Layla hugged her knees and curled up into a ball. Sitting on the floor of the escape pod, she bit her hand, trying not to sob. A tangle of emotions swirled inside her chest—sadness, despair, relief.

For the past few days, she’d been preparing herself for the inevitability of death, for the bone-chilling reality that nobody was coming.

But then, against all odds, someone had found her.

She’d been singing an old Earth song about love, despair, and madness when the man’s sharp command—in some strange alien language—filtered through the speakers.

Oh, crap. That was her first thought, because her singing voice was fucking terrible.

Her second thought was that she must be hallucinating.

It had been so long since she’d heard another voice, and time flowed like thick, sticky syrup in this confined space.

Slow as fuck.

Layla had nothing to look at but the four walls surrounding her and the cold, glittering canopy of space, visible through a single port-hole. The pod’s exterior cameras weren’t working for some reason—the blank holoview told her that much. All she could see was a narrow sliver of the Universe, slightly distorted through the thick synth-glass of the window.

At the very edge of her view, she could just make out the damaged shell of her passenger transport, the Starship Malachi.

The reason she could still see the goddamned ship was that her escape pod had failed to eject properly. Shivering and barefoot, the cell-preserving bioliquid drying rapidly from her clothes, Layla had run through the disintegrating ship, searching for survivors.

There were none.

Struggling with the realization that everyone was dead, she’d turned back, battling through smoke and debris and low-oxygen cabin air until she reached the safety of the emergency hatch.

Why had she been the only one to wake up when the Malachi’s seven other passengers were still plugged into their cryosleep slings? Why had she been spared when dozens of tiny pellets of space debris smashed into the Malachi’s hull at impossible speed? Why had she been right at the very back in Pod 8, the most protected part of the ship?

Layla was no space-engineer, but on some basic level, she understood what had happened.

Extreme velocity micrometeorites, the ship’s AI had warned. Apparently, any object that moved fast enough—no matter how small—could turn into a deadly projectile, and according to the analysis, there were thousands of them.

But there was no time to understand exactly what had happened, because the doors had slammed shut.

An alarm had sounded.

The eject mechanism had engaged…

And failed.

And now she was stuck in a malfunctioning emergency escape pod at the rear of a smashed-up ship.

But at least the oxygen had kicked in, the emergency transmitter worked, and there were enough rations to last eight people for twelve months.

In theory, she could survive for eight fucking years in this metal box, provided the power and oxygen held out for that long.

Eight years of complete and utter… nothingness, hoping for rescue, waiting to die, staving off madness. And what if nobody came? Layla shuddered as she stared out at the vast, terrifying Universe.

Against the seductive backdrop of stars, bits of debris—cables, insulation, metal scraps—hung out of the ship like the guts of a disemboweled beast, floating eerily in the cold vacuum of space, illuminated by the pale light of distant stars. Occasionally, a piece of scrap metal or plastic would break free of the mass and fly off into the distance, growing smaller and smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

This was the same view she’d stared at for so long now… had it been days or weeks? Time had melded into one big long stream of sleeping, eating horrible space rations, and sending out futile pleas through the emergency distress channel—interspersed with her terrible singing, of course, because she’d long ago given up on anyone actually hearing her.

Until he spoke.

What a shock that was. How completely alien he sounded, how devoid of anything resembling human emotion.

Quiet, deliberate, cold, his words shaped by that flawless Universal accent.

Somehow, she got the feeling he wasn’t any ordinary space traveler.

Layla closed her eyes and tried to paint a picture of him in her head, using the memory of his voice as a guide. Dozens of images of different alien species filtered through her mind, but she couldn’t match any of them with that voice. She couldn’t really explain why, but she imagined him as a lithe, graceful being, and there was something distinctly military about his demeanor.

What exactly… was he? Layla was hesitant to ask him too many questions, because she didn’t want to piss him off or drive him away. All she could tell was that he was definitely male, definitely not human, and definitely a bit of a guarded asshole. He hadn’t revealed anything, let alone his name.

And he hadn’t asked her many questions, either.

Wait there and keep your signal open.

That was it.

Huh. He sounded supremely confident and perfectly in control, as if rescuing her from a damaged transport when he didn’t know her location was the easiest task in the Universe.

Well, all she could do now was wait. She was desperate, and beggars couldn’t be choosers, could they? Layla could only pray that her would-be rescuer would turn out to be halfway decent.

We are coming.

She just had to hope.