Chapter One

Her feet trailed across the sand with a rasp. Each step lifting a thin layer of dust into the air behind her and leaving a smooth mark atop the dunes she travelled.

Taylor passed the back of her hand across dried lips. What little moisture she’d had was long gone. She could feel the skin of her lips peeling under the sucking heat and her eyes stung even when the wind died down and didn’t spray her with flaying sand.

She shook her bottle, the half full container feeling far, far too light. “Damn it,” she swore as she continued walking. She didn’t know where she was going, exactly, only that the bigger of the two suns was behind her.

***

She shivered. Her costume, the tattered remains of it, at least, weren’t insulated for the cold of a desert at night.

Three unfamiliar moons hovered above. She wasn’t on Earth anymore, that much was infinitely clear.

Coughing to clear her dry throat, she turned over and looked at her bottle. Only a quarter left, and already the thirst was getting to her.

***

Bugs.

Or maybe not bugs, but some sort of scorpion. She felt the nest of them waiting in ambush just under the sands not a hundred meters away. Still she walked on, legs dragging along with a constant plodding pace that did little to eat up the distance.

She had them move out from under the sands and inspected them with none of the passion she would usually bring to that sort of thing. They were flat, wider than they were tall, with two barb-tipped tails made of overlapping chitinous plates.

They had eight legs, she noted idly as she passed by them. The scorpions followed after her, not making a noise or even shifting the sand as they kept up with her slow pace across the dunes.

She wondered if they were edible.

***

Another night.

She was out of water.

The scorpions, more of them now that she had started to gather them, were guarding her little nook in between a rocky shelf and a sand dune.

She wondered if they would eat her body come morning.

***

She was dying.

Just pushing her feet forwards a step was a chore. Her legs ached, her stomach was a gnawing pit and the wavering haze of the sun beating on the sand left lingering afterimages in her mind that she couldn’t get rid of.

Her every thought was a muddled mess. Memories flashed by in disjointed parts, thoughts of her friends, of Scion, of the world going to shit.

She would have cried, but there wasn’t a drop of water to wring out of her body now.

Another step, then another.

She heard a distant rumble.

More steps, feet dragging through sand that already filled her shoes.

The rumble grew more insistent.

Frowning, and without even the power to raise a hand to shield her eyes, Taylor looked around through sand-crusted eyes and tried to find the source of the noise.

Her scorpions felt it too. They wanted to scuttle away and hide under the sands for protection.

She ignored them. The rumbling came from off to her left, far, but not so far that the sound didn’t carry. There was a pillar of dust rising into the bright blue of the midday sky. Thick, and laced with black smoke.

Breathing in deep and suppressing the kernel of hope in her chest, Taylor turned towards the rumble and kept walking.

***

The machine was huge, a lumbering brick of rusty metal that moved along and over dunes on four tracks the size of minivans. It moved with no grace or elegance, just the slow, sure crawl that all things in the desert adopted.

Taylor shifted, her steps bringing her into the machine’s path where what little strength she had left finally abandoned her.

For a moment, head bowed and eyes closed, she lost what little will kept her going. She rested, waiting as the machine rolled onwards, approaching her from afar like an unstoppable behemoth. It wasn’t until the rumbling engine shifted tones that Taylor awoke from her haze and looked up again.

She was in the long shadows cast by the box, a respite from the boiling sun. The front of the machine hissed as it opened, revealing a long ramp built into the front that came clattering down on long hydraulic pistons.

Blinking dry eyes, Taylor stared at the trio of brown robed figures that moved out of the machine, two of them carrying long rifles tucked against their shoulders while the one in the lead, the shortest of the trio, had a black device in hand. He pointed it at Taylor and she tensed, but all it did was beep a little. “M'um m'aloo?” the creature asked, glowing yellow eyes staring at her from the depths of its hood.

“D--” Taylor tried to speak, but her voice was little more than a rasp, her tongue thick and mouth too dry to speak. She swallowed, but all that did was send a shiver of pain down her throat.

