Dash and Piper stuck close to the Cloud Leopard flight deck, waiting for communication from their crew down on Infinity.

So far, total radio silence.

Dash stood at the screen and gazed out at the desolate landscape. The lifelessness of the place had a certain beauty. The gray rocks shone in the pale light of the nearest star. The planet had a rainy-day gloom about it that lifted gradually as the starlight peeked over the horizon.

A sunrise in a distant world.

It reminded Dash of a sunrise in the desert, when he and his mom and sister had traveled to the Grand Canyon when he was little. Then, and now, the view made him feel small, but also connected to something bigger than himself. The earth, the air, the universe. Something.

His mom had held his hand that day, to keep him from getting too close to the canyon edge. Now he flexed his empty fingers and fought against the warm memory of that vacation long ago.

It was strange to think of himself so far from home. He didn’t want to dwell on those thoughts. He couldn’t afford to let his mind slip into sadness, nostalgia, or fear. If he ever wanted to make it home again, he had to stay ready and keep the crew on task.

Dash turned away from the view screen.

“They should be checking in with us,” he said.

“Give it time,” Piper answered. “It hasn’t been that long, really. We don’t know what might be going on down there.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about,” Dash informed her.

Piper nodded. “I’m sure they’ll radio in when they can. Or when they need to.” The last bit carried an ominous echo.

“No news is good news?” Dash said wryly, trying for a positive spin.

Piper shrugged. “Something like that.”

Dash turned back to the large screen. Clear sky. The stillness of rock. “Since when has a planet brought us good news?” he mused. Feelings of worry churned around in his belly.

“They’re underground, remember?” Piper said. “Maybe there’s just no signal.”

Maybe. Yet the nagging feeling in Dash’s gut still gnawed at him. “Something doesn’t feel right,” he said. “I should be down there with them.”

Or me, Piper thought, although she knew Dash was speaking out of frustration. “Sometimes being part of the team means watching and waiting,” she said. “This is what they need from us right now.”

“Yeah.” Dash’s tone was flat, the word but a short puff of breath.

Piper was familiar with the frustration of being left behind, and the desire to plunge in and help the team. Such impulsiveness had gotten the best of her on the last planet. This time, she was prepared to stay calm and levelheaded.

Dash came away from the screen, still with a troubled look on his face. He plopped into the seat closest to Piper’s air chair. “Do you think Chris told us everything?”

Piper lowered her gaze. Her lips parted as her mind warred between speaking the truth and keeping the peace. “No, actually, I don’t.”

—

The Saw was headed straight toward Carly and Gabriel, and it was blocking the mouth of the tunnel that led back into the Jackal compound. The eel was so large that their flashlight beams couldn’t illuminate its whole face. Not that they wanted to see its whole face.

“Run!” Carly grabbed Gabriel’s arm as they spun around and dashed deeper into the dark. The Saw chomped and slithered after them.

They ran past the place where Carly had discovered the flower. Soon the cave tunnel split into a Y. They stopped running, uncertain.

“Which way?” Gabriel blurted out. “I haven’t studied the maps yet.”

Carly looked back over her shoulder. As frightening and deadly as the thing behind them was, it wasn’t moving all that fast. Outrunning it might not really be their biggest problem.

“We can’t get lost in here,” Carly said. “If we get mixed up, we might never get back.”

“It’s coming,” Gabriel said.

They couldn’t turn around. There would be no way to get past the Saw. Its massive body nearly filled the width of the tunnel. And it was close now.

“Pick a lane!” Carly cried. “You’re the navigator.”

Gabriel darted into the right-hand arm of the tunnel. “If we turn right at every fork going in, then we’ll know to always turn left on the way back.”

Carly followed. “Will that work?”

Gabriel’s voice echoed in the widening tunnel. “I hope so.”

The Saw took the right-hand turn too.

“Dang,” Gabriel said. “That was some luck.”

“It’s like flipping a coin,” Carly said. “It has to come up in our favor eventually.”

