Page 7 of Nansar
The interior told the same story of survival by scraps. A rickety table dominated the center, one leg shorter than the others, propped up with a chunk of stone. Two mismatched chairs flanked it, both salvaged from different wrecks. Our sleeping mats lay rolled against opposite walls—thin, worn things that did precious little to cushion against the unforgiving ground beneath.
It was nothing compared to what I'd once known. No soaring stone archways, no rich tapestries warming the walls, no servants gliding silently through marble halls to fulfill my every whim. Just scraps and stubborn determination, barely enough to keep the elements at bay.
But it was home. The only one I had left.
I shouldered my pack and moved toward the door, pausing at the threshold to look back.
"Don't get yourself killed playing hero," I said.
"Wouldn't dream of it." Ahrick flashed a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Now get moving. That human's not going to rescue herself."
Chapter 3
Chloe
I guess I'd have to save myself.
My skull throbbed like it had its own heartbeat—a vicious, pulsing rhythm that made my teeth ache. I pried my eyes open to find nothing but darkness, save for a single emergency light bleeding sickly orange across everything it touched.
"What the hell?"
The words scraped out of my throat like gravel. I tried to shift and immediately slammed my shoulder into something solid. Too close. Way too close. My hands shot up on instinct, palms cracking against a curved surface inches from my face.
"No, no, no—"
An escape pod. I was in an escape pod.
It all came rushing back in a flood of fractured images. The explosion. Alarms shrieking through the corridors. Crew members scrambling. And then—God, then I'd watched the Alliance ship get blown apart. The hull had split like overripe fruit, spilling fire and bodies and debris into the endless black.
My stomach twisted violently. I tasted bile, sharp and burning at the back of my throat. Squeezing my eyes shut only made it worse—the images carved themselves deeper into my brain. That silent explosion blooming in the vacuum like some terrible flower, each petal a jagged piece of twisted metal.
I'd tumbled through space in this glorified coffin, watching stars spin past the tinted glass in nauseating circles.Time became meaningless—seconds felt like hours, or maybe hours compressed into seconds. All I knew was the cold working its way into my marrow and the crushing certainty that I was completely, utterly alone.
Until the planet appeared.
It grew in my viewport like a bruise spreading across skin, filling the glass with colors that had no business existing in nature. This wasn't Earth. Not even close. Where home had offered blues and greens and clouds like cotton, this world looked diseased. Deep crimson veins cut through swaths of purple so dark it looked like the planet had been beaten bloody. Patches of pale green dotted the surface like mold creeping across forgotten food.
Nothing about it looked survivable.
The pod bucked when it hit atmosphere. A violent shudder that rattled my bones and blurred everything into streaks of color. Then the real nightmare started. The sky transformed from space-black to a thick, dirty yellow—the color of infection, of something fundamentally wrong. It pressed against the glass like something alive, suffocating, as if the atmosphere itself wanted me dead before I even touched ground.
The g-force slammed into me. My chest compressed, ribs screaming under the pressure. I couldn't breathe, couldn't scream, couldn't do anything but feel my body being crushed into the seat as we plummeted. My vision narrowed to a pinpoint, darkness flooding in from the edges. This was it. I was going to die on impact, just another smear on the surface of this godforsaken rock.
The yellow sky turned to fire.
Then—nothing.
Now I was awake, folded into this cramped metal tomb like a corpse in a too-small coffin. My elbows scraped againstribbed walls as I tried to move, every shift sending my limbs into sharp edges that would definitely leave bruises. If I survived long enough to bruise. Seriously, how did those massive aliens even fit in these things?
I managed to brace my feet against the curved viewport, knees bent at an angle that made my thighs scream in protest. Through the dark surface, I could barely make out shapes—rocks, maybe, or wreckage. The glass was built to withstand radiation and impact, not to give me a scenic view of whatever hell I'd landed in.
I wedged my feet harder against the viewport, testing the seal with everything I had. The glass held firm. Of course it did—these pods were engineered to survive atmospheric entry, to protect their cargo through fire and friction and the brutal kiss of a crash landing. But right now, that same engineering was my prison.
The air grew thick, syrupy. Each breath took more effort than the last.
The walls crept closer. My pulse thundered in my ears. And just like that, I wasn't in the pod anymore—I was back in the cage. Declan's special project, custom-built to my exact measurements. Barely enough room to crouch, the bars always cold against my skin. "You need to learn, Chloe," he'd say, his voice honey-smooth and reasonable, like he was teaching me to tie my shoes. Hours in that cage. Sometimes days. Folded up like a doll he'd grown bored with, tucked away until he decided I'd earned my freedom.
My lungs seized. I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't—
