Chapter 2

Nicolas Carver: 2054

Rhea peered through the window of the prisoner car, scanning the road outside for the nearest guard. “We’re stopped,” she whispered to Carver. “Let’s get out of here.”

Carver leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “No, thanks. I’d rather not get shot in the face.”

There weren’t many guards with guns, but it would only take one to ruin his day. Also, they had their handcuffs to deal with, and it seemed unlikely they’d find a pair of bolt cutters lying in the forest somewhere.

No, Carver wouldn’t make some dramatic but ill-fated attempt to escape. He’d have a chance to bid for his freedom once they got to Eden. If Agnes and her people were truly OSE colonists as they claimed, they would listen to the head of OSE. He’d tell his side of the story, soften some edges, and be back in charge in no time.

“Something’s going on up there.” Rhea nodded toward the front of the caravan. “They’re distracted.”

“If you want to make a run for it, go ahead. I’m not stopping you.”

“Oh, that’s so kind.” A hint of a sneer graced Rhea’s face. She settled down and crossed her arms. “You know they’re going to kill us, right?”

“Who said that?”

“What other choice do they have after what you did?”

Carver let out an indignant chuckle. “What I did? You nearly sent the remainder of the human race plummeting into extinction.”

“You told me to apprehend Zach.”

“Yes, apprehend him. Not shoot at him on a space station. I guess I should have been more specific.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. We’re screwed either way.”

“Don’t count on it. These people may be our best hope at getting out of this.” 

If Zach alone determined their fate, they might not stand a chance. But if the Edish had any semblance of a justice system, they might still have options. It would be Zach’s word against Carver’s, and Carver was confident that his version of the truth would prevail. 

A ruckus outside the prisoner car caused Rhea to lean her head against the window again. “Shit, they’re coming back. And they’re bringing a friend.”

The back doors of the transport opened to reveal two spearmen toting a stick-thin prisoner with a yellow bruise on his face. The man’s filthy hair hung over his eyes. His clothes were a mottled assortment of seemingly random pieces, the most noticeable being a torn, military-looking jacket with no shirt underneath. A faded patch on the sleeve displayed a few visible letters—HARB—but nothing else that Carver could discern.

The prisoner bucked and twisted against his captors’ grips, spitting at them as they tried to hoist him through the doors. “Edish pigs!” he growled.

“Be quiet, murderer.” The soldier to his right hit him in the ribs with the back of a spear, causing the prisoner’s muscles to spasm. He grimaced and wailed in pain.

“Shove over,” the soldier told Rhea.

Rhea stayed where she was. “Say please.”

Instead of responding, the soldier jammed the blunt end of the spear into Rhea’s chest. She promptly tensed up, falling sideways onto the bench, then rolling off and landing hard on the riveted floor. Her muscles twitched involuntarily, causing her head to bang against the inside wall. A long tendril of spittle dangled from the corner of her mouth.

Ignoring Rhea’s convulsing body, the soldiers dragged the captive onto the bench opposite Carver and attached the man’s cuffs to a hook on the floor. The awkward position left him bent over at the waist with his shoulder blades fanned out. The rips in his jacket made it easy to see that his face wasn’t the only part of him that was bruised.

One of the soldiers spat a slimy glob of mucus into the prisoner’s hair. The man shook his head violently and pulled against his chains like a rabid animal, ranting and cursing incoherently.

Then, the soldiers were gone.

Carver nudged Rhea with his foot to see if she was still conscious. She mumbled something—probably about his mother—before pushing herself onto her elbows. “They’re electrified.”

“I bet the pointy end hurts more,” Carver said.

Rhea struggled to her knees, then stood and dropped onto the bench next to the new prisoner. “What’s your deal?”

“What’s yours?” the prisoner grumbled.

“They didn’t seem too happy to see you,” Carver said. 

“The feeling’s mutual. Fuckin’ Edish.”

The man’s comment caught Carver’s attention. He had also called the soldiers ‘Edish pigs,’ implying he was something else. “So, you’re not?”

“Not what?”

“Edish.”

“Oh, hell no.”

“So, where are you from, then?”

“Look at me,” the prisoner said, glaring at Carver like he was an idiot. “Where do you think?”

Given that he had only been on the planet for a few hours, Carver wasn’t sure he was qualified to answer that question. “I’m drawing a blank,” he replied dryly. “Remind me.”

