1. Chapter 1

Multicolored lights flickered on screens. Monitors beeped, and the particle field swirled in reddish hues, looking menacing and fascinating at once.

"Do you think anybody will ever work here again?" I asked Eloise, my seventy-year-old coworker. She had worked longer at Interplanetary Communications than I had been alive.

She stopped mopping to cough into her hand before she answered, "They haven't in eight years."

Eight years, I thought despondently. This was my first week down here, cleaning the lab that housed The Porta , a portal to another world, another planet. I found it hard to believe that nobody had tried to go through in such a long time. What I wouldn't give for a chance to be the next person there. It had been my dream since the news had announced the invention of the portal ten years ago. Longingly, I stared at the red swirling fog; my feet itched to move forward, step through it, and see Hope One myself.

"Give me a hand here; will you?" Eloise called, pushing at the bucket of dirty water with her foot.

"I'm too old for this," she complained.

"Sure." I forced some enthusiasm into my voice. Eloise, despite her advanced age, was fully capable of dumping the water and replacing it with clean water herself. Hell, at nearly six feet, she outweighed me by probably a hundred pounds and could have taken me down as easily as she could have lifted and dumped the rolling bucket. But she loved playing the old-lady card, especially with me, since I never called her out on it.

I rolled the bucket down the hallway until I reached the restroom, where I heaved and cursed and sweated to dump the water into the toilet. I watched the dirt swirl down the pipe and remembered my mother telling me to flush my dreams down the drain. She called me a starry-eyed dreamer . "They'll never allow the likes of us on Hope One," she chided whenever I brought up my hopes.

I was fifteen when Project Wormhole—as it was officially called—had gone live, and I hadn't been able to stop fantasizing about it since. I had dreamed of being one of the first settlers on Hope One for ten years.

I was glad I hadn't listened to her. It had taken me years, but finally, finally, I had landed a job here. Even if it was only a lowly cleaning job, who cared? I was here. And tonight, I was in the lab housing The Portal !

I added cleaning product and rolled the bucket back to the lab, where Eloise sat on one of the chairs, chewing on a sandwich.

"All that money," she tsked, staring at the red fog swirling inside the portal—also called a particle field by the smarter people who worked here. "Look at your paycheck next time and count all the taxes they're stealing from us and then take in this useless thing that we paid for with our sweat."

I looked at it, but I couldn't feel the aversion she did. For me, it represented opportunity; for her, it was another failed tax-dollar project.

"I thought Interplanetary Communications paid for it." I dared to argue. Interplanetary Communications was a company owned by Doctor Carl Weidenhof, a private company as far as I knew.

"Bah." She spat a seed from her bread to the floor, and I wiped mechanically over it, picking it up with the mop. "Those rich folk know how to squeeze the government's tit to milk out grants for their projects."

I didn't think she was done yet, so I waited as she sipped from her Coke. "A grant, hah!" She laughed mirthlessly. "Making it sound as if they invested a thousand bucks, when in truth it's millions, probably billions."

I didn't point out that a grand, as in slang for a thousand dollars, was different from a government grant, knowing the finer workings would be lost on her.

"And now they want to dismantle the whole thing," she continued, while I stared into the red swirling fog that seemed to call to me, as sadness filled my heart. Maybe I should have listened to my mom and flushed my dream down the toilet. After all, it seemed she had been right, though for different reasons. It was still breaking my heart, though.

"All we got is a few pictures on the internet," Eloise kept raging, balling her sandwich wrapper.

The few pictures on the internet had been a lonely teenage girl's only dream. They were few and far between, but that didn't matter to me. I could have sat there for hours, just staring at one and always seeing something new. The plants, the rocks, the very ground of Hope One were so different, so alien.

She rose and dumped the wrapper into a trashcan. Picking up a spray bottle, she began spraying and wiping down monitors while I finished the mopping.

"Well, they didn't know they wouldn't be able to send drones and robots," I threw in, defending Interplanetary Communications automatically as I had always done. Arguing with Eloise was like arguing with my mom. The two would have been best friends. My mom had hated Project Wormhole as much as Eloise seemed to do, even for similar reasons.

