Dozens of cables snaked through the external door’s access box, which Jay had never had the chance to close.

Feel free to heckle me into electrocuting myself…

It was a wild hope. She had no idea if Jay had been exaggerating about the electrocution, but it was her only chance. Charles stretched her arm out and grabbed a fistful of the cables, tugged them free of their sockets, and shoved their ends into Ellan’s face.

Thank goodness for non-conductive suits, Charles found herself thinking, her mind numbed with shock as Ellan bucked, writhed, and began splitting apart.

The human skin broke into odd sections, fraying at the edges, peeling away as the monster inside tried to free itself. The wail was deafening, and the smell that crept around the edges of the breathing unit made Charles gag. The black tendrils pinning her bubbled, their moist surface blistering and popping, and then the creature dropped Charles.

She hit the ground hard and skittered backwards, breathing as deeply as her aching ribs and damaged oxygen unit would let her. Ellan lay still on the sparkling diamonds, deformed so much that almost nothing human remained. Little puffs of dark steam rose from where the black flesh had burst.

She looked ridiculous. Ridiculous and repulsive and terrifying. An involuntary moan rose in Charles’s throat, but she smothered it. If she was reading the light hiss correctly, her oxygen unit was leaking air, and she didn’t have any breath to spare. There would be time enough to have a hysterical fit once she was inside a controlled environment.

Charles jogged towards the waiting spaceship, her boots sticking in the thick ground. Her oxygen unit ran out of air halfway there, so Charles held her breath. She was dizzy by the time she reached the door and pressed the button to open the airlock.

As she stood inside the tiny room, punching buttons to pressurise and filter the toxic air out, it was impossible not to remember how she’d stood there with her team members barely an hour before. Central had been desperately short on choices when it had cobbled them together, but Charles thought it had done a remarkable job, regardless. She wished she could have served with her partners for longer. She wished they’d met a kinder end.

A quiet beep announced that the airlock had pressurized. Charles spat out the empty oxygen unit and began gulping down the clean air before pressing another button to open the door leading to the main part of the ship.

The shuttle looked different now that it was empty, as though it were a room she remembered from a previous life, where she no longer belonged.

Robin had been their pilot, but Charles had also gone through the mandatory training for shuttle piloting. I might not be as graceful in the takeoff, she thought as she buckled herself into the pilot’s seat and powered the ship on, but I can do well enough to get off the hellish planet and back to Central.