Reed Auster was a ghost, tumbling through a graveyard of metal and silence. He didn't know how much time had passed, only that he'd been spinning for hours, a forgotten toy in a vacuum with nothing to arrest its motion. The world had collapsed into a slow-motion spiral, his only companions the hiss of his own breath and the fire in every nerve. Shards of personal slates and torn seat fabric drifted past his visor like lazy, metallic snowflakes.
The light inside his helmet was dim and sickly, tinged red from the emergency strobes that pulsed with a rhythm like a dying heart. The HUD was a stream of nonsense—flight vectors charting impossible, looping directions, telemetry blinking with cascading errors. His suit's diagnostic insisted he was alive, pumping oxygen and maintaining pressure. His body remained unconvinced, each shudder of the wreckage a fresh wave of agony.
Like a sudden bolt of lightning in a dark sky, a flicker on the visor—a proximity alert dying as soon as it appeared—triggered the first memory, sharp and unwelcome.
Lyla Chen. Just moments before the impact, she had been laughing, her face illuminated by the holopad in her lap. "You take history way too seriously, Reed," she'd teased, pointing at his furrowed brow. "It's a field trip, not a dissertation defense." Then the jolt, the scream cut short. Now, her face was frozen against the viewport, a mask of shock, eyes wide with a question that would never be answered. Her blood had sprayed in a delicate, crystalline arc, a silent, beautiful horror in zero-g. He'd turned away then, and he turned away now, squeezing his eyes shut against the image.
But memory was a relentless force, pulling him back with crushing power. The feeling of falling—not through space, but through life—was a constant reminder of his past, a burden he couldn't escape.
He was twelve again. The day they were exiled to Sector 43. Before that, life had been Sector 1, third deck, Ventral Promenade. Clean water that didn't taste of ozone, soft lights that didn't flicker, and protein in their meals that wasn't soy-based. Life was stable and predictable until the scandal broke. His father, Richard Auster, Chief of Software Security at the Central Data Vault, was arrested. The official charges were a laundry list of betrayals: falsifying security logs, gross negligence, and espionage. His father, a quiet Sinophile who enjoyed the art and history of the neighboring Chinese station, was suddenly a traitor.
Reed remembered the broadcast of the hearing, the camera zooming in on his father's face. He didn't look angry or ashamed. Just… lost. Like someone had stolen the frame of reference for his world, leaving him adrift. The prosecutor's words were venomous, painting Richard as a monster who had sold out his nation.
The judge's voice was flat, bored, as if reading a grocery list.
"Confiscation of all assets. Revocation of Sector 1 residency. Children reclassified for patriotic re-education and reassignment." The words hit Reed like a sledgehammer, shattering his world into a million pieces.
Overnight, everything vanished. The apartment, the education credits, the future. Reed's brother, Bram, built like a shock-trooper, was expelled from the military academy and sent to vocational labor, his dreams of command crushed. His twin sisters, Mara and Joy, whose lives revolved around the fluid grace of ballet, had their scholarships to the Pluto Conservatory revoked. Their dreams were extinguished in a single bureaucratic keystroke.
Their mother never shed a tear in front of them. She just sorted their life into sterile, gray boxes, her face a mask of iron resolve. She'd clawed her way out of Sector 43 once, marrying an executive. Now she was planning their return.
A strained servo whined somewhere in the wreckage, a high-pitched keen that abruptly pulled Reed back to the present. The shuttle creaked around him, the sound of stressed metal groaning in protest. His breath fogged the inside of his visor. He was so cold, a deep, cellular cold that had nothing to do with the temperature outside.
His mind, scrambling for warmth, found it in a phantom scent: toast. Bright, artificial citrus glaze on bread synthesized from powdered egg and starch. His grandmother, Agnes Auster, had made it for him when he was five years old. A stern woman with an artificial spine that gave her the posture of a statue, she smelled of antiseptic soap and old books.
"Victory toast," she'd said, her eyes, usually as hard as polished steel, softening as she set the plate before him like a medal. "George Washington ate this before Trenton. Remember that, Reed. A man is what he chooses to overcome."
Agnes was a patriot of a nation that had long since abandoned them, which clung to the colonies only through the Internal Revenue Service and sometimes, the Department of Justice.
