by Presley Hall
“You’ll have to come with us,” the tall one says, his voice hard. “The captain will want to speak to you.”
“Good.” I try to keep my voice from shaking as anger and fear churn inside my chest. “Because I think I’d like to speak to him.”
My stomach feels like it’s full of cement as the two men sandwich us between them, leading us back up the stairs and into a staff corridor. I don’t recognize the route we’re taking, but my sense of direction is good enough to know we’re returning to the main part of the ship.
The captain will want to speak to us? Does that mean he knows about this?
I open my mouth to question the guard in front of me, to try to learn something from him, but before I can speak, the ship shudders beneath me.
We all stop walking, and my legs tense as I try to keep my balance.
Then an alarm blares through the air, harsh and piercing. The ship tilts to one side, making all four of us stagger into the wall, and the deep groan of metal fills my ears.
“Fuck.” The guard in front of us looks at his friend, eyes wide. “What the hell is that?”
“Dunno. We better go report to the command deck. Let’s lock these two up for now.”
Shouts and screams rise up in the distance, carrying over the sound of the alarm, and I can’t tell what’s going on. Did we hit something? Are we being attacked?
Stumbling a little as the ship tilts again, the guards haul us into a small room off the main corridor. It looks a lot like the cabin we sat in during liftoff, except there are only a few seats in this one instead of the long rows that fill the main seating cabin.
They shove us inside, then turn and race off down the hallway as the door slides shut.
“Wait!” Elizabeth jabs at the keypad, but nothing happens. She bangs on the door, panic filling her voice. “Hey! You can’t leave us in here!”
The ship lurches, and my stomach tries to crawl up into my throat. There’s a small window set into the wall opposite the door, big enough to give me a view of what’s happening outside.
I want to look away, but I can’t.
Ahead of us, standing out starkly in the blackness of space, is a swirling vortex of color and light. And we’re moving directly toward it.
Giving up on the door, Elizabeth turns around and catches sight of what I’m staring at.
“Holy fuck!” Her ragged shout is barely audible above the blaring alarm. “Is that a wormhole?”
Oh, God.
Is it?
“The seats!” Snapping out of my shocked stupor, I drag Elizabeth away from the door and shove her into one of the hard-backed chairs. “Strap in! Hurry!”
I throw myself into the seat next to hers, hands shaking wildly as I fumble with the straps and secure them around my torso and waist. The vortex outside the window grows larger and larger as we speed toward it, and I close my eyes as the whirling colors seem to eclipse everything else.
When we enter the wormhole, every bone in my body feels like it’s being pressed together. Then it feels like I’m being pulled apart by my atoms. And then I feel strangely weightless, as if my body has ceased to exist entirely.
It’s like being on three different rollercoasters at once, all going in different directions. I think I would barf, if I knew where my stomach was.
I can’t tell how long we’re inside the wormhole, but when we finally pop out of it, my whole body jolts. The lights on the ship flicker.
The alarm is still blaring, the keening wail making my hair stand on end.
Then, just as quickly as the wormhole appeared, something else becomes visible through the window.
A planet.
It’s not one I’ve ever seen before, not one I learned about in any of my classes in high school or college. I see the swirling white of clouds, and patches of green and blue that must be land and water, but the planet we’re hurtling toward sure as hell isn’t Earth.
None of the continents are shaped the same. And there’s a massive ring around it, like Saturn.
“Alert. Alert. Unidentified pressure. Left master engine head damaged. Alert. Unidentified pressure. Please seek shelter.”
The ship is shaking so hard that my vision blurs. The planet in the window is getting closer.
Too close.
So close that it’s all I can see.
We’re going to die.
The noise is unbearable, and the ship is spinning from left to right too quickly to understand what’s happening. I hear the sound of metal being battered. The green and blue planet is so close that I can’t see the ring anymore—then I realize with a shock of horror that we’re flying through it, and that we’re hitting every rock in our path.
“Alert. Thruster one damaged. Alert. Thruster three damaged. Alert. Oxygen breach in sector forty. Alert. Seek shelter immediately. Alert. Increase in descending altitude. Alert. Prepare for impact.”
Time almost starts to crawl.
My ears fill with a roar unlike anything I’ve ever heard. My heart slams against my ribs, my stomach turns, and then—
Blackness.
3
Droth
Seated on the floor in the main room of my small dwelling, Zayre and Rath speak in low voices as they plot out a hunting strategy.
Every once in a while, one of them will dip their scribe-stick into their cup of ink and draw a pattern on the soft hide laid out in front of them.
Kneeling on the floor opposite them, I oversee their work, offering corrections when needed—not that they need many of those anymore. Gone are the days when they struggled to understand formations and figures. At twenty-one and twenty-two years respectively, they are old enough to coordinate a hunt.
Still, they aren’t quite ready to go off on their own yet. Zayre still has trouble with his attack strategies, and Rath is still under-average at pulling back on formations that would leave his flank open. One is too careful, the other too quick to leap into danger.
