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Loris, colloquially known as Greyscape, was not grey at all. Not from the outside. From the outside, the heavy atmosphere was swirling with surface storms, wild and fascinating as pattern-welded steel, glowing in rich shades of blue.

Eli really hated the color blue.

The bright blue outer skin of Loris filled the entire front window of the Last Chance. He gripped the controls with white knuckles as the ship bucked, expressing displeasure as they descended into the exosphere.

“I know, girl,” he murmured. “I know.”

The feeling of being sucked down, the gravity kicking in and taking control, always made Eli’s stomach uneasy.

“See, this is a really tricky landing,” Ketzal said, sitting back in the co-pilot’s seat. Her hair was yellow today. “Because Loris has what seems to be constant violent storms—“

“Really not a good time for piloting lessons,” Eli said. Calmly. Through clenched teeth. There was a thud and a shudder as Loris’s gravity took a more confident grip of the ship, and they began a rapid descent.

“I can leave,” Breek offered, for the third time. He was standing, keeping a white-knuckled grip on the backs of the two mismatched bucket seats. The look on his face added ‘being thrown up on’ to Eli’s long list of worries.

“No, stay!” Ketzal insisted. “You’ll need to know this someday.”

They were entering the stratosphere. The controls had given up on lurching against Eli’s palms and instead had decided upon a tactic of attempting to jitter free, buzzing against his fingers like a fly angry at having been caught.

“Is it—is it supposed to do that?” Breek’s voice wavered a little as the front of the Last Chance burst into flames.

“Yep. It’ll stop soon,” Ketzal said, waving her hand dismissively. “That’s not the fascinating bit.”

The flames juddered and extinguished, trailing smoke as they continued free-falling into the roiling soup of Loris’s stormy troposphere. The heavy clouds hit them like a fist. Eli winced at the sudden jolt, snapping on the secondary propulsion system and counter-steering rapidly to avoid being sucked into one of the towering thunderheads. Purple lightning crackled in a perfect spiral around them, blindingly bright against the indigo landscape.

Eli’s teeth were set, and he was hoping that the high-pitched squealing was Breek and not the landing gear.

It was probably not the landing gear.

“The really fascinating part is that Loris has a fixed orbit, like Bleachbone,” Ketzal went on, unaffected by the chaos. “But, unlike Bleachbone, it’s too large to be temperature-regulated by its own atmosphere. The starward side is mostly burning desert, and the dark side is all icy wasteland. But there’s a thin strip of landing area that we’ll actually be able to survive.”

It was definitely not the landing gear.

“Ketz,” Eli tried to interject, before a thick buffet of wind tossed the Last Chance to one side. He clenched his teeth, course-correcting as best he could.

“And it’s further complicated by the fact that, since Loris never lost her original atmosphere, there’s a thick layer of stormy hydrogen and helium that we can’t see through at all,” Ketzal continued. The Last Chance executed an unplanned loopty-loop as it broke through the top layer of cloud into a second, darker, and seemingly more turbulent region. More than one alarm was blaring, and Eli couldn’t tell what any of them were for. Lightning flashed above and in front of them, jagged strikes that only missed the ship by a few meters. They had to get out of this, Eli thought. He caught sight of a downward twister.

Perfect.

“Hold on!” He roared, probably interrupting one of Ketzal’s explanations. It was hard to hear anything over the thunder. Warning given, he pointed the ship nose-first into the vortex. It lurched, slamming hard into the side of the twister’s wall. There was a brief moment of feeling like a bug glued to a wall before the storm took hold.

Eli couldn’t hear anything over his own yell as the twister sucked them down.

* * *

On the surface of Loris, all was quiet. There was grey stone, and grey rain, and the scuttling grey things that dug in the rocky surface under the grey sky.

One of them was out in the rain, letting the clear water stream down its rusted shell as it quietly scrabbled and scraped at the rock, tapping and cocking its head to listen, then tapping and listening once more. It had forgotten what it was searching for. It had forgotten many things, as the constant rainwater of Loris seeped into the carefully engineered plating of its skull and diluted the precious fluids there that conducted the artificial synapses of its brain. It had forgotten so many things; but it remembered that it was searching for something. It remembered that that something was deep below the surface of the planet.