“Blackwing.” The prisoner snapped his head to the side to whip the hair from his eyes. “Name’s Baron. How about you? You come down on that ship back there?”

“Long story,” Carver said. “But yes. I’m Nicolas. Nicolas Carver. Head of OSE.”

“Wow. You sound important.” He turned his head to look at Rhea. “And you? Are you important too?”

“Rhea Vasquez. And no. I’m just a pilot.”

“Well, Nicolas Carver. Rhea Vasquez. Welcome to hell. Or as these assholes like to call it: Eden.”

Carver and Rhea exchanged glances. Eden was hell? That didn’t sound good. What had they gotten themselves into?

“You a good pilot?” Baron asked Rhea.

“The best.”

“Better than whoever was flying your other ship?” Baron smirked. “You’re still alive, so I guess that’s a yes.”

Carver’s heart skipped a beat. Was the prisoner talking about Ryker’s dropship? He must have been. “You saw it?”

“Heard it first. Then smelled it. It went down hard.” He pantomimed an explosion with his bloodied hands. The red was beginning to crust. “Anyone you care about on there?”

Plenty of Carver’s colleagues had perished on the fallen dropship, but that wasn’t who came to mind.

“No,” Carver replied. “Just some loose ends.”

---

Nicolas Carver: 2055

Carver gripped the cell window bars as he strained to glimpse the chaos outside. From the sound of it, Eden was under attack. Unfortunately, he could only see the towering face of Eden’s city wall from his vantage point.

Behind Carver, a prisoner in a cell across the hall threw himself against the bars and begged, “Please! Let me go look for my kid!” 

“Shut it!” a guard down the corridor shouted. “You ain’t going nowhere.”

The prisoner slid down the cell door to the floor and wept. “He’s only six,” he mumbled between sobs.

Carver gave up trying to see out the window and crossed his tiny cell in one step. “Hey, guard!” he called, trying to sound slightly less deranged than the prisoner across the hall. “What’s happening out there?”

“Does it look like I know?” the guard replied. “I’m stuck in here with you.”

“Think it’s the Roaches?” another guard asked the first.

“Has to be.”

“It’s not the Roaches,” another prisoner said. “It’s some kind of, I don’t know, some kind of… thing.”

“A thing,” the guard scoffed. “Right. Thanks, Stinklines. That’s real helpful.”

The prisoner had earned the unfortunate nickname of Stinklines for refusing to participate in the inmates’ daily shower—the smell was so bad that it was like he had cartoon stink lines emanating from his body. But for the moment, that stench had been replaced with the acrid smell of smoke from outside. It wasn’t just the smell of burning wood—there was a sharper, more sinister undertone that Carver recognized from some close calls with solar flares on Earth.

It was the smell of burning flesh.

In Carver’s estimation, Stink was what one might call an idiot, maybe even a moron. But the idiot was right—it couldn’t have been the Roaches. It wasn’t a terrorist attack. It was much more primitive than that. There was something out there, and judging by the roars that shook Carver’s cell, it wasn’t human. What it was, though, Carver didn’t know. He had spent almost the entirety of his time on Alpha Cen in a six-foot by eight-foot concrete box with a window the size of a microwave as his only perspective on the world, so he had no idea what kinds of beasts roamed the planet.

Carver scratched the heavy black beard that shadowed his cheeks. Were there dinosaurs on Alpha Cen? It was an absurd thought, but that was the only thing that came to mind when he compared the roars he heard with the chaos and devastation the thing appeared to have wreaked outside. Maybe it wasn’t literally a dinosaur, but it had to be something like one. Something huge. 

Whatever the thing was, it seemed to be dead. The roars had stopped, as had the rumbling of collapsing buildings and the terrified screams of the people outside. Those sounds had been replaced with the shouts of men coordinating rescues of people buried in the rubble, and the heart-rending wails of Edishmen returning to find their loved ones dead.

Carver sat on the edge of his cot, avoiding the sagging area where the threadbare canvas had torn. Everything in the jailhouse was in a similar state of disrepair. The cracks in the ceiling wept every time it rained, leaving the floor slick with condensation. The incessant dampness had ruined Carver’s charcoal drawings several times.

