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 against ribbed 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—
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 Chloe fucking Blackwood, 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.
Back to work.
I pulled out what remained: two protein bars, packaging dented but sealed.
They'd taste like cardboard soaked in regret, but calories were calories.
Three water packets, maybe half a liter each—nowhere near enough for a desert planet with an unknown day-night cycle.
A compact medical kit that rattled when I shook it.
A thermal blanket, its silver surface wrinkled but intact.
An LED torch that actually worked when I tested it, the beam slicing through the yellow-tinged air like a knife.
And there, clipped to the inside panel like a gift from a generous god, a utility knife with a four-inch blade.
Not much of an arsenal. But I'd make it work.
I clipped the knife to my belt and fashioned the thermal blanket into a makeshift pack, knotting the corners together and loading it with my meager supplies.
My gaze swept the crash site, hunting for anything else useful.
A section of hull plating lay half-buried nearby—too heavy to carry, too unwieldy to weaponize.
But there, jutting from the red dust like a grave marker, a support strut. Five feet of straight, solid metal.
I yanked it free and tested its weight. Good heft. Balanced. With a stone, I could sharpen one end into a spear point. It might not stop whatever nightmares this planet kept in its closet, but it beat harsh language and aggressive finger-pointing.
I straightened, shading my eyes against the alien sun as I studied the horizon. Those rocky hills to the east, maybe two klicks out. High ground meant perspective. A chance to see what I was really dealing with—water sources, threats, whether this planet wanted to kill me quickly or take its time.
The Navy had drilled it into me until it became reflex: assess, adapt, survive. In that order. Dad made sure I knew it by heart.
I shouldered my makeshift pack and started walking, the strut a reassuring weight in my right hand. Each step sent fire lancing through my ribs, but I gritted my teeth and kept moving. Pain was just data. It meant my nerve endings still worked, my heart still pumped, my body still fought.
The terrain fought back—loose gravel conspiring to twist my ankles, patches of something resembling purple moss but with the texture of old rubber, springy and alien beneath my boots.
The air had a metallic tang that coated my tongue, like licking a battery terminal.
Every breath reminded me I wasn't on Earth anymore.
That I was utterly, completely alone on a world that had no use for me.
But I'd survived worse than an indifferent universe.
I'd survived Declan Hewes.
The name alone sent ice through my veins, dragging with it memories I'd buried deep.
His hands crushing my windpipe. The pressure building, building, building until reality fractured into black stars.
The cold calculation in his eyes when he realized I wouldn't break, that I'd let him kill me before I'd give him what he craved—my complete and utter submission.
The FBI agents who pulled me out called me lucky. Called me strong. Called me a survivor.
I'd felt like none of those things. Just hollow.
Scraped out. But somewhere in that nightmare—in that basement reeking of rot and terror—I'd learned the truth about survival.
It wasn't about strength. It was about spite.
About dragging yourself forward when every cell screamed to surrender.
About forcing air into your lungs when they felt full of concrete.
About choosing, again and again, to exist.
My jaw clenched as I hauled myself over a ridge of volcanic glass. The hills loomed closer, their shadows bleeding across the rust-colored wasteland.
Whatever horrors this planet harbored—apex predators, toxic storms, the crushing weight of solitude—none of it could touch what I'd already endured. Declan had tried to destroy me, and here I was. Still breathing. Still moving. Still refusing to die.
I'd survived that monster. This alien hellscape didn't stand a chance.