“Watch your step,” Severin says, as the ground dips unexpectedly beneath Ophelia’s feet. “We’re reaching the start of the excavation.”
Finally, finally, they’ve reached the edge of the city ruins. The remains of the buildings are larger, more substantial than she expected; her sense of scale is off.
Ahead of her, broken rectangles cluster together in an uneven half circle, covered in a thinner layer of ice and snow. From the angle of their approach, Ophelia can see that at least three or four stories are visible above the ground on most of the buildings, with probably that many or more beneath the level of the snow.
The ruins loom over her, casting vague shadows on the snow like an unwelcome mat.
The so-called towers are to her right and slightly behind, and it’s like she can feel them pulsing at her back, demanding attention, like a beacon. Probably because they’re the only things around here that aren’t white or gray or some shade of either.
On the other side of the towers, there’s another clutch of ruined buildings, worn tops barely peeking through the drifts of snow. A similar set huddles in front of the distant mountains.
But clearly any work that Pinnacle did in excavation has been focused here—on this closest set of buildings, in particular the central trio that is grouped together, two shorter ones leaning toward a taller one in the center, like grieving family members relying on the strong one.
“They started out here, probably just to be able to get equipment in and the snow out,” Severin says. Now that he points it out, Ophelia can detect the ongoing depression, almost like a pathway in front of them, leading to the targeted buildings.
“Field generators are still in place,” he continues, gesturing toward small devices on tripods, stabbed into the ground at varying intervals along the path they are now following, like a perimeter. “That would have kept the snow away, until they ran out of power. Not enough light to keep the solar panels juiced without help.”
She follows Severin down what’s left of the carved path, and eventually they descend into a larger dug-out space near the buildings, where they are more sheltered from the wind and snow. The structures bobbing in the corner of her helmet-obstructed peripheral vision make her feel like either she’s shrinking or they are unaccountably growing taller. As if she’s that infamous Alice and she’s lost her grip on what’s real and what’s not.
It sends shivers over her skin.
As they pass the first building in the trio, Ophelia can see now that it’s not just leaning but has fallen over. Only the taller building in the center is keeping it upright. The quarried stone exterior is cracked and crumbling, but spikey shards of a glossy, orangish finish cling to it here and there. At ground level—or what passes for it at this point—the curved upper edge of a circular opening disappears into the snow below. The space is dark and alluring, promising mysteries to solve if one were to crawl inside. Until Ophelia is close enough to see that inside that particular opening is nothing but iced-over rubble, apparently from an internal collapse.
The central building, the one that appears to be intact and still standing straight up, is covered in a loose framework of scaffolding, behind which a dozen or so of those same rounded entrances beckon.
This is where Pinnacle set up shop. And where she and Severin are headed, even though the plasti-fab boards and piping that make up the scaffolding look shaky at best.
As Ophelia watches, a gust of wind tears past above them and the uppermost level of the scaffolding sways away from the building.
The thought of being on the fragile structure makes Ophelia’s stomach lurch like she’s falling. Her hands and fingers tingle painfully, as if circulation has been cut off. “Severin,” Ophelia begins.
“Yeah, I saw it,” he responds. “We’ll look for another way.”
“Can’t we just go in down here?” Ophelia gestures to the nearest opening on her left side—dim, snow covered, but on the lowest level of the scaffolding. They wouldn’t even really have to use it so much as crawl across the plasti-fab boards.
Severin shakes his head. “I don’t know if there’s a clear internal path between levels. It looks like they were using the scaffolding for ingress and egress.”
“Everything okay?” Liana asks, her smile uncertain on Ophelia’s helmet screen. As uncertain as the fucking scaffolding they’re probably going to have to climb.
“We’re fine. Just contemplating another way in.” Severin sounds easy, unconcerned, as he strides forward along the building front, looking for something, but Ophelia wonders how much of that is for Liana’s benefit. She’s beginning to suspect that Liana’s concerns about a cave-in or other disastrous outcome for this little adventure might not have been so outlandish. This line item on the mission assignment requires a thorough survey, with visual documentation of the entire excavation site. Montrose is desperate to figure out what Pinnacle was up to when it was here.
“Just come back tomorrow with the drone,” Kate says. Her sharply angled bangs are hanging in her eyes, and she huffs a breath upward to move them. “We don’t need trouble on this one. Liana and I are almost at the towers.”
