I’d rather die than find out.

Charles twisted to look over her shoulder, hoping to see something to defend herself with, but there were no guns within reach, just empty boxes and emergency oxygen units that had been scattered across the ground when the shelf hit her.

“I dealt with the others quickly,” Ellan continued, gliding towards Charles. The black tendrils sprouted out of every gap in her suit, writhing around the woman’s legs and carrying her across the room. “But now it’s just you and me, my pretty. And we’re going to have a little fun before I welcome you as my sister.”

Charles lunged for the external door, grabbing an empty box in her left hand and an oxygen unit in the right. The emergency oxygen units were palm-sized and designed to fit inside a mouth. They were meant for evacuations, where the user needed only a couple minutes of oxygen to get to a safe location. Charles pushed the unit into her mouth and bit down on the plastic wings to break the seal, and clean air filled her throat as she reached for the door.

Ellan was fast. The beast’s tendrils shot towards her, and Charles threw the empty box at them, praying that the surprise would buy her the precious seconds she needed to get outside.

If anything, it only enraged Ellan further. She growled—a deep, inhuman rumble—as she knocked the box aside and sent a cluster of tendrils at Charles.

She ducked as the black mass smashed into the door in front of her. The whine of twisting metal blended with Ellan’s roar as the thick metal door burst out of its bracket and ejected onto the sand-like surface of the moon.

Okay, I’ll take it. Charles bent double and barrelled through the opening. The tendrils grazed her back as she slipped under them, then she was free, dashing through the drifts of diamonds. The ship waited for her just two dozen paces away, its black highlights contrasting beautifully against the sparkling ground.

A cold, black tendril wrapped around her ankle. Charles tried to hop out of it, but it tightened and tugged, sending her collapsing into the hard ground. The creature wrenched her backwards and whipped through the air. Her back hit the station’s door with a thud that winded her so thoroughly that she thought she might never breathe again.

Ellan’s face appeared in front of her. The woman’s sweet, innocent visage had been twisted with malice and fury. The whites of her eyes had turned black, and her skin seemed to be cracking, showing tiny hints of the darkness that lived inside.

“Not so fast, my pretty.” Her voice was barely human anymore. It was mixed with a grating, guttural growl that made her almost unintelligible.

Charles blinked her watering eyes, struggling to draw breath through the emergency oxygen unit in her mouth. She thought she must have cracked it when she’d been grabbed; the air wasn’t flowing as freely as it should have. She could see something brightly coloured out of the corner of her eye and twisted to look at it.