Antony stepped off his bike with a sour look on his face.

Kendra hung her helmet from the handlebar and took a deep breath. They left the bikes parked by the supply tent and headed toward the caves. The other two hadn’t arrived, having gotten caught up in diagnostics. Or so Bria said.

Kendra elbowed Antony lightly in the back.

“Hey.”

He grunted in reply. “Not in a good mood this morning.”

“Do you want to talk about it or walk it off while I get started?”

He grimaced. “I’m not gonna make you work alone while I mope. It’s Seph. He was bugging me about equipment diagnostics again.”

“Bugging you about them?”

“Well, he asked me if I was done with mine.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t just making conversation? Maybe doing so clumsily.”

“Okay, maybe. I thought Bria might have sent him to check on my progress or something. And it bugs me when he’s pedantic. Case in point, our last lab meeting.” Antony crossed his arms. “I just don’t get him. He keeps trying to talk to me, but then one of us gets snippy at the other.”

Kendra shrugged. “He seemed upset when I saw him this morning. For what it’s worth, I like him a lot when I’ve talked to him without Bria around. He’s an anxious guy. More likely, he wants to connect with you, not micromanage you on Bria’s behalf.”

Antony crossed his arms and then uncrossed them with a wince. He sighed, looking deflated.

“You’re probably right,” he said.

Inside the cavern, three machines surrounded a building near the entrance. Small crystals emerged from a crack in the wall; the machines were sealing it off, printing rock-like material over it. Another machine hovered above the building’s doorway, where Kendra spotted several longer crystals protruding from the stone. The machine lifted one of its flexible metal arms, extending something like a pair of forceps.

Kendra and Antony crept closer, watching from the corner of the next building over. The machine grabbed hold of a crystal, wiggling it back and forth with its tools until it popped off the stone, and then printed a coating for it.

Antony exchanged a glance with Kendra, a frown on his face. “Those crystals weren’t there before. Does this mean they grow overnight? How?”

She shook her head. “I get why they’d remove them from the ruins, but what’s the point of coating them?”

“What if their sensors are picking up on something that we can’t?” he asked. “This is weird.”

A machine rounded the corner. Antony jumped, and Kendra flinched, backing away from it. A second machine followed, crowding around him.

“Hey, he doesn’t like that,” Kendra said, but the machines persisted, one scanning his arm. Another pointed at her leg, but she pushed it out of the way.

Antony stepped back, sweat gathering at his brow. “What if there’s something inside my arm? I don’t want to get sick,” he said.

“I don’t know, Antony. We scan our suits for contagions and toxins and never find anything besides run-of-the-mill bacteria,” Kendra said.

“I want a closer look at those ruins.”

She nodded, and they approached the building with stones growing from its walls. It was a short building with swirling leaves carved into the stone. Crystals emerged from the wall. The blue light of Antony’s scanner glinted off them.

“It’s quartz. Indistinguishable from quartz, anyway. But quartz doesn’t grow from nothing overnight,” he said, jabbing his finger at the wall.

Kendra ducked under a long crystal and nearly tripped over a machine that appeared behind her. The crystals were dark and reflective, a small flash of purple running through them. She leaned closer, peering into them. It was like looking through a darkened window, and she caught a hint of sparkle within them, like stars.

Antony yelped. He clawed at his right arm, undoing the snaps and rolling up the sleeve.

Kendra crouched next to him, shooing the machine beside him out of the way. “Did that machine do something to your arm?”

“I don’t know,” he said, teeth gritted. Small red marks dotted his arm. He tugged at the skin and something black emerged from a tiny wound. Grasping it between his fingers, he pulled on it and slowly removed a thin shard of crystal. He stared at it, eyes wide.

Kendra reached into her pack, retrieving a sample tube and collecting the crystal. It was several inches long and hardly thicker than a toothpick.

She held her scanner up to him. “I’m not picking up on anything inside your arm.”

“What about now?” he asked with a grunt, as he pulled out a second crystal.

“It’s like it doesn’t exist until it’s outside your arm,” she said. “How is that possible?”

The machine floated closer, brandishing its forceps at Antony. He stretched the skin until another shard emerged, and the machine removed it, followed by another handful of crystal fragments. It scanned his arm, and after another minute of searching, it left.

He let out a breath, collapsing against the wall, holding his arm gingerly. Kendra sat back next to him.

“You okay?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You can bet I’m gonna run a medical scan when we get back to the station.”

“Yeah, no question,” she said. “We need to tell the others about this.”

The four of them stood in the brightly lit lab. Bria’s arms were crossed, her mouth a thin line.