“Can’t risk it getting tangled up in something we can’t see,” Severin responds, but he sounds distracted. Ophelia can’t quite see him anymore; he’s lost to the snowy background on the far side of the scaffolding, except for a few sharp motions that make him stand out. Whose idea was it to make envirosuits uniformly white, anyway?
“Here,” Severin calls. He steps back into view and waves Ophelia forward.
She makes her way toward him, stepping in his footsteps, or trying to, despite his longer stride.
When she reaches him, he’s standing at the base of the uncovered portion of the building, holding on to a ladder.
No. It is an assemblage of fraying dark green straps formed into a ladderlike structure, dangling from the upper-story window.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says, unable to stop herself.
“It’s probably how they first gained access, working their way down,” Severin says. “We’re lucky they didn’t remove it when they built the scaffold.”
“Lucky,” she repeats.
“It’s perfectly safe,” he says, a hint of exasperation entering his voice. “It’s a portable ladder, probably pulled from their ship kit. Designed to withstand virtually any kind of environmental conditions. For a time, anyway.”
He doesn’t wait for her response but pulls on the ladder, and then even steps onto it with his full weight.
Snow falls from the rounded opening above, but nothing else. But the entire contraption scrapes from side to side just with his movement, let alone the wind.
“See? It’s good.” Severin steps back onto the ground but gives the ladder another tug for good measure. “Let’s go. The snow is coming down faster now.”
The harsh flecks of icy moisture do seem to be clicking against her helmet at a faster rate, that’s true.
“Roger that. Same over here,” Kate adds. “We’re bagging and tagging samples now.”
Ophelia is not afraid of heights, but being out of control? Being attached to wildly chaotic conditions with only the faintest grip on what’s happening around her? She swallows hard, her palms damp with sweat inside her gloves. There’s a limit to how far she’ll go to get a patient to trust her.
Severin arches his eyebrows at Ophelia, looking at her directly through his helmet faceplate. His image does the same through the common channel, so it’s a double dose of disapproval. “I assume that telling you it would be faster and more efficient for you to wait out here is pointless,” he says.
Ophelia immediately feels a rush of returning fury. He thinks she can’t handle it.
“I’ll trade you,” Suresh offers.
Everyone ignores him.
“You shouldn’t go in alone,” Liana pipes in.
“I’m here to help. Let’s go,” Ophelia says, all but daring Severin to take it back.
“After you,” he says, holding the base of the ladder steady with one foot and a hand, waving her forward with the other hand. But she doesn’t miss the self-satisfied smile flickering at the corners of his mouth.
Son of a bitch. She freezes, her foot caught in the first rung of the ladder.
He manipulated her. And well.
She’s not sure which she’s more unsettled by—that she didn’t catch it or that he already seems to know how to effectively do so.
“We didn’t have time to argue, Doctor,” Severin says, when she glares at him. But beneath her irritation, grudging admiration pokes its grumpy head up.
That’s all she has opportunity for, though, on that line of thought. Her entire focus is on gripping the rungs above her, one at a time, and pulling herself up onto the next without losing her balance. Severin’s weight at the bottom helps, but not enough.
When she reaches the opening, she leans her upper body through it and half scrambles, half falls inside, kicking her legs free from the tangle of the second-to-last step.
There is a reason she has an office job. This is not her forte.
She lands on the floor hard enough to jar her teeth. The floor is gritty beneath her palms—not a sensation, obviously, with her suit gloves in the way, but a sound that comes through loud and clear on her external mic. She pushes herself up to her feet to look around, breathless.
Severin joins her in a matter of moments, neatly boosting himself inside.
“It’s empty,” she says, gesturing around herself. The space is essentially a block of rooms within a larger room, crumbled stone piles indicating where walls once stood. The ceiling is cracked and falling in in one corner. More rubble. The two metal stakes—she’s not sure what else to call them—pounded into the stone floor to hold the ladder in place are pretty much it.
It’s not as if she was expecting to walk in and find anything recognizable as furniture or tech—especially as the original residents weren’t human, and how would she even know what she was looking at? But to find nothing but snow, rocks, and a thin layer of fine black grit over everything is disappointing.
He nods. “Upper levels were exposed longer, and I assume Pinnacle took everything, if there was anything left to find. We may have better luck on lower levels. They might not have gotten to all of those before they left.”
Which means more time on the ladder. Fantastic.
