Coven 9

Zarpos

The sun on Zarpos did not rise, it cracked open the sky.

By the time Sera reached the ridge above the salt basin, her boots were already sweating. The ground glared beneath her, a stretch of flat, pale earth broken only by the scorched bones of old mining equipment and the glittering scars of half-buried metal veins. The heat pressed in like cloth soaked in boiling oil, and the wind carried nothing but dust and the bitter sting of lithium salt.

She kept walking.

Every third day, she made this trek. Her mother called it “checking the line,” as if that made the miles mean something. The waterline ran half-buried through the basin’s edge, an old military pipeline left behind after the wars moved off-world. The colony’s tankers still tapped it, barely. When the pumps failed—which was often—someone had to go and see if the trickle had stopped completely. That someone was usually Sera.

She didn’t complain. Not out loud.

There were four in the Mykhal family now, and every one of them carried weight on their backs. Sera just happened to carry hers into the heat. Her younger brother, Maliz, had the lung sickness and couldn’t be trusted to walk far without collapsing. Her older sister had married out last cycle and hadn’t looked back. That left Sera. Sixteen, quiet, and too stubborn to stay in the shade.

She shifted the canvas strap of her satchel where it had started to bite into her collarbone. The glass meter inside clinked against her canteen.

The silence was alive out here. It buzzed and pulsed and sighed through the cracked earth. It had a rhythm that matched the blood in her wrists. She had grown up listening to it. Out here, under the weight of the sun and the red-shimmering sky, she didn’t have to speak or explain. She didn’t have to lie.

Because lying took more energy than silence. And her whole life had been a long, careful lie.

She was born with the secret. It had no name, not one she dared to use, but the word lived in the back of her teeth. Witch. The sound of it could get you flayed or disappeared. Not accused. Not arrested. Just gone. On Zarpos, even the suggestion of it was a death sentence.

So she kept quiet. She did her tasks. She minded the line.

But the truth burned hotter than the sun. Some days, she felt it blistering under her skin, aching to move her in ways she wasn’t supposed to move. To fix things. To call the wind. To touch the buried light beneath the rock. She didn’t. She couldn’t. The last time she let it slip, a hawk had dropped dead in mid-air, and the neighbors stopped letting their children come near.

The sand shifted beneath her boots, and she paused to adjust her balance. Far ahead, the pipeline shimmered where it cut across the basin, half-swallowed by the salt flats. She stared at it, the way one might stare at a horizon that never came closer.

Then she started walking again, one slow step after another, as the sun climbed higher and the silence pressed in around her like a secret it could no longer keep.

The pipeline was still a long walk away when the first tremor passed beneath her feet.

It did not come from the ground, but from the air. A shift too deep to be wind, as if the sky had swallowed something large and could not hold it down. Sera stopped moving. Her fingers curled tighter around the strap of her satchel. The stillness was complete for half a breath, then everything erupted.

The engines hit like a scream. A ship tore overhead with the violence of a broken storm. The wind slammed into her, hot and sharp, lifting the edge of her coat and dragging sand into her eyes. She crouched low with her arms raised, bracing against the gale. It pressed hard against her chest and filled her ears with a low, pulsing roar.

Metal flashed above her, silver turned black by heat. The hull was smooth and vast, shaped like the spine of a weapon. Painted across its belly was the emblem she had seen before, once on a broken ration crate, once on a projection screen during the census broadcast. A circle of gold carved by black wings, wrapped in a ring of thirteen stars. The symbol of the Aurex Dominion.

They did not need to come this low unless they wanted to be seen.

By the time Sera stood again, her skin burned with grit and her knees ached from the impact. The ship was already shrinking in the sky, rising toward the edge of the atmosphere in a trail of silver cloud that twisted like a long, dying breath. She watched it go until it was gone.

The Dominion never stayed long on Zarpos. It was a place too dry, too ruined, too poor. But they reminded the people often enough that the sky did not belong to them. They reminded them who held the stars, and the laws, and the fire that could fall from orbit with a single command.