“What I am hearing is that Antony had splinters. Likely from the fall you both took. Did you have splinters as well?” Bria asked.

Kendra opened her mouth and closed it. Bria’s tone bordered on patronizing and it caught her speechless. Her gaze flicked to Antony, who stood a few feet off, leaning against the lab bench with his eyes cast downward.

“Yes, after I fell, I picked some shards out of my leg,” Kendra said. “But those were minuscule. Bria, I scanned his arm. It was like these crystals didn’t exist until they were coming out. It made no sense.”

“But the samples you brought back were dust and sand. Hardly unusual in a desert.”

Antony grunted, eying Bria. “Something happened to them on the way back here. Don’t ask me what because I don’t know. They were actual shards when they came out of my arm.”

“Not to mention—those crystals in the ruins popped up overnight. And some of them crumble into dust at the slightest touch,” Kendra said. “You’ve got to admit that’s bizarre, right?”

“I don’t find the mere fact that these crystals are fragile to be alarming.”

Seph stepped forward. “Bria, we know something interfered with our comms when we were near those huge geode pits. Isn’t that concrete enough evidence that we should reconsider … how we’re handling things?”

Her eyes narrowed. “How we are handling things, or how I am handling things, Seph?” Bria said sharply. She turned to Kendra and Antony. “What you’re saying is implausible. What also makes no sense to me is that you allowed machines of unknown technology to extract material from your arm.”

“It’s not like I sought them out and said, ‘Hey, can you use your little tweezers on me?’ They were removing crystals from the ruins and fixated on my arm,” Antony said, brows furrowed.

“Do you need to evacuate?” Bria asked.

“What? No. That’s not the poi—“

“Because if you need to evacuate for any physical or mental reason, that is your prerogative. But I need better evidence to consider calling off this expedition,” Bria said.

“Call off? I never said anything about calling the expedition off, or even evacuating,” Antony said. “I just want you to entertain the idea that there’s something weird here. The possibility of some unknown energy source in the rocks. If you won’t listen to me, then listen to Kendra and Seph.”

Seph waved his hands. “What I was saying about the comms. And the reaction the machines have to the crystals. Not to mention that the machines can disable stasis fields. All this points to technology here that we don’t understand.”

“Isn’t that all the more reason we should study it?” Bria asked. “Yet, the working theory seems to be that there is an unknown energy source that we cannot measure. If we can’t measure it, how can we study it?” She shook her head. “I haven’t seen anything on this expedition that can’t be attributed to nerves.”

“Fine,” Antony said. He turned on his heel and left. Seph glanced between him and Bria and Kendra before following Antony.

Kendra held her hands up at Bria, opening her mouth to speak, but the other woman crossed her arms.

“I can only trust what I can measure,” Bria said. “We are here to explore this place, and hopefully convince the company for future funding. How many places like this will never be explored because we simply don’t have the means?”

“Bria, none of us are suggesting we call off the expedition. I only think we need to be more careful and a bit more open-minded. How much information and technology has been lost since the first spacefaring age? Think about the thousands of years’ worth of scientific study in databases we can’t understand or access.”

“You’re talking about databases. I’m talking about the here and now. I want to do everything I can to learn from this place,” Bria said.

“Bria, I do too.”

Bria rubbed her thumb over her opposite palm. “If there’s nothing urgent, I would prefer to call it a night.”

“Good night,” Kendra said and sighed.

Kendra entered the living area, where Antony and Seph were sitting on the couch. Antony had plainly been running his hands through his hair, and it stuck up in all directions.

“Bria went to bed,” she said.

“Does she think we’re planning a mutiny?” Antony asked.

“I’m not planning a mutiny,” Seph said. “But I wanted to talk to you two, since Bria didn’t listen. It wouldn’t be the first time something strange stared her in the face and she refused to see it.”

“What do you mean?” Antony asked.

He scrubbed his hand down the side of his face. “Something happened a few years back. An accident involving one of her grad students. She didn’t handle it well.”

Kendra nodded to him. “Can you tell us about it?”

Seph let out a shaky breath. “I had just finished a tour on a research vessel and I wasn’t keen on another. Bria got some funding to sponsor an independent researcher in her lab, and she asked me to come work alongside her.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “It was good at first. Then one of her grad students was in an accident. This woman, Iditri, was coming back from a conference when her shuttle crashed on a remote moon. Though, ‘crash’ doesn’t cover it. The shuttle was a wreck of charred metal. A skeleton. How she survived, how she had enough air to breathe or heat to stay alive, I don’t know. But she was the only survivor.”

