Senna felt her grandmother’s small, skinny hands slip away from hers as the starship ascended. Her feet were locked to the floor, body frozen in place as she watched her grandmother’s figure become a silhouette through the low clouds, then a speck, and then nothing. Everything that happened, happened all too fast. While everyone on the ship began to scatter away from the edges where it was least stable and much colder than anywhere else, Senna remained, both hands turning white from gripping the railings as tight as she wished she could have held her grandmother’s hands instead. Why didn’t she come with her? She just sent her off with this tiny, mysterious seed in a locket which Senna had never seen her remove from around her neck.

This has to be some kind of mistake, Senna thought, taking a deep breath and telling her heart to stop beating so damn loudly. She’s just getting on the next ship, that’s all. We’ll meet up at the first station. She turned, her back against the railing. Slowly, she slid until she was sitting forlorn on the cold, metal floor. There were little bumps stretching from the railing to about two feet inward, to keep passengers from slipping and falling from the railings as they were boarding and disembarking the ship. They were quite uncomfortable to be sitting on. Senna wrapped her arms around herself, ignoring the discomfort and quite frankly, hardly even noticing it. As she exhaled, she watched her breath come out in puffs in the cold air. In another few minutes, she would have to go inside and put on a suit and sit in the oxygen chamber. The air pressure would begin to change drastically as they ascended through the atmosphere. The next two hours would be the most dangerous leg of their trip. The environmental changes exerted immense physical and psychological pressure on people and animals. Even worse, however, was the threat of extraterrestrial attack.

The Last World War had still been raging on when the first attacks came from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. The casualties were likened to a global pandemic. International laws became moot. There was no distinguishing between soldiers and civilians. At some point in the war, every single person still alive was both a survivor and a fighter. There was not one without the other. Loyalty was a value of the past. The weak were offered to the extraterrestrials, which everyone called ETs for short, hoping to be spared. But, it was not human lives they wanted. It was resources. What better time to invade an entire planet and steal all of its remaining resources, than when all of its inhabitants were busy fighting one another instead? By the time humans could respond, the ETs had annihilated nearly a third of what remained of humankind. There were more ETs than humans just months later and humans became refugees and slaves on their own planet.

Many people didn’t have anywhere to go. They were desperate, seeking shelter from whatever forests were possibly left or underground in the basements of buildings left standing. Senna was lucky. She escaped to her grandmother, Kendra Aozra, a brilliant research engineer who had built an off-grid home in the mountains. As she sat, another inconsequential passenger among crowds of broken families and broken people, the first landing replayed in her mind. Everything had been quiet in the underground lab where she was working. She remembered preparing rock and soil samples and solvents for testing in a sterile box, measuring every component judiciously and protecting the specimens from exposure. She had the same steady hands as her grandmother and had done this countless times as a student. It was silent and still and there was absolutely no sign that the ground she stood on would be flipped upside down. Her lab partner, a bright and bubbly young man named Casper who had graduated just a year ahead of Senna, rushed into the lab, grabbing her by the wrist and yanking her out of the room before she had a chance to even put down her specimens. The samples fell out of their tubes, her beakers shattered on the ground, solvent splashing onto the floor – some of which steamed as it mixed with the air. Casper was red, sweaty, and afraid. All the life in his eyes that had always been there was replaced with panic. His never-fading smile was stretched downwards, his mouth agape letting gasps of air escape between words.

“We’ve been attacked!” He yelled, breathlessly. “Invaded! We need to get out of here and hide!”

For a whole minute, Senna thought the war had finally reached them. As soon as they stepped onto the ground above, she realized that human war was but a tiny distraction in the grand universe. Casper then tackled her as she froze and stared at the scene unfolding before her. They crashed onto the ground as scrap metal, dirt, and stone flew over them. People were running, unleashing bloodcurdling screams at the top of their lungs as they desperately searched for anywhere to hide. Above in the sky, shiny, round, metal objects that were surely spacecraft hovered and blasted the ground with what looked like thick lasers and balls of compressed air. They swept through the land, eliminating anything and anyone in the way. Soon it was clear to Senna that they weren’t there to eliminate humankind. They were there to take from the Earth and wanted nothing and no one to be in their way. Death was just an incidental casualty.

“Aliens,” Senna gasped the moment she could find her voice. “Aliens,” she repeated.

Casper turned his neck to look at her. He had crawled up in front of her to watch the ETs’ progression, unsure of whether to run and reveal themselves or to hide and hope not to get hit by one of the laser sweeps. His face was practically drained of blood, his pupils wide, his lips pale. His hair matted to his face from his sweat, which was quickly dried off of his body as gusts of air rampaged by them.

“Yeah,” he affirmed, “aliens.”

It was clear they couldn’t lie on the ground hoping to be unnoticed forever. They had minutes at best until another sweep would get them too.

“On the count of three,” Casper motioned to Senna with his fingers. She read his lips and nodded once.

“One…two…THREE!” They sprung up and entered full sprint towards an idle car. They prayed it had enough charge left to get them out. The two matched each other’s speed but as debris flew recklessly from the aftermath of the laser sweeps and air blasts, they gradually drifted apart to dodge the incoming rubble.

The sleek black car was just 20 yards away. Then 15. Then 10, five, four, three… Senna glanced to her left for Casper, just a full body dive away from the open doors of the car. Casper had honed back towards Senna and was just five feet from the open back door when the edge of an illuminating blue laser sweep made contact with his body. In a microsecond he vanished. And then the laser was coming straight for Senna. She bent her legs and dove into the car, her eyes shut tight. She crashed into the front seats, almost sliding out of the opposite doors. For a moment, she didn’t open her eyes. Did she land in the Otherworld or was she safe? Slowly she peeked through a sliver in her eyelids. Steering wheel. Dashboard. Battery at 90%. She pressed a button; all the doors closed. She pressed another. Biodefense mode activated; it was aliens and not zombies but who knew what type of pathogens could come from outer space? She situated herself into the driver’s seat, taking care to put on her seatbelt (not that it mattered considering the damage that was so easily done already) and placed her right foot on the acceleration pedal. She hadn’t even noticed that she was missing a shoe. It didn’t matter – there was only one place to go and she knew she had to get there before it was too late. She sped off in the opposite direction of the spaceships and watched in the rearview mirror. As quickly as they came, they destroyed, and everything was gone. That was the first landing.

Senna returned to the present, hearing the siren blare and the intercom bark at all passengers to prepare for the danger zone. She headed inside as if on autopilot, stepping into a suit and sitting in a tiny white pod next to another tiny white pod, already occupied by a nine-year-old boy. There had been several landings every day after the first one. Earth had started evacuating weeks ago. Her grandmother made her practice evacuation nearly every day once she arrived at the cabin. If they could not hide, they were going to leave. They were going to leave, together. Senna clenched her fists again, her body heating up in anger and confusion. It seemed to almost steam up the pod she was huddled up in. Why didn’t she come with me, too? Senna bit her lip, mostly to stop from bursting into tears. Would her grandmother get on a ship at all? Of course she would, Senna snapped mentally to herself. We’re all we have. She would never just give up…would she?