Carver longed for the ultra-plush pillowtop mattress from his days on Earth. Running a space agency came with plenty of perks, but he missed his comfortable bed the most—that, and his oil paints. He had resorted to charcoal drawing to pass the time, but the smudged grayscale illustrations were bleak and depressing compared to the colorful oils he preferred. He had asked the guards for a pencil with an eraser, but they would only grant him a few pieces of blunt charcoal—anything sharper than that could be used to attack a guard or even to harm himself.

The idea that Carver would kill himself with a writing implement was laughable. He wanted out of prison, but a pencil in the neck was not his preferred way to go. He just needed to bide his time until the opportunity to escape presented itself. Then, he’d make his way south to someplace warmer. Someplace peaceful. Someplace where he didn’t have a power-tripping wannabe Roman soldier up his ass every five minutes. As much as he loved shitting into a pipe, he felt like he probably could do better. So, he waited. And watched. And planned. When the time was right, he’d be gone.

However, the question of what to do about the people who had put him in a cell remained open. Zach and his accomplices were still out there, still free as birds despite their various transgressions. Was what Carver did any worse than what they did? He didn’t think so.

Carver didn’t want revenge, per se. He mostly had let go of his anger and resentment—it was the only way to stay sane in such a place. But he couldn’t kick the sense that he deserved some kind of restitution for his wrongful imprisonment. The human race would have been toast were it not for him. Well, maybe not the whole human race—the Edish would have persisted—but it was hard for him to factor them in, considering he didn’t know they were alive until a year ago.

Every decision he made while on Earth, and even on the Gateway, had been in furtherance of the greater good. Did he have to make some difficult decisions? Sure. Did some people die as a result? Unfortunately, yes. But that’s what being a leader was all about. Someone had to do the right thing, no matter the cost. And what was his thanks? Jail. 

No trial. No due process. No innocence until proven guilty. Nothing.

He looked around the dank prison cell, his eyes wandering over the bare stone walls, the rusty iron bars, and the pipe where he did his daily business. He had worked his whole life to avoid this fate but ended up right where his father always said he would: behind bars. It would be ironic if it weren’t so infuriating.

A bitter surge of bile soured Carver’s throat. He spat into the bathroom pipe and then walked to the cell door again. The low murmur of voices caught his attention. He hissed at the prisoner still sobbing on the floor across the hall. 

“Psst! Hey! Can you shut up for a minute? I’m trying to hear.” The prisoner swallowed his sobs and trudged to his bed. Carver heard a squeak as the man dropped onto his cot and continued weeping quietly to himself. 

Carver refocused his ears on the conversation down the hall. “At least six of them,” a voice said. “Preferably, the biggest and strongest. But stable. We don’t want any incidents. And we’ll need guards to supervise them.” 

“Hey, take me!” Stinklines yelled. “I can work!”

Footsteps reverberated down the hall, and the long shadow cast by an approaching duo grew bigger. “What’s his deal?” the voice said as the figures stopped outside the weeping prisoner’s cell, a few doors down from Carver. The guard stepped toward the door, allowing Carver to glimpse the other man with him.

Zach.

“He wants to check on his kid,” the guard replied. “I told him we’d do everything we could.”

“I’ll take him.”

“But—”

“I said I’ll take him,” Zach said more firmly. “If his family’s out there, we’ll bring them to him.” Then, to the prisoner, he said, “Deal?”

The prisoner stood and rushed to the bar. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

As the guard moved to unlock the other prisoner’s cell, Carver smoothed his hair and beard, then cleared his throat. “Zach?”

Zach spoke without looking at Carver. “What do you want?”

“What happened out there?”

Ignoring Carver, Zach said to the guard, “I need four more. Take him,” he indicated the weeping prisoner, “and the others, and meet me out front. I’ll catch up.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier replied. He ushered the prisoner out of his cell and led him down the hall past Carver’s cell. 

“Oh,” Zach said, stopping the guard in his tracks. “Unlock this one, too.” He knocked his knuckle on Carver’s door. “Step back,” he ordered Carver. 

Carver nodded and complied, retreating to the cell’s rear wall.

The soldier hesitated. “Agnes said—”

“I don’t have time to deal with what Agnes said,” Zach snapped. “Open the cell.”

“Yes, sir.” The guard inserted a key into the lock and turned it. The mechanism inside the door rotated with a squeal and a thunk. 

