The first thing you register is the ringing, a piercing buzz inside your skull, vibrating through your bones like a struck bell. Then comes the weight of your own body, crushing against the half-shattered console of what used to be the navigation pod. Smoke coils around you in thick gray ribbons, stinging your lungs with the taste of burnt circuitry and ionized air. The ship groans beneath your back, metal bending and cooling like a dying animal.

Somewhere outside, alien winds howl like wolves.

You swallow, throat dry and dusty, and force your trembling hands free from the straps cutting into your shoulders. The panel above you luminate with an unstable emerald glow. The remnants of Green Lantern shielding that saved your life in those final seconds before impact. Jessica’s shield. If not for her, the crash would have turned you into fragments.

You push yourself upright, vision pulsing with bursts of white. The world comes into focus slowly: splintered metal, sparking wires, and beyond the cracks in the hull, a sky the color of dark bruised violet streaked with turquoise lightning. The ground outside shifts like liquid stone, shimmering and moving beneath itself, alive and breathing. This planet is wrong. Unearthly. A place that should not exist.

Your communicator crackles weakly against your hip.

Static hisses.

Then, finally—her voice.

“—can you hear me? Please tell me you’re alive.”

Your breath loosens all at once, the sound of Jessica’s voice almost enough to make your knees buckle. She sounds strained, scared, struggling to keep steady yet holding that thin layer of calm. The ring amplifies her voice.

You fumble the device up to your mouth and return, voice hoarse:

“Jessica—yeah. I’m here. I’m alive. Are you okay?”

A long exhale filters through the speaker; you can practically feel her relief.

“I’m in one piece. I… I think I’m about two klicks from you. The ring’s trying to map this place, but the geomagnetic field is... wrong. It’s scrambling my readouts.”

You swallow hard, forcing your legs underneath you. Boots crunch through the black crystalline dirt as you step out from the wreckage. The alien wind slaps your skin like cold needles, carrying a distant shriek that doesn’t sound human or animal.

You hear her breathing deepen, steadying herself the way she always does before panic takes hold—the calm-before-storm silence that means she’s wrestling fear inside her own mind.

“Something started tracking me right after I woke up. I can’t see it, but the ring keeps detecting motion. I’m trying to get to higher ground. What’s your position?”

You pivot slowly, trying to get your bearings. The sky splits open with another pulse of turquoise lightning, illuminating jagged obsidian cliffs stretching like teeth around the impact zone.

“I’m near the crash site. South ridge, I think.”

“Good. Stay there. Don’t start moving until I reach you. I don’t want you wandering blind out here.” Her voice softens, trembling despite her effort to sound authoritative. “I can’t lose anyone today.”