The blue light pulsed, hot and cold at once, a brand new rhythm drumming against Khyrani’s skin. Commander Raxus’s voice, rough as ground pumice, continued to grate. “This isn’t some pleasure cruise, conscripts. This is the Brass-Blood Cohort. And if you think a little desert fever is all you have to worry about, you’ll be sorely mistaken.” Khyrani shifted, the rough canvas of her cot digging into her hip. A month of forced marches, monster attacks, and Jalrek’s perpetually narrowed gaze would surely shatter her facade of uselessness. She needed out. She needed a reason to be sidelined, to be confined to a sickbay cot where the greatest danger was the boredom, not the detonation of her own neck. “Unless you want to join the dunes as fertilizer,” Raxus barked, “you’ll earn your keep. Now, dismissed! Prepare for morning muster!” The barracks erupted in a scramble of activity. Boots thudded, canteens clattered. Khyrani, moving with the practiced languor of a man barely roused from a coma, waited for the crowd to thin. Her ankle. A classic. Plausible, easy to exaggerate, and best of all, a good excuse to avoid the immediate, brutal training that would follow Raxus’s announcement. She slipped out, aiming for the infirmary at the rear of the caravan, her stride a deliberate, affected limp. The sickbay, a cramped, metal-paneled alcove filled with bubbling tinctures and the sour tang of antiseptics, was mercifully empty. Khyrani peered around a curtained partition, ready to collapse onto the nearest cot. Then she froze. Voices. Low, urgent, vibrating with an almost frantic energy. One was Jalrek’s, taut as a bowstring. The other, a weary sigh she recognized as Dr. Vazzil’s. “It’s unnatural, Vazzil!” Jalrek hissed, his voice raw. “It’s… a sickness! A weakness! How can I lead men into the maw of a Krake-Serpent when my own mind feels like a knot of poisoned wires?” Khyrani pressed herself against the cold metal, straining to hear. A sickness? Was Jalrek injured? A rare moment of concern, quickly squashed by her self-preservation, flickered through her. He was too loud to be seriously wounded. “Jalrek, for the fourth time this week,” Vazzil’s voice, raspy with exhaustion, replied. “There’s no known clinical cure for… this. You’re exhibiting symptoms of intense infatuation. Common. Hormonal. Highly inconvenient for a Cohort officer, yes, but not a plague.” “Infatuation? With a raw private? A *male* greenhorn?” Jalrek’s voice cracked, thick with a humiliation that surprised Khyrani. “It’s an aberration! My blood-pact, my duty… they demand clarity, strength! And instead, I see… *him*… and my gut clenches like I’ve swallowed a live spark-beetle. My hands sweat. My focus shatters. This isn’t strength, Vazzil, this is a godsdamned internal sabotage!” Khyrani’s ears burned. A male recruit? Who? She mentally scrolled through her squadmates, each face a blur of grime and fear. Nobody stood out, certainly not in a way that would trigger this kind of… visceral meltdown from the notoriously rigid Jalrek. A strange, almost giddy curiosity unspooled in her stomach. What poor bastard had accidentally snared the Cohort’s most terrifying leader in a snare of inconvenient desire? “I need a remedy,” Jalrek pleaded, a desperation Khyrani had never imagined possible from him. “A potion. A ritual. Anything to excise this… this *Khyr* from my thoughts. He’s insolent, lazy, disrespectful… and yet my eyes keep tracking him. My mind keeps replaying that impossible kick, that moment he landed on me, smelling of salt and something feral. It’s madness!” Khyrani choked back a gasp, pressing a hand over her mouth. *Khyr*. He meant *her*. The words hit her like a sandblast to the face. Disbelief hit her chest, promptly tangled with a sharp prickle of gratification. Jalrek? *Him*? The fierce, unyielding officer, undone by her accidental heroics and the sheer proximity of her disguised self? Before she could process the full, chaotic implications of this revelation, a sudden, muffled thud vibrated through the metal hull of the caravan. It came from outside, near the supply bays adjacent to the clinic wing. A faint smell of sulfur wafted in. “What in the blazes was that?” Vazzil grumbled, pushing aside his curtain. Jalrek, momentarily forgetting his crisis, straightened, his hand instinctively going to the hilt of his short-blade. Khyrani peered out too, eyes narrowed. She saw Bopo, her usual source of comic relief and accidental chaos, scrambling amongst a stack of crates. He’d clearly been attempting to pilfer something – likely sterile dressings for a fake injury of his own – when his clumsy fingers knocked over a tall, narrow drum. The canister