The Hidden Princess At All-Boys Alpha Academy

I do my best to keep my breaths quiet and even as two, then three more enemy soldiers move out onto my plateau. I peer at their faces through the leaves of the bushes in which I'm hiding, trying to see if one of them is Wright, if one of their eyes is lit with the violence I saw in him that day - the desire to kill me -

But I don't recognize any of them.

"This would be the perfect spot," the man in the lead says, frowning around the plateau, "to put that sniper. And the angles from the shots taken suggest that this is around the right height."

"He must be here then," the man next to him says, dropping to one knee and peering around. More troops move onto the plateau behind him, likewise looking around, wary. "Spread out everyone. Search."

I inhale a deep breath through my nose, my heart pounding in my chest like I've just run a marathon, watching as the troops spread out, moving closer and closer to me. God, this must be the entire team - there's more than ten of them here, maybe even fifteen. They move closer to me, sweeping around the ground with their guns, noting the footsteps that Jackson and I left when we came up here. Their mood picks up then, their chatter revealing tat they realize that I'm here - or at least, I was.

Terribly, the one closest to me raises his nose to the air, taking in a deep sniff. "No, he's still here," he says, a smile breaking out over his face. "Scent's too fresh. He must be...hiding."

Suddenly the man drops to his knee, his gun aimed directly at the bush that covers me.

I gasp in another breath and, absurdly, press my eyes shut, my hands clinging to my gun, wishing desperately that he can't see me - that I'd just disappear - that I could be safe, and that he couldn't touch me - and that I'd survive - And suddenly - quite suddenly -

The world around me...shifts.

The ground beneath me...sags somehow, becoming pliable, stretching like a net made of thinner and thinner material as the milliseconds pass, until it snaps and I somehow fall...through.

I gasp as I tumble backwards, only air beneath me and I fall -

Fall!

fly open as I continue to plummet downwards, though I don't know where,

the cliff's edge -

hard, and all of the air

my face

fills my chest and I open my eyes, looking around, knowing that the troops

that greets me now is

And darkness.

wide as I press one hand down against the sandy dirt, so different from the rocky cliffside that I've been sitting all day. And as press myself up and twist to look

I am no longer on that cliffside in

I'm not in Moon

Moon Valley it is day - and here...here it's

the desolate landscape with a few scattered,

go wide when I

and huge

close that I can count its craters. And behind it...another moon, smaller, crescent, its sharp edge limned in

gently beyond that

Three...three moons...

MS