Page 1 of Deserted

1 /JAS

I should’ve turnedaround when my camel guide refused to go any farther. In hindsight, that was the first red flag. Not the cracked tablet with radiation warnings scratched in three languages. Not the flickering lights dancing on the sand like a mirage was trying to seduce me with its best nightclub impression. Nope. Just me, Jas Navarro, genius cryptid podcaster-slash-freelance journalist, trudging into a restricted zone in the Sahara like I was auditioning for a Darwin Award.

But curiosity is a hell of a drug. So is ambition. And I was chasing both like a girl on fire.

The desert stretched before me in endless waves of gold, each dune carved by wind into ripples that resembled an ocean frozen in time. My boots sank with each step, leaving behind imprints that were already being erased by the restless sand. Three hours since I’d left the last village. Two since my guide had abandoned me with wild gestures and fervent prayers to Allah.

“Demon lights,” he’d said in broken English, pointing at the horizon where something pulsed beneath the sand. “Bad place. Very bad.”

I’d doubled his payment and promised to return by sunset. He’d laughed in my face.

“No return,” he’d said, patting his camel’s neck before climbing atop it. “Only ghosts return.”

Now, squinting through the afternoon haze, I understood his fear. The air had changed. Thickened. Electric currents raced across my skin like phantom fingers, raising goosebumps despite the blistering heat. My satellite phone had died an hour ago, and my compass spun in lazy circles, the needle twitching like it was having a seizure.

Classic signs of electromagnetic interference. The kind UFO hunters had wet dreams about.

I wiped a sweaty hand across my forehead, squinting through the heat haze toward the barely-there structure I’d spotted two dunes back. It looked like a hunk of ancient metal half-buried in sand, sun-bleached and humming beneath my boots. Definitely not Bedouin. Definitely not in any archaeology database I’d checked.

Which meant jackpot.

My podcast listeners would lose their minds. After three years of chasing legends—Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest, ghost ships in the Bermuda Triangle, the Montauk monster—I’d finally found something that couldn’t be explained away by weather patterns or drunk eyewitnesses. Something otherworldly.

If the anonymous tip that had led me here was right, this wasn’t just a UFO landing site. It was a doorway. A gateway to somewhere else, activated every hundred years by the alignment of stars or electromagnetic fields or whatever cosmic bullshit my source had rambled about.

“The gateway will open soon,” the email had read. “Three days after the winter solstice, when the Pleiades align with the Great Pyramid. Be there or wait another century.”

I’d traced the IP address to a cybercafé in Cairo that had mysteriously burned down the next day. Classic. The localscalled this place Bab al-Jinn—the Door of Spirits. Western explorers who’d ventured too close had disappeared, only to return months later with impossible stories and radiation burns.

All of which made for killer podcast material.

My recorder was already strapped to my backpack, and my GoCam was blinking green. I crouched low, brushing sand off a slab of metal that curved up from the ground like a rib cage. There were symbols etched into it—circles, slashes, alien geometry that didn’t belong on Earth. And the closer I got, the warmer it felt beneath my fingers.

“This is Jasmine Cruz Navarro,” I spoke into my recorder, keeping my voice steady despite the adrenaline pumping through my veins. “December twenty-fourth, approximately fourteen hundred hours. I’m at the coordinates sent by our anonymous source, and I’ve discovered what appears to be?—”

I paused, running my fingers along the grooves of the symbols. They were warm to the touch, almost hot, pulsing with what felt like a heartbeat.

“—what appears to be non-terrestrial technology of unknown origin and purpose. The metal has properties I’ve never encountered before. It’s warm, almost like it’s alive.”

I reached into my pack for my sample kit. A scraping here, a soil sample there—standard procedure for when I found something worth analyzing. But as I leaned closer, my long braid slipped over my shoulder, the tip brushing against the center symbol.

It flashed—a split-second of brilliant green light—and I jerked backward, heart hammering against my ribs.

“Shit,” I hissed, fumbling for my water bottle. My throat suddenly felt like I’d swallowed the Sahara. “Did you see that? Tell me the camera caught that.”

The symbols were glowing now, faint pulses of emerald and gold that reminded me of the Northern Lights I’d photographedin Alaska two years ago. They moved like liquid, flowing from one etching to another in geometric patterns that hurt my eyes to follow.

This was big. Bigger than anything I’d covered before. Governments would kill for this kind of discovery. Hell, if half the conspiracy theories about Area 51 were true, they already had.

This was either a UFO or a very elaborate prank. Either way, I’m getting a bonus.

I took a breath. Reached forward. Touched the center of the glyph.

The world blinked.

No sound. No wind. Just a vacuum suck that yanked the air out of my lungs and the sand out from under me. I screamed—maybe. Or maybe it was just in my head. The light flared around me in gold and green, and then the ground disappeared.

I fell.

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