Crash after crash sounded, buildings shattering to the pavement, flames flickering against the starless night sky.

A city destroyed. Demolished. Captured.

The ships buzzed through the air, shining lights over the city set ablaze. The foreigners from the vast regions of outer space, come to take the planet for themselves.

For months they had taken any major cities, ridding them of all human life, and inhabiting them themselves. They seemed to feed on chaos, burning, wrecking, stealing.

Chaos followed whenever they went, and as the population dwindled, fear turned to terror.

But this night, as the city fell to ashes, a child hid in the rubble. Not a human child. No, a child of the terrorists that had taken earth for their own. A little blue ball in the wreckage of where a building had once stood.

A woman, hiding nearby, saw this and rushed to help, mistaking the child for one of her own kind. But she was surprised to see the girl’s grey-blue skin and silvery violet hair, and scales running down her body.

She looked up and faced the woman, gazing with hollow black eyes that seemed empty, though her face crinkled with sadness and fear. The woman stared back in wonder, never having seen one of the creatures up close before.

Slowly, she walked towards the child, crouching so as not to be seen by the spotlights overhead. “Hello dear,” she said carefully, hoping the girl wouldn’t attack. “Are you alright?”

The girl’s lip trembled, and she pulled her knees up to her chest. “They left me. They left me here,” She said in a odd accent, the words sound foreign and strange. The woman kneeled down by the child. “Who left you?” She pointed to the ships circling overhead. “Them?”

She nodded her small blue head, her eyes tearing up. The woman placed a gentle hand on the girl’s knee. “What your name?” She was quiet for a moment. “Zeia,” she said finally. “I’m Myra”, the woman said, shifted to avoid a cluster of flames that had formed by her feet. “We need to find somewhere safe. Will you come with me?”

The girl nodded, placing her little hand uncertainty in Myra’s. “Are they going to hurt us?” She asked, glancing up into the air.

“Hopefully not. We have to be careful.”

Then the woman and alien both headed away, hand in hand, through the chaos. The woman didn’t know how much pain and hurt the girl would cause her. How much destruction. How, long from then, the girl would turn on her, leading to her brutal murder. How, though she was just a child, the girl craved destruction and violence, being born into on evil, vicious race, and could feel no love or empathy.

But for then, together in that awful moment, with the city falling around them, the woman believed that she was doing the right thing, saving the innocent girl from death. But that act, out of the goodness of her hearth, would bring her own demise.