By Celeste Raye

Chapter 1:

Marina

“We’re making an emergency landing. I repeat, an emergency landing is imminent.”

The voice of my ship’s captain hummed over the loudspeaker of the spacecraft and seemed to echo through every empty corridor. My eyes immediately twitched up to my sister, Athena, from across the common lounge. That’s right. Our parents named us Marina and Athena. ‘It’s cute,’ they insisted. All it was to me, really, was a headache.

Teachers would refer to us as though we were twins because of our ridiculous rhyming names, even though at 29 I was three years her senior.

“Did he really just say that?” my sister called from across the room with a cocked brow. She was busied in a game of cards with some of the other scientists aboard.

“Landing,” I repeated unenthusiastically.

“Landing now?” she asked with no small form of impatience.

“That’s generally what landing implies,” I said.

“Not really!” she called back.

I rolled my eyes and shook my head at the comment. If she wanted to talk to me, why didn’t she just walk up and start a conversation? No, ever the extrovert, Athena had to shout it across the entire room so that her voice rang like a bell and everyone would be forced to show her attention.

With a huff and a grumble, she threw her cards down to the table and whispered something in her playmate’s ear before sitting across from me in an old upholstered chair that was bolted to the floor.

“You worried?” she asked nonchalantly as she set her tanned arms on the table between us. I was always jealous of how easily my sister tanned. I was pale as a ghost, like our mother. But she was an Australian beauty, like our father; all golden blonde hair and deeply shaded skin.

I shook my head. “Not especially. I heard we were having problems with the ship.”

She stared at me, stone-faced. “And yet you invited me to come aboard? Your own sister? Your own flesh and blood you would risk on a possible deathtrap?”

Her anger was a put-on, of course. That would be the day, when Athena Livingstone wasn’t dissatisfied with the unknown.

“And here I thought you loved adventure,” I teased.

“Yes,” she flung her long blonde hair carelessly behind her back. “I also quite enjoy living, too.”

My eyes fluttered across the lounge and watched as concerned expressions ghosted over the faces of our fellow crewmates. We were on a secret mission: scientists and few security members. Some of the crew scuttled around the common room in a panic, while others barely looked up from their games. We had a very competent pilot. So much so that I didn’t even feel a need to go bunker down and prep for landing.

“Aren’t we around Ceylara, anyway?” my sister asked.

I nodded. “Yep.”

“And that’s the planet we’re supposed to go to?”

I offered her another nod. “Bingo.”

“So what’s the big deal?” Athena shrugged. “Basically, we’re landing a week early, if nothing else. We should be cheering, not worrying!”

“Well,” I frowned comically. My sister always had an interesting way of looking at things. “We are severely off-course. We’re nowhere near the research site.”

“So we find another way around the planet. Big whoop.”

I blinked in surprise and gave a bemused laugh. “Okay. How do you propose we do this? We have one rover, and it’ll barely hold three people, let alone our whole crew.”

We had 59 on board. I knew this would be an impossibility, but Athena gave an over-exaggerated yawn and waved me off as though I weren’t trying hard enough to remedy the situation.

“We’ll fix the ship, and everything will be peachy. Okay?” she said with a breath.

“Okay,” I agreed half-heartedly. “And you’ll be staying put, I assume?”

She gave me a playful wink. “’Course.”

“You girls nervous?” came a familiar voice.

I turned in my chair to see the source of the tone and watched the red-haired guard waltz over to our chairs, quite literally dancing his way over to us with exaggerated movements. Peter. He was a silly guy who had been trying to get my attention for months now.

“Hello, handsome,” I greeted in our familiar way, smiling at him as he neared us with his contagious spirit.

He held a laser rifle lazily over his shoulder as he spun the top of the chair so that he was sitting with the chair back to his chest, his feet placed firmly on either side of the stool.

“I’m always nervous when you’re around,” Athena said in the most un-flirtatious tone I’d ever heard.

“Because I make you weak in the knees?” he teased.

My sister gave a full, heady laugh. “More like I don’t trust you with this thing,” she mocked as she tipped his rifle back off his shoulder and stood from our company.

“Hey!” he said with a deep frown, watching her walk out of the room. “I ranked first in my squad!”

I laughed at the meager attempt to defend himself and crossed my legs in my chair. “Smooth,” I grinned.

“You think?”

I raised my brows, and we both let out a small laugh. “No.”

