Page 8 of Nansar
Stop.
I drove my nails into my palms until the pain blazed white-hot and real. The sting sliced through the memory like a blade through smoke.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. I counted each inhale, each exhale, the way I'd learned to during those endless hours when counting was the only thing standing between me and the abyss. My FBI appointed therapist's words surfaced through the panic: "You survived then. You'll survive now."
Damn straight I would. I was ChloefuckingBlackwood, and I didn't survive Declan just to die in a glorified tin can.
I shoved the memory back into its cage—turnabout's fair play—and slammed the door. I could fall apart later. Right now, I had a hatch to open and a planet to not die on.
"Come on!" I kicked at the seal. Once. Twice. Three times. Something gave with a sharp hiss that made my ears pop. The hatch burst open and I tumbled out, hitting packed dirt hard enough to scrape my palms raw.
I stayed on my hands and knees, gulping air like a drowning woman breaking the surface. My heart tried to punch through my rib cage. Slowly—so slowly—I pushed myself up and took in my new reality.
Red dust stretched to infinity under a sky the color of old parchment, or maybe a fading bruise. Mesas jutted from the landscape like ancient teeth, their flat tops carving harsh silhouettes against the horizon. The whole scene screamed old Western—the kind my dad used to watch on repeat—except the sun was wrong. Too small, too bright, a white-hot needle set in a yellow sky that seared my retinas when I glanced up.
"Okay. Think, Chloe. Think." I pressed my fingers to my temples, trying to massage away the headache building behind my eyes. I tapped my wrist comm. "This is Agent Chloe Blackwood. Does anyone copy?"
Static answered. Empty, crackling static.
I cycled through every frequency, my fingers shaking. Nothing. Just white noise and the whisper of wind across alien stone.
Panic clawed at my throat, but I shoved it down hard. Box breathing—four seconds in, hold, four seconds out, hold. The rhythm steadied me, pulled me back from the edge. After a minute of forcing air through my lungs like I was back in basic, my Navy training finally muscled past the fear. SERE. Survival, evasion, resistance, escape. I'd aced those courses. Time to prove they weren't wasted on me.
I blinked away the sting of dust and spotted it—the escape pod's control panel, crumpled but still blinking. Red light. Steady pulse. The tracking beacon was alive, screaming my coordinates into the void.
My hand went to my forearm, pressing against the skin until I felt it: warmth. The subdermal tracker. Still there. Still working, maybe. I had to believe it was.
Dad would see the beacon. Admiral Cullen Blackwood had pulled entire squadrons out of worse situations than this. He'd moved heaven and earth for his people before, and blood was thicker than duty. He'd come for me.
I just had to not die before he got here.
The survival priorities clicked into place like muscle memory: shelter, water, food, signal. Pensacola had beaten that sequence into my bones during three weeks of hell that made boot camp look like a day at the spa.
Signal? Check. The beacon had me covered.
Everything else? I swept my gaze across the wasteland with fresh eyes—tactical eyes. Those rocky hills to the east, maybe two kilometers out, were pockmarked with shadows. Caves, probably. Shelter sorted.
But water? I scanned the cracked earth, the dust devils spinning lazily in the distance, the complete absence of anything green or growing. This place made Death Valley look like a rainforest. And I had no clue what passed for a day here, or if that sickly yellow sky would drop to freezing black in an hour.
"Okay. First things first." I turned back to the wreckage, already moving.
The hull had crumpled like a tin can in a vise, metal petals folding inward where the impact had crushed it. But the emergency compartment should still be intact. My fingers found the manual release on the access panel. Stuck, naturally. Because nothing could be easy today.
I grabbed a twisted piece of scrap metal and jammed it into the seam, throwing my weight against it like a crowbar. The panel shrieked in protest, then finally surrendered with a hiss of escaping air. I started yanking supplies free, cataloging each item with the efficiency of someone who knew her life depended on inventory.
My blaster. Where the hell was my blaster?
I'd had it when I ejected—I remembered the weight of it against my hip as the pod screamed through the atmosphere. My hand flew to the holster. Empty. The retention strap hung in tatters, torn clean through. Must have ripped loose when I hit.
I dove deeper into the pod, shoving aside mangled metal and shredded padding, my fingers searching with increasing desperation through the debris.
There. Wedged beneath a collapsed bulkhead section, half-buried in the guts of my dead escape pod.
Relief flooded through me as I grabbed it and pulled it free—then died just as quickly when I actually looked at what I was holding. The power cell housing had spiderwebbed with cracks, delicate circuitry exposed like broken bones through skin. The barrel bent at an angle that would send any shot spiraling, probably back toward my own face.
"Damn it." I turned the weapon over, searching for some miracle that wasn't there. I could field-strip an AK-47 blindfolded and reassemble it in under three minutes, but this?Alien tech I barely understood on a good day, and this was decidedly not a good day.
I hurled the useless hunk of metal back into the pod harder than necessary. The clang echoed across the barren landscape like a funeral bell, and I forced myself to breathe. To focus. Anger was just fear wearing a different mask, and neither would keep me alive.
