My breath came in quick, short bursts, shooting in and puffing out like a woman in labor. The pain in my chest was sharp and stabbing, but I was able to ignore it long enough to realize a cramp was starting to throb in my side. Reeds and stiff leaves whipped my bare legs as I streaked by them unknowingly, and I was forced to duck to avoid being clotheslined by a low-hanging branch. The only sounds I could hear were the thrums of blood pounding in my ears and the rapid thwacking of my shoes against the mud.

I was running for my life.

Slender tree trunks blurred past me in asymmetrical patterns, and I narrowly missed crashing into a few. The sky overhead, rich and dark in its blueness, poked through the awning of foliage above but provided little illumination on my path. Everything smelled of soil, permeating my nose with earthen density and bathing me in the crude odor until I was certain even the most sensitive of snouts wouldn’t be able to detect me. Humidity lingered in the cool air and mingled with my sweat to glue my clothes to my skin.

Finally, I stopped, resting my hands on my knees and panting. Every inch of my body ached. My legs wobbled unsteadily beneath me, and the searing in my sternum pierced my lungs. It had been a long, long time since I ran like that.

The ground was almost exclusively mud, but I was so tired I didn’t care and dropped onto my rear. It reminded me of home, anyway. Growing up in backwoods Louisiana meant I’d spent a lot of my childhood wearing a thin layer of dirt, and the swampy kingdom of Pentaba was a lot like my youthful stomping grounds. Some of the other colonists complained about the heat and the constant moisture in the air, but I found it comforting.

“God, Lena, you sounded like a herd of wild horses!”

I gasped so violently that I actually choked on a gob of saliva and began sputtering for breath. A pair of legs dropped from the heavens above, followed immediately by a slender torso and a shapely head. Relief gushed through me in spurts as I realized I was looking at the grinning, mischievous face of my roommate, friend, and confidante.

“Oh my God, you scared the crap out of me, Isabelle!” I groaned, palming my chest and feeling my heart beat a tattoo between my fingers. In a wheeze, I added, “What are you doing out here?”

She flipped her silky black ponytail over her shoulder. “I was stargazing in the tree until you came thundering along. What were you running from so fast?”

I sighed as my pulse began to return to normal and glanced down. I’d left a muddy handprint on the breast of my t-shirt. “Myself,” I replied dryly.

“Doesn’t look like you did a very good job,” she joked.

I glanced at her with a strained smile before heaving myself to my feet. My legs were still shaky from the intense pace at which I’d been sprinting, but they supported me enough to stand. “Yeah, well, I tried.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” she asked, her brows knitting with concern.

“Nothing,” I replied automatically. She quirked a well-manicured brow at me, and I sighed again, this time fully and deeply. “I guess I’m just a little lost.”

“I’m not surprised. Tearing around like that without watching where you’re going, you were bound to get lost.”

Isabelle’s humor was normally one of the things that drew me to her. We’d been assigned to share a shanty when we arrived in Pentaba nearly three months ago, and she’d broken the ice with a sarcastic comment about how people who claimed wealth was a state of mind had clearly never lived in a swamp. Two weeks and a hundred conversations later, we’d somehow become friends, and we’d stayed friends ever since. Tonight, however, her wit was lost on me.

“That’s not what I mean,” I said seriously. “I keep wondering how I got to this point in my life, and where I’m supposed to go next. And I feel like a complete fraud. I’m a life coach with no grip on life. Kind of hypocritical, you know?”

Her expression sobered, and she looked at me sternly. “That’s not hypocritical. That’s human. Nobody knows everything all the time.”

“I know. I just—”

My words were cut off by a massive, ground-shaking boom that made the mud around my shoes tremble with its reverberation. Isabelle and I stared at each other, frozen, ears pricked and eyes wide for any sign of danger. As the last undertones of the boom died, a new sound filled the air: hair-raising, ear-piercing screeches. They cut through the night like knives and sent a disturbed shiver up my spine to my scalp, which tingled with alertness.

“The Novai,” Isabelle mouthed.

I nodded.

Another boom shook the ground, this one more powerful than the first. My shoes squelched in the thick, grasping mud as I braced myself, uncertain of what was to come. More barbaric voices joined the first until the air was ripe with unbridled yawps. Beneath them rose a smattering of explosive pops and detonations, and my fight-or-flight response kicked in.

“Run!” I bellowed over the noise.

My feet began pounding against the marshy floor once more, and I heard Isabelle thudding close behind me. I wasn’t sure where I was because I’d been aimlessly sprinting, but I ran where the brush was thinnest, assuming it to be the more-traveled path.

Isabelle’s hand closed over my arm on my backswing, and I nearly fell as I was jolted off-balance. “This way!” she cried, yanking me to the right. I stumbled and tried to claw at her hand to get her attention, to tell her the sounds were coming from that direction, but she continued on as if my scratches were nothing more than whispers of breeze.

“Go back! Go back!” I shouted desperately. I dug my heels into the mud, but they merely skidded through the muck and shot geysers of damp filth up my legs. Isabelle plowed forward relentlessly.

Then, without warning, one of the nightmarish, ghostly Novai leaped from the shadows and tackled me to the ground.