So, scrape and tap and listen it did.

When it did finally hear something over the the staccato drumbeat of falling rain, though, it did not come from the ground. It was a distant whine, high up in the sky. The thing stopped and looked up, its dark, lidless eyes unblinking against the rain.

The whine grew closer, louder. The creature’s head swiveled around, tracking the sound, just in time to see the thing that broke through the dark canopy of clouds. It was metallic and boxy, trailing smoke. It banked, wild as a wind-drunk bird, and dipped towards the surface, nearly landing three times before it came to ground with a wild screech of stone and metal, somewhere beyond the thing’s range of vision.

It chittered. This was curious. This was new.

It would tell the others.

* * *

Breek was choking on stomach acid in the nearest disposal chamber to the cockpit, leaning down and breathing hard as he tried to decide whether or not to trust his newly-emptied stomach. So far, the verdict was leaning towards the negative.

“Whoo!” Ketzal’s voice was muffled, but audible. “We’re alive!”

“Are you sure?” Breek questioned under his breath

“Sure am!” Ketzal said, probably responding to something Eli had said, but it made Breek huff a laugh all the same. He winced directly afterwards. Laughing wasn’t a good idea.

“You alright, Breek?” Eli called back, interrupting Breek’s inner argument over whether he should stand up or not.

“Fine!” He shouted. And he was, really—or would be, once he could stop breathing through his nose.

“Come on up, then!” Ketzal said. “We’ve got a whole planet to search!”

A whole planet, Breek thought bleakly. His stomach felt steady enough now, but it was a toss-up as to whether or not he wanted to go look at this new planet. It had been easier, hiding in that incineration bin, to picture Loris as a small globe marked with a large X where all the unimaginable riches lay.

It hadn’t really been until they had gotten close enough to the planet’s surface that the roiling storms blocked out everything else that he’d been forced to rethink that image. It was not a pleasant process. He did not like having all that space between himself and his hopes. In fact, he resented it.

Still. He wasn’t getting any closer by standing alone in a disposal chamber. Soon enough, he would have his share of that treasure, and he would never have to go galavanting across the universe ever again. No desperation, and no galavanting. It was his promise to himself; and it was a promise that he would not break.

He wiped his mouth and straightened his shoulders, letting the door zither shut behind him as he went to rejoin the others.

In the cockpit, the ship had quieted. The only sounds were the drumming of the rain on the window and the quiet murmur of Ketzal and Eli’s conversation.

“So this is Greyscape, huh?” He said, as he entered the cockpit.

Greyscape was a lot—bigger, than Bleachbone. Even with the cloud cover and the falling sheets of rain, it seemed incredibly bright, too, for a planet. Bright, and terrifyingly open. Breek determinedly did not let his heart sink within him.

“How are we gonna find something hidden in all this?” He asked.

“With diligence and hard work,” Ketzal replied, getting up from her seat. “Also, some clues. Excuse me,”

And with that, she squeezed past Breek and left the cockpit. Breek looked at Eli, hoping for some indication as to what that was supposed to mean, but Eli only shrugged. Slowly, one hand at a time, he peeled himself off the controls. Breek watched the process, thinking back to the landing. In his own terror, he’d thought Eli had been calm as Ketzal had seemed.

Today was a day for rethinking things.

Eli got up, giving him a wry look and nodding the way Ketzal had gone.

“Not much to do but follow,” he said.

* * *

Loris was beautiful. It was very wet, but it was beautiful.

Even in the cargo hold, shoving aside crates of tomato-and-chicken mash in order to find the one box that she knew was down here somewhere, Ketzal could still see it. The dark, roiling thunderheads, the thousand neon shades of lightning, the craggy grey rock all shining with the constant pounding rain; it was all there in her head, perfectly captured and yet only serving to sharpen her appetite for more. She’d been to many planets, and they were all amazing in their own way. Loris, though—Loris one was her current favorite.

Finally, she found the box she was looking for. Still wrapped in its protective packaging, stored for years without ever being used.