Zach opened the cell and entered. Carver immediately noticed the bandage wrapped around Zach’s arm. Angry red skin was visible between the haphazard strips of gauze. “What happened to your arm?” Carver asked.

“I’m fine,” Zach replied. He eyed the pile of water-stained charcoal drawings stacked next to the bed. “You’ve been busy.” He bent down and picked up Carver’s most recent drawing, an illustration of a modern-looking building. “This is OSE.”

“It is.” Carver had drawn the front of OSE headquarters from memory. It wasn’t hard—he had walked through the front doors for many years of his adult life. He could remember every detail: the landscaping, the architecture, the spot where Victor fell to his death—

“Still living in the past, I see,” Zach said.

“Why not? It’s better than this place.” Carver took the drawing from Zach’s hand, frowning at a smear of yellow-brown liquid that Zach’s dirty hands had left behind. Carver wanted color, but that wasn’t what he had in mind.

“Is that me?” Zach asked. He bent down and picked up another drawing, a rendering of Carver’s house in Pasadena. Two children were seated on the front step, laughing. 

Carver nodded. “And Cora.”

The longer Carver was in a cell, the more his memories of Earth receded into nothingness. He wanted to document the ones he could still clearly picture before they disappeared. Regardless of how he felt about Zach in the present, Carver couldn’t deny that the boy was a significant part of his past—maybe the most significant part. Carver wasn’t typically so sentimental, but something about being locked in a stone box for a year made him long for a better time.

“Are you going to tell me what happened out there?” Carver asked, changing the subject. 

Zach placed the drawing back on the pile and then stood up straight. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll see for yourself,” Zach said with a wry smile. “When you’re cleaning up the mess.”

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Carver had suffered through lousy work assignments in the past, but this was worse than everything else combined. The smell alone was enough to make him want to lose his lunch. It was a noxious combination of rotten meat and sulfur, the latter being the likely explanation for the creature’s piss-colored blood. He longed for the sweet perfume of Stinklines’s fetid stench.

As he picked his way through the rubble around the hulking corpse, he tried to get a measure of the thing. Its torso was at least the size of a few minivans, with arms that seemed disproportionately long for its body. Its hands, too, were disproportionate—they were far too big for its arms. And its head, well… What the hell happened to its head? It seemed to have been blown clean off. Judging by the size of the body, the head must have been the size of a car. What could have been powerful enough to cause so much damage? As far as Carver knew, they had no artillery on Alpha Cen.

Carver decided he had better get to work. The smell was terrible, but it would inevitably be worse once the sun was fully up, and he didn’t see himself and his five companions finishing by then. Why didn’t they take more prisoners from the jailhouse, he wondered. There were twenty-one other Earthmen in captivity, and he was the only one tapped for cleanup duty? Ridiculous.

“Get on with it,” one of the guards said, nudging Carver with the barrel of a gun. “That scalemonger’s not gonna dismember itself.”

Carver glared at the guard over his shoulder. “I’m going,” he growled.

He gripped his jagged hand saw and approached the beast, shooting wary glances at the other convicts as they did the same. The prisoner beside him positioned his blade against one of the scales and began sawing. It didn’t even leave a scratch.

That’s not going to work, Carver thought.

Instead, he examined the skin visible between the scales. It reminded him of rhinoceros hide: tough but not impenetrable. Wedging his saw between the scales, he tried cutting the softer flesh. Streams of yellow blood spurted from the incision and soaked the front of his gray prison jumpsuit. He swallowed a wave of nausea and continued sawing, zig-zagging between the hexagonal scales until he got down to the ground. Then, he yanked on his saw until it tore from the body with a wet ripping sound. His chest heaved with the exertion. Man, prison had made him weak. 

“Hey,” he shouted to the other prisoners between breaths. “Listen up!”

The other prisoners stopped their futile sawing and turned toward Carver.

The guard stepped forward with a menacing sneer. “Who said you could talk?”

“Do you want this thing cut up any time this century?” Off the guard’s hesitation, he continued. “Good. Then, let me finish.” The guard reluctantly backed up and gestured with his gun for Carver to go on. Carver lifted his chin and assumed a commanding tone. “Alright, let’s try this another way. Saw between the scales, not through them. Start with the legs, then the arms. Then, we’ll figure out the body. Got it?”

The prisoners grumbled in agreement. They repositioned along the length of the creature’s right leg and began sawing between the scales.