The memory of Washington triggered another fragment, this one from a tenth-grade history simulation. A digital avatar of the general, regal, and commanding, stood before him, the VR classroom dissolving around them.
"You let Cornwallis live," the avatar said, its voice flat with programmed disappointment. "A leader shows strength, not sentiment."
"We were graded on peaceful resolutions," Reed muttered into the confines of his helmet, the words tasting like ash.
The memory of failure felt sharp, personal. It wasn't just a simulation he'd lost. It was the placement exam.
The betrayal that had sealed his fate in the 2nd High School. He saw Jeremy Cladwell's smug face as the scores were posted, the flicker of triumph in his eyes, after he had tampered with Reed's review packets.
Reed's throat tightened. The suit felt constricting. Somewhere in the dark, a soft hiss of escaping gas sounded like a final, drawn-out whisper.
He forced his eyes open. The stars beyond the cracked hull were… wrong. They weren't just spinning; they were being redrawn, their positions subtly shifting as if space itself had been rewritten.
Constellations warped into unrecognizable shapes, and familiar nebulae bled into impossible colors.
A new alert, sharp and clear, cut through the fog, screaming in his ear.
"WARNING. SURFACE PROXIMITY DETECTED."
Gravity returned in a nauseating, violent pulse. His boots slammed against the bulkhead, his chest compressed as if by a giant hand. The slow, timeless drift was over. The Rift was done with them.
Outside, the void pulsed with an alien light—a sickly green and violet aurora that swirled across a landscape of jagged, crystalline mountains. The wreckage began to tilt, groaning as it was captured by a force it was never meant to encounter, the shriek of tearing metal a final, desperate scream.
They were falling.
The crash didn't occur all at once—it unfolded in stages. First came the deafening roar of re-entry, then the vibration that threatened to liquefy Reed's bones. The shuttle, already compromised, almost pulverised by Rift turbulence, punched through the final layer of spatial distortion like a shattered projectile.
For a moment, Reed saw the decaying skeleton of a massive structure—a derelict hangar, perhaps, its collapsed ferrocrete ceilings and rusted girders half-consumed by invasive, alien foliage. The fuselage tore through it, hemorrhaging flame and wreckage in a brief, violent passage.
Then came the second stage: the sky. Not the familiar black of space, but a fractured, lavender expanse filled with a light so blinding it overloaded his visor's auto-dimming function. Reed hit the restraint harness hard enough to steal his breath, the force folding him in half. Something popped in his chest—he couldn't tell if it was bone or just the air being evacuated from his lungs.
The Odyssey, what remained of it, arced briefly over a canopy of alien trees and then began its terminal descent. Trees whose trunks were the width of buildings cracked under the craft like splinters, their leaves catching fire in a rain of embers.
The gash the shuttle tore in the ground extended for what seemed like kilometers, burning and charring whatever it touched. Clusters of panicked, winged creatures shot into the air, some screaming in terror, others simply disappearing in the dense, acidic smoke.
Branches cracked like sticks. The shuttle rubbed against a field of violet grass that spat on contact, skidded down a rock face that sheared off its covering like a tin opener, and plowed into the ground near a lake with no name.
Then: silence.
The world was suspended. The roar of impact faded, swallowed by the high, melancholy whistle of the wind. The only movement was from floating embers, tiny sparks that rose like offerings in prayer, disappearing in the battered sky.
Reed blinked, behind the fogging of the visor with condensation and blood. His hearing sensors were overwrought—all he could hear was a high-pitched, ear-piercing whine.
The shuttle's interior creaked back and forth almost as if it were deliberating whether to settle or fold in half.
The filters on Reed's suit were pulling in air. Atmosphere. Breathable, if not clean. The air had the flavor of burnt electronics, melted polymer insulation, and ozone, but underlying it all was some loamy, alien smell of wet dirt and odd, sweet decay. Not space, then. That was obvious. And if there was air, then there was pressure. Gravity. World.
With a grunt of effort, Reed released his harness, wincing as he tumbled sideways. The shuttle's interior was angled steeply, nose-down, with the rear embedded in the soft, lake-shore mud. Water lapped just beyond the threshold.
The groan of distressed metal echoed through the cabin. Reed struggled to his feet, his boots slipping on a slick of coolant. Personal items drifted in the shallow fluid. Books with swollen pages. A shattered slate was still trying to display a family photo. A crushed helmet. A bent flute. A broken thermos still leaking warm, cloying synth-tea. And bodies.
