Prologue

— The Bone Dragon Remembers Her Name

Mara

The red canyon wants to eat me alive, and I am running out of breath to tell it no.

Heat radiates from the sheer, fossilized walls in visible, shimmering waves. It bakes the moisture from my lungs and turns the sweat on my skin into a gritty paste of salt and pulverized bone. This is the Anvil, the final stretch of the entrance trials for Red Meridian Test College, a brutal three-mile vertical maze carved directly into the petrified remains of a desert leviathan.

If I fail, I die. The military doesn’t send rescue teams for candidates who collapse in the marrow-chasms. They just let the desert reclaim them.

My fingers, cracked and bleeding, find a handhold in a porous section of white stone. It isn’t just stone, though. As a bone-speaker, I can feel the faint, stagnant echo of the ancient beast that died here thousands of years ago. The college built its entire campus inside the ribcage of this colossal fossil, treating sacred remains like a playground for their experimental aviation and sun artillery.

I pull myself up over a jagged ledge, my muscles screaming in protest. My heavy canvas flight suit, issued at the base of the canyon, feels like a lead weight. I strip off the heavy gloves, needing the tactile connection of my bare skin against the ancient bone. My people, the keepers of the desert graveyards, were erased from the maps before I was born. Red Meridian was built on our dead. I am not here to become one of their elite test pilots. I am here to steal my ancestors back.

A shadow falls over the ledge.

I freeze, my hand hovering inches from my sidearm.

Standing ten feet away, silhouetted against the blinding glare of the desert sun, is a man. He doesn’t wear the standard drab canvas of a new recruit. He wears the reinforced, dark-leather flight harness of a death-rider—the veterans who pilot the temporary, reanimated bone constructs for the Republic.

His face is angular, hard, and entirely unreadable behind a sleek, pitch-black sun visor that covers his eyes.

"You’re off the designated route, Candidate," he says. His voice is a low, abrasive rasp, like stone grinding against stone. It carries effortlessly over the howl of the canyon wind.

I push myself to my feet, ignoring the trembling in my thighs. "The designated route collapsed two miles back when the artillery cadets got trigger-happy. I improvised."

"Improvisation in a live-fire test zone is a good way to become part of the geological record," he replies, stepping closer. The silver insignia on his shoulder catches the light. Two crossed marrow-blades.

Rook Calder.

I know his name from the dossiers. He isn’t an instructor, but he might as well be a god in this brutal ecosystem. He is a senior candidate, a death-rider who has survived six test cycles—an impossible statistical anomaly. Rumors say he walks away from crashes without a scratch because he trades the lifespans of his wingmen to the college’s necromantic engines. Looking at the grim, immovable line of his mouth, I can believe it.

"I’m at the checkpoint," I say, my voice steady despite the adrenaline spiking in my veins. "I survived the Anvil. That means I pass."

"It means you reached the triage point," Rook corrects, his boots crunching softly on the bone-dust. He stops just an arm’s length away. The sheer physical presence of him is suffocating. He radiates a violent, contained heat, smelling of ozone, leather, and burnt marrow. "And as the perimeter vanguard for this cycle, I have to ensure you didn’t cheat to get up here. Turn around. Hands on the canyon wall."

My jaw tightens. "I’m unarmed except for the standard issue."

"I don’t care about your sidearm. I care about contraband relics. Bone-speakers have a habit of smuggling sympathetic splinters to cheat the resonance tests." He tilts his head, the black visor reflecting my own dirt-streaked face back at me. "Hands on the wall, Candidate. Or I fail you right here, and you can walk the three miles back down."

Rook

She glares at me with a ferocity that could ignite the dry brush at the bottom of the gorge.

Mara Sol. Twenty-two years old. Unaffiliated civilian background, practically a ghost in the Republic’s registry until she forged her way into the draft. I’ve been watching her progress through the Anvil through the telemetry scopes. She didn’t just survive the obstacle course; she read the dead canyon. She anticipated the rockfalls. She found holds in the fossilized spine that shouldn’t have been visible to the naked eye.

She’s dangerous. And she is standing exactly where I need her not to be.

Slowly, she turns, pressing her bleeding palms flat against the pale, petrified bone of the canyon wall. She spreads her feet shoulder-width apart, the lines of her body tense and rigid beneath the dust-caked flight suit.

I step up behind her. The heat coming off her is visceral.

"Standard search," I murmur, my voice dropping a fraction to be heard over the wind. I don’t wait for her to brace herself. I sweep my hands down her sides, checking the deep pockets of her suit.

She flinches slightly as my thumbs trace the line of her ribs. The contact is strictly protocol—looking for the hard, sharp edges of smuggled bone-chips—but the friction of my leather gloves against her canvas suit feels entirely too loud. I can feel the rapid, frantic beat of her heart through the fabric.

I crouch slightly, running my hands down the outside of her thighs, checking the boot sheaths. "You moved too fast through the marrow-chasm," I say, keeping my tone flat, detached. "No novice navigates a dormant resonance field without a crutch."

"Maybe your novices are just weak," she snaps back, her voice tight.

I straighten up, my chest brushing against her back for a fraction of a second. I ignore the sudden, sharp spike of heat in my own blood. I’ve survived in this meat-grinder of a college by staying completely, ruthlessly unattached. I pilot dead things, and I don’t let living things get close enough to burn.

"Arms out," I order.

She complies, extending her arms. I step closer, sliding my hands down the undersides of her arms, checking her wrists. When my fingers brush over the pulse point on her left wrist, she inhales sharply.