Severin turns away from her, and the forward-facing light on the exterior of his helmet brightens. On her helmet screen, she sees his feed switch to indicate recording, with a red flashing circle above the view of the room. They’ll all be able to hear him, but none of the common channel transmissions will interrupt.
“This is Commander Ethan Severin, documenting existing excavation site identified as location of interest number 147B, formerly code-named the New Sistine Chapel in Pinnacle report briefing 113.”
The New Sistine Chapel? Ophelia rolls her eyes. Jesus, Uncle Darwin. Fire the naming department, please.
The bright light turns toward her. “Dr. Ophelia Bray assisting, in a volunteer capacity,” Severin adds.
Her own face, pale, small, and tinted blue in her helmet, appears in the feed. Her brow is furrowed in the image, and she looks unhappy.
Ophelia resists the childish urge to flip Severin and his external helmet cam a very unprofessional finger. Only because she’s sure he’d insist on rerecording—and he’d be right to do so; she doesn’t need to get fired over something so petty and stupid, what is she even thinking?—and she doesn’t want to be here any longer than necessary.
Standing here in the center of this now open space, she shivers, feeling the tiny hairs at the back of her neck rise to attention.
Something about this place just feels … wrong. She’s not even sure why at first.
She turns in a circle, trying to identify the feeling, tuning out Severin’s narration for the recording.
Maybe it’s just that all the nothing here is somehow eerier than finding unidentifiable detritus.
Like, there should be stuff here, signs of former life. Although she knows nothing about the decay rate of whatever materials might have been used for such things on this planet, or how long they would last in these conditions, it still feels as if something’s missing.
No. That’s not it. Not missing.
Hiding.
There’s something—or someone—here. That’s what it feels like. As if she and Severin have just missed someone sweeping through, removing all signs of themselves and anyone else. It’s not a scent left hanging in the air, obviously; even if that were so, she wouldn’t be able to smell it. It’s not even a noise, echoing in the distance. Just a sense of not being alone.
She remembers the figure in the storm earlier, the one she thought was Birch. The one she dismissed as an optical illusion, a trick of the mind. But what if it wasn’t?
“Ready?” Severin asks, at her side suddenly, and Ophelia jumps.
“Yes, right, okay,” she says quickly, to cover. The recording icon is no longer flashing on his feed. He must have paused it. “Back to the ladder?” she asks, trying to sound like she’s been paying attention.
He looks at her oddly. “No, I thought we’d try the stairs.” He gestures toward a doorway on the far side of the room.
“The stairs? There are stairs?”
There are not stairs. However, there are two rows of pegs extending from the wall in what appears to be a corridor of sorts. The pegs are rounded and made of the same stone as the building itself. Actually, the pegs look more like a natural outgrowth of the stone—about a half meter in length and set at regular intervals in a gently descending fashion. Of course, Ophelia’s not even sure if the building/wall is truly stone or if that’s just the closest human analogue. Because stone doesn’t really do that, right? Grow pegs without a seam or some other sign of manufacturing.
Plasti-fab boards have been laid across the lower row of pegs, lashed together and to the pegs themselves to stabilize them. Somewhat.
They shift and creak with every step she takes, despite trying to follow Severin exactly. She finds herself reaching up to grasp the pegs in the row just above her head for extra help with her balance. They are smooth and worn, almost the perfect size for grasping, just slightly too large for her hand and spaced at just the right intervals. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Brachiation. The Lyrians might well have used their arms to transport themselves short distances instead of walking upright. That’s what one of the astro-bio archeologists had hypothesized in the mission briefing. The pegs would certainly support that idea.
The last plasti-fab board lies across the opening to the next level down, making it easy to hop off the pegs to the floor. Ophelia imagines that the Lyrians might have swung themselves over without needing the reassurance of something beneath their feet.
This level is virtually identical to the first one. Emptiness. Rubble. More of the dark grit, like ash but shinier.
It’s the same on the next level down, and the one after that.
They find the bones on the first level beneath the snow line.
It’s darker down here, not even the limited sunlight making it through the blocked openings. Though the Pinnacle team has shoveled out or melted most of the snow in the central room, there are still mounds of the stuff around the edges of the outer wall.
Along with other things.
Ophelia kneels in a corner for a closer look at a pile of what might be fabric remnants and a collapsed chain of rings made of some flexible material, each oval slightly larger than the next. When she gently lifts one edge of the closest ring, with one fingertip, to get an idea of how long the chain might be, of what the contraption might have been, she finds something familiar.