The majority of his classmates were still restrained in their seats, their bodies limp and lifeless. Many were undoubtedly dead, their vests torn or bodies injured. One was still convulsing, the grotesque, spasmodic movement that ceased soon after one finally died. Another was just… gone, with only a severed restraint harness remaining.
It was like wading in wet sand with every step Reed took. He waded through the coolant slush and smashed composites beyond a ruptured bulkhead. Diaz was there—in part. The rest of him had been lost en route through the Rift. There was a streak of blood on the ceiling next to where his upper body had separated from the lower part.
Lyla Chen lay twisted in the wreckage around a fallen locker, no helmet on her dome-shaped head. Her face… was not intact. The blood had separated out in the tiny interval of zero-g before impact, and now it fell sluggishly down toward the deck in liquified orbs of deep red, like rubies.
Reed's stomach heaved, the hot, sour surge, but he pushed it back down. There would be time to grieve. Later. If there was a later.
A motion—a shape—drew his attention.
Kye Harrow, the niece of their late teacher, was slumped against the wall. The beacon of her suit flickered a weak, sporadic red. The visor was cracked, the spiderweb of cracks warping her face.
"Reed…" Her voice was a hoarse, ragged whisper. "Where the hell are we?"
He didn't respond, his own throat too tight to form words. He turned instead to the forward breach, crawling past snapped power conduits and torn struts that sparked feebly. The outer hull had split wide enough for him to squeeze through.
He clambered over the torn piece of metal, his boots falling into sloppy, spongy ground. The wreckage gave way to a scene he was not prepared for.
An old forest, boundless in dimensions, lay beyond the lake.
Towering, spiral-trunked trees dominated the horizon, their heights dwarfing anything grown on Earth, their bark shimmering with an iridescent, oily sheen. The foliage glowed in places—bioluminescent veins ran along massive, twisted vines that snaked from tree to tree. It was a wilderness, primal and uncharted. Strange, broad-leafed ferns, each taller than Reed himself, lined the undergrowth. A few of them shuddered—not from wind, but from unseen movement within.
The sky was bruise lavender, and the clouds churned against reason, changing direction as if in defiance of gravity. Two suns, one a sapphire blaze and the other a mottled, wrathful crimson, rode the horizon, throwing fitful, unnerving colors over the planet.
Reed turned and helped Kye crawl through the breach. She stumbled, catching her foot on a loose cable. He grabbed her elbow and steadied her, his own legs trembling.
They were in the mire, side by side in dented suits.
"We're not in the system anymore," said Reed, his voice small and weak in the great quiet.
Kye scanned the horizon, her pupils dilated with shock and awe. Her lips moved, but her words were barely audible, a whisper of pure disbelief. "I don't think we're even on the charts."
A low, static crackle burst from Reed's helmet comms, a sound so violent in the stillness it made him flinch. A soft voice filtered through, thin and desperate.
"H-help... please... is anyone—"
The signal died, but the plea hung in the air between them like a question with no safe answer.
Reed turned back toward the wreck. Kye took a step to follow, then gasped, her leg buckling. She leaned heavily against a jagged piece of the hull, her face contorted with a fresh spike of pain.
"Go," she rasped, clutching his arm. Her eyes, bloodshot and strained but still steady, locked onto his. "I'll stay here. Tend to the others. If any of them are still breathing, they'll need stabilizers. There should be a medkit somewhere aft—try under the deck lockers. And Reed? Be careful. If the crash didn't kill us, this place might."
Reed gave a silent nod and started crawling back through the breach. The air inside the wrecked shuttle was a dense, chemical humidity—the stench of scorched plastic, ruptured coolant lines, blood, and melted insulation hung in every breath. The interior groaned like a wounded animal, every metal creak a painful reminder that the Odyssey was dying, piece by piece.
He moved quickly, forcing himself past Lyla's body, past the sight of Diaz's half-torn corpse. He locked his gaze forward, unblinking. There would be time to grieve. Later. If there was a later.
The mid-compartment was a ruin, but lit enough by the pulse of emergency strobes that he could see motion. Reed pushed through a collapsed bulkhead and counted heads as his vision adjusted.
