She gasped at the sight and shut her eyes briefly before redoubling her efforts to focus her vision.

Yellowed grass. And trees! Dirt. They were basic words Romy had learned from her nanopad, but never believed she would use.

She groaned as her head throbbed viciously.

The destroyed Critamal battle craft, the failed thrusters, the lost altitude. Their battler had been hurtling towards the ground. She didn’t dare believe they’d survived.

But there was no other explanation. Romy’s mouth dried. Knot 27 was on Earth.

Her knot!

“Hello?” she called, wincing at a flash of pain through her skull. “Dei? Pho?” They’d been closest to her on the battler.

There was no reply. Why weren’t any of them speaking?

Romy gasped—they were injured. Maybe dead. Rational thought flew from her mind as terror took its place. Her knot. She had to get to them! Romy thrashed against her constraints.

She couldn’t be alone! They couldn’t be dead. She screamed, throwing herself around in an effort to escape, despite the pain warning her to stop.

Finally, panting from exhaustion, she admitted defeat.

Romy twisted as far as possible in her seat, squinting through the small blood-free patch of helmet as hope and dread warred for top spot. She froze, stomach lurching at what lay behind her.

It turned out there was a good reason why the others weren’t responding. If Romy had to guess, she’d say it was because most of the ship seemed to have disappeared. The next few moments rendered her incapable of thought, but eventually she decided on relief. Her knot had landed somewhere else. They weren’t dead.

They weren’t dead.

Romy’s side of the battler must have torn away during landing. Only a few shredding battler walls remained. It was as though her side of the ship had been ripped off like a chunk of bread from a loaf.

The floor underneath her was gone, leaving her legs dangling. Romy herself was suspended by the harness, which dug into her torso. It was the only thing keeping her from falling three metres to the dry grass.

The bottom part of her battler segment had embedded itself into the ground on an angle. Romy’s end of the segment was immobilised in the air, forty-five degrees to the surface.  She looked to have landed at the edge of a grassy clearing. Or maybe a forest, she amended, judging by the multitudes of trees before her.

Behind her, the ripped walls were flayed wide open, smoking, sparking, and hissing.

She took in the vast splash of colours before her with unseeing eyes. She was on Earth. Hanging above real ground.