Carver glanced at the prisoner next to him, the scruffy, poorly-groomed Roach named Baron, then moved closer to him and began sawing. He didn’t usually spend too much quality time with the other prisoners, so he decided now was an excellent opportunity to get reacquainted with his old buddy. He didn’t have any specific use for Baron—not yet, anyway—but the enemy of his enemy was his friend. Any ally was a good ally. 

Carver waited until the guard had wandered out of earshot, then whispered to Baron, “Psst. Hey.”

Baron stopped sawing, closed his eyes, and pushed hot air through his nostrils. “From the bottom of my heart, go fuck yourself.”

“Always a pleasure.” Carver continued cutting. “I’m sure you’re glad to see Eden get leveled.”

“When I heard the explosions, I was hoping the boys from Blackwing had decided to bust me out and take Eden in the process. But this is a close second, I’m not gonna lie.”

“Ah, that’s too bad. Maybe your friends haven’t got the balls…?” Carver quipped. He had heard stories about the Roaches pulling the ol’ snip-snip when one of their own got out of line. There were a lot of outrageous rumors like that—he didn’t know which were true and which were just urban legends. But if all the Roaches were like Baron, some of the stories were bound to be true.

“Joke all you want, asshole,” Baron sneered. “But with the wall looking like that,” he nodded over his shoulder at where the creature had breached the city wall, “it’s only a matter of time.”

“That’s a bold prediction for someone in your position.”

“In our position.”

Carver gave him a forced smile. “Right.” He finished sawing, then pulled his blade out of the reeking carcass. That was enough Baron for now.

Moving toward the ruined neck of the scalemonger, Carver began to consider how the crew might cut up the creature’s massive torso. The limbs would be relatively easy—they were thick, but the prisoners could sever them if they worked their way up one side, over the top, and down the other side. The body, on the other hand, would probably need to be gutted first. Then, someone—not him, that was for sure—would need to crawl inside and start cutting from the inside out.

Thankfully, someone had left an entryway they could drive a truck through by blowing the thing’s head into a million pieces.

“You just gonna stare at the thing, or are you gonna get to work?” one of the guards shouted at him.

With a sigh, Carver reluctantly pushed his blade into the edge of the cavity and began sawing. Yellow blood and grayish sludge slid down the saw and over his hand. It reminded him of the food they served him in the jailhouse. Smelled about the same, too.

He wondered whether scalemonger meat would be next on the prison menu. After a year of eating colorless prison gruel, he’d be willing to give it a shot. Grill it up with a bit of butter and salt… a scalemonger steak didn’t sound too bad at all.

To get better leverage for his cutting, Carver stepped up onto a pile of rubble next to the body. The rocks shifted under his weight, causing him to stumble a little. He braced his hand against the scalemonger’s still-warm hide, then glanced down to find a better place to get his footing. He was surprised to see three small vials scattered in the gravel by his boot. With a glance over his shoulder to ensure no guards were watching him, he pretended to drop his saw. 

“Shit,” he mumbled, then bent over to pick it up, snagging the vials and tucking them into his palm in one smooth motion. Using his body to block the guards’ view, he peered down at what he found. 

They were clear glass capsules filled with a strange red liquid resembling semi-congealed blood. But why would there be capsules of blood in the wreckage?

He stared at the beast’s ravaged collar. The meat in some places was charred as black as a hamburger forgotten on a grill. Chunks of the thing’s head were splattered on every visible surface for a hundred feet in all directions. He knew only one substance that might be powerful enough to do so much damage with so little.

Irogen.

Carver tilted his head at the sky, where the sun was just beginning to rise. If he left the capsules where he found them, they would inevitably explode. Irogen didn’t need a flame to ignite—solar radiation alone would make it go boom. It would be irresponsible of him to leave the capsules where he found them, where they would be exposed to sunlight. Someone could get hurt. Even killed. Certainly, it would be much safer if he kept them in the darkness of his cell for a little while.

And hey—if an irogen explosion was powerful enough to take down a scalemonger, what else could he do with it?

---

Cora Keaton: 2055

“Whoa, that one’s bright,” Cora exclaimed, leaning in for a closer look at the sparkfly in Dr. Amira’s container. Behind the glass, a glow emanated from the insect’s thorax and traveled through a network of tubules in its translucent wings, creating a delicate lace-like pattern of pulsing light that cast dancing patterns on the wall behind it.