leaked a thin trail of silvery, shimmering dust that smoked faintly. “Bopo, you idiot! Get away from that!” Vazzil yelled, his exhaustion replaced by genuine alarm. “That’s unstable ignis-grit! Used for emergency signal flares!” Bopo, eyes wide as a startled grak-rat, fumbled for a fallen rag. He wasn’t trying to clean up, Khyrani realized with a jolt of horror. He was trying to *snuff* the smoking ash. A fatal error. Friction. Heat. “NO!” Jalrek roared, lunging forward. But it was too late. Bopo’s clumsy hand brushed against the sparking trail. A tiny, fizzing fuse ignited, racing along the powder line towards the drum. The metallic smell intensified, sharp and acrid. There was no time to think. Instinct, pure and unadulterated, seized Khyrani. Years of training, of muscle memory honed to a razor’s edge, took over. She moved, not as the lazy, limping Khyr, but as the martial arts genius Khyrani. Her body became a blur of motion, frictionless and impossibly fast. A low, sweeping kick, a move designed to disarm and deflect, not to harm, propelled her forward. She didn’t even register the surprised grunt from Jalrek as she brushed past him. She hooked Bopo’s leg with the inside of her ankle, a precise, controlled movement that sent the scrounger sprawling away from the barrel, directly into the open sickbay. Then, with a fluid, upward pivot, she twisted, slamming a heavy, empty field crate against the floor, perfectly positioned to shield the entrance to the bay. All in one seamless, breathtaking sweep of movement. A deafening *CRUMP* tore through the air. The ignis-canister detonated, not with a vast, destructive blast, but with a sharp, concussive blast. Shrapnel from the casing peppered the timber Khyrani had planted, splintering deep. Superheated air hammered her back, pushing her forward, but the impromptu shield held, deflecting the worst of the blast into the open desert air. Silence. Thick, ringing. The smell of burnt powder hung heavy. Bopo whimpered from the safety of the clinic floor. Khyrani stood, breathing hard, her muscles humming with residual energy, the faint tremor of adrenaline coursing through her. She turned, her feigned limp completely forgotten, her eyes meeting Jalrek’s. His face was a mask of utter bewilderment, his jaw slack. He had seen it. Every impossible, flawless move. The speed, the precision, the raw, undeniable power. His gaze, usually so sharp and critical, was now wide, a mixture of shock and something else, something bordering on awe, etched into their depths. He looked at Khyrani – at Khyr – as if seeing him for the very first time. “Good gods, Khyr,” Vazzil croaked, scrambling up from behind the shielding crate. “You just… you just moved like a wind-ghost. How did you…?” Khyrani quickly recovered, forcing a look of panicked confusion onto her face. “I… I don’t know! It just… happened! I think I twisted my ankle again!” She collapsed dramatically, clutching her supposedly injured limb. Jalrek didn’t move. His eyes, still fixed on her, slowly narrowed. The shock began to recede, replaced by a glint of dangerous understanding. He’d caught a glimpse behind the curtain. He’d seen the real Khyrani, the force of nature she truly was. “Right,” Vazzil said, ignoring Khyrani’s theatrics, rubbing his temples. “Jalrek, my diagnosis for your… *condition*… just changed. It’s not simply infatuation anymore. It’s an obsession that requires direct intervention. My prescription is simple: Exposure therapy.” Jalrek blinked. “Exposure… to what?” Vazzil gestured towards Khyrani, who was still rubbing her ankle with exaggerated wincing. “To him. To Khyr. You claim he’s a distraction? A weakness? Then you will face that weakness head-on. Every night, after evening muster, for at least two hours. You will spend time with him. Train him. Observe him. Let the anomaly become mundane. It’s the only way to purge this fixation.” Khyrani’s heart plummeted. *No. Not this.* This was infinitely worse than a month of sand patrols. It meant endless hours of inescapable scrutiny from the one man who already suspected her. Jalrek’s eyes, bright with a new, terrifying intensity, shifted from Vazzil back to Khyrani. A slow, predatory smile, devoid of humor, spread across his lips. It was the smile of a hunter who had just spotted his prey. “Excellent, Doctor,” Jalrek said, his voice low, a dangerous hum. He stepped over the still-shaking Bopo and advanced towards Khyrani, his shadow falling over her. “Consider the therapy initiated. Khyr. You will be my exclusive, private sparring partner. Every night. We’re going to purge these demons, one sweat-soaked session at a time.”

Palpitations and Powder Kegs