"It’s gone," Elias whispered.
He was leaning so close to the radar screen his nose was almost touching the glass. He tapped the monitor with a trembling finger. "I swear, Boss. I didn’t touch anything. It didn’t fly away. It just evaporated."
"Ships the size of a city block don’t just evaporate, Elias!" Jax snapped, his hands gripping the edge of the console. "Run a diagnostic. It has to be a glitch."
"It’s not a glitch," Catrin said.
Her voice was calm, but her mind was racing a mile a minute. She stared at the empty radar grid. Ten seconds ago, a massive warship had been sitting directly above them. Now, there was nothing but static.
"They cloaked," Quinn said, slinging her rifle over her shoulder. She looked sick to her stomach. "If they have the tech to vaporize a mutated bear from the clouds, they definitely have the tech to turn invisible."
Catrin nodded slowly. That was exactly what she was thinking. The alien ship hadn’t left. It was just hiding, biding its time.
"They are watching us," Catrin ordered, turning to face her team. "Jax, tell your men to keep their guns lowered. Do not fire at the sky. If they wanted to kill us, we would be dead."
"So we just wait for them to kick the doors in?" Jax asked, his jaw tight.
"No," Catrin said. "We make the Ark as quiet as a graveyard. Elias, kill all external lights. Shut down the heavy machinery in the lower levels. I don’t want a single vibration leaving this mountain."
"Total blackout," Elias confirmed, his fingers flying across the keyboard. "What about the internal alarms?"
"Disable them," Catrin said instantly.
Quinn frowned. "Boss, if we disable the internal alarms, we won’t know if someone breaches the lower rings."
"If that ship decides to breach the hull, an alarm isn’t going to save us," Catrin countered smoothly.
But that was a lie. Catrin didn’t care about the ship breaching the hull. She cared about the loud, blaring sirens terrifying Nico. She had learned the hard way that fear and frustration caused her son to unleash crushing gravity. Joy caused zero gravity.
To keep the Ark in one piece, and to prevent Nico from accidentally firing off another cosmic flare that would lead the ship right to his bedroom, she had to keep the environment perfectly, numbingly calm.
"I want absolute peace inside these walls," Catrin continued, looking at Jax. "No shouting in the barracks. No sparring with live ammo. Keep the morale up, but keep the noise down. Understood?"
"Understood," Jax nodded, though he looked confused by the new pacifist rules.
Catrin left the security hub and walked quickly down the hall to her private quarters. Graves was standing outside her door, standing perfectly still.
"How is he?" Catrin asked quietly.
"Quiet," Graves rumbled. "He’s drawing on the floor."
Catrin opened the door and slipped inside. The room was softly lit by a single desk lamp. Nico was lying on his stomach on the plush carpet, using a thick red crayon to draw a very lopsided dinosaur.
Catrin felt a massive wave of relief. The gravity in the room felt perfectly normal. Nothing was floating. Nothing was crushed.
"Mommy!" Nico beamed, dropping his crayon.
"Hey, little boss," Catrin smiled, masking every ounce of her terror behind a warm, maternal glow. She sat on the floor next to him. "That is a very scary dinosaur."
"He eats the bad guys," Nico explained seriously.
"Good," Catrin brushed his hair back. The brown dye was perfect. He looked like a completely normal human boy. "Are you hungry? Do you want some peaches?"
"Yeah!"
As she stood up to get his snack, Catrin looked toward the heavily armored window of her bedroom. Outside, the purple storm raged on. Somewhere out there in the dark, the father of her child was watching them.
I won’t let you take him, Catrin promised silently. I don’t care what you are.
Forty miles away, at the very base of the mountain, the storm was completely blinding.
The purple ash fell like thick, toxic snow. The wind howled through the dead pine trees.
Suddenly, a streak of fiery orange cut through the dark sky.
A small, sleek drop-pod plummeted toward the earth. It had no thrusters firing to slow its descent. It had no advanced navigation systems guiding it to a safe landing zone. It was falling completely blind.
CRASH.
The pod slammed into the side of a frozen, rocky hill. The impact sent a massive plume of purple ash into the air. The metal hull groaned and buckled, dragging a deep trench through the dirt before finally slamming into a dead tree and coming to a violent stop.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of the howling wind.
Then, a heavy thud echoed from inside the ruined pod.
BANG.
The heavy metal hatch didn’t just pop open. It was forcefully kicked outward, the thick steel flying several feet through the air before hitting the snow.
A man pulled himself out of the smoking wreckage.
He fell to his hands and knees in the freezing ash, coughing violently. The toxic air burned his lungs. The biting cold pierced his skin like a thousand tiny needles.
Commander Zeviel squeezed his eyes shut, gritting his teeth against a sudden, sharp pain in his side. He reached down and touched his ribs. When he pulled his hand back, his fingers were coated in dark, wet blood.
"Fragile," Zeviel rasped, his voice a low, rough growl.
He slowly pushed himself to his feet. He looked down at his body. He was no longer a towering, armored Vanguard Prince. The Morphic Crystal had done its job flawlessly, violently compressing his cosmic biology into a human vessel.
He was incredibly handsome, possessing a sharp, aristocratic jawline and striking, pale silver hair that whipped wildly in the toxic wind. But it was his eyes that truly stood out. They were normal, human-sized eyes now, but the irises burned with an intense, predatory gold.
He was wearing simple, dark civilian clothes that Vael had replicated for him. They offered almost zero protection against the cold.
Zeviel shivered. It was the first time he had felt a physical chill in over two thousand years.
He looked back at the wrecked drop-pod. He needed to bury it. If the local scavengers found alien technology, it would complicate everything.
He reached out his hand, intending to crush the metal hull into a tiny cube and bury it deep underground with a single thought.
He focused his mind.
The heavy metal pod groaned. It shifted a few inches to the right.
And then, Zeviel fell to his knees, gasping for air as a massive, blinding migraine ripped through his skull. His nose began to bleed.
He wiped the blood away, panting heavily. The ten percent rule. Vael had warned him. His human brain simply could not process the complex, massive telekinetic equations his alien form could. He couldn’t crush the pod.
"Fine," Zeviel muttered, his golden eyes narrowing.
He focused on a smaller target. He looked at a heavy boulder resting near the wreckage. With a flick of his wrist, the boulder lifted off the ground and slammed into the pod, denting the hull further to make it look like regular scavenged junk.
It was a pathetic display of power compared to his true form, but it was enough. He was still stronger than any human on this planet. He just couldn’t be a god anymore.
Zeviel turned away from the wreckage and looked up.
Through the thick, swirling purple fog, he could barely make out the massive, jagged peak of the mountain miles in the distance.
He didn’t know her name. During their one night together four years ago, they had talked for hours, but she had coyly refused to give him her real name, teasing him that a handsome stranger didn’t need to know everything. He had simply called her "Green Eyes."
"I am coming," Zeviel whispered to the wind.
He took a step forward. His ribs screamed in protest, and his boots crunched in the freezing ash.
It was a forty-mile hike up a frozen, mutant-infested mountain. He had no armor. He had no weapons. He was bleeding, and he was freezing.
Zeviel smirked, a dark, thrilled energy rushing through his human veins. It felt good to bleed. It felt good to have stakes. For the first time in his long, endless life, he actually had to fight for something that mattered.
He pulled his dark collar up against the biting wind and began the long walk up the mountain to find his family.