Eloise was pissed because taxpayer money had been wasted , and my mom because she would have rather seen this money invested into the failing school system. As a teacher, she had been underpaid and would never have been able to afford to send me to college. She had hated that I would have to work and go to night classes just like she had done.

But I didn't mind .

Especially now that I had gotten this job and worked nights. That left me free to take a college class whenever I had saved enough money to pay for one.

"That's exactly my point." Eloise wiped down harder on a monitor, making me worry she might break the glass. "They didn't know shit. But they did know how to spend all our hard-earned money."

Drones and robots disintegrated minutes after stepping through the portal onto Hope One. Nothing metallic survived the planet's atmosphere. One robot had barely held on long enough to transmit that the air on the other side was breathable, though, and another to read Hope One's gravity, which was similar to ours.

After I finished mopping, I grabbed a rag and spray to clean the fifteen pictures on the wall. They represented fifteen brave men who had given their lives stepping through the portal. None of them had ever come back.

"What a waste."

I jumped. I hadn't realized Eloise had walked up next to me. "All these men… what a waste of life. What a waste of money."

I polished Lieutenant Robert Franklin's face, wondering what he had seen. If he was dead or alive. Nobody knew for sure what had happened to all these men. They had just disappeared from view. They had stepped through the portal and away from the limited view it allowed, and that was it.

"I, for one, will be happy if they shut this whole thing down tomorrow. Nothing but ghosts here. Mark my words, girl."

I moved to the next picture, Captain Kirk Pictus .

Fifteen men, fifteen more reasons why they would probably cut funding tomorrow. A big meeting would be held here in the morning, which was the reason for Eloise and me meticulously cleaning tonight. It all needed to be bright and shiny as if that would make the government officials decide to keep financing what the press now called the money pit of the century .

"I can't stand this any longer." Eloise threw her bottle of spray into the container holding our supplies so hard it startled me. "I'm gonna go have a smoke."

Without waiting for my reply, she exited the lab. Seventy years old , I mused. According to her, she had been smoking for sixty years, was even proud of it. Look at me, smoking for sixty years and healthy as an ox .

Healthy as an ox, except for her hacking cough. It wasn't as bad as my mom's, though. She had died of lung cancer without ever so much as inhaling one drag of a cigarette. Go figure, I thought darkly. Life and fairness; they just didn't seem to get along.

I moved from picture to picture until I came to the last one, Doctor Matthew Bauer. I stared into a pair of soulful brown eyes, willing him to tell me what had happened to him. Of course, he stayed quiet.

I took a seat on one of the chairs, knowing Eloise wouldn't be back tonight. She had done this before, saying she was going to have a smoke, and when I went in search of her an hour later, I found her asleep in the waiting area, relying on me to get our work done. I leaned back and took a drink from my water bottle, staring at the portal's open cylinder commanding the room .

Tomorrow , all my dreams might be shut down, I thought darkly.

My eyes moved to the tantalizing buttons on the control panel embedded in the desk I sat next to. They were labeled activate and deactivate. And for anybody who hadn't paid attention, another white label was stuck in between the buttons. FOG .

It would be so easy to push deactivate, I mused. The fog would disappear, and I would catch a real glimpse of Hope One. It would be so simple. Would anybody even know? Was it worth risking my job for? I had seen pictures of the surrounding area so many times that I knew the landscape by heart. Still , my inner self lured, this would be different. You would see it live. You would be righ t there . What stopped me was the knowledge of what I would do next. Consequences be damned; I would step through that portal and go to Hope One. Chances of me dying there were pretty high, but if they closed the portal tomorrow, they would take away the only dream I had ever had.

What did I have to lose? It wasn't like anybody would mourn me. My mom was dead, I was an only child, and my dad had long been in the wind. I knew his name, but we had never had any contact. It had always just been mom and me against the rest of the world.

So why not take that one step that would change the course of my life? Or end it? Either way, at least I would be able to say I had lived. I had a dream, and I followed it.

Lost in thought, I stared at the swirling fog so long that, after a while, I thought I saw a figure move inside in it. Curiously, I narrowed my eyes to make it out better, and as the form solidified, my heart began to beat harder.

This wasn't my imagination playing tricks on me; there was something in the fog—a human-like shape.

What if it is one of the lost explorers returning ? My mind shot at me.