Their father, Xondr, should have been the one sitting in my spot, teaching his sons to be true Voxerans. Teaching them the ways of our people. But Xondr is dead thanks to me, and so it is my duty to see that his near-grown sons reach their second majority at twenty-three years.
I almost spill the cup of ink I’m holding when the quiet of our village is broken by a rumbling burst of noise. Across from me, Zayre does spill his cup. He’s got a while yet before the instincts of war stiffen his limbs, so I don’t scold him for his reaction. Rath shoots him a look, and Zayre quickly rights the cup, a flush staining his cheeks.
I’ve already forgotten it though.
I’m on my feet, striding across the length of my small hut. Pushing the door open, I step out into the sunlight.
All movement within the camp has stopped. Jaro and Axen, two of my most trusted men, are standing by the cook fire nearby, and I move toward them on instinct.
They don’t look away from the sky. Neither do I.
My men and I have lived on this planet for five years. We’ve seen and heard ships arriving on Nuthora before—every few months, the solar council sends down a new batch of prisoners.
But this is different.
Instead of a ship navigating through the skies, one is falling.
It’s far off, its massive form appearing deceptively small at this distance. As it barrels across the sky, I realize that the vessel has split into two pieces. The ship must’ve hit the ring system that orbits Nuthora, cracking apart as it crashed through rocks and debris.
The two halves fall farther and farther from one another the closer they get to the ground, leaving trails of smoke in their wake. They’re so far away that it’s difficult to see exactly where they land, but I can tell they’re quite a distance from each other.
“Slanch.” Jaro mutters the curse in a low voice, his gaze fixed on the sky.
I feel a small swell of pity for the creatures in the ship, but it’s gone as soon as it appears. It takes a great pilot to be able to navigate through the rings,
and it seems as if that ship wasn’t lucky enough to have one.
At least the passengers on it will likely all be dead, and therefore no threat to us.
On a prison planet like Nuthora, newcomers aren’t exactly greeted with open arms.
The last time a ship dropped off a load of prisoners in our quadrant, we had months of ambushes and scavengers to contend with. We lost two men to the raiders before we were able to beat them back, sending them off to other areas in search of easier prey.
“I’ll double the perimeter.” Axen mutters, glancing at me. His blue-green eyes are narrowed, his muscles tensing as if he’s already prepared for a fight.
“Unnecessary,” Jaro grunts, crossing his arms. “That’s a dead shipment. Although we could probably get to the crash site before the scavengers descend on it. There’s bound to be something salvageable.”
Jaro is always eager to go hunt something down. I can’t fault him for it. That ability to fight tooth and nail for the smallest things has gotten us some precious resources more than once.
Axen considers Jaro’s words, then turns to me. “Should I send out a party, my prince?”
My shoulders tense slightly at his words. I’ve told my men to call me simply Droth while we’re on this planet, but old habits are hard to break. I’m not a prince anymore though.
On Vox, my royal lineage meant something.
But here?
What am I prince of in this desolate, dangerous place?
Ignoring Axen’s slip of the tongue, I consider his question. Depending on how badly the ship was damaged when it crashed, there’s a good chance we could find something worth taking from the piece of wreckage closest to us.
But it isn’t worth the risk.
I’ve lost too many good warriors thanks to my foolish decisions in the past, and I won’t make the same mistake again. We have all we need, and to go looking for more is asking for trouble.
“I’ll think about it,” I say. “Go ahead with the perimeters in the meantime.”
Rath and Zayre have emerged from the hut behind me. I can practically smell the eager curiosity radiating from them as they take in the plume of smoke that billows up from the crash site closest to us. I don’t want to allow them past the tall walls that keep our village safe, but I know that if I don’t, they’ll go without my knowing and, true to their age, do something foolish.
“Take the youngbloods with you,” I tell Axen. Glancing over my shoulder, I lift my chin at the two of them. “Get your weapons. And do as Axen tells you.”
With whoops of excitement, the two young men hurry toward their shared hut to pick up their spears.
“I’ll see it done,” Axen says. I nod and watch as my best warrior marches away to gather the patrols.
“You know where to find me,” Jaro mutters before he too walks away.
Standing alone, I look at the horizon and the plumes of smoke I can just make out wafting above the lush green trees in the far distance.
A strange ache builds between my ribs, and I rub my bare chest absently, my gaze still fixed on the evidence of the crashed ship.
The feeling in my chest spreads, and I take a deep breath as my heart pounds harder. I can’t quite identify what this feeling is, but it’s strange. Unusual.
An unsettled feeling sits in my gut, urging me to act. To do… something. I feel hungry, but not in the usual way.
“Droth?”
Kzuri’s voice snaps me out of my reverie, and I shake myself to attention. The taller male is standing nearby, the butt of his spear resting against the ground and his head cocked slightly to the side. He doesn’t say anything else—he’s never been one to speak much—but his expression is curious and a little worried.
“I’m fine,” I tell him.
And I am. Whatever momentary spell came over me, it’s gone now.
Maybe I’ll never know what it was.
4
Charlotte
Light blazes from beyond my closed eyelids.
I blink, wincing as pain throbs in my temples. It takes several long moments for the world to stop spinning and come into focus around me.
