“Cleo.” Mierva’s voice cut through my spiral of calculations. When I looked at her, she gave me a small smile. “Whatever happens, it’s been a pleasure being on this expedition with you and Dr. Rivers. Until now, that is.”
“Same to you, Mierva,” I said, forcing the words past the fear lodged in my throat. “Destrans and humans make a good team. At least, we would have.”
Baleck closed his eyes and appeared to be trying to calm his mind. For whatever good that would do. “We’re not dead until we’re dead.”
The clouds broke.
For one crystalline moment, I saw what we were falling toward. Mountains, sharp and unforgiving, covered in ice and snow. The peaks looked like claws reaching up to snag us from the sky. And we were spinning too fast, coming in at the wrong angle, the pod’s belly exposed and vulnerable.
“Hold on!” I shouted, though there was nothing else any of us could do.
The impact, when it came, was everything I’d feared and nothing I could have prepared for. Metal screamed. The harness cut into my chest and shoulders hard enough to steal my breath. My head snapped forward and back, and somewhere in the chaos I heard Mierva cry out.
We hit once, bounced, hit again. The world became a confused blur of noise and motion and pain. Something shattered. More alarms joined the cacophony, if that was even possible. The pod tumbled and rolled, and I lost all sense of up or down.
Then stillness.
My ears rang in the sudden quiet. The emergency lights still flickered, casting everything in hellish red. I tasted blood where I’d bitten my tongue.
“Everyone alive?” I managed to croak.
“Define alive,” Baleck groaned from somewhere to my left. “I’m conscious but reconsidering that as a positive development.”
“Mierva?” I fumbled with my harness, my fingers clumsy and shaking. The buckle finally released and I nearly fell as the pod’s angle became apparent. We were tilted at roughly forty-five degrees, nose down. “Mierva, answer me.”
“I’m here.” Her voice sounded strained, pained. “My arm. I think it’s broken.”
I pulled myself toward her, using the seats and wall panels for handholds. The pod’s interior was a disaster. Broken equipment, scattered supplies, a thin haze of smoke that made my eyes water. Through the cracked viewport, I could see rocks and sky that looked wrong somehow. Too clear. Too quiet.
“Let me see.” I reached Mierva and carefully examined her arm. It was definitely broken, the forearm bent at an unnatural angle. She was breathing through her teeth, her skin flickering with vivid distress patterns. “I’m going to need to splint this before we move you.”
“Where are we?” Baleck had managed to free himself and was checking the control panel with single-minded focus. “And please tell me we have heat, because I can already feel the temperature dropping.”
I glanced at the environmental readout and felt my heart sink further. “We’re in a mountain range. Our heat system is running on emergency backup, which gives us maybe six hours before we freeze.”
Six hours to figure out where we were, assess our injuries, and find shelter. Six hours before the cold killed us just as surely as the crash could have.
“Perfect.” Baleck’s skin patterns had settled into grim determination. “So we survived one disaster to die slowly in another. Consistent, at least.”
I found myself smiling despite everything. “You’re a real optimist, you know that?”
“It’s been mentioned.” He moved to help me with Mierva,his large hands surprisingly gentle as we braced her arm. “What do you think, Cleo? Any chance that some of the communications equipment can be fixed?”
I looked at the dark control panel, then at the hostile landscape beyond. Somewhere out there, maybe, was the rest of the crew.Zara. People I cared about, people I needed to know were safe.
But first, we had to survive the next six hours.
“I can’t fix it,” I said, reaching for the emergency kit and hoping it wasn’t as damaged as everything else, “But they’ll send a rescue team. All we have to do is not die until they get here.”
Baleck laughed again, that dark, amused sound. “How will our rescuers have any better luck landing on this cursed planet than us?”
“That’s their problem,” I said. “We have more than enough of our own.”
CHAPTER 2
Rezor
I’d been leading patrols through these mountain passes for twenty cycles, and I still didn’t trust them.
