Dawn’s Early Light - Episode 1 - Preview

The dust became a wall.

It rose around the canyon like a living thing, swallowing the rock pillars, swallowing the moon, swallowing everything except the lights. Red and pale and flickering, moving through the murk in patterns Hal couldn't follow. He heard impacts. Heard the screech of metal. Heard Kadie shouting something he couldn't make out.

He bolted.

He didn't know where. The canyon had become a maze, every direction identical, every path leading deeper into the dust. He stumbled over rubble. Tripped on debris. Caught himself on a rock pillar and pressed his back against it, breathing so hard he thought his lungs might burst.

A beam screamed past.

The pillar beside him exploded. Fragments peppered his face, his arms, his chest. He threw himself sideways, hit the ground rolling, came up moving without looking back.

The dust swallowed him.

He was blind now. Completely blind. The only way to orient himself was by the sounds of the fight, the flashes of light that penetrated the murk just enough to show him obstacles before he crashed into them. He rounded a corner. Found a gap between two pillars. Squeezed through.

Another beam. This one close enough to heat the air against his cheek. He felt his eyebrows singe. Smelled his own hair burning.

He kept moving.

The fight had changed.

Hal could hear it in the rhythm. Kadie's strikes were coming slower now. The machine's responses were coming faster. She was tired. Exhausted. Running on fumes while the thing from the sky ran on whatever machines from the sky ran on.

He found a boulder. Pressed himself behind it. Tried to see through the dust.

A gap opened. Just for a moment. Just long enough to show him Kadie on her knees, her shoulders heaving, her fists bloody and raw. The machine stood over her, its chest plates sliding apart, revealing something bright and terrible underneath.

The glow built.

Hal opened his mouth to scream her name.

The sky exploded.

The ship came down like the wrath of a god.

Green fire trailed behind it, cutting through the dust, turning the night into something biblical. For one impossible moment, the entire canyon was illuminated, every pillar and boulder and grain of sand thrown into sharp relief, and Hal saw everything with perfect clarity.

The machine, looking up.

The ship, burning.

The collision course that neither could avoid.

Impact.

The sound was beyond sound. It bypassed his ears entirely and went straight into his bones, rattling his teeth, shaking his vision, making his heart stutter in his chest like it had forgotten how to beat. The shockwave picked him up and threw him. Again. He hit something. Bounced off something else. Tumbled across the canyon floor until he came to rest face-down in rubble, ears ringing, lungs full of dust.

He lay there for a long time.

The world was quiet. Not silent. Quiet. The kind of quiet that follows catastrophe, when everything that was making noise has been broken or burned or buried and what's left is just the settling of debris and the crackle of dying fires.

Hal coughed. Spat grit. Pushed himself up on arms that shook so badly he almost collapsed again.

The wreckage was everywhere.

Twisted metal. Burning fuel. The ship, or what was left of it, lay scattered across the canyon floor in pieces that still glowed green at the edges. Some of the pieces were bigger than cars. Some were small enough to hold in his hand. All of them pulsed with that same strange light, a color that didn't quite look like any green he'd ever seen, too alive, too aware.

And in the center of it all, half-buried in debris, the machine was trying to claw its way free.

Its plating had warped from the impact. Metal dripped from its joints like blood, still molten, still glowing. One of its arms hung useless at its side. But those red eyes were still lit. Still burning. Still fixed on something Hal couldn't see.

He crawled toward the wreckage.

Every rational part of his brain was screaming at him to run, to get away, to find a road and flag down a car and pretend none of this had ever happened. But something else was pulling him forward. Some instinct older than reason, deeper than fear.

The flames licked at the twisted metal. The heat pressed against his face, into his eyes, down his throat. And for a moment, Hal wasn't in the canyon anymore.

He was somewhere else.

Another crash.

Another fire.

His father's voice crackling through a radio, saying words he couldn't remember but had never stopped hearing.

He froze.

His hands stopped moving. His breath stopped coming. He knelt there in the rubble, paralyzed, watching the flames dance across the wreckage and seeing a different wreckage, a different fire, a different night when the sky had taken everything from him.

The machine pulled itself free.

Raised an arm toward him.

The red glow began to build.

Green light erupted from the wreckage.

It came without warning. One moment the flames were orange and red and hungry, and the next they were pushed back, overwhelmed, drowned by a luminescence so pure it hurt to look at. The light expanded outward in a sphere, driving back the dust, the smoke, the heat, everything, until the center of the wreckage was clear.

And from that light, a figure rose.

Hal's mind went blank.

It stopped trying to categorize, to understand, to fit what he was seeing into the framework of a world that made sense. It simply observed, recording details with the flat objectivity of a camera, because anything else would have required him to accept that what he was seeing was real.

The figure was tall.

Taller than any person Hal had ever seen. Six and a half feet at least, maybe more, with shoulders broad enough to block the light behind him and limbs that moved with a grace that seemed wrong for something so large. His skin was purple. Not painted. Not tattooed. Purple, the color of an orchid, the color of a bruise, the color of nothing that had ever been born on Earth.

His head was bald. His features were human but not quite, the proportions slightly off, the angles too sharp, the bones arranged in ways that evolution had never tried. His eyes glowed with an inner light, green like his aura, ancient and vast and seeing more than a human gaze should be able to contain.

He wore robes that moved without wind. They shifted around him, rippling with energy, made of fabric or light or something that was both and neither. And around his right hand, pulsing like a heartbeat, was a ring.

It was the ring that drew Hal's attention more than anything else.

Small. Simple. A band of solid green light wrapped around the figure's finger. It shouldn't have been the most remarkable thing about an alien standing in the middle of a crashed spaceship in the California desert. But it was. Somehow, inexplicably, it was.

The figure looked at Hal.

At the boy frozen on his hands and knees, lit by the glow of the machine's charging weapon, seconds from death.

Something shifted in those ancient eyes. Recognition, maybe. Or curiosity. Or something Hal had no name for.

"Look alive, young man."

The voice was deep. Resonant. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the air and the ground and the inside of Hal's own chest.

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

He lifted his hand.

The ring flared.