ROY

Prologue

Ava woke to a gentle voice whispering “danger impending.” Her eyes flew open to see her ROY system blinking the red warning across the heads up display. She felt a prick as her suit injected extra adrenaline in her system. Her night vision flickered on and she cast about, trying to determine what the ROY system had picked up on. Green trees made ever greener peered back, glowing dully.

She raised a shaking hand, pressing the button on her helmet just at her temple, an overabundance of adrenaline and instinct battling with opposing desires. She cautiously pressed the button again, thermal vision sweeping through the clearing. Dread crept through her as the saw the outlines of several creatures stalking towards her. Even with her thermal vision, she could only catch their silhouettes thrown into stark constrast by the warmer surroundings.

She involuntarily stepped back, freezing as the outlines began to writhe, churning as they sped towards her. She let the adrenaline singing through her dictate, scrambling backwards and hauling herself up into a tree. Branches reached and clung to her suit but were unable to cut through the tensile mesh as she climbed higher and higher, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the ground, only stopping when her suit began to chirp “danger” at her once more.

Not for the first time, she sent up a silent word of thanks for her suit as she pulled a cable out of her belt and hooked herself around the branch she was hugging, securing herself in a standing position before looking down. The outlines clustered around the base of the tree with their faces pointed towards her. She used the toggle on her wrist to zoom in on them, trying to figure out what they were. She knew they were a species not found on her home planet. She had been briefed prior to coming here that she would encounter environments and creatures that no one else in her world had— they pitched this information to her as if it were some kind of treat. “We’re a world of explorers,” they had said, “everything you discover on your assigned planet with help us make the home planet more comfortable for our citizens.”

She swallowed away the bitter taste in her mouth, focusing on that only one tour of duty was mandatory per citizen. A rustling below caught her attention and she gazed back down at the creatures below, repressing a shiver when she saw that the sockets where their eye should have been stood out as even darker than their bodies. Tremors wracked her, setting the leaves around her to shivering. She had been unable to see their eyes reflecting back with her night vision because they had none.

Thirteen days down, three hundred fifty-two to go.

Chapter 1

The gentle exhale of the machine whirring around her head soothed her awake. Her vitals blipped before her eyes, the yellow numbers fading gradually, nothing of consequence to report. Ava stood, moving forward gingerly, loamy moss masking her footsteps. This world stifled—its silence oppressive and ominous after the cacophony of noise and activity she experienced on her the home planet.

She now lived for ROY’s mechanical intervention, the quiet voice that whispered “scheduled diagnostic check” every hour. The thirty seven yellow tally marks seemed to glow bright before her eyes again, reminding her of the three hundred twenty-eight days left on her tour. Three hundred twenty-eight more days of no human contact aside from her ROY’s inflectionless voice.

Ava felt her way along the trunk of the tree, the dark not yet great enough to activate her night vision. She felt the mossy handhold and grasped on, hauling herself up through the branches as the daylight seeped from the sky. The creatures came every night now. She had salvaged everything she could after the first night and moved into the trees. She admired her handiwork as she gazed at the ramshackle hut that now made up her home.

The massive tree limb stretched out three or so feet on either side of her sleeping bag. She had peeled off a substantial piece of bark from base of the trunk, tying it up on either side to form some semblance of walls. The portion of her tent that she had managed to salvage hung above the hut in a meager canopy. She had learned within the first few weeks that it never rained here, rather, she longed for the privacy her little walls afforded. The creatures responded to movement and Ava had only been able to tolerate a few nights of watching them writhe at the base of her tree before the lure of a shelter proved too great.