Zarpos was only one link in a massive chain of broken worlds, all claimed and governed by the Aurex Dominion. The empire stretched across half the galaxy, built from trade routes, military force, and control of oxygenated environments. Some said it had once been something gentler, back when it rose from the ashes of the last galactic war. Others said it had always worn a mask over its teeth.

Out here, the mask had long since fallen away. People lived by ration tickets and manual labor, with their names recorded in central census files that never forgot a single misstep. Law on Zarpos came from orbit. It came written in the cold code of imperial regulation. It did not ask questions. It did not listen to protest. It arrived in black ships and left silence in its wake.

Sera wiped her face with the inside of her sleeve and kept walking. The taste of fuel lingered on the back of her tongue. Her satchel bumped against her hip, its contents still secure. Ahead of her, the ground shimmered with heat. The pipe was nearly visible now, half-buried in the chalky salt.

An hour later, the first signs of Rustvale appeared on the horizon. The silhouette of the town rose low and jagged against the cracked basin, a scattering of stacked dwellings and salvage sheds clinging to the edge of a crumbling canyon. Thin solar panels shimmered weakly under the weight of the sun, and the old broadcast tower leaned slightly to one side, its metal bones groaning whenever the wind caught them.

Sera followed the dry road in. It was little more than a pressed path between flat stones, flanked by lines of sun-bleached flags and broken markers. A few children sat in the shade of an abandoned hauler, carving shapes into the dust with sticks. They looked up briefly as she passed, then turned back to their drawings.

The scent of copper and smoke lingered in the air. Somewhere in the distance, someone was burning old electronics again, trying to melt the pieces down for trade. The smoke here always smelled like burning wire and dead batteries.

“Back early, Sera.” The voice came from a stall pressed against the side of a storage wall. Marlen, a wiry man with skin like tanned hide, leaned on a makeshift counter of bolted scrap. He was sorting through a bundle of dried roots, the kind used to steep bitter water into something close to tea.

“The pipe’s still running,” Sera said, pausing at the stall. “Low, but steady.”

Marlen grunted. “That’s something, I guess.” He picked at a piece of dirt stuck under his thumbnail. “Heard a ship earlier. Shook my cups off the shelf.”

Sera nodded. “A Dominion flyover.”

He squinted up at the sky. “Probably looking for something they lost. Or someone.”

She said nothing to that, only gave a faint shrug before moving on.

Near the central square, a rusted water drum groaned as someone kicked it into position. Hani, the old woman who ran the pump schedule, was tying a scarf over her head to keep the dust out of her hair. She squinted when she saw Sera.

“You check it?” Hani called.

“Still flowing,” Sera said.

“About time.” The old woman spat into the dust. “If the Dominion won’t fix the regulators, we’ll start drawing straight from the pipe. Let them fine us. What else can they take?”

Sera gave a small, polite smile. “They’ll find something.”

“You always say that.”

She kept walking. The street narrowed between two rows of buildings, their walls made of pressed stone and sunbaked polymer. A lizard scuttled across her path, tail twitching, then vanished into a crack in the wall. She passed the small market, where two women argued over the price of a can of powdered starch. Their voices overlapped in a familiar rhythm—sharp, fast, tired.

No one looked at her twice.

That was how she preferred it.

Rustvale was a town where everyone had something to do and no energy to waste on anything else. The heat made tempers short and gossip slower. People kept their heads down, their eyes on their feet. Sera moved like one of them, always steady, never loud, and never strange. She wore the same stitched canvas jacket every day. She spoke when spoken to. She kept her face calm and her hands quiet.

It worked. Most days.

She turned the corner toward the outer ring, where her family’s home sat wedged between two shuttered storage units. The roof was patched with rusted metal, and the door stuck when it was too hot, which was always. She reached for the handle, paused for a breath, and looked once over her shoulder.

The town continued to move behind her—slow, tired, and familiar. A place full of worn faces and unspoken rules. Her place.

For now.

She opened the door and stepped inside.

Inside, the air was thick and stale. Heat clung to the walls like a second layer of paint, and the faint scent of boiled roots and iron hung in the corners. The living space was one room divided by fraying curtains. A low table sat near the window, covered in old cloth and scattered with tools. The cooling unit in the far wall let out a weak, rattling hum that meant it was working just well enough not to be kicked again.