Eight. Eight upright, dazed but alive, excluding Kye and himself.
Others lay crumpled and broken—some moving, some not. Fourteen total. Four severely injured. Ten, himself included, still ambulatory.
"Reed?" a voice called hoarsely. It was Felix, propped up against a wall, a dried streak of blood across his cheek and his right eye swollen shut. "You look like hell."
"So do you," Reed said, voice dull.
Felix gave a weak laugh that turned into a cough. "Fair."
Nearby, Juno was prying open a heat-warped locker, dragging out thermal blankets. Her uniform was torn, her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. One boot was gone. She muttered to herself as she worked, the kind of angry, rhythmic muttering that kept panic at bay.
Margaretta knelt beside a younger girl Reed barely recognized—a first-year transfer named Liyen. Margaretta's hands trembled as she applied pressure to a bleeding scalp wound.
"Three are critical," she said, glancing up at Reed. Her voice was shaking. "I used a trauma patch, but without a diagnostic scan, we're guessing. They need help. Real help."
"No pun intended," Felix muttered, then winced at the glare he received from Margaretta.
"Can it, Felix," Juno snapped, tossing a folded thermal to Luca. "We need to keep them warm. Shock'll kill them faster than bleeding out."
Reed looked around. Leo was cradling his left arm, the forearm bent at an unnatural angle. Sasha was holding her friend's head in her lap, murmuring nonsense to keep her awake. The air buzzed with fear, muffled crying, groans of pain, and the pop of failing circuitry.
Loose clusters had formed: some students crouched protectively over friends, others hovered near the walls, frozen and pale. Everyone was dazed. No one had any illusions of safety.
"Okay," Reed called out, louder than he meant to. His voice cracked. Heads turned. "Listen up. We're alive. That's more than we had ten minutes ago. But we stay that way by keeping calm and staying sharp. First priority: the wounded. Blankets, fluids, meds, whatever we can find. We get them comfortable, then we talk options."
"What about rescue?" Luca asked, wiping blood from his neck. "We should wait here. Stay put. Standard crash protocol."
Reed hesitated. The next words tasted like glass. "We went through a Rift. Not a storm, not a drift. A Rift. The kind of thing that doesn't have a map. We could be... anywhere. If the long-range comms are toast, and there's no beacon, we're toast. But also, rifts are teleportation portals, remember. This means we might be somewhere between a hundred to a thousand light years away from our own station."
A breath caught. Someone began to cry, quietly.
"No," said Yasmine, standing stiffly with her arms crossed. "They'll find us. There are protocols. They have to track the Odyssey. There has to be some kind of black box."
"Maybe," Juno said, wrapping a blanket around Liyen. "But we might not even be in the same galaxy. You saw the stars. That wasn't our sky."
"Don't act like you know everything," Luca snapped.
"I don't. But I know enough not to pretend this is normal."
"Stop yelling," Yasmine shouted. "You're scaring people!"
"Good," Juno barked. "Because we should be scared!"
"Cool it!" Reed roared. Everyone froze.
He took a breath, steadied himself. "Look, nobody knows where we are. We're probably way off chart. Rescue might come. But until it does, we act like it won't. First step is stabilizing the injured. Then we check the wreck. Inventory everything—food, suits, water, batteries. Then we scout. Just the perimeter. No one goes alone."
"And if we find something?" Felix asked.
Reed took a long look out the cracked viewport, at the shimmering forest beyond and the twin suns rising in impossible hues.
"Then we survive," he said. "One step at a time."
Reed and all the survivors who could walk had been scouring the forests for about four hours now. Kye had stayed behind tending to the four survivors who were either critically wounded or couldn't walk.
Typically, upon landing on a new planet or entering a new space station, the slates on the children's arms should automatically adjust the time and date. But on this planet, the time display only showed dashes, an indication that either there was no Horological Beacon nearby. Neither did the planet have a positioning system, or at least one that synced with their slates. They were walking blind, manually mapping the terrain using the systems on their suits.
The group, however, had stabbed one of their two thermos flask-sized directional beacons into the muck near the crash site. The beacons functioned like a SmartTag, emitting radio waves that the children's suits picked up on. On their visors, the children could see a small arrow that pointed towards the direction of the beacon and how many miles and kilometers they were away horizontally and vertically from the device, which was their sole compass.