“I honestly believe it was a miracle.” He paused, looking down at his hands. “Iditri never talked about what happened in great detail, and who could blame her? But from what she said, I started to think she had a deeper experience there. That something out there kept her alive. Whether it was an unknown technology or some sort of organism, I don’t know.”

“I’d believe it,” Antony said.

“Yeah,” Kendra said. “There’s a lot out here we don’t understand.”

Seph nodded. “Certainly. Whatever happened, it motivated Iditri to change the trajectory of her career afterwards. She became more interested in lost knowledge. These days she works with ancient libraries, trying to decipher databases from the first spacefaring age.”

“In any case,” he continued, “Iditri survived the accident, but the experience affected Bria as well. She was nervous about her lab and reacted by hiring the first postdoctoral researcher she interviewed. This woman was a fine researcher, but she was rude and disparaging of research outside traditional academia.”

Antony’s lip curled. “Always charming.”

Seph scoffed. “I know. Bria didn’t do enough to shut down that nonsense, and I hate to admit it, but I fell into a subordinate role. Doing administrative tasks that were not my job to do. It was all in the name of helping Bria, but it was clear that our relationship had soured.”

“It was a surprise when she asked me to come on this expedition,” he continued. “I was no longer working with her then. And yet, she spoke so often of being stressed that I started playing her secretary again. She didn’t make me do anything. But I wanted to help her, and it made things worse.”

He sat back in his seat, exhausted.

Antony tugged at his ear. “So Bria has a history of dismissing reasonable concerns. That’s irritating enough in a lab environment, but it’s dangerous on an expedition.”

“I agree. She might come around, but we’ve got to be careful,” Kendra said.

Seph nodded. “I understand that Bria badly wants to complete this expedition. Yet, she has been preoccupied this entire time.”

He looked at Antony and jumped, letting out a high-pitched noise. “Antony, there’s something black coming out of your ear.”

“What? What is it?” Antony moved his head back and forth.

“It looks like a shard of something,” Seph said. He fidgeted, caught between getting closer and moving farther away. He settled on leaning into Antony’s space and peering into his ear. “I can’t see what it is.”

Antony tilted his head to the side and shook it, a small black fragment falling onto his shirt. He picked it up.

“Oh. This is from my hearing aid.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a case. Using a small tool, he removed a pair of black hearing aids from within his ears. Seph leaned back in again, watching him match up the plastic fragment with the casing of one hearing aid. Antony scowled at it.

“I should complain,” he said. “I didn’t think it was possible for these to fall apart inside my ears.” He dumped everything into one compartment in the case and removed a pair of sleek black devices. These fit in his ears and looped up and around them.

“I’ve seen other people wear those. I always thought they were comms,” Seph said.

“What? Hang on,” Antony said, turning them on. “Alright.”

“I said I always thought those were comms.”

“Most of them are comms, but some are hearing aids too,” Antony said. “Anyway, I have tinnitus and hearing loss from an expedition a while ago—explosion under the research station where I was working. I’ve got tiny implants that tone down the tinnitus and amplify external sound, but they work better with a hearing aid.”

Seph pulled back, his face reddening. “I owe you an apology. I was insensitive earlier. There are a few things that make more sense to me now, but I shouldn’t have needed any explanation in order to handle myself better.”

Antony’s eyebrows quirked up. “I appreciate that. We’re good. You can let me know if my hearing aids squeal or whatever—though my old ones had been acting up since we got here.”

“Do you think they got damaged when we fell?” Kendra asked.

“Makes sense. Though I was getting weird feedback around those crystals even before that.” He gestured at his new hearing aids. “These are more sensitive, and I don’t know what they’ll pick up on.”

“Is that why you wore the other style?” Seph asked.

“No, that’s been out of habit. For a long time, I thought seeing these on my ears every day would remind me too much of Urtica.”

Kendra tilted her head at him. “The megacities? People wear them to cancel out the noise there, yeah?”

Antony nodded. “Yeah, or just to hear the person next to you. Even a hundred miles out, you can’t get away from the dull hum from the cities. I could not leave that place fast enough.”

“I understand that,” Seph said, a pained expression on his face. “Needing to leave.”

“Yeah.” Antony leaned back, resting his head against the couch. “Anyway, that’s done. I got out. And no matter what conclusions Bria jumped to today, I’m not trying to end this expedition early.”

“I’ve got your back,” Kendra said. “Both of you.”

Seph met Antony’s eyes and then hers. “We’ll look out for each other.”