness or cruelty—just function.
"Water", the first soldier said, pressing a canteen to her cracked lips.
The liquid was warm, metallic, and perfect. It spilled down her chin as her throat struggled to swallow, muscles uncoordinated. The soldiers didn't comment, didn't hurry her. They simply waited, as if her struggle was ordinary, expected.
"Tomorrow's route is sixteen kilometers. We move at oh-four-hundred."
Captain Zara's voice floated above her as the soldiers guided her toward a sleeping bag laid out at the perimeter of the camp. Not among the others. Separate. Whether out of respect for her civilian status or to mark her failure, she couldn't tell.
"Your performance was insufficient, Vega. You should do better tomorrow."
The captain turned away, and the conversation ended. The two soldiers deposited her on the sleeping bag, set her rifle beside it, and left without a word or backward glance. No encouragement. No contempt. Their neutrality was somehow worse than either would have been.
She watched them return to their stations, joining the others—a community bound by shared competence, shared understanding. The distance between them and her sleeping bag might as well have been another desert. Her eyes closed involuntarily, the stars above blurring into streaks.
"I don't belong here", she thought, the words forming and dissolving like mist.
They had sweat discipline into muscle, trained for this. She had mango crates, videogames and unfinished dreams. They were becoming soldiers. She was still trying to become someone.
The gauntlet's needle glowed faintly, not like a machine, but like an old friend waiting to speak. Tomorrow will be longer. Harder. The thought should have terrified her, but exhaustion claimed priority over fear. Her last conscious sensation was of the desert sand shifting beneath the thin barrier of the sleeping bag, the earth itself restless with secrets.
She wakes to silence. Not the hush of sleep, but a hollow, crackling absence. No voices. No birdsong. Only the faint hiss of wind scraping sand across canvas. Crusted eyes blink against the sun-already slicing the sky in half, too bright, too soon. Her tent is empty. The camp is empty. Just her, the rations, a new map, and the gauntlet on her wrist.
She sits up. Every muscle protests. Feet pulse with pain-raw, blistered, swollen. Shoulders bruised, skin rubbed raw beneath the straps. The pack, set aside, looks heavier than ever. She swallows. The taste of dust and old sweat.
She scans the horizon. Nothing moves. The world has moved on.
The gauntlet vibrates, a subtle insistence. Its arrow points, unwavering, toward a horizon she cannot trust. She forces herself up, legs trembling. The map shakes in her hands. She tries to orient it, to match lines and ridges to the world around her. The gauntlet nudges her wrist, a gentle pressure, trying to turn her hand. She resists.
She mutters, "Let me learn, please." The gauntlet's light dims, a soft acquiescence.
She remembers-Archon, patient, drawing Cartesian curves on a screen, shaping a heart for her daughter's prom gift. Dision, who built a naval battle out of sunlight and shadows, teaching her how the angle of the sun could chart a course. They never rushed her. Never left her behind. Learning with them was flight, not this-this stumbling, this ache.
A single sob. Release for a lost time.
She tries. Measures shadows with her hand, clumsy. Holds the map sideways, then upside down, cursing softly. Talks to herself to keep the panic away. Gets it wrong. Gets it wrong again. The gauntlet pulses, wanting to help. She shakes her head. "I know you know where to go. But let me figure it out. Like they would've."
The sun climbs. Sweat patterns shift down her back. Each step is a negotiation with pain. She studies the notebook: 'Use the sun's arc. Find north by shadow length at midday.' She tries. Fails. Tries again. Each attempt, a little less wrong.
Time fractures. Fragments of effort. The world narrows to sand, sweat, the taste of metal in her mouth. Then-something clicks. A ridgeline, at last, matches the sketch. Relief, sharp and sudden. She orients herself. Letting the sun be her compass, the way the old explorers did. The gauntlet flickers, less like a machine, more like a companion.
She walks. Not guided, for there was no guiding light like in those rpgs she used to watch Bairon play. Not lost. Learning.
And somewhere inside her wrist, the gauntlet glows again-quiet, respectful. Not leading. Walking beside her.
Eight days became a universe, each one an orbit around the star of her own endurance. Time was no longer measured in hours or minutes, but in horizons conquered and distances devoured. Each dawn arrived as a new world, each dusk a fading nebula in the expanding cosmos of her struggle.
"Better than yesterday, Vega. Still insufficient."
On the third day, the skin between her toes split open-blood mapping constellations within her boots, tiny galaxies of pain. She arrived one hour and forty-two minutes late, the desert indifferent to her suffering.
The fourth day, hallucinations flickered at the edges of her vision: the shimmer of Colombian street corners, the ghostly glow of Archon's interface in the dark. One hour and six minutes late. No one remarked on her improvement. The silence was absolute, the judgment implicit.