They had, however, driven one of their two thermos flask-sized directional beacons into the muck near the crash site. The beacons, acting like a SmartTag, emitted radio waves detected by the children's suits. This served as their only compass; on their visors, a small arrow indicated the beacon's direction and their horizontal and vertical distance from it in miles and kilometers. As of now, the arrow pointed bottom-left. The beacon was 2.4 kilometers away and twelve meters lower in elevation
The scouting party, hoping to find a clearer vantage point, maybe a safer shelter zone, maybe just something know, had been walking a slow arc along the shoreline, a crooked semicircle.
The forest wasn't just thick, it was hostile. The moss underfoot had a slick, rubbery consistency—springy in one step, quicksand-like the next. Jagged, coral-like roots jutted from the undergrowth like bones, eager to trip ankles. The trunks of the trees spiraled like twisted DNA, their bark glimmering with a thin, unnatural sheen. Even the ferns were taller than some of the kids, pulsing faintly with bioluminescent veins that flickered in sync with no visible pattern.
The fading light didn't help.
Both suns were beginning their descent. One sank low behind a ridge to the west, the other casting long, wine-colored shadows that wove between tree trunks like fingers searching for something to grab.
"This moss is the devil's yoga mat," Juno grunted, steadying herself after nearly tumbling into a patch of spongey lichen that hissed as she kicked off it.
"I'd like to formally lodge a complaint with the planetary parks department," Luca said, flicking goo off his boot. "Five stars for ambiance. Zero for trail maintenance."
"Don't forget the air," Felix added, blinking condensation off his visor. "Smells like melted glue sticks and burnt pickles. Really top-tier atmosphere."
"I'd kill for burnt pickles," said Leo, grimacing as his foot disappeared ankle-deep into something gelatinous. "Even one of the cafeteria's rehydrated mystery nuggets."
"Didn't those cause seizures in Sector 12?" Margaretta asked, dryly, eyes still locked on her slate.
"Only if you chewed them," Leo replied, pulling his foot free with a wet slurp.
"How are we still making jokes?" Liyen muttered as she wiped a neon-blue insect smear off her helmet.
"Because it's that or scream," Sasha offered. "And we've only got the battery power for one existential breakdown."
"Dibs," Yasmine said instantly, lifting her knees high to avoid a low-slung vine.
"Too late," said Felix. "I already cried in my helmet at kilometer one. Fogged the whole thing up. Nearly walked into a glowing fern that looked like a squid."
"That was a squid," Reed murmured from the front, his voice calm but grim.
Felix blinked. "Wait. What?"
"Probably. Or a plant pretending to be one."
"Oh. Great," Juno said. "So the ecosystem is a theater kid. That tracks."
Despite the terrain—and the fact that they were stranded on a completely uncharted planet—the mood had somehow lifted. They hadn't encountered anything worse than weird moss, gravity-defying trees, and oversized bugs. And maybe because nothing had tried to kill them yet, the banter had returned like a nervous reflex.
"Feels like we've passed this same fern like six times," Luca muttered, glancing around. "You think the forest's looping us?"
"They all look like that," Margaretta said. "Shiny, cursed, and way too symmetrical."
Reed paused by a thick trunk and tapped its bark with two fingers. "Spiral-barked gigagymnosperm."
"You can just say 'tree,' Reed," said Yasmine. "It's not a thesis defense."
"You're just jealous of my nomenclatural swagger."
"I'm jealous of your ability to make everything sound lame." Yasmine rolled her eyes.
"That's a gift," Luca said. "He could make an alien deathbeast sound like a tax form."
Sasha ducked under a vine. "Maybe the planet's in a dormant phase. You know—no apex predators, just sleepy plants waiting for their ecosystem to regrow."
"Oh yeah?" Luca asked. "We find a berry bush, we start a farm?"
"If I see a goat, I'm naming it after Mr. Kepler," said Juno. "For his sins."
"Dibs on naming the colony," Margaretta added. "I vote 'Mudville.'"
"Mudville's too optimistic," Juno replied. "Maybe 'Soggydeath.'"
"'Damp Regret,'" offered Leo.
"'Planet Disappointment,'" said Yasmine, not missing a beat. "Sponsored by New Florida's Department of Field Trip Planning."
