Emily had never seen a desert before. Not in person. She had never been able to travel far from home.

The closest thing she could recall was images from a distant colony moon. That sand was a strange gray, the color of ash, and the sky was not a sky at all, just the black of space and the sharp eerie light of stars. That landscape was something quite literally alien and hostile.

In contrast, the desert of white sand and cloudy skies she stood in now felt far more familiar. The grains sparkled in the light, though she still did not know where that light could have been coming from. There were no footprints, no indication that anything walked the ground other than her, and the tracks that she left behind as were vague depressions that would wipe away in the wind in short order.

She walked, because there was little else to do, picking a dark patch on the horizon that looked a little different from the sand, and wandering there. She learned that it was far easier to travel on the peaks of dunes than trying to slice sideways across on the skittering ground. The gray clouds roiled above, as if trapped in a storm that she could not hear. Beyond them, the indecipherable writing hung in the sky, motionless, never growing any larger or smaller.

Walking felt wrong, like maybe up and down were not as well defined as they should have been. She had once looked down at her feet, doubtful of her footing, and found that she could not focus on them. She was fairly certain they were there, but no amount of trying would bring them clarity. The sensation was not unlike that strange transition between waking and rest; the last moments in the dark when everything becomes unstuck, and the mind begins to feel as if it were falling, sleep rushing up to greet it.

The wind had been whispering against the sand this entire time, a rasping sound of rising and falling intensity, almost like waves of water. Sometimes it spoke what could have been words, with drawn out consonants that clicked and whispered, and vowels lost in the tumult.

She couldn’t remember where she had been before here, but was sure that there was a before, and she had not always been standing in the sand.

Tapping at the vacant space where memory was supposed to be in made the world buzz a little, so she decided not to try.

The dark space on the horizon resolved itself slowly, and became irregular shapes that jutted out of the sand. She thought, at first, that they were dark rocks, a natural ridgeline. But, as she came closer, she realized they were blocky, rectangular, and artificial. They came up from the sand as a shipwreck–-askew, blackened and burned. Beams. Foundation. The remnants of buildings. They were solid to the touch, and it seemed that the majority of their mass must have been somewhere deep in the sand, with only fingers grasping out at the top. A drowned city, buried in glittering white.

She came to the edge of what must have once been a wall, now brittle from scorching heat, with twisted steel bars jutting out.

A shadow fell across the ruin, and she looked upward. The buzzing sensation returned, and the sand roiled around her again. Drifting above was a deep black shape, a misshapen sphere. It had followed her, or drifted on the wind, or perhaps it was always there, above and waiting, and she had not been able to see it, just as she had not been able to see her feet. It had no eyes, and yet there was no question that it could see her with perfect clarity. It pulsed in shades of red and the deep purple of a fresh bruise, the only other thing alive in the expanse.

A thousand arms on its surface twitched, moved erratically, without purpose, probing at the air, maybe even whipping in the currents of the wind. It was hard to focus on the thing, but something told her that it was important, very important, that she try. She squinted up at it, trying to decide what this creature was, and realized that the arms seemed to be growing larger.

No, closer.

The only place to hide was the drowned city, and she vaulted over the wall. The thing buzzed, howled as an immense animal, so loud and encompassing that it made her teeth ache.

She woke up, and found herself still in that medical bay, lying in one of the beds and waiting on a scan, but the adrenaline was still there, and the situation she woke to felt no better than the one she had just left.