I jumped off the chair with such force that it rolled back, hitting one of the consoles, but I didn't pay it any attention; my focus was only on the form in the fog.

"Hello?" I called out tentatively, noticing how my voice shook.

A hand came through the swirls, palms up, orange-reddish in color, and I jumped back. My heart pounded so hard inside my chest, causing my blood to rush too fast to form a coherent thought. Could that person just simply step through? Could they see me?

The hand retreated. N onono, come back , my mind screamed.

I still stood right next to the console with the buttons. My hand was already hovering over deactivate . When had it reached for it? It shook just inches above it. This was it. If I pressed it, I might save one of the explorers who had returned after experiencing God knows what and having been gone for years. Or I might let somebody through who meant harm; I might literally open the gates to hell.

My mind, however, clung to one thought, they won't shut the project down if whoever is on the other side steps through .

Determined, I pressed my forefinger to the green button and stiffened in anticipation of an alarm ringing out, but nothing happened. Only, the fog lessened in intensity until it dissipated. Slowly, the form standing inside the portal took on shape, and I swallowed. He looked human enough, except that his skin was the color of a deep red ochre, the same as his hair and slight beard, only darker.

I tried to rationalize that maybe the red fog had discolored him, because otherwise he looked human enough, as long as one could overlook the way his naked chest and arms looked to be covered in scales He displayed very large, thick arms and a very wide, perfectly sculpted chest.

His pants, however, were black, a sure sign that no discoloration from the fog had taken place.

And his eyes, good God, no human has eyes like that .

I swallowed and held up my hand in a universal sign of peace or surrender or maybe to ward him off because he looked utterly terrifying with his glowing dark orange eyes. In its center was a reptilian-slit pupil, dark green in color.

His features were hard and angry, his lips pressed into a thin line, further indication of him not being happy to be here.

"Hello?" I squawked, unsure of what to do while my brain whispered, R un, Gwyn; run .

Run where, though? The exit was on the other side of the room. I would have to get past this… this… man first.

My eyes returned to his naked torso, his very muscled torso. I had never been the type to swoon over a man's body, but this guy? I was sure he could have broken my neck using one hand or maybe just a few fingers without breaking a sweat .

Now that thought sobered me, causing a tremble to move through me.

He lifted his palm in imitation of my gesture and took a step forward. With a pounding heart, I also took a step forward, wondering why my knees hadn't given out yet. They were shaky enough.

I couldn't take my eyes off him; his gaze pulled me in as if he were a king cobra hypnotizing me.

Suddenly, his pose relaxed some; even his slitted pupils widened like a camera lens.

"You are a gallis." It was a statement, not a question. spoken with a slight accent I couldn't place, and how the fuck did he speak English?

"Um, yes." I licked my dry lips, my palms hovering in the air like his, waiting to meet each other. I should have been concerned; this man definitely wasn't a lost explorer; he was an alien coming from Hope One. And if my eyes weren't betraying me, a barbarian at that. Because who else would run around bare-chested, carrying a wicked-looking stone axe on one hip and an even more wicked-looking polished, serrated stone knife on the other? Everything about him looked just like the barbarians from the history book I had read for one of my classes.

Easy Gwyn, don't rush to conclusions , my mind warned, but everything inside me told me that this man was a barbarian. I swallowed at the idea of him pulling me over his shoulder and carrying me back through the wormhole, back to Hope One.

My stomach fluttered pleasantly at the idea. I didn't even consider what he could do to me. That he could take me against my will—because… I wasn't that unwilling despite not knowing the first thing about him, other than that he was an alien!

He could have come here to cut me open as a sacrifice or eat me. None of these gruesome images daunted me, though. There was something in his eyes as they took me in—filled with something almost akin to wonder—that held an unspoken promise that he would never harm me.

Who was he? Why was he here? Why now after ten years of nothing? Did Interplanetary Communications know about his species' existence? No word of alien lifeforms had ever spread to the public. But there had to have been if he was here, right? I tried to swallow my fear down and the fact that I had opened this gate. Was he a lonely nomad who had stumbled upon this gate by accident? After ten years? Get a grip, Gwyn .

An ice-cold hand reached for my heart when I realized that Interplanetary Communications must have lied to us. And the only reason that I could think of for them doing so was to cover up hostile aliens.