We’re the last spark of a dying flame.
Outside the forward port, the sky is chaos. Debris cuts across the view in burning streaks. Something massive tumbles past.
“Hold tight,” I mutter, not for anyone else. For me. My hands tremble. I clench the ring tighter. Think of my grandmother and how she’d flip off the void with both hands and a glass of whiskey. I’ll never know what really happened to her.
Ten seconds.
The rear cam flickers to life. One last view of the upper bay. Nothing moves but the wind. Torn banners flutter, then settle into a river of ash.
Even I can see the metaphor, and I failed poetry class twice.
The launch engines ignite.
The thrust punches me into Sloane. She doesn’t complain. The whole hull shudders. Around me, bodies lurch, brace, hold. Someone groans. Someone laughs.
It might’ve been me.
Underneath it all, under the fear and sweat and the bone-rattling ascent, something sparks that isn't hope. It's refusal to let this be the end. We are twenty women with nothing left but each other, a doomed shuttle, and a destination we don’t know.
We ascend.
CHAPTER 2
A DOOMED SHUTTLE
ELENA - NEW TERRA
My spine slamsinto the wall as the shuttle shifts direction. My vision whites out. For a terrifying second, all I can taste is blood.
But the hull holds.
Outside, the light shifts from apocalyptic orange to blinding white. Then, for one suspended instant, everything turns black.
The good kind of black. The kind that meansspace.Through the streaked windows, we watch New Terra fall away, layer by layer. This is nothing like the recruitment videos. No gentle gliding. No soft ballet of solar sails. Just nausea. Sweat. That awful taste in the back of my throat.
Quinn gasps. “We made it.” She left her sarcasm back on the launch platform.
“Don’t jinx it,” Tessa fires back. “We’re stuck in orbit until the ship reaches the transfer coordinates. Elena, how long?”
“It’s still calculating. The AI keeps restarting,” I answer.
We cling to the interior like shipwreck survivors on driftwood. Fingers tight on the crash bars and netting. One breath at a time.
For three heartbeats, that’s all there is. No war. No planet. Just the sickening intimacy of being too close to too many other bodies in air that’s already been exhaled too many times.
We’re lucky we’re all women. Male soldiers would’ve taken up more space, more oxygen. I just hope some of the men got out. Smart ones. Someone who might find us again. Because we don’t have weapons. And we’re headed toward who-knows-what.
But we’re not out of immediate trouble yet. We have to make it past all the planetary defenses. They’re under enemy control now, they’ll be aimed at us.
We should’ve left sooner.
We’re basically every doomed expedition rolled into one. Pick a historical disaster, and we're probably living the remix. With our luck, we'll end up a footnote about preventable failures, or land somewhere worse than dying in orbit.
The console’s voice command system crackles to life.
—sys…tem… re…boot?—
Sloane lifts her head. “Is that the AI?”
