For two long days, Malik and Oscar navigated their way across the open water. The voyage, for all of Malik’s anxiety, turned out to be relatively peaceful. Clear skies the color of a Starling’s egg stretched overhead as far as the eye could see. Occasionally the pristine sky was interrupted by a handful of fluffy white clouds as plump as oversized marshmallows. The rare cloud cover offered a welcome respite from the steady sunshine during the otherwise balmy days.

I should have made myself a damn umbrella, Malik thought to himself as he gazed mournfully at his ruby-red skin. By the morning of the second day, his complexion had taken on the qualities of a ripe tomato. He’d tried to mitigate the sunburn by wearing his synthetic shirt on the second day, but the damage had been done. He’d spent the last leg of the trip living in abject fear of the taller waves that sent salty spray scattering across his body.

Aside from the lack of sunscreen, the only other complication that arose was a single attack by a loan coatl. Mal couldn't say if this was a straggler from the previous flock he’d encountered or an entirely new clan. In the end, it didn’t matter much because the solitary pest met the same fate as so many of its cousins. After circling the human and his trusty steed, the winged serpent dove toward the duo with a shriek like nails dragging down a chalkboard.

Malik Rosen calmly lifted his pistol and shot the beast out of the sky. Much to Oscar’s delight. Too much to Oscar’s delight, in fact. Mal had run out of treats the day before that particular random encounter. Lacking the leverage petty bribery afforded him, it had taken close to an hour to coax Oscar back on course after it moved to gobble up the air-dropped snack.

Steering a sea monster, Malik found, was some combination of artful negotiation and pious prayer.

Regardless of the minor inconveniences posed by Oscar’s mulishness and Malik’s lobster-colored skin, the duo arrived at their destination a few hours before sunset.

Mal pushed ideas for how to engineer an umbrella from his mind to focus on the island as they approached. The first thing that struck him was the island’s size. His drone had seen precious little of the island the night he’d discovered it so Malik, perhaps to manage his expectations, had imagined it to be little more than a glorified sandbar.

In reality, the first landmass he’d discovered was much, much larger.

Did I find a continent? Malik thought to himself as he scanned the sprawling landmass with a glimmer of child-like wonder dancing in his blue eyes. It’s significantly larger than I could have hoped for. Then again, I suppose it could be long and narrow. Should I try to circle around to get a better grasp of what I’m working with? Nah. I’ll have better luck scouting things from a higher elevation.

Besides, I'm ready to take a break from the crocogator cruise line.

Narrow beaches of white sand formed a ragged boundary separating the surf from the heavy undergrowth of the island’s interior. The picturesque beaches lazily meandered up and down the coast until they vanished from sight. But while the lack of shoals or other obstructions made the coastal landscape easy to scout, the lay of the land beyond the sand was an enigma.

Most of the island’s inner topography was hidden by a sharp change in elevation that began a few meters beyond the waterline. Further inland, the canopy of the alien forest soared high above sea level, suggesting mountainous terrain. That could come later. For the moment, his attention was directed firmly at the beach and the tree line at its edge.

From this distance, Malik couldn’t make out any details of the vegetation on the ground aside from its density. What he could see, even from a half kilometer from the coast, was a forest of oddly shaped trees. They were scattered among the tall grass and twisting vines, each one soaring seventy to eighty meters into the air. The imposing plants had a wide, smooth trunk the color of polished obsidian and a crown of long branches that gave birth to leaf structures that hung down toward the forest floor in delicate-looking ropes. The entire effect made him imagine a forest of jet-black Weeping Willows.

To say then, that the atmosphere was ‘less than inviting’ would have been an understatement.

“What the hell, Oscar?” Malik mumbled as he idly scritched at Oscar’s back. He wasn’t sure the leviathan could feel the touch, but Mal figured that it was the thought that counted. “First I end up out in the middle of the ocean surrounded by man-eating pterodactyl knock-offs and now I stumble across an obviously haunted island?”

Mal groaned as his blue eyes scanned the nearest section of the beach. “Something is going to try to eat me before sunset. Mark my words.”

Mal could almost hear Oscar rolling his eyes like a preteen listening to a parent brag about the ‘good old days.’

“You’re right. It hasn’t all been bad, buddy. I met you and you didn’t try to eat me. Maybe the coatls are just assholes and everything else is pleasant and agreeable.” Mal tried to keep the skepticism from his voice as he affectionately patted Oscar’s coarse scales. Scales that were not designed with human comfort in mind. One of his first goals was to devise something akin to a saddle. Or a palanquin.

Oscar might have continued chiding Mal for his speciesism if the massive alligator hadn’t been busy trying to test its footing. After two unsuccessful attempts at gaining traction, Oscar’s clawed feet finally found purchase in the sand. That first halting step was followed by another lumbering lurch forward. The erratic motion jostled Mal hard enough that the human began frantically grabbing for Oscar’s Dyneema harness to keep himself from being tossed overboard.

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Mal’s distress did nothing to slow Oscar’s advance. The sea monster’s ponderous bulk began to emerge from the ocean as it plodded further up the beach. Heavy steps of the prehistoric alligator’s webbed claws lifted it from the swirling water like a battleship being guided into a dry dock.

A battleship that was no longer safe for human passengers.