“It has a bigger photophore.” Dr. Amira briefly covered the unit, and the sparkfly calmed down. “About five millimeters.”

“Do you think it’s from the colony we found?” Cora asked. They had spotted a whole nest of them in a tree not far from Foxhold. The hive was hard to miss—at night, it lit up the canopy like the lights atop the Spire.

“Maybe. But the wings are different. The ones from the colony were longer and thinner. These are more rounded.”

Cora immediately reached for a pen. “Great. What should we call it?”

“Cora, you can’t give a new name to everything that looks unique.”

“But that’s the fun part,” Cora pouted. Half of the animals on Earth had been miscategorized as separate species when they were actually different individual variations of the same species. If it was good enough for Charles Darwin, it was good enough for her.

“What about these?” Cora pulled a clear canister of red beetles from her specimen bag. Inside, the bony-looking creatures wrestled with one another, their massive white fangs gnashing as each struggled to assert dominance over the other. “Let’s call them Dracula beetles.”

“Seriously?”

“They have fangs, they drink blood… What else would we call them?”

Dr. Amira rolled her eyes. “Fine. But only because it’s almost breakfast.” She took the container from Cora, wrote the new species’ name on the label, and placed it in a box marked TO EDEN. “Now, let’s go eat.”

She and Cora tossed their gloves in the trash and exited into the morning light. The glare was blinding, even though the sky was gray, just like yesterday and the day before. Cora honestly couldn’t remember the last time the sky over Foxhold was the deep turquoise she’d grown accustomed to seeing over Eden.

“Hey, did you hear? I’ve got a new nickname,” Cora said.

Dr. Amira cocked an eyebrow. “Do I want to ask what it is?”

“You don’t.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I’d rather not.”

Dr. Amira laughed and rolled her eyes. “I’m sure it’s lovely.”

Cora had a love-hate relationship with the soldiers at Foxhold. The soldiers were resentful about having to protect her and the rest of the scientists, and she was resentful about needing protection in the first place. She had always been able to handle herself—she didn’t need a bunch of babysitters lumping along and scaring off her specimens. But Zach insisted she be accompanied by a protective detail whenever she left the outpost. She appreciated the soldiers looking out for her—their intentions were good—but it was so much more of a pain than necessary.

Most of the creatures around Eden had been identified over the years, but the areas around Foxhold were still relatively unexplored. That meant there were plenty of new species for Cora to discover and, of course, name. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to travel from Eden to Foxhold and back again in a single day, so it made sense for Cora and her crew to stay at the base until they finished their work.

“Any word on when the boys are getting back?” Dr. Amira asked.

“Galen said they’re clearing one last Roach outpost, then coming home.” Cora didn’t want to think too much about what ‘clearing’ meant, but the soldiers insisted it was necessary. More Roaches in the area meant more danger for her and her team whenever they went searching for new life. Besides, if the north were no longer blocked off, they’d have the opportunity to make some new discoveries. From a scientific perspective, it was completely uncharted territory—the Edish hadn’t been able to access it for years. 

As Cora understood, the Roaches controlled everything north of Foxhold until recently. There wasn’t much the Edish could do about it, considering how much better armed and equipped their adversaries were—the Roaches had far more vehicles, weaponry, and ammunition than Eden. But in recent months, the Edish had managed to fend off a few Roach ambushes of their supply caravans, unexpected victories that allowed them to confiscate a sizable cache of armaments. With their soldiers better equipped, Eden parlayed their good fortune into further advances against the Roaches, reclaiming some of their long-lost territory in the north. Cora didn’t know much more about it, but the details didn’t matter. She was just happy to have some new land to explore.

Cora and Dr. Amira crossed into the courtyard, where grumbles and chatter greeted them. Some of the soldiers sat on the stairs of the barracks and armories surrounding the square, while others stood in tight circles nearby. When Galen—an Edish outrider she’d come to know since getting to Foxhold—saw her, he jogged over.

“Hey, glad you’re back,” Cora said as he approached. “Are we—”

“Did you hear what happened to Eden?” Galen asked, breathless. His spiky hair was spikier and messier than usual.

The tone of his voice made Cora’s heart skip in her chest. “No, what?”