“There she is,” she heard Eli say, and she looked up to see him and Breek at the top of the stairs that led down into the hold. “See, it’s a small ship,” Eli turned back to explain, a smile quirking his lips, “So no matter how many times she runs off in some random direction, it’s only a twenty-minute search to find her again. Thirty, at most.”

“I don’t run off anywhere!” Ketzal protested, flipping her hair out of her face. Maybe the bright yellow hadn’t been such a good idea; it was a little distracting. “You’re just slow!”

“Hey, now,” Eli said, grinning at her. “I’m an old man. Show some respect.”

For that blatant ridiculousness, she threw a packet of tomato mash at him.

He caught it, laughing, and handed it over his shoulder to Breek, who after a moment of confusion, stuck it in his pocket.

“Alright,” Eli said, coming down the stairs. “What are we doing now?”

“Getting these suits out of storage.” With a grunt, she pulled the box free and scooted it out into open space.

Eli bent down beside her, tapping the box thoughtfully as he read the description written on it.

“The emergency spacewalk suits?”

“Yes.”

Eli cocked his head, squinting at her.

“Not sure if you’ve noticed,” he said, “But we do happen to be planetside, at the moment. We came through the atmosphere a few moments ago. It was that terrifying bit, with all the lightning?”

Ketzal’s shoulders slumped, and she fixed Eli with a look. She wasnt sure what kind of look it was, since it wasn’t one she’d practiced, but it was definitely a look.

“And I’m not sure if you’ve noticed,” she said, “but it’s raining outside, and none of us have any waterproof gear. These will work instead.”

“Ah,” Eli allowed, nodding.

“Plus, they have lamps for when we go underground.”

“Underground?” Eli asked.

“Underground,” Ketzal confirmed, with a grin.

* * *

Breek shrugged his shoulders, testing his range of movement in the heavy rubber suit.

It was clunky and uncomfortable, but to Ketzal’s credit, it was doing a good job of keeping him dry in the driving rain and wind. The surface of Loris was warm, though, and Breek was already sweating into insulation meant to protect wearers against the bitter cold of open space.

“We’re looking for a cave!” Ketzal shouted, her voice cracking loudly over the suits’ dusty inner radio. Breek jumped, fingers scrambling for a volume modulator. He found it, cranking it down just in time for Eli’s voice to come through and not break his eardrums doing so.

“Of course it’s a cave,” Eli said bleakly.

“Why a cave?” Breek asked. He knew Ketzal had already explained, but he’d forgotten to listen—and she never seemed to mind explaining things.

“I’ve been reading up,” Ketzal said. “They’ve actually found some of Ma-Rek’s old secondary stashes—not enough to have been his entire haul, but it’s definitely Ma-Rek’s work. He seemed to prefer underground locations, usually on the side of the planet closest to the Solar System. He was earth-born—there was a psychology paper that talked about how it meant he was always trying to find some kind of way to return home, or something. Whatever it meant to him, though, it was definitely a pattern.”

So, Breek thought. Cave. He could look for a cave. That didn’t sound too hard.

The rain was splattering against his face shield, turning the world into a mysterious mass of blurry shapes and colors, so he fumbled for the latch, swinging it up and away from his face. The warm rain splattered against his face now, splashing into his eyes and making him blink; but he could see a little.

Eli and Ketzal were both standing a few feet away, one of their half-bickering conversations crackling through Breek’s radio. Instead of listening, he started scanning the ground, carefully searching for any rift or opening that could lead into a cave.

The ground was dark and dull—almost black. It was a strange reversal, the light sky with the dark ground. Different from home, he thought, before angrily quashing that thought. Bleachbone had never been home; it had just been the only place he knew. He had spent sixteen years of his life planning to leave it, and that plan had not changed. If anything, it had gotten more solid, more real, now that there was treasure within reach—lost treasure, not even chrome he’d have had to steal or slave for.

He would find the treasure. Get the treasure. And then, enjoy never having to wallow on dangerous, ugly planets like this or Bleachbone ever again.