Dull yellowish-white stones, smooth and oddly shaped, exposed in a cracked and tattered leather wrapping.
It’s the fingernails, though—black, flaking, and falling away at the opposite end—that give it away.
A hand, with even the tiniest of bones still in place. Undis- turbed by time, predators, or the weather. Just as if it had been left to deteriorate where it fell, skin and muscle rotting away to this mummy-like state.
Bones, bright white and splintered, poking up from a shattered mess of a hand, red blood and torn flesh. A last-ditch defense to protect the head, the face, but fingers and palm were nothing against the heavy swing of the wrench.
Ophelia stands up fast. “Fuck.”
Severin must register the alarm in her voice, because he doesn’t even bother to shut down the recording or berate her for injecting profanity into it, just cuts across the room.
“There’s, uh, a hand over here.” She points.
He crouches down and gingerly lifts the ring she indicates.
“Is that human? One of Pinnacle’s, I mean?” Her boots grit on the floor as she turns in place, looking around for dried bloodstains, any sign of the chaos. People scrambling for their lives tend to make a mess.
“There’s nothing in the Pinnacle mission report about it,” Severin says with a frown.
“Like that means anything,” she says before she can stop herself.
He looks up at her sharply, but she doesn’t take it back. Seriously, does he expect her to believe that all mission reports are comprehensive collections of fact instead of shaded half-truths to protect the team and the company? She might have thought that once, but if so, this experience with this team and Ava have taught her otherwise.
He frowns. “It doesn’t look quite right. The fingers are too long.” He stretches his gloved hand out above it for comparison. “I don’t think it’s human.”
The common channel crackles abruptly with static, startling them both.
“… return … storm … samples. Copy?” Kate’s voice is broken and fading with interference.
Ophelia realizes then that the images in the corner of her helmet screen are frozen. The common channel is breaking up in the deteriorating weather conditions.
“Come on. We’re running out of time.” Severin stands. “It’s just remains. Been here long before us and will be long after. Pinnacle probably just didn’t see it.”
“Except it’s not just remains. Who leaves a hand behind? It’s been cut off. Look, you can see it.” She points to the blunt edge of the hand, where leathery skin and bone are both severed in a straightish line. Right where the wrist would be on a human. “And that cut does not look fresh, so it’s not like Pinnacle was packaging up the rest of the body and just forgot it.”
Severin glances at her for a moment too long, and Ophelia flushes, as if she’s exposed herself. Dropped her envirosuit and her clothes to bare herself and her metaphoric scars.
“We don’t know their rituals or practices,” he says finally. “But this is documented in our findings now. We’ll leave it for the archeologists, anthropologists, and whoever to work out. Not our job.”
He’s not wrong, and yet Ophelia can’t shake her increasing unease.
Anything that happened here happened a long time ago. It can’t hurt us. But that doesn’t feel as reassuring as it should.
“Let’s try to capture at least one more floor before we have to leave,” Severin says, turning toward the central corridor that runs vertically through the building’s core.
Reluctantly, Ophelia follows him down another set of “stairs.”
But he stops abruptly as soon as he steps off the plasti-fab boards onto the next floor.
Ophelia sees why as soon as she does the same. The walls on the far side are crumbling inward, as if the building is being squeezed like a meal-pak. There is no getting to the next level or any lower in the building, at least not without special equipment.
Next to her, Severin edges forward. Pebbles crumble and clatter somewhere nearby.
“Careful,” she begins. “I think—”
He stiffens abruptly, peering over the far edge into the debris.
Ophelia flinches, throws her hands out for balance, expecting the floor to give way on both of them. But nothing happens. And Severin is still just standing there, staring down at something.
After a moment, she cautiously moves toward him, one step and then another, until she reaches him.
When she looks down to see what he’s seeing, it takes her brain a second to make sense of it, to convert the raw data of parts and pieces into … arms, legs, torsos, skulls.
Bodies. Piled on one another. Sightless eye sockets stare upward at them from above gaping mouths, teeth glinting in their helmet lights. The forms are longer, leaner in desiccation than they must have been in life, all stiffened and dried out. Hair or fur, Ophelia isn’t sure which, or if it matters, strands in varying shades of orangish and white, stir in the air she and Severin have disturbed with their arrival above.