Her mother stood near the stove, hunched over a dented pot. Kera Mykhal wore her hair tied back in a rough knot, streaked with the pale dust of the basin. Her clothes hung loose, patched in too many places to count, and her shoulders curved inwards like she had been folding into herself for years.

“You’re late,” she said without looking up.

“It’s only just past third sun,” Sera answered, setting her satchel down beside the wall. “The pipe’s still flowing. Nothing new.”

Kera stirred the pot with a flat piece of scrap metal. “Then you should’ve been back sooner. No reason to dawdle. You know what kind of sky that was.”

“It passed,” Sera said.

“You don’t know that. And don’t talk back.”

Sera pressed her lips together. She crossed the room quietly and poured a little water from the filter tank into a cup, then set it on the edge of the stove for her mother. It was a small habit between them, not spoken aloud but never missed. Kera did not thank her, but she took the cup and drank.

The curtain behind her stirred with movement, and a blur of limbs and messy hair came tumbling out.

“Sera! You missed it!” Maliz launched himself across the room, nearly slipping on the smooth stone floor. “A hawk flew straight into the antenna this morning. It exploded. Like, feathers everywhere. I saved one!”

He waved something in the air—a bent, half-burned feather, blackened at the tip.

“You’ve said that three times this hour” Kera said, her voice flat.

“Yeah, but she wasn’t here yet,” Maliz replied, grinning. “Now she is.”

Sera caught the feather before it could brush against her face. “What are you going to do with this?”

“Put it in my collection,” he said proudly. “It’s my fourth bird feather. This one smells like lightning.”

“You’re not putting that anywhere near the sleeping mat,” Kera said sharply. “And stop shouting. Your sister’s tired.”

Maliz pouted but shoved the feather into his shirt pocket anyway, then flopped onto the floor beside the table and started poking at the wiring from an old speaker core.

“He’s been up since second sun,” Kera muttered. “Nothing keeps him still. Not even heatstroke.”

“I’m not sick,” Maliz called.

“You will be if you keep running around in this heat like a lizard on fire.”

Sera knelt beside her bag and pulled out the water meter. She unscrewed the top and checked the reading. Still holding steady, just like she’d said. She wiped it clean with the edge of her sleeve and set it gently on the shelf above the door.

Maliz had started humming to himself, tapping out a rhythm with one bare foot against the wall. Sera gave him a look, and he paused mid-beat.

“You’re like a noise machine,” she said.

“I’m making music. It helps me think.”

“You’d be the only one.”

He grinned, pleased with himself, and resumed tapping—softer this time.

Kera sat heavily at the table, rubbing her eyes. “What’s for dinner is what’s left. If it’s not enough, we’ll be less hungry tomorrow. Nobody better ask me for anything extra.”

“No one’s asking,” Sera said gently.

Her mother didn’t respond. Her hands were folded on the table now, fingers twisted tight around each other, knuckles white with old tension. She stared at the pot without really seeing it.

Sera moved to set the bowls, careful not to clatter them. She had lived long enough in this house to know the edges of her mother’s temper, the invisible cracks that ran through her voice, the places where weariness lived like a second shadow. Kera wasn’t cruel. She was just tired in a way that no amount of sleep could fix.

And Sera knew that too well.

Maliz suddenly sat upright. “Did you see the ship? I bet it was scouting. Or maybe looking for rebels. Or treasure. Or secret tunnels full of gold and corpses.”

“It was just a patrol,” Sera said. “Nothing important.”

“That’s what they want you to think.”

“You’ve been listening to Hani again.”

“She knows things.”

“She makes things up.”

“She said the last time a ship came this close, someone disappeared. That’s true.”

Sera looked at him. He didn’t notice the way her face changed. Just went back to drumming.

Kera exhaled through her nose, long and slow. “Enough talk. Sit still and eat when the pot’s ready. I don’t want voices bouncing around in my head tonight.”

Sera sat. The light through the cracked window had started to change, stretching long shadows across the floor. Outside, the sun was sinking down behind the canyon walls, and the sky had gone a dull, bruised orange.