It wasn't a sound that cut them off—it was a shape. A jagged silhouette that rose from the undergrowth like a bad memory suddenly made flesh, half-obscured by mist and fern, emerging with the deliberate malice of something that had been waiting a very long time for visitors.
Reed slowed first, and the others followed his lead like children sensing the approach of something far worse than any monster their parents had warned them about. Their boots squelched in mossy mud that seemed to grab at their soles with the hungry persistence of quicksand.
"What is that?" Sasha murmured, her voice carrying the particular quality of someone who already knew the answer would be nothing good.
Through the trees stood the remains of a structure that looked like it had been beaten to death by years of neglect. Its skeleton was hunched and broken, half-collapsed against the trunk of one of the massive spiral pines like a drunk leaning against a lamppost. Steel beams, oxidized and pitted, jutted out with the aggressive ugliness of broken bones. The platform above was twisted and fractured, its floorboards caved inward like a chest that had been kicked in. Moss grew over every edge with the persistence of something that knew it was winning, and vines dangled from the corners like the severed arteries of some enormous corpse.
"It's a watchtower," Reed said quietly, the words falling into the forest air like stones dropped into deep water.
"No way there's one," Margaretta said, but her voice held the tremor of someone who was beginning to suspect that ownership might be a more fluid concept than she'd previously believed.
"Humans were here?" Liyen whispered, her breath fogging her visor in quick, nervous puffs. "It's... human."
Juno had already moved closer, her movements quick and birdlike, sweeping aside a vine to reveal something scratched into one of the support beams. Her sharp intake of breath was audible even through the comm. "Guys..."
There, half-covered by rot and lichen that had claimed it like a patient landlord, was a faded blue decal—a stylized eagle and shield with a tricolor stripe still faintly visible beneath years of methodical erasure.
"Strategic Corporation," she read aloud, her voice carrying the hollow ring of someone reading an epitaph
"And—" Sasha pointed with the careful precision of someone handling explosives. "Is that...?"
The faint outline of an American flag flickered under the ambience of their headlamps, just above the base panel. Red, white, and blue faded, but unmistakably, impossibly there.
Felix blinked rapidly, his young face cycling through expressions like a slot machine settling on bad news. "Okay, wait. Strategic Corporation? As in, the Strategic? The ones from history class?"
"They had operations everywhere," Margaretta said, her scientist's mind already working through the implications. "But this planet wasn't in the catalog. We'd know if—"
"We're not supposed to be on this planet," Yasmine cut in.
The group stepped through the broken archway of the tower's base, moving with the reluctant fascination of people exploring a haunted house. Inside, it smelled like rust and wet wood. The interior was gutted. A metal locker lay on its side, half-swallowed by moss. Cracked plastic meal packs and tangled wires lined the floor. A smashed comms console still bore the faded imprint of a handprint scanner, and scattered beside it were strips of what once might've been uniform patches.
Reed's visor light flickered again, casting long shadows that seemed to move independently of their source, and in that stuttering illumination, he saw them.
"Don't move," he said.
The others froze.
Reed stepped closer, kneeling. He reached out with one gloved hand and brushed aside a coating of grime.
Etched into the metal panel, running upward from floor to ceiling, were five long gashes—each one wide enough to swallow his hand, curving with the deliberate artistry of something that took pride in its work. The edges were jagged like torn meat, but precise in their spacing.
Claw marks.
Deep. Deliberate. Violent.
Sasha's breath fogged her visor. "Those are... not weathering."
"Is that—an animal?" Liyen asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Not an insect," Yasmine said quickly. "Those aren't chewed or bored. This is vertical. Like a bear. Or..."
"No carnivores on this planet," Margaretta whispered. "I hope," she later muttered
"There weren't supposed to be watchtowers on this planet either," Juno snapped.
Felix let out a shaky breath. "So, worst-case scenario? Whatever made those claw marks is still here. Right?"
Reed didn't answer immediately. He stood, turning to look at the forest. His jaw was clenched, eyes scanning the trees.
"Kye, do you hear me?" Reed spoke into the intercom, his voice tight with urgency.
No response.
A sudden wave of guilt washed over him. In all their hours of walking, it hadn't even occurred to him to check in with her. None of them had. The silence had just been... accepted.
"Why didn't I—"
"Reed," Yasmine interrupted gently. "Her radio was busted. Remember?"
