Page 5 of The Edge of Dawn

Jade promptly flopped back down on the bed.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, hoping to hell and back that the alien in her dreams really was just that.

A dream.

I’ve been asleep this entire time, right?

Because if he wasn’t a figment of her imagination—as he himself had said—then she was in a whole lot of trouble.

Come on… come on. Just go to sleep, damn it.

But her mind was buzzing.

She couldn’t shake off the feeling that she’d just encountered something mythical and powerful and forbidden.

Dragek.

He’d inserted himself into her consciousness with effortless arrogance as if he ruled her dreams.

She’d dreamed of people before: of strangers and objects of desire, figments of her subconscious that were so intense she felt as if she’d known them for a lifetime.

Sometimes, when she woke up, she felt like she’d lost something profound.

She’d been having these crazy, vivid dreams ever since the accident. Normally, sleep was elusive. Most of the time, insomnia was her companion, but when she did manage to fall asleep, she would slumber so deeply that even the loudest disturbance couldn’t wake her.

Once, when she was visiting the northern tropical city of Darwin, she’d slept through a cyclone, waking to find the trees outside stripped bare of their leaves as the morning sun rose above the eerily calm aftermath while ominous grey clouds and monsoonal rains loomed darkly in the far-off distance.

Oh well, he’s just another figment of your imagination.

She would ignore him just like she’d ignored all the other voices that had spoken in her head since the injury.

The real voices.

Those stupid voices were the reason she was here, hiding out in an underground dwelling in the abandoned town of Coober Pedy. The Federation’s Healthy Mind and Wellbeing Agency, the MWA, was after her, and this was the only place on Earth she could think of where she could lay low for a while and buy herself some time while she figured out her next move.

Apart from a couple of old, crusty, cantankerous individuals—hold-outs who wouldn’t ever sell her out to the government—the town was completely deserted. The opals had been mined out long ago, leaving the sun-blasted earth scarred and pockmarked with mineshafts and craters.

Well, nearly all the opals were gone.

Jade knew of a few secret pockets where, with a little skill and knowledge, one could unearth the most precious gems. Just the other day, she’d found a five-carat red opal. Polishing had revealed brilliant fiery shades of crimson.

It was a high-grade opal, extremely rare and valuable. In the past few years, demand for Earth-origin gems had soared, thanks to alien buyers.

Apparently, opal didn’t exist on any other planet in the Universe.

If she found the right buyer, she could get good money for it—not enough to get her out of this predicament, but enough to sustain her here for some time… until she figured out her next move.

She’d already removed her tracking implant—cut it out with a store-bought scalpel; it had hurt like a bitch even though she’d used numbing cream—but if she ventured anywhere too public, there was always a chance they would identify her on the body recognition surveillance systems.

She’d initially thought of escaping off-planet, but now that the Kordolians had taken control of Earth’s orbit, that possibility was looking more and more remote.

Especially if they were anything like him.

Dragek.

Are you real?

If Kordolians were taking over, there was no way she was getting off this planet. Out there, in the cold void of space, how could anyone—especially a human—possibly survive?

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