She knew Makrath's presence by now: the way he moved, the weight of his attention when he watched her. This felt alien in a different way. This felt like…
Threat.
It came out of the foliage like death wearing skin.
Grey skin stretched tight over angular bones. Webbed hands ending in claws that looked like surgical instruments. Eyes that held nothing but hatred: black and gleaming and fixed on her with predatory focus.
Alien, but the wrong kind. A species beyond her briefings, beyond her preparation.
Alarm spiked through her, sharp and cold. They hadn't said anything about other aliens. Four weeks of training, hours of briefings, and no one had mentioned this possibility. Had Morgan lied to her? Had this been a risk all along, a danger they'd glossed over in the fine print? Or was this an attack, an enemy that had slipped past whatever resources and guards the program had in place?
Either way, she was alone with it.
The creature moved with a liquid grace that made her stomach clench with instinctive revulsion. Every nerve in her body screamed danger. Predator. Threat. She could feel its hostility radiating off it like heat, a killing intent so pure it needed no translation.
Nearly seven feet tall andfast—she could see it in the coiled tension of its body, the way it shifted its weight. Built for killing.
"You're the human." The voice made her flinch. The translator—the smooth, stone-like silver disc she wore on a cord around her neck, small enough to fit in her palm—hummed warm against her chest as it rendered the words flat and affectless, stripping them of whatever inflection the original speech had carried. "The one he chose."
Serafina's finger moved to the trigger.
"Who the fuck are you?"
It smiled. At least, she thought it was a smile. The mouth stretched too wide, showing rows of teeth like broken glass.
"The one who will make him suffer."
It attacked.
Fast. Faster than anything that size should move. She threw herself sideways, and claws raked across the space where her chest had been a heartbeat before. Air displacement. The whisper of death passing inches from her throat.
She hit the ground rolling, came up with her weapon tracking, and fired.
The beam caught it in the shoulder. It screamed—a sound that scraped against her eardrums like metal on metal—but it didn't stop. Didn't even slow. It kept coming, and she understood with sudden clarity that this wasn't a fight she could win by playing defensive.
She met its charge.
The bio-armor absorbed the first blow, hardening on impact, but the force still drove her backward. Her boots carved furrows in the soft earth. Her teeth rattled in her skull. She felt a rib shift—strained, close to breaking—and she twisted away from the follow-up strike that would have opened her throat.
Her fist connected with its face. The armor amplified the blow, and she felt cartilage give beneath her knuckles. A spray of dark fluid: blood, maybe, or worse. It staggered, and she pressed the advantage, driving a knee into its midsection and bringing her elbow down on the back of its skull.
It caught her arm.
Twisted.
Pain exploded through her shoulder, white-hot and blinding, and she felt the claws punch through the armor at her bicep. Not a slash, a stab. Deep. She felt the points scrape against bone.
Blood. Hot and immediate. Running down to her elbow, dripping from her fingers, spattering the jungle floor.
She didn't scream. She headbutted it instead.
The impact rattled her teeth and sent starbursts across her vision. But it released her arm, reeling back, and she spun away, putting distance between them. Three meters. She needed more. She fired again.
The beam took it in the thigh. It went down to one knee.
Yes. Stay down. Stay…
It threw a blade.
