Blake plummeted through a vortex of swirling colors and distorted space. The wormhole ripped at his body, stretching and compressing him in impossible ways. His jacket was torn from him with impossible force, dislocating his right shoulder. Bones cracked, organs shifted, soft tissue tore.

His screaming was lost to the warping space around him.

Images of his life flashed by in rapid succession. His mother's smile. The day he enlisted. His first firefight in Afghanistan. The faces of the men he'd lost. All of it blurred together, indistinguishable from the psychedelic nightmare engulfing him.

With a bone-jarring impact, Blake landed on a surface of twisted metal and debris. He gasped, his lungs burning as they filled with air that smelled wrong—foreign. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. His hands groped for purchase, fingers brushing against jagged edges and strange textures.

As his surroundings came into focus, a wave of confusion washed over him. He was whole and unhurt. That surprised him, but he wasn't sure why. He was in full battle rattle—flak vest, Kevlar helmet, combat boots, and rifle slung across his back. The weight was familiar, grounding. But the landscape was... odd.

Towering heaps of unidentifiable wreckage loomed around him, silhouetted against a sickly green sky. Fragments of memories began to bleed into the alien vista. The burnt-out husks of vehicles became the charred remains of Humvees. The distant screeches of unknown creatures morphed into the cries of wounded soldiers.

Blake staggered to his feet, heart pounding. He spun around, trying to get his bearings. Kabul. He was in Kabul. Wasn't he? The streets he knew so well twisted and warped, merging with the otherworldly junkyard.

Shadows moved in the periphery of his vision. Enemies? Allies? He couldn't tell anymore. Panic clawed at his throat as he reached for his rifle, fingers closing around the comforting weight of the weapon. He must have taken a hit to the dome. He was just turned around.

A glint of metal caught his eye. Dog tags. His dog tags. Blake reached for them, but they dissolved into a swirl of sand and grit. The ground beneath his feet shifted, and he stumbled.

He had to move. Had to find cover. Had to... had to...

Blake's thoughts fragmented, scattering like shards of a broken mirror. The line between memory and reality blurred until he could no longer distinguish between the two. He was lost, adrift in a landscape that was both familiar and utterly alien.

Blake's heart pounded as a child's cry pierced the eerie silence of the junkyard. The sound echoed off the twisted metal, distorted and haunting. He spun around, trying to pinpoint the source, a sense of dread settling in his gut.

He moved forward, boots crunching on the debris-strewn ground. The cry came again, more urgent this time. Blake quickened his pace, weaving through the towering piles of scrap. His surroundings began to shift, the alien landscape blurring and reforming into something familiar yet terrifying.

Dust swirled around him, the acrid smell of smoke filling his nostrils. The junkyard melted away, replaced by the war-torn streets of Kabul. Bullet-riddled walls and shattered windows loomed on either side, the sound of gunfire echoing in the distance.

Blake's breath caught in his throat as he recognized the scene. He knew this dream. He'd been here before, trapped in the crossfire of a firefight. And there, huddled against a crumbling wall, was the child. A little girl, no more than six years old, her face streaked with tears and grime.

He lunged forward, desperate to reach her. But as always, his movements felt sluggish, as if he were wading through waist-deep water. The girl's cries grew more frantic as bullets struck the ground nearby. She was sobbing and curled up tight into the fetal position.

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Blake's fingers were a hairsbreadth away from reaching her when the world exploded in a deafening roar. The ground heaved beneath his feet, throwing him backward. He hit the ground hard, the air rushing from his lungs.

Blake scrambled to his feet, ignoring the pain that lanced through his body. He staggered forward, dust and smoke obscuring his vision. The metallic tang of blood filled his mouth. His balance was all wrong, and he fell more than once. He lost his lunch after his second fall, the nausea unbearable. But still, he stood and tried to find her.

A sudden breeze swept away the clouds of obscuring dust, and there she was, lying crumpled and motionless in the rubble. Blake dropped to his knees beside her, his hands shaking as he reached out to check for a pulse. He already knew she was gone. He was too late. He was always too damn late.

As he had done a hundred times before, he turned her head towards him to reach her neck. He was on autopilot, trapped in his own body, watching the scene play out and unable to stop himself from seeing the devastation the RPG had wrought on the girl. Just like always, the sound and sight of things falling out of the wreckage of the poor girl as he moved her sent him reeling backward. Bile rose in his throat, but he had nothing left to vomit.

But this time, something new happened.

Blake watched in horror as the child's body began to twitch and writhe, her small frame jerking unnaturally. He retreated backward, his heart pounding in his ears, as the girl's features contorted and shifted, her skin rippling like liquid.

"It wasn't like this," he found himself saying. He wasn't sure why he said it, but his voice sounded distant and unimportant. It didn't matter. What mattered was what was happening in front of him.

The child's remaining eye rolled back in her head, revealing the damaged and bloodied white of her sclera. Her mouth stretched impossibly wide, emitting a guttural, inhuman screech. Bones cracked and snapped, rearranging themselves beneath her flesh as she rose to her feet, her movements jerky and unnatural.

Where once there had been a child, now stood a twisted, grotesque creature of rusting metal and diseased flesh, its elongated limbs twitching spasmodically. It was still only 4 feet tall, but it was disturbingly muscled. Each gnarled finger ended in a pitted razor. Blake's grip tightened on his knife, his knuckles turning white, as the creature fixed him with its soulless, goggle-like eyes.

It let out another ear-splitting shriek, and then it charged, its gait a disjointed, lurching stride that covered the distance between them with alarming speed. Blake barely had time to react before it was upon him, its claws slashing through the air mere inches from his face.

He ducked and rolled, coming up in a crouch, his heart thundering in his chest. The creature whirled around, its movements fluid and predatory, and lunged again. Blake deflected the attack with his forearm, the force of the blow rattling his bones, and countered with a vicious slash of his knife.

The blade bit deep into the creature's flesh, eliciting a high-pitched screech of pain. It recoiled, its movements growing more erratic, more frenzied. Blake pressed the advantage, striking again and again, his blade a blur of steel in the eerie half-light. Some part of him registered that he was uninjured and back in his civvies—and that he didn't know how to use his knife this well back in Kabul—but those thoughts scattered as the creature continued attacking.

With each wound Blake inflicted, the creature's form seemed to shift and warp, its features flickering between the twisted visage of the alien and the innocent face of the child. Blake's stomach churned, bile rising in his throat, but he couldn't falter, couldn't hesitate.

The creature lunged once more, its jaws gaping wide, and Blake seized his opportunity. He feinted left, then spun right, his knife leading the way. The blade plunged deep into the creature's chest, punching through flesh and bone with sickening ease.

For a moment, time seemed to freeze. The creature's body went rigid, its mouth open in a silent scream. And then, in the blink of an eye, its features resolved into those of the child, her eyes wide and terrified, her face contorted in agony.

Blake's breath caught in his throat as he looked into her eyes, saw the life fading from them. He tried to pull back, to stop the inevitable, but it was too late. The knife was buried to the hilt, and there was nothing he could do.

The child's body crumpled to the ground, her blood pooling around her, and Blake collapsed to his knees beside her, his hands shaking uncontrollably. He reached out, his fingers brushing against her pale cheek, and opened his mouth to scream.

It was his own screaming that woke him up fully. He was soaked with sweat, panting, and alarmingly he discovered he was strapped down. It was only years of training kept him from panicking, and he was quickly able to put together that he was on Eland's ship. It helped that only a few seconds after he had the thought, the man himself ran into the room.

"So," Blake croaked. "I'm alive."