"That’s the Zone for you: come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success;
come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else - that’s
fate." - Arkadiy and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, pg. 25
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My name is Marie.
31 years ago, I was born on Kharak.
A hot ball of sand no one cared about.
Except the people who lived there.
And the Taiidan Empire.
They watched us from afar.
Like we were something they forgot to finish.
To me, it was home.
Even though everyone knew it was dying.
A few good centuries left, maybe.
If you stayed near the poles.
The cities weren’t bad.
Tiir could be beautiful at night.
They were building a ship.
One big enough to carry some of us away.
Back to Hiigara.
Our ancestral home.
They called it the Mothership.
It was almost done by the time I was born.
When I was seven, my family was brought onboard.
Six months in cryo.
I went to sleep with sand in my mind.
I woke up to find my home was ash and glass.
The Taiidan did it.
Said we broke a 4,000-year-old treaty.
No one knew about it.
Didn’t matter.
They burned the planet clean.
We fought back.
We won.
And we came home to a place we’d only heard about.
Hiigara.
Everyone called it a dream.
I called it something else.
Even then, I knew I didn’t belong.
I grew up.
Went to school.
Joined the Marines.
Like the rest of my family.
Sobani, through and through.
I wanted to see what else was out there.
Nine years ago, a Kiith Somtaaw mining ship, the Kuun-Lan, found something.
Drifting in the quiet of space.
An ancient pod.
It came from a ship called the Naggarok.
Inside it was a sample.
The Beast.
Everything changed.
The virus spread.
It touched minds.
Turned ships into bodies.
Turned crew into something else.
It tried to grow.
It tried to win.
But the Kuun-Lan stopped it.
Barely.
Before it died, the Naggarok left behind something.
A fracture.
A wound in the galaxy.
We call it the Zone.
Tucked away on the edge of some Taiidan remnant kingdom that no one knows about.
No one knows what it is.
Or why it happened.
But after the Naggarok's death, anything made or touched by the Beast changed.
Most of them became like us.
In the best and worst ways possible.
They started thinking.
Dreaming.
Grieving.
Two of them became my friends.
But a few years ago, there was another.
A man once.
A Taiidan king.
Touched by the Beast.
Whatever he became - he wasn’t human anymore.
He tried to remake the galaxy in his own image.
Through blood.
Through fire.
I don’t even remember his name.
He was stopped.
By something the Beast had made.
The irony of it still stings.
The details are blurred now.
I’ve let most of them go.
But the Zone?
The Zone stayed.
It’s my home now.
It's like a child that has massively outgrown the parent that birthed it.
And it has its own rules.
It breaks.
It heals.
It gives.
It takes.
It didn’t let me lie to myself anymore.
It peeled away the last layers of who I used to be.
All the noise.
All the uniforms.
All the service medals and sob stories.
My worst vices.
And it gave me something in return.
A reason.
But not the final one.
Not yet.
The Zone still has one last thing to teach me.