Once I had a gutful of icy cold sloshing around in my stomach, I shut my eyes and floated on my back in the shallows with my heels and butt and fingertips dragging in the sand. It’d been a long day, and instead of getting some sleep the night before, I’d gotten killed. That’ll wear you out.

I realized I’d messed up the second I felt something dripping on my forehead. I jackknifed up into a sitting position, splashing water everywhere, and smacked face-first into the top of a mouth lined with razor teeth wide as my hand.

Which also happened to be coming down to chomp me in half.

I freaked out, inhaling water and splashing and scrambling, but it was like one of those dreams where you try to run and can’t get away. The teeth were slamming down too fast, and the water felt like it was dragging me under. Images of my legs sticking out of the mouth of some prehistoric megalodon flashed through my brain unhelpfully.

Then someone grabbed my arm and jerked. I caught a split-second glimpse of black hair and opal-colored eyes with weird lacy patterns in them, then I heard wood splinter behind me. A rib-shaking roar tore through the shut-in.

“Come on!” the girl who’d grabbed me yelled, dragging me toward the bank.

I sloshed through the water with her, hauling backside now that I was on my feet.

We ran out onto the rocky shore, and a calf-deep wave hit us in the back of the legs. I swung around, figuring I could at least block that monster from eating her, but it was gone. All I caught was a translucent blue-green fin as tall as I was slicing back down into the deeper part of the stream.

“It’s okay,” the girl said, finally letting go of my arm. “We’re safe. Creek carp can’t walk on land until after their third molt. Their adolescent legs aren’t strong enough to support them.”

I’m pretty sure my eyes got as big as my fists. “There are versions of that thing that can walk?”

“Adults.” She shrugged. “But none of them can breathe on land, so they’re not in it for an extended chase. Carp are more ambush predators. The carnivorous ones are, anyway.”

“Should we—I don’t know—get out of here?” I pointed up at the red sandy tops of the gorge. “Climb back up top?”

“Go ahead,” she said. “I still have day sun to burn and materials to scavenge.”

The girl had black hair twisted into two messy buns on the top of her head, and she was wearing a set of welding goggles pushed up on her head. What really got my attention, though, was the eyes I’d seen when I was about to be chomped inhalf. They were huge, and instead of irises and whites, she had this black lace pattern.

Realizing I was staring, I glanced at the wispy trees and undergrowth surrounding us. There was an awful lot of brush on this side of the stream. Plenty of space for something big and hungry to hide.

“What if one of them sneaks up behind us?” I asked.

“I’ve got my fish-finder on.” She tapped the big screen on her wrist like that would save us. “It’ll go off if one gets close enough to do any damage.”

“Isn’t ‘close enough to snap us in half’ too late?”

She glared at me, and the black lace in her eyes got darker and thicker. “It’s a prototype, okay? When it reliably alarms at close distances, then I’ll be able to recalibrate its radar to scan a larger diameter.”

Right about then I realized I was arguing with a cute alien girl about man-eating mega-carp early warning systems, and my words dried up. Under normal circumstances, I wasn’t great at talking to the opposite sex, and the girls at my school had never wanted anything to do with trash like me anyway. This was probably the longest conversation I’d had with one since puberty struck and even just saying hi to them got complicated.

She bent down and picked up a huge backpack stitched together out of gunny sacks, and slung it onto her shoulder with a metallic clinking. Once she had it on, she turned toward the trees.

“Hey, uh—” I took a step to follow her, then realized that might be kind of stalkery. I stopped where I was and stuck my hands in my pockets. “I mean, can you point the way to the nearest town?”

The branches behind her rustled, and I forgot all about being awkward and started looking around for a stick or a really big rock I could clobber a river monster with.

Instead of a fish, though, a heavyset guy came out of the trees. He was the same tan as the girl was and had the same big lace-patterned eyes. His black hair was shaggy, and he had on a ragged sleeveless shirt, long cutoff shorts that used to be pants at some point, and wooden sandals. If not for the eyes, he would’ve looked like an overweight surfer dude from Earth.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“You fed that carp my walking stick,” he said, flicking his hair out of his face with a jerk of his head.

“I’ll find you another one,” the girl said.

“It’s not about the stick, Kest, it’s about you stealing my stuff.”

“If I’d had time to ask, I would’ve. Besides, the carp was going to eat this guy.” She turned to me. “Guy, would you rather I stopped to ask Rali if I could use his stick to jam the carp’s teeth open or make it so you lived long enough to question my methods with him?”

I looked at him. “Sorry, man, I got to go with the one where I don’t get eaten.”

He laughed.

“I bear no ill will toward you, new friend,” he said, putting his palms flat against each other like he was praying and bowing over them. “My twin’s the only one I want to make feel bad.”

Twins. That explained it. You could definitely see the family resemblance, even though the guy was on the chubby side.

