Ten years later…
The smell of smoke filled her nostrils. Carmen lay slumped over the controls, blood running through her raven-dark hair and into her eyes. Roaring flames closed in from all sides. Embers dropped onto her back with the crackle and hiss of burning flesh. She tried to move, but found her muscles unwilling to obey. Death was coming for her, close enough to breathe down her neck...
Then someone was pulling her out of the wreckage. Carmen caught glimpses of a forest floor as she hung from their shoulder. They carried her away from the crash, away from the flames that were supposed to be her funeral pyre. No! How dare you! But she found herself too weak to cry out, too weak to protest the unjustness of her rescue.
She had no idea how long it had been, how far they had gone, when they finally stopped. But next thing she knew, her body was sinking to the ground like a dull and heavy weight. "She's in bad shape," someone remarked. Their voice sounded faint and far away, as though it were drifting towards her through a dream. It almost sounded like Geordi, but it couldn't be Geordi. She had just watched him die. She had just watched them all die. Now here she lay, so cruelly prevented from joining them.
There was a chirp of a combadge and then someone else spoke. "Do you have a lock on us? The survivor is in need of immediate medical attention."
Carmen's blood ran cold, even as her skin smoldered with flames. She knew that voice, too. "Dad?" she tried to say, but it merely came out as a groan.
"Lie still. Everything's going to be alright," he promised. Mustering all her strength, she cracked her eyes open. And there, looking back at her, was the face that haunted her memories. The face she had wanted more than anything to forget. The face of William T. Riker.
The shock was too great. She shuddered violently and then, as someone answered his page, Carmen found herself plunging into the darkness once more.
A/N: For those who don't know, this has actually been a spin off of my first Star Trek story, "Somewhere Out There." In a sense, it's like a prequel. If you want to find out what happened to Carmen (both before and after the crash), then her story continues there :-). To my readers who have already been following along, I'm so excited to get back into the current storyline. I'll be picking up with the next chapter of "Where the Heart Is" soon. I hope to see you there :-)