Ben had never truly understood what people meant by "void" until now. Before, it was just a word—something to describe death, a black hole, the depths of the oceans, or those terrifying seconds he spent between a space station and the Ember.

  He’d never actually considered the possibility of being packed in something like a polystyrene peanut and shot into the unknown. He had accepted the rattling around, until the escape pod’s last vidscreens opaqued with intermittent static and the only thing left was the sound of Thorn, arms wrapped around himself, pointed little teeth clacking as he shivered.

  After wandering into restricted areas once too often, Ben had been forced to sit through a “Basic Starship Survival” tutorial. One of the topics covered were for pods like the one they were in. But one of the newer pods—fully stocked, padded, with touchscreens and auto-stim injectors.

  Their pod looked like it had been welded together by a sadist with a grudge against ergonomics. The internal lights pulsed as they sliced through space. Their harnesses had stains that Ben decided were not blood.

  “You think there’s a rescue protocol?” Ben asked, voice bouncing off the riveted walls.

  “I know that Ember will have recorded which way we went. It will miss me greatly,” Thorn said. “What I’m worried about is when there’s something in our path. Let’s just say our odds are suboptimal.”

  Ben winced as the straps scraped old bruises and peered through the physical viewport. Nothing but the faint blue smear of a distant nebula and the cold, unforgiving nothing that was space.

  “Well, at least there’s a decent view for the last moments of our lives,” Ben offered.

  Thorn busied himself with the pod’s control panel, which mostly consisted of a cracked touchscreen and an assortment of buttons carefully labeled in a language Ben didn’t recognize. The grimp’s fingers worked the controls with practiced contempt.

  “Bad news, human. Or maybe good news. There actually is something in the way. A planet sized something.”

  Ben weighed the odds of dying in a fireball versus running out of air and decided to root for the fireball.

  “What are the chances it’s a friendly planet?”

  “I have literally informed you of everything I know.”

  Ben closed his eyes, feeling the pod vibrate with the slow, unstoppable grind of inertia, and tried to remember anything about his past that would offer a clue. Anything about why he came to be here. Not much surfaced. A blurred face, a rush of anger, the taste of cheap beer, and a thick, oily resentment aimed at people who’d never bother to remember his name. If the pod cracked open into a warzone, at least it wouldn’t be a shock.

  The world arrived sooner than expected. One moment, stillness; the next, a juddering force as every atom in Ben’s body was pressed rearward at once. “Atmosphere!” Thorn squeaked, his tail tucked.

  The pod’s hull screeched as friction chewed away the last of its paint. Ben grabbed the harness and held on, chest compressing as the g-forces ramped up. The viewport brightened, then darkened, then the light turned red—sickly, then almost beautiful. He tried to count the seconds but lost track in the buffet of turbulence.

  A miracle occurred when the chute deployed with a thunderous snap. Ben's stomach lurched as their descent slowed from certain death to merely catastrophic. The pod still hurtled earthward like a meteor with delusions of survival.

  There was no warning for the crash. All Ben’s senses compressed into a single, splintering moment: thunderclap, heat, the sensation of being fist-punched through every bone and tendon. Then darkness.

  He blinked awake face-down in shredded upholstery, a taste of copper on his tongue and the electric bite of ozone in his nostrils.

  “I'm so over that smell.”

  He lifted his head, blinking through the debris and saw that Thorn had somehow wedged himself into the pod’s survival locker, wrapped in a tangle of paracord.

  “Welcome to paradise,” Thorn said, voice muffled.

  Ben unlatched the hatch with numb fingers. The external world looked like the inside of a blast furnace. The pod had tunneled through what used to be a roof, then several floors of what used to be a building and now rested at a forty-five-degree tilt in a tangle of rebar and thermal insulation. Outside, there was nothing but the black skeletons of dead towers stretching toward a red, angry sky.

  Ben’s first impression: a city built to last a thousand years, left to rot for a hundred and ninety-nine. Concrete and metal scorched and stripped, not a single pane of glass unbroken. Not so much as a weed or a patch of moss.

  “Great,” he muttered.

  Thorn crawled out of the locker and stretched, vertebrae popping. He took in the scene and sniffed the air.

  “Reclamation world would be my guess. This system didn’t list any inhabited worlds.” Thorn surmised.

  Ben stared blankly at him. “Reclamation? Nothing about this looks or hell, even smells reclaimed.”

  Thorn rolled his eyes. Which was quite the feat with him not having pupils or anything else a normal eye has.

  “It’s what can happen after a global extinction event. Corporates claim ownership after everyone else is dead or run off. Usually by mining the planet core or dumping waste until the biosphere has a psychotic break. Or they use the entire world for its natural resources, braving whatever ruined it in the first place. But it looks like whoever tried to reclaim this place failed.”

  Ben considered this. “So, we’re stuck on a haunted garbage planet.”

  “Technically, haunted salvage planet,” Thorn corrected. “The difference is, the ghosts here usually have teeth. Or guns.”

  Ben kicked his way out of the pod’s battered hull, lowering himself onto what used to be an office cubicle. He found a flashlight in the survival kit, clicked it on, and scanned the interior. On the wall, a faded corporate logo—a stylized ‘X’ inside a gear—reminded him of some childhood cartoon villain.