The next right they came to was a smaller side tunnel that must have led to another set of caves. It was pitch-black but for the small beads of their flashlights. It didn’t seem possible that the dark could get any darker, and yet it did. Their lights appeared to shine less and less distance ahead of them.

“No,” Gabriel said, stopping suddenly. Carly bumped into him from behind.

“Go, go,” she urged him.

“Uh…” Gabriel had his hand stretched out in front of him, pressing against a wall of stone. The tunnel was a dead end. The “always turn right” plan had seemed smart a minute ago. Now Gabriel feared he had signed their death warrant.

The Saw had already reached the crossroads behind them. No going back.

“Now what?” Carly asked.

“Hope it doesn’t turn?” Gabriel offered.

“Great.”

They inched backward into the space and waited. There was nothing else to do. They had a fifty-fifty shot of being eaten alive.

The Saw made the right turn, which was, in this case, entirely the wrong turn.

Carly’s stomach practically dropped into her shoes.

They were dead.

They’d failed.

The mission was over.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. Over and over he said it, grasping desperately at the stones as if feeling for some possible exit to materialize. “I’m so sorry, Carly.”

Carly felt the strange flower move against her finger. She shone her flashlight at it. If she was going to die, at least she could take one last look at something pretty. The flower tendrils tightened around her finger. She wasn’t imagining it, was she? They pulled her arm to the side. Repeatedly. Insistently. Tugging.

“Um, there’s something…” She relaxed her hand and let the flower take over. Her arm raised in front of her as if of its own accord. She followed the tugging sensation. The flower was pulling her forward in the tunnel—back toward the Saw!

It took all the courage Carly had to follow it. She felt with her hand along the stone wall until…the wall wasn’t there anymore. Carly nearly stumbled as her hand slid into a gap in the stone. It was barely a foot wide, but deeper than her arm was long. A fissure in the rock.

“Gabe, get over here,” Carly shouted. She waved her flashlight back toward him. He appeared at her side as she pressed herself into the gap. Gabriel smashed himself in behind her.

“Think thin,” Carly whispered.

Up close, the Saw’s gnashing teeth looked like icicles of steel. The Saw bit and snapped at the edges of the tunnel, widening the walls as it moved through. Its cool breath smelled like a cloud of construction-site dust.

“Whoa!” Gabriel yelped as it chewed the rocks right beside his shoulder.

The Saw’s tapered tail slithered past their hiding spot. It chewed its way forward. Soon the tunnel would no longer be a dead end. This was an exact example of how navigation could be impossible down here, Gabriel realized. How many Saws were out there, chewing and changing the tunnels right this minute? Any maps the Jackals had were bound to be outdated within minutes.

Carly and Gabriel squeezed out of the crevice. “Two left turns,” Gabriel recalled. They darted through the tunnels. Everything looked different, coming from the other way. The tunnel actually was different now, Carly knew. The Saw’s chomping path had changed the contours of it.

“We are in so much trouble,” Carly commented as they ran. “We might never get out of here next time.”

“I’m going to handle it,” Gabriel said, trying to hide the nervousness in his voice. He had to solve the tunnels. It was his job.

Luckily for now, the two left turns did the trick. They caught sight of the entrance to the Jackal compound. As they approached, the string of red lights flickered on.

“I think red means stop,” Gabriel said. “Or proceed at your own risk.”

Carly nodded. They’d missed that clue the first time. It wouldn’t happen again.

—

“This is way too dark,” Ravi commented as the Omega crew ventured farther into the tunnel system. “Not cool. Not cool.”

Suddenly a burst of red light lit the darkness ahead of them.

“We must be near the Jackal compound,” Niko commented. “Those lights are not a natural phenomenon.”

“We are in outer space,” Siena reminded him. “We don’t know what ‘natural phenomena’ we might encounter out here.”

They crept closer. The gigantic bulbous lights did appear to be man-made. Creature-made. Handcrafted. Something. Niko wasn’t sure what the right term would be for alien lighting installations.

“Colin says avoid the Jackals,” Niko said.