“It got attacked by a scalemonger.”

“A what?”

“A scalemonger. It destroyed half the town.”

Without another word, Cora sprinted to the communications center, a small shack on the courtyard’s edge. As soon as she entered, she tore a radio off the wall, ignoring the workers’ protests. She dialed in a familiar frequency and held the radio to her lips. “Zach? Are you there?”

A few seconds passed. No answer.

“Zach—”

“I’m here.”

Cora heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank God. Are you hurt?”

“Nothing serious, no. Just a few burns.”

“What about Mabel? Is she okay? And Erik?”

“All fine.”

Zach recounted the entire ordeal, from the moment he was startled awake to when he blew the scalemonger’s head off. He described the creature as a cross between a giant horned lizard and the Rancor from Star Wars.

Cora’s scientific curiosity immediately kicked into gear. “I’m coming back.”

“What? No. Why?”

“It’s a new species, Zach. And, based on your description, it sounds like nothing we’ve ever seen. It’s an important discovery.”

“It’s a monster that just destroyed half of Eden. It killed people. Our people.”

Cora took a deep breath. “I’m not trying to be insensitive to that, but that doesn’t change the fact—”

“Now’s not the time.”

Zach’s sharp tone diminished Cora’s enthusiasm. She sighed. “Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry. But can you at least preserve the body until I get back?”

“Preserve it where? The thing’s the size of a house. Besides, it’s too late. I’ve already got Carver cutting it up, along with a few others from the jail.”

Cora bristled at the murderer’s name. “You let him out?”

“Relax, there are guards everywhere. He’s not going anywhere.”

Cora hoped Carver would try to escape—at least then there would be a good excuse to gun him down. Though she wished she could be there to do the honors.

Zach went on. “Listen, I get where you’re coming from. I’ll see what I can do. Maybe we can at least preserve part of it somehow.”

“That would be great,” Cora said. “Thanks, Zach.” Losing the opportunity to dissect the scalemonger in its entirety was painful, but she understood that the circumstances made it impossible. She would have to settle for whatever she could get. “I’m glad you’re safe,” she continued. “Stay that way, okay?”

The rumble of engines caused Cora to look up from her specimen table. Cheers arose from the masses assembled in the square outside the lab. The raucous applause told Cora all she needed to know about the Edish soldiers’ latest mission—they had won.

But what exactly were they celebrating? The deaths of more Roaches? The thought didn’t bring Cora any joy. She had no quarrel with the Roaches nor any stake in whatever feud poisoned the relationship between them and the Edish. As far as she was concerned, it was all a bunch of pointless bloodshed. She preferred focusing on the planet’s diverse lifeforms rather than cheering for some strangers’ deaths.

Returning to the branch-hopper splayed on the dissection tray before her, Cora continued examining its circulatory system. She followed what appeared to be its primary artery up to a spiral structure that she assumed must be its heart. It looked nothing like any heart she had ever seen on Earth, yet it seemed to serve the same function.

As she dissected the unusual organ, the lab door swung open. Galen rushed inside. “Hey, you’re gonna want to see this.”

“See what?”

“A scalemonger.”

Cora dropped her scalpel on the table and peeled off her surgical gloves. “Where?”

“The Roach outpost. We were expecting a fight, but the place was already wrecked when we got there. Aside from a few stragglers we found hiding in the wreckage, hardly anyone was left alive. The whole base was flattened.”

“And you brought the scalemonger back?”

“No, but we’ve got the next best thing. Come on.”

Cora followed Galen as he led her out of the lab building and into the courtyard. Outside, the roar of engines was much louder. An entire caravan of Roach vehicles driven by Edish soldiers was rolling through the square and down a side street. 

“Where are we going?” Cora asked.

“Motor pool. Turns out some of these things,” Galen banged his fist on the dented side of a rust-scarred pickup truck rolling past, “have dash cams.”

Cora trailed Galen single-file down the narrow path between the sides of the trucks and the sides of the buildings. Along the way, she marveled at the state of the battle-scarred vehicles. Many were Frankenstein monsters of mismatched components and salvaged parts, crudely welded together with plates of sheet metal to form a kind of makeshift armor. It was a miracle that some of them were still running. Others, though, were actual paramilitary vehicles akin to the SWAT transports Cora remembered from Earth.

