1. Olivia #4
A comet of molten rock slams into the ground twenty yards to my left.
Holy shit!
The impact throws a wave of heat over my face and a spray of superheated debris that peppers my forearm like thrown gravel. I don't stop. I can’t stop.
I veer right, widen my arc around the impact site, and keep moving. Another one strikes ahead of me, then one further right, then two in quick succession somewhere just behind me, each impact a sound like the earth being beaten with a hammer.
The volcano is in full voice now — I can hear it even over my own gasping breath, a continuous deep-throated roar that I've stopped trying to track because it's everywhere all at once. It's the whole sky, it's the ground vibrating under every step I take.
I don't look back.
Looking back means slowing down. Looking back means the things behind me have already won, and I am not in the business of giving those away for free.
I can hear them — the alien males — but I can't parse the sound into anything useful. Sometimes there’s a roar and a clash. A roaring from deep in the throat and a bellow as one slashes into another.
The sounds are big and close and scary and getting no smaller. That's all I know. And that’s all I need to know.
I don’t know where I’m running to, or what I’ll even do when I get there. I am just running. For my freaking life.
The terrain shifts. The fractured rock gives way to a stretch of smoother stone, black and glassy-looking, still warm through the soles of my shoes.
I push harder here — better footing, longer strides — and gain maybe ten seconds on whatever's behind me before the smooth patch ends and the fractured ground begins again.
My left foot finds the exact wrong angle on the exact wrong edge and?—
I slip.
The ground comes up fast.
My palms hit rock. My left knee hits harder.
The impact punches the air out of me and I'm sliding, ash and grit tearing my hands to ribbons.
But I'm already moving again before I'm fully aware of being down.
Back onto my hands and knees, crawling forward through the pain because forward is the only direction that matters.
My palms leave tracks in the soot and ash. I can feel it running from me. Wet and warm. I register it and set it aside the way I've set aside a hundred worse things in triage .
Just keep moving! I yell at myself. It’s the one thing that matters.
I get my feet under me.
I'm pushing upright when they collide above me.
I feel it before I see it — a concussive displacement of air, the ground shuddering with impact — and then they're there, two of the males smashing into each other.
Huge bodies of massive muscles and serrated teeth and wounds.
Gashes a forearm deep. Green blood. Blue blood. All the colors of the rainbow.
The only thing that saves me is that I'm still low, still half-crouched from my fall.
They pass over me like a wave breaking. I flatten instinctively, face down against the rock, and for one terrible second they're both right there — mass and heat and the sound of claws on alien hide and a language of violence I don't speak but understand perfectly.
Then the momentum carries them past me and they hit the ground together ten feet away in a tangle of limbs and blind fury.
I don't wait to see how it resolves. Who wins. Because ultimately, there is only one real outcome. And that is me losing.
I'm up. I'm moving. My knee screams, weak and jittery, barely able to hold my weight. But not wrong enough to stop, not yet.
I file it away for later and keep going, picking the clearest line through the debris field ahead. Another volcanic comet lands to my right, then one directly behind me, close enough that the shockwave catches me between the shoulder blades like a shove.
I stagger. Recover. Keep going!
The males are still fighting. A different pair, this time, I think. Though I’m not sure. I can hear them tearing into each other, the sound receding slightly as I put distance between us.
I take this as evidence that at least right now they're more interested in each other than in me. But it won't last. Nothing on this platform lasts. But I'll take the ten seconds it buys me and I'll spend them running.
Then the volcano erupts again, throwing a hissy fit larger than any before.
Not a rumble. Not a tremor. A full-on eruption, a massive upward detonation of gas and rock and fire that punches a new column into the sky and shakes the entire platform like a struck bell.
This is what it must have been like at Pompeii!
Except…
Except with wild snarling aliens trying to mate with you at the same time.
I lose my footing again — both feet this time — and I'm down on one knee when the debris starts falling. Smaller rocks first, a hail of them across a wide radius, pinging off the ground around me like hissing stones from a peashooter.
