Something is tracking me through the trees.
I know the feeling—that prickle at the back of the neck that says 'predator' before conscious thought catches up. Three years in contested airspace taught me to trust that instinct even when instruments say the sky is clear. The instruments are usually wrong. The instinct never is.
I slow my stumbling pace, trying to control my breathing despite ribs that scream with every inhale. Listen. The forest has gone quiet—no insects, no night birds, just the soft rustle of something large moving through underbrush with more grace than anything that size should possess.
Eyes in the darkness. Red, glowing, wrong. Multiple sets, spread in a formation that suggests pack hunting.
The first one emerges from shadow like shadow itself given form. Black fur over too-angular bones, a white mask of bone that splits into a muzzle full of teeth that gleam wet in the fractured moonlight. It's nothing I've ever seen. It's everything nightmares are made of.
My hand finds my Beretta before I consciously decide to draw. The weight of it is the only familiar thing in this entire alien hellscape—nine rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber, safety off with only a brief struggle because I haven't bothered with my handgun since the third week of Cascadia.
The creature lunges.
I fire. Two controlled bursts, center mass, the way I was trained. The recoil travels up my arm and through my shoulder into ribs that have already had enough tonight, thank you. The thing staggers, black ichor spraying from wounds that smoke at the edges, and then it dissolves. Just—comes apart. Like smoke given temporary weight, now dispersing back into nothing.
No time to process that. Another one charges from my left.
I pivot, fire, miss the first shot because my reach is off and I'm still compensating for an arm length I no longer possess. Second shot catches it in the skull, right through that bone mask, and it tumbles past me close enough that I can smell it—ash and something older, something that makes my stomach turn.
It dissolves too.
Two down. How many more? The red eyes blink in and out of visibility between the trees. Three? Four? I'm losing count because my heart is hammering too loud and my hands are shaking despite every ounce of training that says *steady, steady, you don't get to shake until the mission's over*.
The third one comes from directly ahead. I fire, miss, fire again, catch it in the shoulder. It keeps coming. I put two more rounds into its chest as it closes the distance, and the last one takes it in the throat just as its claws swipe toward my face. It dissolves inches from my skin.
The slide locks back.
That hollow click is the loneliest sound in the world.
I scramble backward, hands shaking as I drop the empty magazine and reach for—nothing. No spare. Of course no spare. I packed for a routine patrol, not for interdimensional displacement into a world with demon wolves.
The last one of the little nightmares—because that's what my brain has decided to call them, needs to call them something—stalks out of the darkness with the patient certainty of a predator that knows its prey is cornered. It's larger than the others. Older, maybe, with more bone plating along its shoulders and spine.
My back hits a tree. Nowhere left to run.
It charges.
I watch its claws arc toward my throat in that strange slow-motion that happens when the brain knows it's about to die and decides to make the most of the remaining seconds. This is it. This is how it ends—not in the sky, not beside Monarch where I belonged, but alone in an alien forest torn apart by something that shouldn't exist.
'No,' I think in fear as I pull out my boot knife and thrust forward as I impale the creature in the plate. I don't understand. I don't have time to understand my luck in the moment.
I run.
Branches tear at my flight suit as I crash through the forest with no regard for stealth or direction. Just away. Just *away*. Blood runs down my arm from somewhere—did its claws catch me before I stabbed it? I can't tell. Everything hurts and nothing makes sense and I keep calling for Monarch on a frequency that only answers with static.
"Monarch, please—"
My radio beeps once, weakly, and dies. The screen goes dark in my hand.
I don't know how long I run. Long enough for my lungs to burn and my legs to shake. Long enough for the sounds of pursuit to fade into nothing. Long enough that when I finally stop, gasping, leaning against a tree, I have no idea where I am in relation to those distant city lights.
Water. I can hear water somewhere nearby.
I follow the sound on autopilot until I find a pool—dark, still, reflecting the broken moon above. I collapse at its edge, meaning to drink, meaning to wash the blood from my hands.
I see my reflection instead.
For a long moment, I don't understand what I'm looking at. The face staring back at me is familiar but 'wrong'. Too young. Too smooth. Eyes too large in a skull that's shrunk around them. My cheekbones are softer, my jaw less defined, my neck thinner.
My dog tags hang past my sternum instead of resting against it.
I raise a hand. The reflection raises a hand. Smaller than mine should be. Shorter fingers. Less scarring across the knuckles.
I'm a child.
Somehow, impossibly, I'm a child again.
"Okay," I hear myself say, voice cracking on the word. It sounds higher than it should. Younger. Wrong. "That's new."
My legs give out.
The last thing I register before darkness takes me is Monarch's callsign slipping from my lips one more time, a prayer to a frequency that will never answer again.