“Don’t get too attached to them,” said Galen. “Half are going straight to Eden.”

Cora and Galen arrived at the motor pool to find a crowd of soldiers blocking the entrance. They were at least six inches taller than Cora, which relegated her to staring at the backs of their sweat-stained fatigues or sun-bleached steel armor.

Undeterred, Cora pushed past Galen and shouldered her way through the masses. “Excuse me!” 

Galen managed to slip through in her wake. The two emerged from the crowd and into the garage in front of a dented and damaged vehicle. The windshield was a fractured spiderweb of cracks, with wide streaks of dried blood smeared on its hood. 

Inside the vehicle, Rhea Vasquez sat in the passenger seat with a dusty, rugged-looking laptop perched on the dashboard and wired to the dash cam. The sleeves of her prisoner uniform were rolled up, revealing her grease-streaked forearms.

Cora recoiled a bit at the sight of the former pilot. If it were up to her, she’d have left Rhea in Eden’s jailhouse to rot alongside Carver. But apparently, Rhea’s time in the Air Force and her experience at StarSet qualified her to work in a motor pool. Or, more accurately, almost causing the Gateway station to plummet through Earth’s fiery atmosphere didn’t disqualifyher.

“I figured you’d show up,” Rhea said to Cora.

Cora suppressed the urge to sneer and said, “Play it.”

“Nice to see you too.” Rhea slid toward the center of the truck to give Cora enough room to lean in, then tapped the spacebar on the laptop. A grainy black-and-white video began playing. 

“What am I looking for?” Cora asked as she squinted at the screen. The only thing visible was a towering concrete wall. If it weren’t for the timestamp advancing in the corner of the video, she would have thought she was looking at a still photo.

“Wait for it,” Galen said.

For about ten seconds, nothing happened. Then, a Roach sprinted by. A moment later, another one stumbled past. He looked over his shoulder, his dirty hair swinging as he turned to see whatever was behind him. After a second, a colossal, scaled form lunged into the frame and collided with the wall, causing it to crumble in a cloud of dust. The creature regained its footing, then lunged again, this time off-screen. 

A few moments passed.

Suddenly, a body flew through the air and slammed against the windshield in front of the dash cam, shattering the glass with a spray of blood. Cora flinched. 

Then, the footage went dark.

Cora swallowed the lump in her throat and looked at the broken, blood-splattered windshield in front of her. She briefly wondered where the unlucky Roach’s body had ended up before deciding she didn’t want to know.

“What a world,” Rhea marveled. She nodded to the motor pool supervisor standing outside the truck. “Am I done here?”

“You’re dismissed,” the supervisor barked. “Get back to intake.”

Rhea snapped a crisp salute. “Sir, yes, sir.” Then, she slid out of the truck, passing almost nose-to-nose with Cora. “Ma’am,” she said with a smirk.

“Rhea.”

Once Rhea was gone, Cora gestured for Galen to follow her outside. She led him into a graffiti-covered alley next to the garage. Some of the painted messages on the walls were innocuous, even humorous. Others were much more ominous, like the one that read, CHOOSE DARKNESS. Cora didn’t know what it meant, but it gave her chills nonetheless.

“Crazy, right?” Galen said.

“I need to go out there. Dr. Amira, too.”

Galen gaped at Cora in silence for a moment. “Um… No?”

“That’s the same scalemonger that attacked Eden. It has to be.” 

“I wouldn’t say it has to be. Could be another—”

“Did you see the timestamp on the video? That attack was just six hours before the one in Eden. It must have kept heading south.”

“Okay, but what good would seeing a bunch of rubble do? It’s not like the scalemonger’s still there.”

“I don’t want to see where it’s been. I want to know where it came from.”

The chance to observe such a creature in its natural habitat was a scientist’s dream. Cora’s head swirled with questions. Where did they live? What did they eat? Were they social or loners? Did they raise their young or leave them to fend for themselves? And what drove one of them to attack not one, but two, human settlements in the span of a few hours?

“Hell, no,” Galen said, folding his muscular arms across his chest. He obviously wasn’t as excited about the opportunity. “It’s too dangerous.”

“You just cleared the area, right? No more Roaches?”

“For now. But—”

“Good. So, it’s never been safer.”

“Okay, what about that thing? What if there’s more of them?”

A small smile crept onto Cora’s lips. “I’m counting on it.”

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