Before Oscar could move any further up the beach, Malik decided to abandon ship. He dove from the alligator’s back to land in a wobbly crouch. His knee had scarcely pressed against the sand before he was rising to his feet to hustle out of the path of the trundling sea monster.

“Don’t slow down on my account,” Mal said with a scowl. The words were so fresh that he could still taste them on his lips when he had to dive out of the way of a swinging tail that could have moonlighted as a wrecking ball.

“Hey!,” Mal shouted, shaking his fist at the gator as Oscar turned to stand parallel to the waterline. “How about showing a little appendage awareness? Where I come from people get in trouble for waving body parts in other folks’ faces.”

The slow blink of Oscar’s faceted amber eyes spoke volumes about how the leviathan felt about the etiquette of Malik’s home world.

Before the human could get in another word edgewise, Oscar sank onto his stomach with an audible thump that sent sand billowing out in a cloud of fine grit. The gritty cloud turned into a veritable dust storm as Oscar’s entire body began to writhe sinuously against the ground. Each twist of its gargantuan body excavated kilos upon kilos of sand until the gator lay half-buried on the beach.

Wisely retreating before Oscar could give him a sand bath as well, Malik planted his fists on his hips while he watched the impressive, and worrisome, display. “You comfortable now, buddy?”

Oscar replied by closing its orange eyes and promptly falling asleep.

“Guess that answers that,” Mal said wryly as he surveyed the destruction that Oscar had wrought across the beach in a mere handful of minutes. He couldn’t help chuckling softly at the sight of the deep furrows the massive amphibian had dug through the sand. Some of the ditches were deep enough to pass for graves, albeit shallow ones.

We’ve come a long way, my friend, Malik thought as his sapphire gaze shifted from the enormous crocodile to look out over the ocean. Just one more thing to take care of.

Mal’s eyes followed the gleaming tow cable from where it was hitched to Oscar’s harness to where it terminated beneath the hatch of his lifepod. It was the work of only a few short minutes to paddle out past the shore to where the pod bobbed among the waves like a king-sized buoy. Once there, Malik hopped up into his mobile home and moved toward the control panel.

He was pleased to discover that two days of crisp, briny air had scoured most of the lingering scent from the pod’s interior. That would make sleeping a significantly more pleasant experience. But before he could worry about getting any shut-eye, he had to get the pod safely to shore. Thankfully, it took only a single click of a button to start the winch that began dragging the pod through the water. Mal ducked his head out of the hatch, watching for any reaction from Oscar once the pod ran aground and started dragging through the loose white sand. Seeing no response from the big lug, Mal let the winch pull the pod several meters up the beach before he cut it off and hopped down onto the sand.

His bare feet carried him to Oscar’s slumbering form where he quickly unfastened the tow line. The hitch bounced idly in his hand as he looked around for a new anchor point. Settling on one of the nearby trees, Mal looped the cable around its impressively large trunk before tying the cable off to itself.

Then he dropped to his knees as the choking sound of an aborted sob rattled past his lips.

He pitched forward, rolling himself down the steep dune heedless of the agony it awoke across his sunburned skin. When he came to a stop, he lay spread eagle across the ground with his fingers clawing at the sand. Malik stared up at the crystal clear sky, his eyes wet with the emotions of a falsely condemned man who’d just received a stay of execution.

I did it. Malik thought as he turned his head to watch the fine grains of sand sift through his open palm. You hear that, Cat? I did it. I’m still out here. Still alive and kicking. You better be, too.

Because I’m going to find you. All of you. And I’m not going to rest until I do.

Malik didn’t know how long he stared up at the expanse of the empty sky. Time seemed to stand still in those precious, quiet moments that he selfishly claimed for himself. When he finally rose, his eyes were dry and his heart was light as a dove’s feather.

“Ugh, I hear you,” Mal said, casting a glance at the still-sleeping Oscar. “I promised dinner. I’m getting on that right now.”

A half dozen jogging steps took Malik back to the pod where he retrieved the boots he hadn’t worn since his first day on Ryujin. The feel of their fabric chafing against his sunburned skin was almost enough to make him pull them off again, but he decided that was better than stepping on some strange poison briar. Footwear seen to, he double-checked his pistol, vibroblade, and compass in his utility belt before beginning his first trek down the beach.

He’d only moved a few hundred meters from Oscar’s slumbering form when he found a break in the tree line. Happy to avoid as many of the black trees and their gnarled roots as he could, Malik began to carefully trudge his way through the tall, yellow fronds that were thick as wheat on an Olympus Mons farm. He’d only managed to move a few meters into the thick brush when he noticed the clack his boots made with every step he took.

Is that rock? Malik wondered as he tapped the toe of his boot against the solid, unyielding surface underfoot. Mal’s brows knit together as he began gnawing on his lower lip. It was strange, now that he looked at it, for there to be such a wide gap in the ominous black trees that dominated the landscape. On a whim, Mal sank into a crouch to feel at the ground with his fingertips.

He felt coarse, porous stone beneath his touch.

And straight edges that mother nature would never produce.

His gentle exploration quickly took on a note of savagery as he began uprooting the fronds and the grass to cast them aside.

Two minutes later, his eyes were wide with disbelief.

“What the hell?” he whispered.

That was how Malik Rosen found himself staring down at a two-meter by two-meter square of red stone brickwork.