  He checked the rest of the kit: two med-packs, a canteen of water, half a dozen nutrient bars, and a tracking beacon with a battery life measured in days. Ben thumbed the beacon on and breathed out a sigh of relief as a little red light started to blink. Maybe someone would notice.

  Or maybe it would blink uselessly into forever.

  A clatter of debris drew Ben's attention to where Thorn balanced precariously on a twisted metal beam. The grimp's tail flicked with excitement as he pointed toward a gap in the rubble. "Unless you enjoy the view from this death trap, I've located our descent route."

  Ben followed the grimp out onto a twisted bridge of support beams and down a stairwell that ended abruptly in midair. The bottom floor had collapsed into a pit of rubble.

  They made their descent in silence, Thorn moving with uncanny lightness, Ben cursing every time he scraped something. At the bottom, they emerged into an open plaza, littered with the remains of what might have been a sculpture garden before entropy and high explosives had their say.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The silence was complete. No wind, no birds, no distant hum of machinery. Just the ache of pressure in Ben’s ears and the sense of being watched by a thousand empty windows.

  He picked a direction and started walking, Thorn at his heels. The streets were paved with a composite Ben didn’t recognize—still intact, even as the buildings decayed. The only sign of recent activity was gouges in the road, as though something massive and tracked had passed through in the last few weeks.

  Ben scanned the horizon for anything alive, or at least not actively decomposing. “You think there’s a way off planet?”

  Thorn shrugged, which for a grimp involved his whole body. “If we find a working comms array, maybe. Or a shipyard. Or a junkyard with enough parts to build an escape vehicle.” His tail twitched. “Or we could join the ghost population. Options abound.”

  They walked for what felt like an hour, past collapsed warehouses and office blocks, past a playground buckled into a crater, and past a monument of a man with a sledgehammer—whose inscription was unreadable. Ben’s muscles warmed up, and his mind settled into the rhythm of survival scanning for danger.

  And then, as if on cue, there was a sound: a high-pitched whine, followed by the crackle of static.

  Ben ducked behind a shattered wall with Thorn disappeared beside him. The source of the noise drifted into view—a floating orb, metallic, with a row of glassy red eyes circling its equator. Some type of recon drone, Thorn sent him.

  Ben’s mouth went dry, but he gritted his teeth and reached for his wand. Got any advice?

  Yeah, don’t get shot.

  The drone scanned the plaza, its eyes flickering as it pinged the ruins for movement. Ben waited until it moved past their hiding spot, then motioned to Thorn. They advanced, slow and low, using the debris as cover.

  The drone paused, rotating, one eye now fixed on the spot where Ben had been moments ago. He froze, a bead of sweat trickling down his spine. Its lenses swept the rubble, pausing as if thinking. Ben held his breath, counting the seconds as the machine hovered, its internal mechanisms humming with deadly purpose.

  The drone drifted closer to their wall, its red lenses pulsing with increasing frequency. Ben felt his muscles cramp from holding still, the tension building in his shoulders like a gathering storm. Just as he thought he might snap, the drone emitted a low beep and resumed its patrol route, floating away toward a collapsed bridge in the distance.

  "That was uncomfortably close," Ben whispered, releasing his breath in a slow, controlled exhale. His heart hammered against his ribs like it was trying to break free. "Why would they still have security drones on a dead planet?"

  Thorn emerged from the shadows, his leathery skin blending back to its normal green. "Its core must be absorbing ambient mana, keeping it charged. "

  They continued their trek through the ruins, moving more cautiously now. The cityscape gradually shifted from commercial to industrial, the buildings giving way to massive processing facilities and storage depots. Most were collapsed or gutted.

  Ben's fingers kept returning to the beacon in his pocket, its plastic casing warm against his skin. Every few minutes, he'd pull it out to check if the red light still pulsed—a tiny, desperate heartbeat barely visible even in shadow. The device was hardly larger than his thumb, pathetically small against the vast desolation surrounding them. He imagined its feeble signal struggling upward through the toxic atmosphere, dissipating into cosmic static long before reaching any potential rescuer.

  A warning prickled across Ben's skin, his body reacting before his mind could process the danger. He lunged sideways, snatching Thorn mid-stride as superheated air crackled where they'd stood moments before. Scrambling behind a fallen column, Ben glimpsed a drone—perhaps the same one—bearing down on their position, its weapon array glowing with renewed charge.

  "Move!" Thorn shrieked.

  Ben scrambled sideways, Thorn leaping away as another blast dug a line in the ground. His lungs burned from the superheated air. No time to think—just react. He sprinted toward a half-collapsed warehouse, zigzagging between chunks of rubble as energy bolts stitched the ground behind him.

  The drone's high-pitched whine intensified, its tracking systems compensating for his evasive pattern. Ben risked a glance over his shoulder and immediately regretted it—the machine had accelerated, locked onto him with mechanical certainty.

  "Wand!" Thorn yelled. "Use your fucking wand!"