The remains match, more or less, the sketches from Pinnacle’s astro-bio archeologists in the mission brief. The Lyrians are perhaps a little taller than predicted, more muscular, given the broadness of the shoulders. It’s hard to tell with them in this condition.
Ophelia’s gaze lands on a particularly confusing collection of limbs and faces, until her mind finally sorts it out. This is not an aberration, a two-headed being, but a child still clutched to its parent’s chest. The tiny face stares up at her, as if looking for rescue far, far too late.
Maybe she should feel elation, excitement—this is one of the few instances of former intelligent life being found, even as remains. But she can’t. Dread that she can’t even articulate or fathom fills her, like weights pulling her beneath the surface.
“This should have been reported.” Severin’s voice is hoarse.
Reported? Pinnacle should have shouted about it, sending out the news on every streamer channel it could find. But it had not.
The dread in her stomach increases.
“They must have been trapped, in an earthquake maybe?” Severin continues. “If it was an asteroid, then there might have been huge tectonic—”
“No.” Ophelia shakes her head, grim comprehension suddenly filling her. Now, now she understands what her subconscious was trying to tell her a moment ago. “Look. They’re stacked up on one another, not in a group.” She can picture it easily, unfortunately. Moving toward an exit that is no longer an exit, panicked cries. “No one runs toward certain death unless there’s something forcing them to it.” Extraterrestrial or not, there are just some instincts that nearly all species are going to share, assuming evolution is in play—like the overwhelming drive to survive.
Once again she has the sensation that she’s said too much. Severin turns his head to give her another, even more scrutinizing look. But she doesn’t care. Not this time.
“I don’t like this,” she says flatly, expecting him to argue or dismiss her.
“Agreed,” he says with a curt nod. “We’re done here.”
He turns, and they carefully, one at a time, edge their way back onto the plasti-fab boards and begin the climb back up.
Ophelia can feel that prickling sensation on the back of her neck again, that feeling of being watched or not being alone. Because of the bodies? No, that doesn’t seem right. It’s more ephemeral than that. Besides, the Lyrians are dead, gone. This feels more … present than that.
Or it’s something else.
You need to be careful, Ophelia. Paranoia is the first symptom.
She shakes her head roughly to dismiss the thought—her family’s bullshit, not hers. But with every step, she expects the boards to give out under their feet, a series of pegs crumbling, sending them plummeting back down. Or the walls around them to give a mighty groan and finally give in to gravity, burying them beneath tons of debris.
She and Severin make it out, though, to the level above, and then to the next one, without issue.
Severin, however, must feel a similar concern, because rather than leading her back up to the ladder, he heads to the outer wall window/door as soon as they reach a floor above the snow line and pushes through the accumulation of snow to exit.
It forces them to clamber over the unsteady scaffolding on the lowest level—another opportunity for catastrophe, for the entire structure to collapse on their heads. But they make it out unscathed.
When they’re finally standing on the snow-packed ground, away from the building and the shaky scaffolding, in a blinding whirl of icy flecks and wind, Ophelia should feel better. Relieved.
Only she doesn’t. Not entirely. The rock-hard pit of dread in her stomach remains.
They start slogging toward the hab, Severin at her side this time instead of ahead of her. She hopes he knows where he’s going. She can’t see anything, and there’s no orange guide cord this time.
But he moves confidently, as if following a signal she can’t see or hear.
The common channel buzzes intermittently in her ear, but she can’t hear any transmissions and now the only face on her helmet screen is Severin’s.
“I realize this may be against the rules or your personal ethos,” he says a moment later, sounding uncomfortable, formal. “And I respect that, if so.”
Ophelia waits.
“But the team didn’t witness any of … what we found, because of the interference. And I’m not sure that they need to know about it. I’d prefer to keep this to ourselves. For now.”
It doesn’t require much imagination to conjure the varied reactions. Kate would probably be fine, and Birch would be … Birch. But it would worry Liana, who is obviously already struggling. And Ophelia could even see Suresh being unnerved by the development. Death isn’t as funny when you’re the one caught off guard by it.
“No need to inflict additional trauma,” she says. “It’s ancient history, literally.”
He nods, his expression relieved, with a hint of grudging respect. “Thank you.” At least they can agree on this.
But even that doesn’t make the inexplicable dread in her stomach—and now also perched on her shoulders like one of those old-timey stone gargoyles that her grandmother added to more than one of her residences “for the look of it”—go away.