When I open my eyes I know at once that I’m no longer alone. Something is out there, beyond the firelight.

It’s them.

I can’t see them, but I sense them, clearer than ever before. The hairs bristle on my arms. They’ve surrounded me.

‘What do you want?’ I whisper.

The wind howls; whips out a tongue to lick the moisture from my eyeballs, cat-slinks around me. But that’s just the wind. They haven’t moved.

‘What do you want?’ I ask it again.

Useless to talk. They would not listen to anything I have to say. I’m not even sure they speak. Words are a skin to keep fear within the body, and they have no bodies, have no fear.

Whether they understand me or not, there is a shift, a change in the air as if they are pressing closer, and my heart starts to beat madly. They seize my attention, stretch it far beyond my normal capacity, stretch it out to the east where something waits, hot and sharp and urgent.

My mind rebels, catapulting me back into myself, into a confusion of images: cold metal piercing skin, pain on the wings of black birds, a figure gloved in blood…

I open my eyes. I’m lying in the dirt, the hat fallen from my head. Beyond the fire there’s nothing, just the night. Have they gone? Impossible to tell. They’re never truly gone, just as they are never truly here.

But they have left a feeling behind them: the conviction that past the plateau to the east, something waits.

I look up to see the ship fall flaming to the earth.

* * *

It takes me the rest of the night to reach the crash site. The glow lights the horizon pink as raw flesh. I travel as fast as I can, but the mule is sluggish, jostled by the wind, sand-scoured and grit-loaded. By the time I smell the smoke, night is losing its fullness and the wind is weakening, dragged to another hemisphere by the darkness.

I’ve seen wrecks in my time, in their many stages of tragedy, but never one like this. The destruction is total, every inch of metal a flame, every flame so hot it has scorched the sand to glass. There’s no telling what the ship once was, no telling how many souls it carried to this bright and violent end. I scrape at the dirt with my boot. Can’t linger here. A wreck like this will attract scavengers like the Seekers within hours.

What’s a ship doing out here, in any case? There are no ports, only the scattered townships of the Barrens. A navigational error? I squint up into the lightening sky. From how far has the ship fallen?