“So what do we make of this here, our broken ship?” he asked in his boyish tone. In truth, Peter was exactly my age, but his fair red hair, smooth skin, and freckled face gave him a younger appearance that I found immensely charming. The disturbing thing was that with our fair hair and freckles, we could have been cousins.

He even had the same heart-shaped face that I did. The shape was both endearing and somewhat odd on a man’s frame.

I smiled as he continued talking about the system failure in the ship and slowly I rolled my wrist in expectation of his next words.

“Do you think its aliens?” he asked enthusiastically.

“You always say its aliens,” I scoffed. “You’ve been saying this for four missions. That’s two years now!”

“Yeah, and that one time it was!”

“Um,” I deadpanned. “I think you’re rewriting history a little there, buddy.”

“I think not,” he defended. “When we were on Noxuvis, did we not break down because of an alien attack?”

I slapped my hand on the table and giggled profusely. “It wasn’t exactly an ‘it’s on the wing’ situation, Pete. It was an electric current that gave us a blackout.”

“An electric current caused by…?” he tempted.

“By an alien life form,” I admitted reluctantly. “But it was so cute!”

He shook his head with a smirk, crossing his arms in disapproval. “It doesn’t ‘not count’ because it was cute.”

“Look, all I’m saying is that I’ve heard you tell that story to other people and you treat it like it was a dinosaur that attacked us or something. It was a little baby!”

“Yeah,” he said forcefully. “And it managed to take us out for a month. We had to contact headquarters and request emergency rations rocketed in. You know, the more I think about it, the more it seems like you’re the one who isn’t remembering things clearly.”

I waved him off with humor, and he rolled his eyes with a perfectly straight smile.

“You know that the captain wants us to be in our quarters for landing, right?” he said after a moment of uncomfortable silence. Peter and I had edged on the cusp of flirtation for so long now that we hadn’t quite crossed over into friendship, nor hopped the line into dating. This made silences incredibly awkward, like we weren’t sure how to read it, or each other, yet.

I inhaled with a breath that asked, “So?” and he chuckled.

“Why, Pete? You inviting me to your room?” I teased almost seductively, knowing I was great at riding the line of impropriety with my coworker.

“No,” he said almost too quickly. “I was being a gentleman and offering to walk you to yours.”

“So be it,” I said, smiling as I stood from the table; then the sudden thrust of the engine knocked me to the side. I slammed my foot on the ground to balance myself and then brushed my breasts off as though some imaginary substance had fallen on them during the wave.

I watched his eyes trail my shirt with delight and I couldn’t help but smirk. “Well,” I breathed, reaching for his hand. “I’ll remember this!”

“Remember what?” he asked in a panic.

“I gave you your shot, Petey, and you turned me down.”

With that I spun on my boot and started walking toward the crew’s quarters, listening with satisfaction as he chased after me.

He walked me to my room and I sat in my chair, buckled in, and prepared for landing. I had told Peter that I wasn’t nervous as he left my door, but as I heard the screeching of the ship vibrate the walls around me, I couldn’t help but feel a rush of panic seeping through my blood.

We landed on the strange planet with a dull thud. The ship, already damaged, crashed and crunched against the foreign surface of the red planet, aptly referred to as Red Wall 7. The planet’s technical name? Ceylara.

The red planet was our research destination. A government space program had sent only its top scientists on a secret mission, though the details of our work were still being kept under wraps. It was just that secret, apparently. All we knew was there were life forms here worth exploring.

I was eager to leave the confining walls of our immense ship and not at all worried about our crew’s ability to put the steel craft back together. Nor was I concerned that we were far off course of the area we were supposed to be setting up in.

Athena said we should use this as an opportunity to explore more of the planet. She suggested we gather a few materials from our surrounding areas, bag them, and then head back to our ship when it was fixed. And since I was heading the science department, I approved her request.

We didn't want to waste more resources than necessary, so decided only to trek out for the day. While I was always ready to appease sister's need for taking risks, I couldn't help but feel uneasy at the venture. Our higher-ups saw fit to assign us to a certain area of the planet for a reason, I kept reminding myself. Whatever was over there was what we should be focusing on.

Despite my eagerness to explore, I was one of the last ones to leave the ship.

“Look at this!” my sister exclaimed vigorously as she ran out of the Vulcana starship.

I followed hesitantly, watching the armed guards darting their vision across the strange atmosphere with trepidation. Peter wasn’t approaching things much different from me. I watched as he looked over at me and gave a concerning nod, his eyes warning me not to wander off too far.

