As we got closer to the cave’s opening, the alarms blared louder and louder. But it wasn’t just the bleating of the sirens that split the sky. That chaotic rhythm was underpinned by the sounds of...

Engines.

“Not a fucking drill!” Min-Ji shouted, breaking into a run at the mouth of the cave. Marta followed suit, grey boots flying over the hard, cracked ground, kicking up cerulean dust. Heart in my throat, I sprinted behind them.

Paska. Shit.

As a kid and young teen in Finland, I’d skated my ass off on the ice rink. But I hadn’t been a hockey player for years, and my cardio wasn’t what it once had been. The result was that the distance between my two friends – long-legged Marta and phenomenally fit ex-boxer Min-Ji – and me grew wider and wider with every step we all took through the dusty valley between alien cave systems.

This area of the planet was essentially all caves and the space between them. There was one supremely large, wide valley, and the other valleys split off from it like tributaries of a river, with bulging blue caves lining them instead of shorelines. At the end of this extra-huge valley was the ship. I saw it gleaming ahead of Marta and Min-Ji and at the very same moment saw the reason for the alarms.

The air up above was hardening, just like it had over the last planet. The gold-choked alien sky of sunset became dense. Opaque. Solid. Matte and dark and not at all reflective.

It was only Min-Ji’s screaming that made me realize I’d slowed way down, distracted by the cosmic fucking horror of the sky turning into stone. Sweat drenched the back of my grey tank top and beaded between my breasts. My breath burned in my lungs as I stared upward, suddenly unable to take another step.

When the hard stone substance in the sky cracked, it felt like something inside me cracked, too. Like bone was broken. My body split from skull to spine. Min-Ji screamed again, and I was pretty sure she said my name, but I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t tear my eyes from the darkness of the chasm in the stone.

And the glittering behemoth that clawed its way out of it before diving straight down at the ground like a human might dive into deep water.

The force of that winged thing hitting the ground was catastrophic. A crater exploded between the others near the ship and me. The force threw me backwards to the ground, knocked every shivering breath from my body. Gasping, choking on the sudden, disorienting emptiness of my lungs, I fought to sit up, crawling backwards, further away from the cavernous hole ahead of me in the valley.

And further away from the ship.

I couldn’t see Min-Ji or Marta now. Couldn’t even see the ship. The planet-quaking power that had just pounded into the ground ahead set loose a torrent of rock. High caves and stone formations cracked and collapsed beyond the crater, creating a massive wall of blue and grey rubble that bisected the valley. Some of the falling stone poured into the crater, and I watched, wild with panic, hoping all the rockfall would subdue the alien thing at the bottom long enough for me to get to the ship before it left.

I should have known that was a stupid fucking hope. I should have known that I would not have been so lucky.

Because the thing emerged, dusty but unscathed, flinging boulders from its body as it climbed the way a human might shake off snowflakes.

It reached the top of the crater and stood to its full and dizzying height. It’s got to be at least two... two and a half metres tall... It was huge and terrible and all fucking wrong, some disturbed mash-up of dragon and man. A two-legged, two-armed, two-winged beast with emerald scales and a tangled tumble of black hair. I could tell right away that this was not the same creature who’d come from the sky on the other planet. I’d glimpsed that one too, and it had had entirely different colouring. Stony greyish hide, silver-white hair, and black wings dotted with glowing lights.

This one had similar lights, though. It took a second for me to register the glow beneath the dust. But now that the sun was setting, shadows deepening and stretching, the lights on its body grew brighter in the ruined valley. Shining gold veined between the scales and all over its wings, glimmering like little flames.

The little lights illuminated its thick neck, its reptilian snout, and what looked like the sunken, ruined place an eye should have been

But it still had one eye. An eye bright with fathomless alien rage.

An eye fixed solely, squarely, upon me.

CHAPTER TWO Skallagrim

Drag body through the darkness.

Darkness everywhere. Darkness hard wet cold hot, hot, crush kill claw ruin.

Bleed. Drag body again and again and again. Drag up. Up up up. Hand in hard sky. Crack.

Down. Down like falling. Headfirst sucked right down to ground, into ground. Hard hole deep deep deep.

Word. A word for that. Word for bone drag down to ground. Energy attraction mass. Brevity cavity calamity depravity.

Down. Hard on top below and all around. Drag body out.

Stand.

New world. Same hot cold foul and fighting darkness.

Same same same.

Except...

Not same. Not same.

Ahead. One single spot not-dark.

Darkness all around body. Inside body. Darkness as far as forever.

Until now. Until one little not-dark.

Another word for that. Shine sky eye blink bright night.

Not-dark not still. Wiggle worm crawl away.

Do not let it go.

Not-dark beneath body. Tendrils snap and lash.

Collides. Connects body to the not-dark.

And I can see again.

CHAPTER THREE

Skallagrim

Igasped, and it was like the very first time I ever took breath. I wrenched my head back, my eyes—no, my eye—wide and unblinking. My skull was going to split. I knew it. Could feel it. Feel the bone cracking, buckling, breaking under the pressure of the tsunami inside it. The ferocious wave, like a suddenly undammed river, filled me with sounds, tastes, thoughts, memories, memories. Memories when I had not had a memory in... in...

In I did not know how long.

I could not recognize it all, could not tell one memory from another. Could not place all the syllables joining and separating, words and not-words sparking into sound and then disappearing. It all crashed and took everything along with it, flooding through my head. A dauntless river, a wide and glittering river, a river that felt somehow familiar, like I’d swam in it, bathed in it, lived my entire life beside it...

My life. What life? What life?

What life had I lived once? Who had I been until now? There was someone before the darkness. There had to have been. Someone distant and discordant, someone whose name was nothing to me now but the sound of water crashing over rock, wind rustling through the tall reeds of somewhere, somewhere, somewhere...

Knees digging into dirt, I groaned and closed my eye, clutching the sides of my head as the river slammed and swirled. If I let go, the bowl of my brain would crack and then shatter. And I’d fought too cursedly long to be obliterated now by nothing but the force of an entire life forgotten inside my own head.