“Do you see any Jackals?” Ravi countered. “Avoiding them doesn’t mean we can’t take some advantage of their stuff.”

They maneuvered through the corridor faster now that there was better light. They were working blind, otherwise. The map Colin had given them only showed how to access the tunnels from the planet surface. Inside, he’d told them, the tunnel layout was constantly changing. Even the Jackals hadn’t figured out how to properly map the tunnels, though they were forever trying.

Niko spent a minute trying to take one of the lights from the wall. Siena hung by him, while Ravi wandered farther into the darkness.

“Yeah, this is not going to work,” Niko determined. “They’re all plugged in and attached.”

“Not loving this planet so far,” Siena said. “Let’s all hope we have enough extra flashlight batteries to get back out.”

“Hang on,” Ravi said, reappearing suddenly from the black cave. “Forget about the light thing. I found something way better.”

—

Gabriel and Carly returned to the hall of labs and resumed looking for Chris. Rather than retrace their steps, they headed in a different direction, following a string of yellow lights this time. The rooms in this section of the compound did not have glass walls. They were more like the study stations in a library, with carpeted half-height walls enclosing the different sections. The walls did not reach the ceiling, but were too tall to look over.

“Chris!” they shouted, but their voices only echoed off the compound’s eerie walls.

They passed more and more cubicles, still deserted. They walked down either side of the hallway, poking their heads into each cubicle. Most contained a desk and some file cabinets. Very few had any more interesting items.

Carly prodded at her MTB, messaging Chris. “He’s not answering.”

“Maybe we’re too deep,” Gabriel suggested. It still wasn’t working to contact the Cloud Leopard either.

“Or else he’s too far away,” Carly mused.

Gabriel found a neon-yellow-handled flashlight lying on a desk in one room. He brought it into the hall and flicked the switch a couple of times.

“It kinda looks like a black light,” he said. “But it’s broken.”

“There was one of those in the lab with the safe,” Carly said. “It didn’t work either.” Several more of the cubicles had them. None seemed to work.

Gabriel kept his anyway. It gave him something to do with his hands. He felt himself getting fidgety, itching to get on with the mission. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed. It was probably still mid-morning, but between the dim lighting in the compound and the dark of the caves, it no longer felt like daytime.

“I’m getting worried,” Carly said. “If we don’t find Chris soon, we’ll have to continue without him.”

“It’s weird that he just wandered off,” Gabriel agreed. “Do you think he’s okay?”

Carly shrugged. Who ever knew with Chris? This mission might be up to her and Gabriel alone. She had known it the minute Chris vanished—he was still keeping secrets. He had his own agenda, and Carly wasn’t sure which priority would come first for him—the Voyager team’s interests or his own mysterious intentions. Carly wanted to trust him—they had to! But it was hard when he was acting suspiciously.

At the end of the last row of cubicles was a large office. Carly’s gaze zeroed in on a clear glass cabinet with stacked trays of syringes. They were all full, capped for individual use, and ready for injection. The glass doors had the slanted writing of the Jackal language etched on them.

“Ooh, interesting.” Carly approached the cabinet and raised her MTB to access the translator.

Gabriel set the Jackal flashlight down on the desk. His hand brushed against the top. “Whoa.” The bulb had grown warm to the touch. It didn’t look like it was on, but something was clearly happening. An idea lit up in his mind—one that had been slowly heating along with that lightbulb.

“I wonder if…I’ll be right back,” Gabriel said.

“Where—” Carly started, but Gabriel was long gone into the hallway. She rolled her eyes.

Carly put the translator on to scan the words and translate them. She watched her wrist as the images scattered and turned from Jackal to English. Carly grinned excitedly as the translation came up.

Gabriel darted back into the room. “Hey, Carly, I have to show you what I found,” he said.

“Whatever it is, this is better,” she answered. “It’s an anti-Stinger serum!”

“Excellent,” Gabriel said. He rushed up beside her, and they opened the cabinet. “We’d better grab some of this for the road.”

Carly reached in to extract a few vials of the serum.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” said a voice behind them.