Three teenagers crash-land on a strange planet when their ship vanishes and the wilderness around them starts behaving like it knows they're there.
The Explorer-5 slid through the black between stars with the kind of silence that made every breath feel too loud. Inside the cabin, Kaja, Leo, and Sara pressed close to the panoramic window, their faces washed in starlight. They were fourteen, and this was supposed to be the best day of their lives: the prize flight for winning the Interplanetary Science Competition.
Leo was still grinning when the onboard computer chimed.
"Warning," it said, flat and calm. "Object on collision course. Immediate trajectory change required."
"That is not a good sound," Leo muttered, already reaching for the controls.
Kaja leaned over his shoulder. A jagged shape filled the display, too close, too fast.
Sara's fingers flew across her tablet. "I’m checking emergency procedures. Hold on—"
The impact came before she finished.
The ship lurched violently. A crack of metal ripped through the cabin. Lights flashed white, then died. Kaja was thrown against her harness; Leo cursed under his breath; somewhere behind them a panel burst open with a spray of sparks. For one terrible second, the whole ship seemed to spin apart.
Then there was only blinding light and the sick, dropping feeling of a forced descent.
When Kaja opened her eyes, the sky above her was the colour of bruised glass.
She pushed herself up slowly. The ground beneath her was soft with pale moss, and trees towered all around them, their leaves glowing a hard, neon green as if lit from inside. Leo was coughing nearby. Sara was on her knees, already scanning the clearing.
"Everyone alive?" Kaja asked.
"Barely," Leo said, rubbing his shoulder.
Sara stood and turned in a slow circle. Her face tightened. "Where's the ship?"
Kaja looked past the strange trees, expecting to see the Explorer-5 broken in two, or half buried in dirt, or anything at all.
There was nothing.
No hull. No wreckage. No smoking crater. Only a scatter of tiny glowing metal flakes on the ground, like someone had ground the ship into dust and blown it away.
The air smelled of ozone and something sharper, like hot wires.
From deep in the forest came a low, steady hum.
Leo picked up one of the glittering fragments and turned it between his fingers. "That is impossible," he said.
"Then explain it," Sara snapped, but her voice had gone thin.
Kaja stared at the glowing trees. The trunks leaned in twisted arcs, forming narrow paths that seemed to shift the longer she looked at them. Their footprints were already fading behind them, swallowed by the strange moss.
"We need the ship," Leo said. His voice had lost its shake. "If we don't find it, we're stuck here."
They started forward carefully, moving between the trees as the hum deepened around them. A few steps later, Kaja stopped so suddenly that Sara nearly ran into her.
Ahead of them, in the clearing between two bent branches, the ground was marked with prints.
Not human. Far too large. Too deep. And glowing faint blue, as if they had only just been made.
The leaves overhead began to tremble.
The hum turned into a high, thin note that made Kaja's teeth ache.
"Did you hear that?" she whispered.
Something shifted in the shadows between the trees.
A silhouette emerged, slow and deliberate, its shape too tall, too broad, and wrong in a way Kaja couldn't name. The neon leaves threw broken light across its surface, but never enough to show what it really was.
The three of them froze.
The figure took one more step toward them, and every glowing leaf on the planet seemed to pulse at once.