No track in the sand, no footsteps.
A moon swept past a cloud and found a crack in its facade, spilling silver light over the scene.
Over the horrific scene.
“Help me!”
The prison guard struggled against the thick line wrapped in a vice grip about his leg as it pulled him up the gently-sloping incline.
“Don’t struggle,” I said. “Struggling only makes it squeeze tighter.”
The prison guard released his hands from the vine and raised them, ready to attack again if my advice turned out not to be sound.
But it was, and the relief was etched on his face.
The vine squeezed him so tight it’d crushed the armor plate around his leg, snapping his bones like twigs.
His arms didn’t fare much better.
One dragged uselessly behind him while the other brandished a bloodied knife.
“Give me that,” I said.
I dropped to my knees and placed one hand on the vine.
I set to sawing at with the knife.
The vine bucked, knocking me aside.
I got up, planted my feet in a stronger stance, and continued hacking.
Thick green-tinted water spilled from it, dousing the sand like blood from a gaping wound.
It quivered and retracted into the night.
“Can you stand?” I said.
The guard leaned back, relieved at having been rescued.
“Yes,” he said. “I think so. If you help me.”
He never reached his feet.
Quick as a flash, another tendril snapped around his shattered leg and continued dragging him up the incline.
“No!” he screamed. “No!”
He reached for me and accidentally knocked me off my feet.
He pummeled at the arm with a fist and it squeezed so tight I heard the guards’ bones snap.
An enormous creature emerged from the gaping hole at the top of the mountain.
At least four times larger than the one that’d snagged me.
With four times the number of tendrils, swirling into the night sky.
A second moon drifted from behind the cover of clouds and joined its sister to peer upon the field of war.
Four other victims were clutched in thick tendrils, each dragged up the incline toward the gaping maw.
One of the bodies barely struggled while another didn’t move at all.
Before, I had run.
I’d run but didn’t realize I’d been heading directly toward the mouth of the beast.
I was as doomed now as I had been back at the camp.
The tendrils slithered like angry snakes from an overturned nest and headed directly for me.
My breaths rasped in my throat.
I had no more fight left in me.
Egara
The shuttlecraft complained when we re-entered the atmosphere.
Fire leaped over the windows and trailed over its external shell.
Something crunched, snapped, and then splintered off completely.
I shut my eyes and ignored it all.
I wasn’t sure the craft would survive the trip.
But that didn’t matter.
What mattered was finding Agatha.
I had spent less than ten seconds staring at the emptiness of space.
The only thing emptier was the hole left inside me, an emptiness I had lived with my entire life.
All the booty in the world couldn’t fill it.
Neither could the accolades of being the most fearsome pirate in the galaxy.
Only she could give me meaning.
Agatha.
She was my only chance to turn my life around, to do something else.
I only hoped it wasn’t too late.
I had no plan of how I would break into the prison, how I would locate her.
None of that mattered either.
The craft screamed and I gripped the base of my chair with both hands.
I must have looked like a ball of molten fire as the shuttlecraft streaked across the night sky.
Within seconds, the fire was doused and I was falling head-first into the giant sand dunes below.
I seized the controls and pulled up, easing the shuttlecraft into a gentle glide.
Far below, the frozen ocean splayed out before me as far as the eye could see.
“Locate Ikmal prison,” I said.
“Ikmal prison located,” Computer said.
A holographic skin dropped over the windscreen and a three-dimensional image swelled from it, revealing the contours of the desert below.
A beacon alighted in the far distance, a simple yellow arrow pulsing on the horizon.
I brought the shuttlecraft down closer to the surface, hugging it as closely as I dared.
I peered at the undulating waves and focused on heading toward that beacon.
The prison guards had the use of land vehicles.
There was no doubt in my mind they would have used them and returned to the prison far faster than we had escaped it on foot.
It was a miracle they hadn’t discovered us before they had.
And, small though it might be, there was still a chance they hadn’t yet reached the prison.
As I sailed overhead, I noticed a few pinpricks of light on the surface dotted like acne on a teenager’s face.
I reduced speed and pulled in closer.
I couldn’t make it out with my naked eyes.
“Computer,” I said, “zoom in on those fires.”
Computer brought the images up on screen.
A flurry of fires had been tossed across the sand like breadcrumbs.
A handful of fabric fluttered like ghostly apparitions.
It made no sense.
Why would anybody come here to camp?
My answer came in the form of a vehicle trapped in the sand.
Its front corner was buried deep in a sand trap.
I recognized the vehicle type.
It was what the prison guards used when they made their rare trips into the desert.
Could Agatha be down there? I wondered.
But where was the movement?
Where were the drones buzzing overhead?
At least one would have spotted me and pitched in my direction, scanned my underside to pick up the vehicle’s identification number.
But there were no drones.
It was eerily quiet without those buzzing hornets overhead.
And there.
I noticed something, half-buried in the sand.
It was…
It was…
Dear Creator, no…
The blood froze in my veins.
A body.
The armor glowed brightly in the roving moonlight.
“Computer,” I said in a hoarse voice. “Zoom in on that fire.”
Computer brought the image closer until the sprawling mass made sense to my eyes.
A dry and shriveled and black form.
Vines.
A Desert Flower had attacked them.
It had attacked and killed some of their number.
But there had to be at least half a dozen prison guards.
And that wasn’t counting the drones they had at their disposal.
There could only be one form of
