Sixty-six hours.
The wreckage of the alien ship still smoldered across our compound as we pulled survivors from the debris. But it wasn't the twisted metal and shattered crystals that made my hands shake—it was what we found inside.
"They're not aliens," Lyra announced, her voice hollow as she examined one of the ship's former crew members. "They're human. Or they were."
I knelt beside the body she was studying. The features were definitely human, but wrong somehow. The bone structure had been subtly altered, the skull expanded to accommodate additional neural implants that gleamed like silver stars against exposed brain tissue.
"How is that possible?"
"Look at this." She pointed to scarring along the subject's temples. "This is surgical modification, not evolution. Someone took a hum