He was so focused on the ground that he didn’t notice, at first, the thing flickering just on the edge of his vision. It morphed and blinked, a moving light in the corner of his eye, barely there at first, and then an annoyance he was determined to ignore.

It took him a moment to realize that this was an uninhabited planet—and that Ketzal and Eli were behind him. His head snapped up with a jerk.

The thing, whatever it was, might have given one last flicker; or it might have been a trick of the light on the rain. The more he searched for it, the less he was certain he’d seen anything at all.

But he had seen something. Hadn’t he?

He took a cautious step towards where he thought the thing had been.

The line clipped onto his belt snapped, juddering him to a halt. He glanced down at it, frowning, and then looked back towards Ketzal and Eli. Ketzal was still stumbling a little, drawn off-balance by the connecting line, and Eli was steadying her with a hand under her elbow.

“Kid, what on earth are you doing?” Eli’s voice crackled loud and clear through the radio, though it was lost in the wind. “Get back here.”

“Have you found anything?” Ketzal asked, sounding breathless even through the static.

Breek didn’t think that a flicker on the horizon counted as finding something.

“No!” He shouted, and jogged back to within a reasonable distance. He gestured apologetically. “Forgot about the line thing.”

It felt a little like being on a leash, but he didn’t mention that.

“Well, I’m glad we have it,” Ketzal said, grinning at him. “Wouldn’t want to lose you.”

Breek nodded, even though he wasn’t sure if he agreed with the sentiment.

“So, cave.” Ketzal declared, and began walking off, studying the ground as she went. Eli fell into step beside her.

Breek had enough line to let them walk on for a bit before falling in himself. He held back, glancing over his shoulder at the horizon. It was completely still, save for the clouds and the rain.

But he could have sworn he’d seen something.

* * *

Eli had—he thought to his credit—decided to suspend his judgement of Greyscape until they had spent at least ten minutes on its surface.

It had been ten minutes.

He hated it.

It was hot. It was dark. The clouds were so heavy that it might as well have already been a cave for how open and free it felt, and they were currently looking for a way to sink even lower under the surface, piling more weight over their heads.

Just wonderful.

Eli squinted hard, trying to keep his eyes open enough to see without also getting them full of stinging rainwater. It was an impossible dilemma. Warm water ran down his face, and his too-large, too-heavy boots repeatedly stubbed themselves against the uneven rock shelves. Occasionally, he’d forget to watch the line, and it would run out and pull him off-balance, leading to a wild, flailing dance before he could right himself again.

At this rate, they would find a cave in approximately three hundred years. Eli resigned himself to a lifetime of being hungry and rained on.

Beside him, Breek was stumping along equally miserably. Eli was glad to not be alone in his bad mood. Ketzal, with her eternal cheeriness, occasionally felt like sunshine on a funeral.

The boy also kept stopping, glancing over his shoulder. It was making Eli nervous.

“What do you see?” He asked, after the third time. Breek looked at him as though he’d been caught stealing.

“Nothing,” he said. It was less than convincing.

Eli looked back to where the boy had been staring. There was the ship, all but hidden behind the sheets of falling rain, but there nonetheless. His heart cried out against leaving her, even though Ketzal had assured him that the planet was uninhabited.

There was something—a trick of the light? He stopped, frowning, trying to see through the rain. What was that?

“I found it!” Ketzal called, her voice echoing double—through the radio, and the rain-soaked air. It met his ears like a tap on the shoulder, pulling him away from his contemplation of the ship and towards the cave that Ketzal had found.

It had probably been nothing, anyway.

As it turned out, Ketzal’s ‘cave’ was little more than a crevice in the earth, just large enough for someone to squeeze through. It was raised up, protected by a shelf of rock, and unlikely to be flooded, even in the torrential rains. So, it was probably not a drowning death trap.

He could feel the walls closing in, though, just looking at it.

“We’re going in that?” Breek asked from just behind his shoulder. He sounded as excited by the prospect as Eli felt.

Ketzal glanced up at them both.

“I mean, it’s the only way underground we’ve found so far.” She said, reaching into her suit. She pulled out a tiny neon-green square and stuck it on the lip of rock overhanging the cave. It stuck there, clinging with incredible strength, and began to glow with a pulsating light: a marker to keep their place.

