Chapter 1: The Relic Beneath the Sand

Act I: The Discovery

The desert had a way of stripping things down to their essentials.

Under the relentless Arizona sun, color bled from the world until everything resolved into harsh contrasts—light and shadow, heat and stone, survival and surrender. Thomas Morgan rode his rusted ATV across the dunes with the steady discipline of someone long accustomed to inhospitable terrain. He didn’t rush. The desert punished impatience.

The remains of the military research base emerged slowly, as if the land itself were reluctant to admit it existed. Concrete slabs jutted from the sand at odd angles, skeletal and bleached. Chain-link fencing lay half-buried, its warning signs flaking into illegibility. Whatever secrets had once justified this place had been deliberately erased.

Thomas cut the engine and let the silence settle.

No birds. No insects. Just wind dragging grains of sand across forgotten ground.

“Figures,” he muttered.

The contract had been vague—obsolete site, minimal yield, no liability—which usually meant someone wanted plausible deniability. Those were the jobs Thomas accepted. He had learned the hard way that when institutions were finished with something, they preferred it stay buried. Including people.

He dismounted and stretched, joints protesting as they always did in the heat. His body still carried the quiet ledger of past service—old fractures, scar tissue, reflexes that refused to dull. The military had trained him well. It just hadn’t trained him for what came after.

Scavenging had been a compromise. Not honorable, not shameful. Just quiet. You worked alone, answered to no one, and stayed far from systems that pretended to care while calculating costs. Thomas liked places like this—forgotten, unwanted, stripped of expectation.