Then nothing.
The darkness pulled her back under, and Elsa went willingly this time. Fighting seemed pointless. Staying conscious meant facing whatever new nightmare awaited her.
Better to sink. Better to disappear into the void where there were no monsters, no alien stars, no frozen wastelands.
Better to forget, even for a moment, that she was utterly and completely alone.
The next timeconsciousness found her, it came with sound.
A low hum, steady and mechanical, vibrated through whatever surface she lay on. Voices—real voices this time, though still wrong, stillother—murmured somewhere beyond the darkness behind her eyelids.
Elsa didn’t open her eyes. Not yet.
She listened instead. Catalogued.
Two voices. Maybe three. The words were indistinct, but the tones registered—command and deference. A question asked. An answer given.
Footsteps. Heavy. Clawed.
Then silence.
The hum continued. Beneath it, she could hear her own heartbeat, too fast, too loud in her ears.
I’m alive.
The thought should have brought relief. Instead, it brought only a cold kind of clarity.
I’m alive, and I’m their prisoner.
Her fingers twitched against smooth, warm fabric. Not the frozen ground. Not the creature’s fur. Something else. Something that felt designed. Intentional.
A bed?
The absurdity of it almost made her laugh. She’d expected chains. Cages. The kind of brutality that matched the violence of being snatched from a crash site by monsters in a snowstorm.
Not bedding.
She filed the observation away. Added it to the small collection of data points her cartographer’s brain insisted ongathering despite the terror.They have technology. Language. Organization. Beds.
They’re not mindless.
Whether that made them more dangerous or less, she couldn’t yet decide.
Elsa drew a slow breath. Opened her eyes.
Light. Soft, blue-tinged light that pulsed gently from runes or circuitry embedded in curved walls. The surface above her was smooth, translucent—a dome of some kind, encasing her in a space barely larger than a coffin.
Her heart stuttered.
A coffin. They put me in a coffin.
Panic clawed at her throat, but she swallowed it down. Shoved it into the same dark corner where she’d learned to put all the things she couldn’t afford to feel. Not now. Not when every second counted.
Her fingers pressed against the dome’s interior. Cool. Solid. Real.
Not a coffin. Something else. Something designed to hold.
To heal?