Doran had learned the difference between silence and stillness.

Silence was absence. Stillness meant something was waiting.

The desert was still.

She stood on the ridge overlooking the crater, wind tugging at her torn jacket, sand caking her face. The air still carried a faint electrical taste—ozone and scorched glass, the smell of something that had tried to be divine and failed.

Below her, the crater pulsed faintly under the sand, an echo of gold light that came and went like a dying ...