“Mi’amo ro! Massa kaa, roo? Waa,” the creature said, its voice pitched so high that she could barely hear it. A scent wafted by, like wet dog and rotting grass. It touched a canister at its hip, and from the sloshing she could hear it wasn’t hard to guess at its contents.

“I, I can’t,” Taylor said. She pointed at her mouth.

The creature nodded and took a few more steps towards Taylor. Steps that brought it into her range.

She didn’t want to, not again, but in the back of her mind there was a snap, like a rubber band going off and between one blink and the next the tiny creature was her. She shook her head. It wasn’t her, but it was hers to control, to play with, to dominate.

The creature stopped, almost falling over until she had it take another step to regain its balance.

She looked into glowing yellow eyes, her mind, meanwhile, was scouring over unfamiliar nerves and a body that was unlike anything she had ever controlled. She felt sick for a moment, but she was already on the brink. “I’m sorry,” she said to the little creature.

It was alien, not human in the least. It had two arms and legs, but the similarities ended there as far as she could tell. Not that it truly mattered. With the creature’s arm, she had it reach to its hip and pull the canister away. It handed it to her.

Its partners had kept their rifles lowered, but now they were chattering at her and at their friend. She didn’t have forever, or many options besides.

Taylor paid them little heed. She popped the lid off with a trembling, desperate hand, the bottle leveraged between her knees. She almost cried with a few drops splashed out of the side and to the sand where they disappeared with a hiss.

She sniffed at it just once before her self control broke and she tipped the flask back. Water, lukewarm, leather-y tasting water, ran down her chin and up her nose. Taylor almost choked as a relieved sob escaped her. She swallowed one mouthful, then another.

There was a vague memory of advice about giving too much water too quickly to someone who was dehydrated. She didn’t give a damn as she choked down more. The two creatures outside her range got a little more antsy as their companion stood stock still.

Throat wet for the first time in days, Taylor lowered the flasked and ran the back of her hand across her mouth, then licked her lips. She focused on the creature frozen before her. She could feel its nervousness, its fear, but surprisingly no panic. “I need a place to rest,” she told it. “I don’t have anything to pay you with. I’m sorry.”

She wasn’t sure what the impressions she was getting from the little creature were, it probably didn’t understand what she was saying to begin with. She certainly didn’t understand it. Sighing, she had the creature step back until it stumbled out of her range.

There was chattering, a whole lot of high-pitched squealing and the repetition of the word ‘jii die’ a few times while pointing at her.

One of the riflemen ran back up the ramp on stubby legs, gun catching on the entrance before it disappeared into the bowels of their huge home. She wished there were bugs within, but it was clean. Or, perhaps, it was too damned hot for the average insect to live. There were certainly few enough in the sand around them.

She brought her scorpions closer, but figured that they would not be appreciated by her new friends. Said new friends were gesturing at each other with expansive waves of their arms and more squealing noises.

A minute later, maybe two, the creature with the rifle returned, and this time it was being followed.

The thing was large, half again as tall as the nearest robed creature and made of rust coloured steel. Yellow eyes inset into an almost cat-like face of steel glowed briefly as it followed after the creature. Its steps were faltering and weak, as though it should have been more graceful but couldn’t get up the strength to move right. She could sympathise.

It wasn’t until the new creature spoke, its voice flat and monotone that she realized that it was some sort of robot, not a living thing. It rattled something at her, then shifted dialects. Again and again for a few long minutes, a new series of sounds every time.

“Are you, are you trying to talk to me?” she asked it. Her mind was still a hazy mess. It was going to take more than one bottle of water to fix that.

The robot paused, then turned to the little creatures and chittered at them. There was a distinctly annoyed tone to it as it gestured towards its chest. A silvery medallion-shaped thing was bolted there, the only part of the robot that wasn’t rusted.

“Can, can I have more water?” she asked. They, of course, didn’t understand. She shook the canteen towards them and the nearest creature jumped back and started pointing its rifle at her.

More chattering. They eyed her for a moment, three pairs of glowing yellow disks half hidden within deep cowls taking her in. One of them came a little closer, then pointed to the darkness within their boxy home.

Taylor’s choices were simple. Follow the little creatures into their home, or wait in the great desert for the sun and sand to end her once and for all.

***