The brightness that woke me is the sunlight beaming through what remains of a shattered window. The entire aisle across from me has been destroyed. The metal is folded in on itself, and some of the seats have been dislocated from their positions.
Oh, God.
The ship.
We crashed.
Everything comes flooding back in a rush, and I jerk my head up so fast that my brain feels like it rattles inside my skull.
Beside me, Elizabeth is unconscious. Her head lolls to the side so that I can’t see her face, but I can make out a smear of something dark and red across her temple and in her hair. Shit.
Her chest is rising and falling, at least. She’s not dead. Not yet.
“W-wake up. E… Elizabeth…”
My voice is weak and rough, and I strain against the constraints holding me in place. I need to get to my friend, need to help her somehow. I’m not a doctor, but I have to do something.
With shaking hands, I reach up and fumble with the clasps. My head still hurts, but I’m barely conscious of the pain anymore. I can’t feel anything except for a burning need to move, to act, to do something. When the straps finally fall away, I stand on my wobbly legs and stumble over to Elizabeth.
She’s still passed out, and to my untrained eye, she appears to be uninjured except for her head. I touch the wound lightly and look for the opening, but I only find a long, thin cut that, when prodded, seems too shallow to be anything serious. She’s probably just passed out from the shock.
I hope so, at least.
Working as quickly as I can, I unbuckle Elizabeth’s harness. She slumps forward out of the seat, and I catch her before she can hit the floor. Unfortunately, my legs are about as strong as wet pieces of string right now. When I try to hold up her bodyweight as well as my own, they bend beneath me, and I end up sitting with her awkwardly splayed across my lap.
With a groan, Elizabeth stirs, her brows drawing together. My heart jumps. I let out a sobbing laugh through the layer of tears that are springing from the corners of my eyes because we’re fucking alive. I keep holding her, cradling her body against mine, and she moans again, blinking her eyes open.
“Charlotte?” She stares up at me with a slightly dazed look, like she can’t quite believe I’m real. “We’re… alive?”
“Yeah, we made it.”
“F-fuck.”
I laugh again, despite there being absolutely no humor in our situation at all. I laugh because I’m still so full of adrenaline that my body doesn’t know what to do besides laugh and cry hysterically at the same time.
“I think… you may be insane.”
Elizabeth sits up as she speaks, making a fresh wave of relief course through me. The way she’s moving and the clarity in her eyes seems to support my earlier guess—she doesn’t have any major injuries besides the small cut on her head. No massive internal injuries and no major head trauma.
God, we’re both so fucking lucky.
“Are you okay to walk?” Struggling to my feet, I pull Elizabeth’s arm over my shoulder, and she leans against me.
“Yeah.” She’s breathing hard already, and she grimaces. “Just give me a minute, I’m still a little out of it.”
As I hold still, giving her a moment to gather herself, it occurs to me for the first time that maybe I’m not okay.
I feel… strange.
Everything around me is sharp and clear. My head keeps throbbing where I must have hit it during the crash, and yet I feel fine. Better than fine, even. Oddly focused.
It must be the adrenaline surging through my system on overdrive. I’ve always been good in a crisis, and those instincts are roaring to the surface now, pushing everything else aside to allow me to function.
But I think, physically, I’m all right. And I know what Elizabeth and I need to do.
“We need to find ot
her survivors,” I murmur. “If there are any.”
She nods, straightening a little and taking some of her weight off my shoulder. “Let’s go.”
Her toughness and determination only solidify all the reasons I knew I liked her. I keep my arm around her for support and balance, though, not wanting to risk her falling and hitting her head again.
The door to the room is open, thank God. Maybe something short-circuited during the crash. We walk through the doorway and down the main corridor. At the end, where it splits to the right and left, there is way too much light to be anything but the sun streaming through the entire corridor.
My already racing pulse spikes again. “Oh, shit…”
“Go. Go.” Elizabeth slips her arm away from my shoulders and hangs onto the wall as she walks as fast as she can. At her urging, I move much faster, sprinting all the way to the end of the corridor.
I skid to a stop when I reach the end.
All I can do is stand there, looking left and right at where both ends of the corridor have been completely torn away. Sunlight envelops me, and I raise a hand to shield my eyes.
Both of those corridors led to different sections of passenger cabins. They’re gone, and from the looks of it, the entire back half of the ship is gone as well. I step to the very edge of the corridor, where the metal has been broken roughly, torn apart by the force of whatever hit us as we travelled through that ring. I can still see the ring overhead, arcing across the sky. I'd think it was beautiful if I didn't have firsthand experience with how deadly it is.
Because of the size of the ship and the way this section hit the ground, we’re three stories up. It’d be a long fall to the ground, and as I peer over the edge, my stomach pitches sideways.
Stretching out in front of me, I can see the rough path where this part of the ship mowed through the dense foliage of the forest. Trees have been completely uprooted or splintered apart, and several appear to be smoking.
“We need to get down. Here.”
Elizabeth’s voice makes me jump. I didn’t realize she caught up to me already.