“He’s not our friend, Rali.” The girl, Kest, shoved a wispy branch up and ducked under it into the trees. Her voice filtered back to us. “He’s a criminal.”

“No, I’m not.” I followed her into the foliage.

She had come out in a sandy clearing and was wandering down along the cliff wall, head down like she was searching for something.

“We saw the transport shuttle fly over,” she said.

Rali came through the brush and joined us. “That’s true. If you’d been here before that, we would’ve known. We don’t get many new faces out here.”

“No, I mean, I came by the shuttle, but I’m not a criminal,” I said. “It’s a mistake. I don’t think I’m even supposed to be in this universe. See, there was this methhead in my house, and I think one of us got stabbed, then this ditzy grim reaper screwed up and took me instead of him because our names sound alike or something. She got mad when I called her on it, then I dropped through the stars and landed on the shuttle.”

Rali was smiling like he didn’t believe me. Kest hadn’t even stopped walking.

“Okay, that all sounds made up,” I said. “But it’s true.” I scrubbed my hands down my face in frustration. “My dad used to make crap up all the time to make it sound like he wasn’t the bad guy, but I’m not like him. I’m not a criminal, I promise. It really happened.”

When I said that, it was like a shockwave went through the air. This was real. I wasn’t dreaming. It was all really happening. To me.

Suddenly, I got lightheaded. Sound fuzzed out, and the ground started tilting back and forth. Neither of the twins seemed to notice. I grabbed for a tree, but my fingers felt numb. They slid off the sappy bark.

Then I was flat on my back looking up at Rali and Kest. The lace patterns in their eyes shifted slowly from thin to wide then back again.

“Are you all right?” Rali’s voice sounded far away.

“Oh God,” I whispered. It sounded crazy loud inside my head. “I think I really died.”

Kest blinked and looked down at her giant watch screen.

A little at a time, the sound of the rushing stream and the wind in the trees came back.

“I don’t think he’s lying,” Rali said like he was amazed.

“He thinks he’s telling the truth,” Kest said, turning her wrist to show him her watch.

“You can’t trust technology for that kind of thing,” her brother argued. “It can’t think for itself.”

“Yet,” she said. “But it can read his brain chemicals, heart palpitations, and sweat glands. He’s got all the markers of someone who suffered a recent traumatic experience, but none of the markers of insanity. None of the physiological ones, anyway.”

“My gut says we trust him,” Rali said. “That’s good enough for me.”

Kest snorted, but didn’t stop Rali when he stuck out his hand and helped me stand up.

“Thanks.” I meant for believing my crazy story, too, not just the hand.

He shrugged. “If you’re not a criminal, then you should probably stick with us.”

“What’s your name?” Kest said, leaning up against the rock wall. She didn’t look at me while she said it, just stared down at her watch screen.

“Grady Hake. Everybody just calls me Hake, though.”

Rali did that praying-slash-bowing thing again. “Iye Skal Akarali.” Then he cracked a grin. “Grady Hake’s a weird name for a human. Were you raised by some other race?”

“What?”

“Humans usually have tough-sounding, ‘Meat Roaches will rise again’ type names,” he said. “The ones our age do, anyway.”

“Like Warcry?”

“That’s a popular one. One of the original Meat Roaches from the Ylef-Human War named her kid that, now all the humans are doing it.”

“There’s no Grady Hake in the Van Diemann profiles,” Kest interrupted.

“You’ve met my sister, Iye Skal Irakest,” Rali said. “As you can tell, she doesn’t observe societal niceties.”

I laughed.

“I mean, she saved my life, so I’ve got to cut her some slack,” I joked.

Kest ignored us. “I checked the new arrivals’ profiles to make sure you weren’t giving us a fake name, but your picture isn’t on the rankings.” She let her watch-arm drop and looked up at me. “You really aren’t supposed to be here.”

“Rankings?” I frowned. “What rankings?”

“The Spirit rankings. Every planet keeps a public record of its citizens’ Spirit that shows in real time how you stack up against any other citizen. If you’re not on it, then you’ve never been given a Universal implant, which means you were never born.”

“Or you removed your implant to protest being a part of a system designed to conflate meaningless numbers with achievement,” Rali said.

Kest rolled her eyes. “You’re the only one who did that, and you just did it to seem like some cool non-conformist.”

“I did it because I like my privacy.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I’m not the only one. The Beggar Clan—”

“Is just a story,” his sister said. “The only real universal gangs are the Big Five.”

Behind her back, Rali shook his head at me.

“Some aliens—” I cut off, because I didn’t want to be a jerk, and who even knew if they were aliens on this planet. Maybe I was the alien. “Some people were talking about the Big Five when we got off the shuttle. What are they?”

“They’re gangs,” Kest said. “And if you want to stay off the record, then they’re the ones you want to avoid.”

“Easier said than done,” Rali said. “Considering they run this planet and a good number of the others.”