She twisted weakly, her stomach churning from the swaying motion and the smoke and the fear coiling tight in her gut. The creature’s grip tightened—not painfully, but firm. A warning.Stop moving.
The pack surged faster.
Another howl, sharp and commanding, cut through the storm. The creatures responded as one, their pace increasing until the trees blurred into dark streaks against white. Wind whipped against Elsa’s face, stealing the breath from her lungs, freezing the tears she hadn’t realized were tracking down her cheeks.
The distant wreck grew smaller. The crater that held the twisted remains of her escape vessel—her one link to theStardancer, to Earth, to everything she knew—shrank until it was just a dark smudge against the endless white.
Then it was gone.
Swallowed by the storm. By the forest. By the growing distance between her and any hope of rescue.
Not rescue.
The thought crystallized, sharp as ice. The way they’d emerged from the darkness. The way they’d scooped up survivors without hesitation, without communication, without any attempt to help the wounded or put out the fires. The efficiency of it. Thepractice.
This wasn’t a rescue.
This was a capture.
A kidnapping by monsters that shouldn’t exist—and yet here they were, tangible, undeniable, their fur brushing against her frozen skin, their growls rumbling through her chest.
Elsa squeezed her eyes shut.Wake up. This has to be a nightmare. Some VR simulation gone wrong. A head injury from the crash.
But the cold was too real. The pain too sharp. The fear too immediate.
When she opened her eyes again, one of the pack members had fallen back, running parallel to her captor. This one was smaller—if anything that massive could be called small—with fur that caught the moonlight in shades of gray and brown. It glanced at her with eyes that glowed amber, and something in its expression shifted.
Recognition? Curiosity?
It didn’t matter.
A bark from ahead, and the creature faced forward again, dismissing her as easily as one might dismiss an insect.
Cargo.That’s what she was to them. Nothing more than cargo.
The thought should have terrified her.It did terrify her.But beneath the fear, something else stirred—a cold, quiet anger that settled in her chest like a stone.
I’m not cargo.
She’d survived the crash. She’d survived whatever had happened on theStardancerbefore that—the chaos, the evacuation, the captain’s disastrous decision to push beyond the sol system against every warning she’d given him. She’d survived being locked out of the bridge, stripped of her position, forced to play civilian while idiots destroyed everything she’d charted.
She could survive this too.
If she just—
A flash of blue light erupted from somewhere to her left.
Elsa’s breath caught. One of the creatures had vanished. Not fallen behind. Not ducked into the trees. Simplygone. In itsplace, a shimmer of blue energy faded into the night air like dying embers.
What—
Another flash. Another creature disappeared.
Then another. And another.
The pack was vanishing one by one, winking out of existence with each pulse of blue light. The energy seemed to originate from their wrists—from dark bands she’d noticed but hadn’t processed, each one set with a glowing blue gem that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Technology. They have technology.