Chapter 1

Alyssa

My eyes sting as I stare at the three moons so enormous and so close to me that I feel like an ant. They shine white gold with a brown tinge around their craters—like a breathtaking menace against the dark orange expanse of the sky with a full moon and two crescents. It’s as light as a summer evening.

I’m dreaming. I’m certain I am. Yet I feel the sand beneath my naked feet burning my skin. The hot air scented with herbs is burning my lungs.

Panic races through my heart and it threatens to break out of my rib cage.

I woke up about two minutes ago. I’d been lying on the sand. The heat of it had woken me.

The pain from my feet urges me to move. I rise on my tiptoes.

“God, help me wake up,” I shriek.

My throat feels dry. My eyes feel dry.

I’m a flower drying out, dying, except I’m a student.

I studied family law last night and I went to bed around midnight as usual.

I should have woken up in my bed in the flat I share with Lisa, my best friend. I should have woken up on Earth where I live.

Except I didn’t.

I woke up below those three fucking moons. In a desert.

I sniffle and pull forward. Shakiness invades my blood like a poison. My vest and shorts cling to my body. Sweat beads my forehead. The thin streams of salty moisture trickle down my temples and prick my eyes.

I start panting.

The horizon blurs, glitters, shines like a mirror as the brown expanse of the hostile land threatens to swallow me, kill me, and make me insane.

Then I see them—a group of people emerging from the shimmery wall of the horizon as though they’re ghosts. They’re dressed in black—long tunics, scarves covering their heads and faces, but their eyes are cold like glaciers, blue like the air in the high mountains.

“Help me,” I rasp. “Please, help me.”

“Straniera,” one of them growls with a deep female voice.

I know this word. It’s Italian and means ‘alien’, ‘foreigner’. Relief washes over me and my knees bend.

I’m on Earth.

I’m just hallucinating.

Too much coffee.

They’re doctors who are going to help me. They’ll deal with the caffeine overdose and I’ll start seeing them as doctors not people from some alien desert.

I’m American, but I was accepted to the Italian University six months ago. I have just started my first year of Law.

My mom dreamed of going to university in Italy—the country where her mom comes from. She never went to university so I decided to study in Italy for her.

The people surround me and I freeze. They’re tall. I’m like a dwarf compared to them. Two of them leap to me and grip my arms, tumbling me down to the sand so I lie on my back. I manage only a sigh.

Two hands fold my legs, causing me pain and they spread my knees. Those hands rip my shorts off me.

My heart stops beating as two fingers touch my pussy lips and a hot breath puffs on my inner thigh. I wiggle but too many hands are immobilising me.

“A virgin,” a raspy male voice says.

It’s English, but rough and distorted. Dreadful.

The hands tumble me over on my stomach as the sand invades my eyes and mouth. My wrists get bunched together and tied with a piece of string. I’m lifted like I’m a feather.

As my feet find support against the ground, one of them throws a cape over me, covering my vision. A hand shoves me forward. Another hand slaps my ass.

A thought wavers in my head.

I’m in hell.

I can’t see anything as these wild dangerous people race me like I’m a horse. My feet burn, hurt and numb then hurt even more as the uneven surface of the desert damages my soles. I fall to my knees. A hand griping my arm urges me to stand up.

Then a hand shoves me into a smelly environment. The stench makes me retch—human sweat and urine. The sounds of human breaths surround me.

A hand pulls the cape away from my face and my eyes meet a female’s glance. She looks my age, nineteen to be precise, her face dirty in the streak of light filtering through the window in the wooden ceiling just above my head. It’s secured with metal bars.

“Straniera,” the girl says, sadness pervading the emerald ocean of her eyes. Her irises have yellow flickers like those of wolves. She wears a kind of tunic that’s too tight and exposes her small breasts. “You shouldn’t have come here.”