Then larger fragments. First fist-sized, then pizza, then microwaves, trailing smoke as they arc downward. I cover my head with both arms and move, staying low, changing direction when I can see where the next wave is going to land.
I get upright again. Find my stride again.
And then I hear it — or rather I don't hear it. That’s the only warning I get: a sudden absence of sound, a gap in the noise where there should be something, the way a shadow falls before the monster that casts it arrives.
I look up.
The boulder is enormous. A genuine chunk of the mountain itself, massive and dark and trailing a comet-tail of ash, tumbling slowly end over end through the orange sky.
It has been airborne for long enough to lose its initial heat glow, and it is coming down fast, coming down here , and the calculation my brain runs takes less than a second and returns the same answer from every angle.
There is nowhere to go.
I try anyway. I dig my heels in to change direction. One lunge to the left, desperate and too late. My body refuses to accept what my brain already knows. I get maybe two feet before?—
CRUNCH.
"Ten."
I gasp.
Not a gentle return to consciousness. Not a slow, cinematic fade-in with soft focus and swelling music. I gasp like someone who just had the air knocked out of them by a boulder the size of a studio apartment.
Every nerve ending I have fires simultaneously in a full-system panic that takes about three seconds to resolve into the understanding that I am not, currently, dead.
I'm back in the pod.
"Nine."
I stare at the curved glass six inches from my nose and I take one breath, then another, and I wait for my body to catch up with the situation.
The situation being that I had definitely died.
I was crushed by a volcanic boulder on an alien platform in the middle of space.
I should be dead. And now I am standing in a glass pod that I recognize, listening to a countdown that I also recognize .
The glass is cool against my palms when I press them to it, and my palms are not bleeding. Not even a mark.
I check them twice.
The knee that had been screaming at me for the last hundred yards of my desperate run: fine.
The welts on my forearm from the molten debris: gone.
Even the bite on my tongue has healed, which I discover by probing it carefully and finding only smooth, uninjured tissue where there had been a swollen, copper-tasting problem.
"Eight."
Right. Yes. The voice had said: female competitor resets to full health.
I'd heard that. I'd filed it. I just hadn't understood what it meant in practice until now. Which is that I get to experience dying and then wake up with a full set of functioning body parts and absolutely no psychological preparation for the fact that I'm about to do it all over again.
Fan- tastic.
I look up.
They're all here. Same arrangement, same formation, same ring of pods around mine like I'm the terrible prize at the center of the worst carnival game ever designed.
Then I look again and realize they're not exactly the same. The difference lands somewhere in my chest with a weight I wasn't prepared for.
Four-Arms has a burn along the left side of his neck that climbs his jaw in an ugly, mottled ridge. His lower-left arm hangs slightly wrong, like something in the shoulder didn't quite reset correctly. Given how recklessly he'd thrown himself at everything in range, I'm surprised it's only one arm.
Chuckles has a gash across his ribs, partly closed but still dark and raw-looking, and for once he's not laughing — just watching with that amber gaze slightly narrowed, his tail moving in a slow, deliberate arc behind him. Recalibrating. Filing things away. That's somehow worse than the laughing.
Scratch has a cracked horn. Just the left one, split maybe a third of the way up from the base, a clean diagonal fracture.
He's touching it with two fingers as I watch, a brief, almost unconscious assessment, and then his eyes find mine through the glass and his hand drops and he just — looks at me.
The way he always looks at me. Patient and measuring and giving nothing back.
Jawline has blood on him. Dried, dark, not his — at least I don't think it's his — matted along his forearms and spattered across that enormous jaw in a pattern that tells a story I don't particularly want to read.
He's pacing. Four steps, turn, four steps, turn, the contained trajectory of something that doesn't fit in the space it's been given.
Then there's Goldie.
He's still.
Of course he's still. He's always still.
But there's something different about it this time, a quality to the stillness that I can't name immediately, and I find myself looking longer than I mean to.
He's the only one with no visible injuries at all — standing in exactly the same position as before, arms loose, weight even, like the reset changed nothing about him except the expression.
And the expression is doing something more complicated than before.