He blinked. Right. The fractured receiver. The busted helmet.
Everybody's suit lights flickered.
Yasmine continued, quieter now. "We forgot to tell her to swap it out. There were at least a dozen spare suits back at the wreck. We all just... didn't think."
Reed didn't answer. He just stood there for a moment, staring at nothing. Then he clipped the slate back to his arm and turned toward the woods. One of the two main headlights on his suit failed. "Shit! We have to move. Now. It's getting dark."
"Yeah," Luca muttered, peering up at the sky. "Lights are glitching. Mine's dropped twice."
"My telemetry just lagged," Margaretta added. "Battery's draining faster."
Reed looked back at the claw marks.
"We need to get back. Now."
"We haven't finished the arc—" Yasmine started.
"I don't care," Reed said. "Kye's alone with the wounded. It's almost nightfall. And we just found out we're not alone."
Silence.
"No more jokes," Reed said. "Lights on. Slates ready. We stay together. We don't make noise."
They turned from the tower, the forest darker now. The vines no longer shimmered. The shadows no longer waited.
They followed Reed in silence.
They returned to the Odyssey as the alien sky folded into darkness with unsettling haste. The single moon had not yet risen, leaving only the lake's faint phosphorescence to guide them through the gathering gloom.
Reed felt it first—a wrongness that crawled up his spine like ice water. The shuttle sat too still against the shoreline, its emergency beacon dark when it should have been pulsing. No voices called out in greeting. No movement stirred behind the viewports.
Then they saw the blood.
It painted the ship's exterior in sweeping arcs like some mad artist's final masterpiece. Visceral trails streaked down the hull, catching what little light remained and throwing it back in sickening crimson gleams. The entry frame was smeared thick with crude streaks, as though something immense had tried to communicate through carnage.
The metallic tang hit them even through their suit filters—copper and meat and something else, something sweet and wrong that made their stomachs clench.
"Shit," Sasha whispered, her voice barely audible over the comm.
Inside, the shuttle resembled a slaughterhouse. Severed limbs hung from torn bulkheads like obscene wind chimes, swaying gently in the recycled air. Shredded fabric—clothing, seat cushions, something that might once have been a sleeping bag—lay scattered like grotesque confetti. Entrails painted the walls in abstract patterns that hurt to look at directly, glistening wetly under emergency lighting that cast everything in hellish red.
They found Kye first.
Or what was left of her.
Her upper half had been thrown into the pilot's chair with casual brutality, jaw half-ripped away and hanging by torn sinew. Her eyes were still open, staring at nothing with terminal surprise. Her left arm, severed entirely, hung from the viewport like a flag of surrender, fingers frozen mid-reach.
Her lower body was simply gone.
Sasha screamed—a sound that tore itself from her throat and echoed off the shuttle's walls. The sound cut through their comms like a blade, making everyone wince. Liyen collapsed against the bulkhead, sobbing into her hands, her whole body shaking.
Reed stood frozen, his mind refusing to process the carnage. His breathing came in short, sharp bursts that fogged his visor, each exhale a desperate attempt to deny what lay before them.
The others—Trevor, Casey, Nia, Donovan—were in worse condition. One had been pinned to the wall by a strut through the chest, the metal driven so deep it had bent against the hull behind him. Another had been reduced to legs and torso, everything above the sternum simply erased. A third was spread across the ceiling in pieces, as if something had exploded him from within.
Death had rendered them anonymous, reduced them to meat and bone and the terrible democracy of violence.
Claw marks scored nearly every surface. Deep gouges cut through metal, insulation, chairs, even the floor plating. Whatever had done this had torn the shuttle apart with surgical precision, methodical and purposeful. The marks were too large, too deep to be from any creature they knew.
Felix's voice cracked over the comm: "What... what could do this?"
Silence stretched between them, broken only by wind whistling through the torn hull and waves lapping against the shore. Worse than the carnage, worse than the death, Reed's skin crawled with the sensation of being watched. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up despite his suit's insulation.
"We need to leave," he whispered, his voice tight with barely controlled panic. "Now."
"But the shuttle—" Margaretta started.
"Is gone," Reed cut her off. "It can't shield us from whatever came here. Whatever did this... it's still out there."
The feeling intensified—a primal awareness that made every instinct scream danger. The darkness beyond the shuttle seemed to pulse with malevolent life, and the wind carried something that might have been the echo of movement through the trees.
