The darkness is a good sign.

Nestled in the deepest shadow in the blackest hour on a dead-end street of a shattered city, I shrug and roll my shoulder to stretch a nagging ball of tension in my neck. Just as I breathe a little easier, a slim glimmer of moonlight wavers from behind the broken buildings. I coil up again.

Nothing moves. Not even the wind. Nothing rustles over the cracked road or through the crispy tips of burnt trees. Nothing disturbs the ashy scorch marks of a long-dead population that gaped at the apocalypse as it struck them from the sky. This night, like many, is as quietly comforting as a tomb. I raise my gaze again. Beyond my puffs of breath, I catch the stars blinking luminescent code. They inform me we're all clear. There's no sign of lurking Invaders.

Yet.

I shift my weight onto another foot, flinching as the crunch of debris under my boot resonates off the dilapidated building at my six. I peer at it over my shoulder. The United Region of Earth's Scavengers have been in there for hours. If they don't come out in the next thirty minutes, I'll be forced to climb the stairs and wrangle the idiots myself.

I'm not in the mood. My private conversations with the stars happen on such rare occasion, I'm loath to relinquish our time. I only have a few hours of freedom left before I'm sucked back into the desolate, steel-lined asshole of hell. 

No. I'd much rather be up here where every minute holds the wind-whispered promise of an agonizing death.

I wish this night could last forever.

No. Focus. 

The Scavs must be protected. It's my only mission.

Ten minutes pass. I glare at the structure's skeletal facade. Tonight's menu is a small tower—one that smiles with teeth made of jagged fragments from its formerly reflective surface. I frown at it in return.

Five minutes left. My black-and-gray Reaper uniform chafes my skin. I wiggle in place to alleviate the pinch against my thighs when I sense what I'd been dreading all night.

The wind picks up.

I lower my gray half-mask and take a deep breath, tasting the air. It's not like the natural winds I've experienced in the past—ones that supposedly come from clouds and lakes and mountains. This one stinks of metal.

I shift my rifle higher.

The little device attached to my palm vibrates furiously. I open my hand and check my Personal Analytics for Human Life Mechanism. The blue hologram activates, stretching to my fingertips and trickling down to my elbow like a glove. Bold white words appear over the pixelated surface, curving over the contours of my hand and wrist.

[Incoming Message: SCOPE TOP]

INVADERS INBOUND

IMMINENT CONTACT NORTHEAST

INCREASE POSTURE

EXFIL--OUTPOST BRAVO

I don't even think about the next steps—it's muscle memory from here on out. I pivot and bolt toward the building that holds my team.

As I approach the massive stairway, the squeal of rusted hinges punctuates the heavy thuds as Scavs and Reapers run toward me. They congregate in the courtyard, poised to escape. I proceed to headcount before ushering them along and flinch when I realize with pure dread—one's missing.

A civilian Scavenger—one whose father paid a hefty sum of creds for his son to join the official troop on this month's outing. He's still putzing around while we need to high-tail the hell out of here before the Invaders obliterate us all.

"Negative. One civilian. Will spot," I say into the air.

A grainy voice assaults my earpiece. "SCOPE TOP to Captain Lorn, copy all."

"Take the rest to Outpost Bravo. We rendezvous there unless SCOPE says otherwise," I say to the Reaper at my side.

"Roger that, Captain." He faces the line of trembling Scavs and gathers them with one sweeping gesture. "We're oscar mike."

I shove my rifle over my shoulder and burst through the doors of the building. Invaders are here. Stealth is useless.

"Saguro?" I shout into the echoing halls. "Saguro, get the hell out here now." I pause at each doorway to check for the kid. I promised his dad he'd be fine. I told him these outings were uneventful.

The ground trembles. A low, sonorous quake from a vast rumbling pressure scrapes the surface of the Earth.

The earpiece buzzes to life again. "Captain Lorn, evacuate now. I repeat, evacuate now."

"I'm leaving you in ten seconds, Saguro. You'd better be out here, or I'm gone."

"Captain . . . Sit-Rep on Egress, copy?"

"Ten!" I scream into the debris. "Nine. Eight."

"Captain Lorn, abort. I say again, abort. Return to base."

"Seven. Six. Five. Four."

"Captain Lorn!" a familiar voice blares in my ear. My colonel's commands have never been pleasing sounds. It doesn't matter if he's eighty miles away or close enough to recognize his breakfast between his teeth. "Get your ass out of there now! Goddamn Reaper moron . . ."

"Three. Two. Saguro, you'd better be dead by the time I get to one."

The kid spins out of the hallway and stumbles on upturned tiles as the entire building convulses under us.

"Civilian secured, we're oscar mike." I drag Saguro by the collar as he hugs an enormous sack to his chest.

"Copy that," the voice bites out with frustration.

I pull my missing Scav through the streets. The ground's tremors break our pace. Saguro trips forward, his newly acquired possessions scattering over the pavement.

"Leave them." I hoist him by the arm.

"I can't." He scrambles toward the junk that fans out before him. I grab him by the shoulders to attempt to shake some goddamn sense into him.

"Do you see that?" I point at a rolling black cloud speeding toward us. The cloud thins, and the massive gray structure appears like the vengeful gods of old folklore. "If we don't leave here now, they will shoot their white lights at us, and we will die in flames. And if I let that happen, your dad will kill me. We're leaving now."

When I tug his arm one final time, he falls into me like all the bones in his body have evaporated.

Crouching low, we move through the rows of broken buildings. The meeting point is fewer than four blocks away. I check the Personal Analytics for Human Life Mechanism's blue screen wrapped around my arm again. The white lines of a map appear above my wrist. A dot blinks to life at the recognizable cross section of exactly where Saguro and I crouch. The skull and crossbones icon of the Invaders inches away from the dot. My PAHLM says the Invader ships are headed northeast. We're going to make it.

Until I feel an abrupt shift in the wind that smells like burning steel.

"SCOPE TOP to Captain Lorn. Enemy ship changing course. It's heading west. Move to OP Alpha. Confirm, over."

"Oh, Holy Heaping Hell, that fast?"

"SCOPE TOP to Captain Lorn, copy last?"

"I copy." I spin around to being our eastward journey and halt after flying through the calculations. "That will take us right under the projected course of the Invader ship. We're trying to avoid them, remember? Has SCOPE TOP lost its damn mind?" I scream as the wind accelerates, blustering around us.

"Stop asking so many fucking questions, and MOVE."

"Roger that."

Before Saguro has a chance to shrink into the piles of rubble around us, I clutch his wrist and pull him forward. As we sprint around the debris of the old world, we evade the scraps of structures shattering around us.

Then the lights drizzle down.

Hot lights. Lights burning whiter than naked xenon bulbs. They patter on the ground and mimic harmless rain bouncing with inconsequential sparks.

But I've seen what those seemingly innocuous lights can do to a human body. I've witnessed them far too many times to be fooled.

My weapon rests against my shoulder. It's ineffective against the white shots of the Invader beams.

I push Saguro toward a crumbling building that may have been a house—a sweet home with charred, maroon bricks and broken, black iron railings. I kick open the door dangling on broken hinges and find a stairway descending into deeper blackness. A primal instinct kicks in.

Go below.