By the fifth day, language itself abandoned her. Her mind recalibrated, counting only in footfalls, in the metronome of her heart, in the shifting angles of shadow across sand. Forty-nine minutes late. The world narrowed to the arithmetic of survival.
The sixth day brought rain-brief, violent, a parody of relief. Water soaked her uniform, chafed her skin raw. Thirty-two minutes late. Captain Zara made a single notation. No more, no less.
On the seventh day, she unearthed reserves hidden beneath exhaustion-determination embedded not in muscle, but in marrow. Forty minutes late. The soldiers no longer watched her with curiosity. She was expected now. Not equal. Present.
Between collapse and resurrection, she gazed skyward. There, Alkalurops burned-twin stars locked in a gravitational embrace, one consuming the other, their light centuries old. She saw in them the epitome of persistence beyond reason: one star dying, refusing extinction, its ancient light arriving just for her, a message sent before her ancestors were born.
The final day dawned differently.
Her body, once a machine of will, had become a democracy of pain. Every cell cast its vote for surrender. She stood anyway. The pack was no longer a burden but a vertebra; the rifle, a bone. Sixteen kilometers stretched before her. The gauntlet on her wrist hummed-not guiding, but bearing witness.
She walked five kilometers before her legs began to fail. Not suddenly, but with the slow, inevitable grace of systems shutting down. Muscle fibers stretched past recovery. Tendons inflamed beyond function.
By the eighth kilometer, she measured progress in arm-lengths. When walking failed, she stood. When standing failed, she knelt. When kneeling failed, she crawled.
Time stretched and compressed. The universe contracted to the next handspan of earth. Her world: grit beneath fingernails, elbows carving tracks in the sand, breath scraping her throat raw. As her body diminished, her consciousness crystallized, thoughts sharp as starlight.
If black holes devour their neighbors, I will devour distance.
If stars collapse into darkness, I will condense light.
The grime on her face-salt, sand, sweat-became the topography of her effort. Tear tracks carved canyons, not of surrender, but of the body's last negotiation with will. Her sweat, like stellar matter, elements forged in interior heat, marked her passage.
At the thirteenth kilometer, hallucination and reality merged. The desert floor became the cosmic void. Her crawling, the movement of life emerging from primordial seas. Evolution compressed into hours.
No ambition drove her now. Not pride. Not duty. Something older. The force that drove single cells to become complex, that drove fish to land, that kept Alkalurops burning as gravity crushed its core.
Persistence beyond reason. Psychotic perseverance.
When the checkpoint appeared, she did not register faces. Did not hear the silence as soldiers turned. Did not see Captain Zara's chronometer stop, then reset.
She crawled. Each movement atomic in its simplicity, cosmic in its defiance.
Her anima-what the ancients believed bound human to universe-flared. Not light, not yet, but anti-darkness. Not energy, but anti-surrender. The universe, indifferent to striving, nevertheless composed of the same elements as her determination.
Three meters from the line, her arms failed. Forehead pressed to earth.
She inhaled sand. Tasted stardust.
With final resources drawn from places without names, she moved forward-chin, collarbones, the contracting muscles of her abdomen. Imperceptible to observers. Vast to her.
Her hand-bloody, swollen-crossed the line.
She did not hear Captain Zara's words.
"Still not on time, Vega. But welcome to Phase Three, Soldier."
The line is crossed. The silence is immediate-fractured only by the sound of a dozen breaths caught mid-inhale.
Fiona lies motionless, blood-soaked fingers still curled around the rifle strap, dust clinging like a second skin. The checkpoint, once a fortress of quiet efficiency, holds its breath.
Then-
Something shifts.
A shimmer rises, faint as heat haze, coiling upward from her back. A pulse-not light, not wind, not electricity-but something older, primal.
Anima.
Captain Zara watches from her station. Her jaw tightens; a chill crawls over her skin, subtle as static electricity. Her glasses catch the flicker. She marks the reading silently. She knows. She says nothing.
Around the camp, the recruits remain frozen. No one speaks. Goosebumps ripple across arms and necks.
Then a boy steps forward-no older than nineteen, lean and sunburnt, voice cracking with disbelief.
"My grandpa used to talk about them. The bronze saints. Said they burned like stars when they fought."
"Yeah," another whispers, "my grandfather said they could punch through mountains. Break the sound barrier with their fists."
No laughter follows. Only silence, heavy and waiting.
"But she's… she's glowing."
The shimmer grows-not flame, not fire-but a quiet defiance of entropy, a presence that presses against the void. As if the universe itself leans closer, curious.
Captain Zara finally speaks, voice low and certain:
"She's one of his."
No one dares ask who he is.
Fiona does not rise.
But the desert itself seems to recognize what they have found.