"The lake," Reed said, his voice cutting through the sound of Sasha's continued sobbing. "We take the lake. Now."
Lightning arced across the sky in brilliant, jagged lines that threw the landscape into stark relief. For a brief moment, the twisted trees stood out like skeletal fingers against the alien sky, their branches swaying in the wind. Thunder followed, rolling across the lake in waves that seemed to shake the very air.
Rain began to fall in fat drops.
"Grab the rafts," Reed ordered, his voice gaining strength as training took over from grief. "Leave everything else. Move!"
They rushed to the cargo locker, hands shaking as they pulled out emergency supplies. The sealed rations, water purification tablets, survival gear—all of it secondary to the desperate need to put distance between themselves and whatever presence lurked in the darkness.
The wind howled through the trees, and every sound seemed to carry the promise of something approaching. Reed's hands trembled as he worked, his body responding to threats his mind couldn't yet process.
"Change suits," Reed commanded, his voice sharp with urgency. "All of them. If it's torn, bloodied, or breached, you're not keeping it on. We use the spares."
They moved with the mechanical precision of shock, each action deliberate and necessary. The cargo locker held six pristine suits and three more that were serviceable—hand-me-downs from the dead that would have to serve the living. They stripped out of their damaged gear like shedding infected skin, climbing into fresh ones.
The darkness pressed in around them, alive with possibility and threat. Every shadow could hide a predator, every sound could herald their death. The weight of unseen eyes seemed to bear down on them from all directions.
"Faster," Reed hissed, helping Juno fasten her chestplate with steady hands that belied the tremor in his voice. "We need to move. Now."
The pile of discarded suits—bloodied, slashed, reeking of death and failure—was left where it fell. No time for ceremony. No time for dignity. The rain fell harder, drumming against the shuttle's hull with increasing intensity.
Felix pumped air into the rafts with desperate efficiency, the rubber stretching taut under pressure. Each stroke of the pump echoed in the growing darkness, and Reed couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched from the tree line.
"Grab what we need," Reed ordered, loading supplies into waterproof bags. "Filters, rations, slates, beacons. Nothing else. We travel light or we don't travel at all. We can obviously breathe on this planet—throw away the oxygen tanks to make space for supplies. We've got in-suit filtration."
They knew they were standing in a predator's crosshairs, that moment of perfect stillness before the strike. Reed's elevated heartrate screamed that they needed to move, to run, to put as much distance as possible between themselves and whatever caused this carnage.
They pushed the rafts into the black water, the lake accepting them with barely a ripple. Their reflections stared back from the depths—pale, frightened faces that looked like strangers.
Behind them, the shuttle sat in darkness, a tomb of metal and death. The trees swayed in the wind, and Reed could swear he saw movement in the shadows between them—something large, something patient, something that had been waiting for them to make their move.
"Paddle," Reed whispered, his voice barely audible over the sound of rain hitting water. "Paddle and don't look back."
They pushed off from the shore, the rafts sliding silently into the alien lake. The water was warm, almost blood-warm, and it seemed to pull at their oars with strange resistance, as if reluctant to let them pass.
The feeling of being watched never left them. Even as they moved away from the shore, even as the shuttle disappeared into the darkness behind them, Reed could feel invisible eyes tracking their progress across the water.
"We're not safe," Sasha whispered, her voice high with barely controlled panic. "It's still out there. Whatever did this... it's still out there."
Lightning flashed again, illuminating the vast expanse of lake stretched out before them. In that brief moment of clarity, Reed saw nothing but water and sky—but the absence of visible threat somehow made it worse. The unknown was always more terrifying than the known.
"We're not alone," he whispered, but his words were lost in the thunder that rolled across the lake with deep, resonant force.
The rain fell harder, washing away the blood but not the memory of what they had seen. They paddled into the darkness, and the darkness welcomed them with open arms—and gnashing teeth.
Lightning struck the Odyssey, igniting its reinforced fuel tanks, which had finally ruptured, giving up after having withstood the crash earlier that day so well. The ensuing explosion briefly illuminated the waters between the wreckage and the two wave-tossed rafts.
"Well, they were cremated," Leo muttered, chuckling to mask the terror that overwhelmed his weak heart.