I saddled up beside my sister and took in the breathtaking views.

The red planet was full of oddly shaped crescent hills and rocky surfaces: all flooded by tiny, tube-shaped red plants that flooded from the ground like tentacles. They writhed and moved like living organisms that made me feel unsteady.

Athena walked up next to me, surefooted as she waved Peter off from us. While I found him sweet and charming, she found him boring and a worrywart. Which, she also said, was just perfect for me. Clearly, she didn’t think much of my taste in men.

We walked through the field of red and were careful not to disturb the life we saw nearby. I could hear our crew scuttling around the land: our navy blue jumpers flooding the grounds of Ceylara.

I grabbed some of our items for bagging and handed them to Athena. She took them from me, bored. My sister was not a scientist. She was security. But, since she was my sister and I was heading this operation, she had to listen to me and do as I asked. For once.

She took the tools from me and stared down at them with trepidation.

“You do remember what we’re doing here, right, sis?” I asked with a laugh.

“Yeah, year,” she rolled her eyes. “Thinly populated solar system. The planet is a quarter of the size of the Earth. And we’re looking for life forms to study. You know…” she brushed the tip of her boot against the red tube worms that twisted and contorted to the shape of her foot before bristling against her touch, then burrowing back underground with such haste we both backed up in surprise.

“And?” I asked in a lecturing tone, a sigh escaping my lips in frustration.

“Uh,” she stammered, counting on her fingers trying to recite her research as quickly as possible. “A day here lasts 43 hours. A year is 100 days. It has two continents separated by a line of lava.”

“It’s not lava,” I corrected while kneeling down to touch the red, slithering organisms that seemed to leap from the rocky ground.

“Hot liquid, then. Tea! Happy?”

“My joy cannot be restrained,” I said with a breath.

She shrugged. “Look, I’m just not sold on the place, okay?”

“Uh huh,” I said dismissively.

“Do you see any life forms here, besides these things?” Athena asked, once again looking below us. “Honestly, what are you going to bag here besides these?”

I looked up at her sternly and could feel my lashes hitting the base of my eye. I set my jaw with frustration. I loved my sister, but we were very different. I was quiet, and calculated when I was on missions. And she rushed into danger without a second thought. It made me nervous, especially since the one who was supposed to be protecting me and my crew could run off chasing a dust bunny at a moment’s notice.

“Just,” I spat, pulling one of the tube worms from its socket and tossing it into one of the bags before hooking the enclosure to my work belt, “take me to that cave there; we’ll grab a second sample and then we’ll go back to the ship, okay?”

“Dandy,” she said, reaching for her rifle and taking careless steps forward.

We made our way to an outcropping of molten rock. I turned around to see the ship now a good 50 feet away from us. The red tubes seemed to creep away from our footsteps, likely alerted by the vibrations our feet were making. They were protecting themselves, which excited me.

If they were instinctual enough to know they needed to protect themselves, it meant they were something’s source of food. And that something might be what we were sent to study.

I walked around the cave’s opening and peeked inside. It was too dark to see how deep it went, but I could feel heat radiating from within. I went to grab my flashlight but grew startled when my sister pushed me low to the ground. She breathed out in fear and dropped low next to me, pulling the sight of the rifle close to her eye and backing up slowly, drawing us further behind the cave.

“What is it?” I demanded in a fearful whisper.

“That,” she said, nodding her head forward.

I raised my head, quiet as a mouse, and saw a large creature about the size of a rhinoceros approach in the distance.

“Shh,” my sister cautioned, keeping her weapon steadied on the beast.

The creature was a large arthropod. It was a deep maroon color and had a visible exoskeleton covering the mass of its segmented body. It had long, skinny tusks that it drove into the ground with enormous force and dug up some of the red, shivering plants before stomping them and pulling their remains to its mouth using its long, spider-like appendages.

My sister looked at me with annoyance as she saw the smile that was spreading across my face.

“You take a real joy in this, don’t you?” she scoffed in a whisper.

“Don’t you see?” I asked. “That’s it. That’s what we came here to study! We need to get close to it.”

“Wait,” she said, extending an arm in front of me.

Before I had the chance to protest, we both watched in horror as three winged creatures dove down, their wings soaring with the wind billowing beneath them, and descending violently on the creature.

And they looked like… humans.

Or… like dragons.