The outskirts of Fange City stretched before me—a wasteland of twisted metal. Wreckage from crashed ships jutted from the ground at impossible angles, their hulls stripped of anything valuable, skeletal frames creating a jagged horizon against a sky the color of old bruises. The ground beneath my feet was hard-packed dirt mixed with debris, sharp edges of metal and plastic that crunched with every step.
The guards stopped at what seemed like an arbitrary point—just another stretch of wasteland identical to every other. One shoved a bottle of water into my hands. Another tossed a small pack at my feet.
"This is as far as we go," the Romvesian said. "Fange City is that way." He pointed toward a cluster of structures barely visible through the haze. "Good luck, spy."
They were back on the ship before I could respond, before I could ask what I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to survive. The ship's engines roared to life, kicking up clouds of toxic dust that made me cough and stumble backward. I watched it rise into the ochre sky, where it disappear into the upper atmosphere. And then I was alone.
Completely, utterly alone.
I stood there for what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, trying to process the reality of my situation. The bottle of water in my hands felt pathetically inadequate. The pack at my feet contained—I checked—a thin blanket, a protein bar that looked expired, and nothing else. No weapon. No comm device. No way to contact the Alliance operative who was supposedly in place to extract me once the job was done.
Just me, standing in a wasteland on a prison planet, with nothing but the clothes on my back and the desperate hope that I could somehow kill the man who'd destroyed my life.
I turned in a slow circle, taking in the full scope of my situation. The wasteland stretched in every direction, kilometers of broken ships and toxic soil under a sky that looked diseased. Yellow-gray clouds roiled overhead, backlit by a sun I couldn't see, casting everything in sickly orange. The air tasted wrong—metallic and bitter, coating my tongue with each breath.
No one was coming.
The thought settled into my bones. The Alliance operatives the Prime had mentioned—if they even existed—weren't here. Weren't watching. Weren't going to swoop in and save me if things went wrong. I was bait, and bait was expendable.
I looked down at the water bottle in my hands. One liter, maybe less. The label was in a language I didn't recognize, the plastic already warm from Palaydium's heat. How long would one bottle last in this climate? A day? Two, if I rationed carefully? And then what?
The protein bar in the pack looked like it had been expired for months, its wrapper faded and cracked. The blanket was thin enough to see through in places, more symbolic than functional.
My breath caught, hitching in my chest. The panic I'd been holding at bay since the ship landed started creeping in at the edges, cold fingers wrapping around my lungs.
If I died out here—collapsed from dehydration or torn apart by whatever predators hunted in this wasteland—no one would know. Ana and Sebastian would never learn what happened to me.
I'd just be gone.
Another body. Another piece of debris among the wreckage.
The wind picked up, carrying with it the smell of chemicals and rot, and I realized I was shaking. Not from cold—the climate-adjusting fabric was doing its job—but from the bone-deep understanding that I was completely, utterly alone on a planet that wanted me dead, with a mission that would probably kill me even if I survived long enough to attempt it.
This was what redemption costs, I thought, and the bitterness of it was sharper than the taste of Palaydium's poisoned air.
The sound of engines made me spin around, my heart racing. Not the Alliance ship—something smaller, cruder, cobbled together from parts like a mechanical Frankenstein. A transport vehicle that looked like it had been built from the corpses of different ships, held together with welds and prayers and sheer stubborn refusal to die.
It stopped about twenty feet away, and the doors opened.
Three males emerged, and every instinct I had screamed at me to run.
They were big—not as big as some aliens I'd seen on the station, but big enough—and they moved with casual violence that told me they were used to taking what they wanted. Two looked vaguely humanoid, despite their deep red skin. Their features twisted by genetic modifications or radiation or just thewrongness of this place. The third was something else entirely—scaled, with eyes that reflected light like an alligator.
"Well, well," one of them said, his voice rough and amused. "Fresh meat."
I took a step back, my fingers tightening on the water bottle like it could protect me. "I'm looking for Fange City."
"Lucky you," the scaled one said, showing teeth that were too sharp, too many. "We're headed that way. Persico likes to know when new arrivals show up. Especially pretty ones."
The way he said "pretty" made my skin crawl. Made me want to scrub myself clean, run, fight, do anything except stand there while they looked at me like I was something they could consume.
Persico. I knew from the Prime's intel that he was a crime boss who'd carved out territory in this hellscape and ruled it with brutality that made even the other warlords nervous.
A nasty sort, the Prime had said, her voice flat and clinical. As if "nasty" could encompass the kind of monster who thrived in a place like this.
But I had no choice. The wasteland stretched for miles in every direction, and I had one bottle of water and no idea how to survive out here. Fange City was my only option.
"Fine," I said, keeping my voice level. "Take me to Persico."
