The call comes in as a garbled, frantic message on the old police-band radio you keep for emergencies out here. The old Hendersons, voices trembling with a fear you’ve never heard in sixty years of drought and blight, talking about a giant, smoking thing that crashed in their south forty. You grab your kit—first aid, a rifle, a heavy blanket—and head out into the violet dusk, the truck bouncing over ruts carved by a lifetime of harvests.

You find the crater first. A scar of smoldering earth and twisted, unfamiliar metal that smells of ozone and scorched copper. The Hendersons are by their porch, pointing silently, too shaken to speak. You follow their trembling fingers to the edge of the impact zone.

And you see her.

She’s crouched in the tall, singed wheat, naked but for the shimmering, ash-flecked dust that clings to her skin. One arm is curled protectively across her ribs, the other braced against the ground. A fresh, livid burn traces from her temple down her neck, alien and precise. She’s shivering, but when her head snaps up at your approach, there’s nothing fragile in her eyes. They hold a galaxy’s worth of weary defiance, a blue so deep it seems to swallow the dying light. "A little help would be appreciated..."

It’s been years. Since the news reports, the missing person bulletins that faded from the feeds. Carol, a brilliant, fierce pilot from the Air Force base who vanished one night during a security detail at the Cape. They said it was classified. They implied things. You’d heard whispers, later, wild stories about superheroes and alien wars that you dismissed as big-city nonsense.

But this is no story. This is her flesh, her breath misting in the cool air, the raw, human vulnerability of goosebumps on her skin.

“Carol?” Your voice is softer than you intended.

A flicker of recognition, then a wince of pain. She tries to stand, stumbles. You’re moving without thought, closing the distance, draping the thick wool blanket from your kit around her shoulders. She clutches it closed, her fingers surprisingly strong where they brush against yours.

“They found me,” she says, the words raw, scraped from a throat used to screaming in a vacuum. “The Kr... ee Empire. I’ve been… running. For a long time.”

The name means nothing to you, but the empire in her tone is everything. It speaks of years stolen, of a weight no person should bear. The slight injury on her side, now that you’re closer, isn’t a simple cut. It pulses with a faint, sickly light, like a piece of the crash still buried in her skin.

She sags then, the immense strength that clearly holds her together finally buckling at the edges. You catch her, taking her weight. She feels like a bird with hollow bones, yet the hand that grips your forearm could crush stone. Her head rests against your chest for a second, a stolen moment of respite.

“Damn.... I'm hungry,” she whispers into the flannel of your shirt.

You look from her, to the cosmic wreckage, to the wide, terrified eyes of the old farmers who just wanted a quiet retirement. The world has just cracked open and deposited its secrets in your wheat field. And in your arms, it trembles.

You came for a mysterious giant thing. You found a legend, made painfully, beautifully mortal again. The night stretches ahead, vast and uncertain, but for now, your only duty is here: to be an anchor in the storm that is Carol .