Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee-Chapter 76: Second Expansion

The things in the shadows aren’t attacking.

Jacob said they rode hard to reach us. He didn’t say why they bothered with the animals when they could have just walked. Now I know.

They’re sizing us up. Deciding if we’re worth the effort. That calculation won’t take long.

Behind me, I feel Rhayne shift—the specific, small contraction of someone trying to take up less space.

I glance back for exactly one second. Long enough. Not longer.

She straightens slightly.

Jacob’s companion speaks first, addressing all of us but not singling out anyone in particular.

"So. Divers or Drowneds?"

He looks us over with the casual assessment of someone who’s made this evaluation enough times to not need long.

"By the smell—Divers."

"Lex." Jacob’s voice carries the particular flatness of a correction he’s made before. "Don’t."

"It’s a practical question—"

"We don’t make distinctions here." Jacob doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. "Nobody leaves Lost Ark regardless. The classification stops mattering quickly."

Lex shrugs. The argument isn’t new to him either.

"You never told me your name," Jacob says, looking at me over the shoulder.

"Dryden." I point down the line without ceremony. "Dryden Sands. That’s Lola. Rhayne. Oliver."

I pause at the thug.

He clears his throat for the first time in what feels like days.

"Brendon," he says.

About time someone introduced himself without a blade at his throat.

Lex isn’t looking at Brendon. He’s looking at me. Not at my face—into it. The specific, drilling focus of someone who just heard a word land wrong and is running it back.

"Sands," he says. Slow. Like tasting it.

His mouth pulls into a sideways smile that doesn’t reach anything above his cheekbones.

I don’t like that smile. There’s an entire conversation happening inside it that I’m not invited to yet.

"How long have you been here?" I ask Jacob. Not because I care. Because I need the data.

Jacob thinks.

He actually thinks of the kind of pause that isn’t performance, just genuine arithmetic against a timeline that probably stopped feeling real years ago.

"Nine years, I think. I came during the first great expansion." He tilts his head toward Lex. "He arrived a year ago. Second expansion."

The second great expansion.

Something shifts in my chest.

Not dramatically. Not the way it would in someone who hadn’t spent a decade learning to keep their reactions below the waterline. Just a small, dense weight dropping from one shelf to another.

My father ran the second expansion.

Alden Sands. The man whose name I inherited and whose shadow I’ve been navigating around in two separate lifetimes without ever quite admitting that’s what I was doing.

He led the second great push into the Deep. Lex arrived during it.

Lex knew my father.

I look at him. The sideways smile makes more sense now. And less.

"Second expansion," I say, keeping my voice flat. "Did you know Alden, Lex?"

I already know the answer. I’m fishing for the shape of what he knows.

Lex’s smile holds for exactly one more second. Then something moves behind his eyes—not grief, not guilt, something harder to name—and the words start and stop before they form.

"Alden Sands..." He exhales through his nose. "Yeah. I knew him."

That’s all he says.

The rest dies in his mouth with the specific silence of someone who has decided that a dirt road outside a city wall is not the right place for this conversation.

Jacob glances between us with the practiced discretion of a man who has learned when not to speak.

"We’re almost at the gates," he says. "Boris can fill you in better than either of us."

Boris.

The name lands with the faint echo of something I should be able to place. A frequency I recognize without a signal. I reach for it—dead man’s memories, old archive, something from the Deep, personal—

The sound tears through the air like a blade through wet canvas.

A shriek. Then a second. Low, guttural, the specific register of something that hunts by closing distance fast.

Jacob doesn’t hesitate. "Reef Sand Sharks. Company."

Lex is already pulling from behind the saddle—rolls of hard leather, thick and curved, each one tied to a rope with a loop handle at the top. He tosses them behind without looking. Jacob does the same.

Four sliders hit the road.

Five people.

I do the math instantly. "Rhayne. Sit. Lola on your lap." I point at the board. "You two count as one."

Rhayne grabs Lola without arguing. Lola lands in her lap with the Lullaby with the unbothered weight of someone who has not registered that this situation is urgent.

I barely have my grip on the handle before the Ferredons accelerate.

[Mount: Dune Slider—Ferredon]

First a train that tries to kill us. Now a surfboard pulled by a ferret-camel. Thirstfall’s transit system is a joke.

The leather board skims across the packed sand at a speed that makes my teeth rattle. Dust kicks up behind us in a dense wall that I can barely see Brendon two sliders back.

Oliver is already sideways, chest pressed flat against his board, legs dragging twin furrows in the fine sand.

Rhayne has both arms locked around Lola, struggling to hold the handler while her eyes are closed.

Lola has both arms raised above her head and is laughing.

The hair on my forearm goes up before my eyes find the reason. Eventide is in my hand before the thought finishes forming.

The shark hits the space between us like a dropped stone—ten feet of a shark-like frame topped with a flat, wide head packed with teeth, erupting out of the sand mid-breach. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

I move my head. Only as much as I have to.

The teeth pass close enough that I feel the displaced air against my nose. I catch a lungful of something rancid, like rotting meat baked in desert heat, and then it lands on the other side of the road. Folds back into the sand like a swimmer going under.

The fin traces its path beneath the surface, parallel to us.

It’ll focus on the slowest target dragging behind the mounts, That’s how they hunt.

I watch the fin.

The Ferredon’s rhythm shifts. One hitch, a half-stride shorter than the rest. My peripheral vision catches the rock a fraction before the slider does.

I stand up.

One hand on the rope. Eventide in the other.

The board hits the rock, and the impact sends me airborne—not fighting the momentum, using it, letting the launch carry me up and into a lateral flip.

Below me, mid-rotation, the shark clears the sand.

I cut downward through the arc without calculation, just weight and edge and the angle that’s there. Eventide catches it somewhere along the upper body. The thing crashes back into the sand with a sound like a heavy door slamming.

I land. Hard. My bones register the impact all the way up to my back molars.

I don’t fall.

Jacob and Lex are staring at me with wide eyes that they’re trying to make look narrow again.

I face backward.

Another fin. Behind Oliver.

He’s still fighting to sit upright, his slider crabbing left and right with no stability, legs kicking at empty air.

The shark rises. Slower this time, circling first. Testing.

Oliver kicks at it. Twice. Nothing.

Up ahead are iron gates, cast and enormous, swinging inward with the groan of something that hasn’t moved quickly in a long time. A siren cuts through the desert air, sharp and mechanical.

"WE DON’T HAVE A ZONE SHIELD." Jacob’s voice, raw now, stripped of the easy cadence. "BRACE."

I look at Oliver.

His slider is completely unstable. The shark is close enough that I can see its eyes, flat and pale. The specific blankness of something that has never been outrun.

It’s not going to work.

Oliver opens his mouth to say something.

The shark’s jaw closes.

The scream comes out instead.