  Ben fumbled for the wand in its sheath, nearly dropping it as his sweaty fingers closed around the grip. He spun, raising it just as the drone lined up another shot. Gritting his teeth, he released pure mana.

  The blast that left him wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t even intentional in any meaningful way. It was panic given shape.

  A spear of raw, colorless force erupted from the wand and tore across the plaza in a screaming arc. It didn’t hit the drone so much as it unmade the air between them. Concrete exploded outward in a halo of pulverized dust. The shockwave lifted Ben off his feet and flung him out the warehouse’s broken threshold.

  The drone corkscrewed wildly, one entire hemisphere dented inward like a kicked can.

  “Too much!” Thorn shrieked, scrambling over debris to reach him. “Or not enough! Hard to tell!”

  The drone righted itself midair with a stuttering whine. Three of its lenses went dark. The others flared brighter.

  “Oh good,” Ben groaned, dragging himself up. “It’s angry.”

  A beam lanced through the warehouse wall, slicing a glowing line across a support pillar. The metal screamed and sagged.

  “Ben!” Thorn vaulted onto a stack of broken pallets and launched himself upward, dagger flashing. His small form blurred—just for a heartbeat—edges shimmering as if heat-hazed. He vanished.

  The drone pivoted, confused, scanning.

  A split second later Thorn reappeared on top of it.

  His dagger punched into a seam between plating segments. Sparks erupted. The drone spasmed, spinning violently, trying to shake him loose. Thorn clung on with his tail and one clawed foot, stabbing again and again, teeth bared in a feral grin.

  “Core’s in the center!” he shouted. “Crack the shell!”

  “Working on it!” Ben yelled back, though he had no idea what that meant.

  The drone bucked, slamming into a wall. Thorn was flung off, hitting the ground hard and rolling.

  The weapon array flared toward him.

  Ben didn’t think this time.

  He raised the wand and reached—not for a blast—but for something tighter. Smaller. He remembered Thorn vanishing. The shimmer. The distortion. He didn’t know the mechanism, didn’t know the gate structure, but he knew the idea.

  Don't get shot.

  Or… don't be a target.

  Mana answered.

  It didn’t explode outward. It folded in, crawling over his skin like cool oil. The air around him warped, light bending slightly off his outline, and his eyes immediately began aching inside his skull. He could still see himself—barely—but the world seemed to hesitate when looking directly at him.

  The drone’s targeting reticle flickered.

  Its beam fired—wide.

  Ben stared at his own faintly translucent hands. “Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, that’s useful.”

  Thorn blinked up at him from behind rubble. “You did a thing.”

  “I did a thing!”

  “Do another thing!”

  The drone recalibrated. Its remaining optics pulsed, sweeping wider now, compensating for the distortion. It began firing in a fan pattern, carving molten scars across the area.

  Ben sprinted—not away—but toward it.

  Every instinct screamed at him that this was the wrong move. His camouflage shimmered with each step, light bending awkwardly around his outline. The drone struggled to maintain lock, beams snapping erratically.

  He slid beneath it just as another shot blasted through where he’d been.

  Up close, the machine was bigger than he’d thought—armored plating layered like scales, humming with stored energy. In its underside, through the dent Thorn had made, he saw it: a fist-sized sphere of churning violet light.

  “Core!” he shouted.

  Thorn didn’t hesitate. He leapt, shrinking, clinging to Ben’s shoulder for balance. The grimp prepared to launch again, dagger raised.

  “Boost me!”

  “I don’t know how!”

  “Just feel aggressive!”

  That, at least, Ben understood.

  He shoved mana through their connection. Thorn’s hand glowed and he grabbed the seam and yanked.

  The metal split.

  Thorn drove the dagger straight into the exposed core.

  The world shrieked.

  For a fraction of a second, everything froze—the drone, the air, the light itself pulling inward toward that punctured sphere. Then the core exploded with a deafening crack.

  Ben threw himself flat.

  The explosion wasn’t fire. It was force. A concussive bloom that blew out the remaining warehouse walls and sent shards of metal raining across the plaza.

  Silence followed.

  Dust drifted.

  Ben lifted his head slowly. His ears rang. His camouflage flickered and died, the mana draining out of him like water through a cracked glass.

  Thorn lay sprawled a few meters away, coughing.

  “…We are,” Thorn wheezed, pushing himself upright, “incredibly incompetent.”

  Ben rolled onto his back and stared the sky. “We are incredibly alive.”

  He began to laugh.

  Then he noticed something.

  The drone’s wreckage wasn’t just wreckage. Its internal systems still sparked faintly. A low pulse flickered from somewhere inside the twisted shell.

  Thorn followed his gaze. “Oh no,” the grimp muttered.

  The pulse repeated.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Then, somewhere far off in the ruins, another whine answered it.

  Ben’s laughter died in his throat.

  From beyond the collapsed bridge, beyond the skeletal towers, red lights blinked on across the skyline.

  One.

  Then three.

  Then too many to count.

  Thorn slowly sheathed his dagger.

  “Congratulations,” he said softly. “You have discovered the planet’s group chat.”

  The answering whines multiplied.

  Ben pushed himself to his feet, every muscle protesting.

  “Run?” he suggested.

  Thorn was already moving.