She brushed her wet hands uselessly on the soaked space suit, and stood up.

“Whatever Ma-Rek hid here, we’re not going to find it if we don’t look.”

Eli stopped himself on the cusp of saying that maybe, not finding the deranged leavings of a bloodthirsty pirate (even an ancient one) was a good thing. He’d proposed his death trap theory. Several times. Ketzal was determined to be curious. Breek, in his own way, was dead set on it too.

Eli was reminded of his own purpose here. He was here to keep them both safe. So, keep them safe he would, even if they were both utterly insane.

He leaned down, reaching a hand into the crevice. Nothing bit him.

“Well then,” he said, with a resigned sigh. “We might as well get going.”

* * *

Breek scrambled and scraped as he crawled into the cave after Eli. Ketzal sat on her haunches, waiting her turn, bouncing slightly on her heels to slough off some of her impatience. She loved this feeling—the prickling of not-quite-fear that started in her spine and ended in her fingertips. A new planet, a million and one new ideas and mysteries and stories. Maybe even treasure. Who knew what artifacts Ma-Rek had unintentionally preserved? Ancient coinage and art, metalwork and clothing. It was sure to be fascinating.

Finally, it was her turn. She unshouldered her pack and shoved it inside, then got down on her belly, wriggling and twisting to fit into the small space. The rubber suit made unhelpful bumps and rumples that caught on the stone, but soon enough, she was able to see the cave.

It opened out, after the initial lip, into a small, rounded chamber, large enough for Breek and Eli to stand up in. It seemed to be made of a different kind of stone. Unlike the matte grey surface of Loris, this stuff was pitch black and shining, gleaming under their lamps like the center of a giant jewel.

With one final kick, she worked herself free, sprawling into the cave and landing with a thud on the cave floor. Her lamp gave a faintly yellowish beam, making dancing triplicate shadows as it met with the beams from the other two suits.

“Wow,” she said, looking around the cave in awe. “I’ve never seen this type of rock before.”

Eli reached down a hand, helping her to her feet. He looked around the cave too, the bright bluish glow of his lamp enunciating the worry-lines around his eyes. “I’ve never seen this much of it,” he said.

Ketzal swung towards him, curious. “You know what kind of stone this is?”

Eli shrugged.

“We called it waterstone, on Colony 9. Sometimes you’d run into a little vein of it, and it’s not something the mining barons ever wanted, so we got to keep it. If you chipped off a little lump of it and kept it in your canteen, it’d keep your water from going funny. So, waterstone.”

Which was fascinating, really, but—

“Why did you need to keep your water from going funny?” She asked, lean not down to snatch her pack up off the floor. “Aren’t they supposed to keep it filtered?”

Eli huffed, something like amusement flickering over his face. “Well,” he began, but was interrupted.

“Hey!” Breek called. “There’s a tunnel that leads further down! It’s big enough to walk through!”

“Big enough to walk through?” Ketzal asked, huffing as she shouldered the pack, all heavy with climbing gear, She turned to Eli. “There’s no way this wasn’t man-made,” she breathed. “We’re getting close. We have to be.”

“Close to a death trap?”

Ketzal rolled her eyes. “Close to something.”

* * *

Waiting for Ketzal and Eli to start moving, Breek studied the tunnel he’d found. It was long and deep, plunging down into the earth at a pitch that was just this side of dangerous. Far, far down, he could hear something, like a low hum. Air reverberating through the small space, he guessed, like the way the wastes of Bleachbone would sometimes be set to wailing for hours on end.

“Hello,” he called, softly. His own voice came back to him, several times over. Hello! Hello! Hello!

Ketzal came up beside him, bright-eyed. “OOh!” She called. “An echo!”

Echo! Echo! Echo!

Eli came up behind them both, his eyes shut and his mouth in a straighter line than Breek had thought nature ever intended.

“If you could both never do that again,” he said, “I’d really appreciate it.”

“Never again!” Ketzal called.

Again! Again! Again!

Eli sighed.

* * *

Luckily, echoes were not endlessly enthralling. Not even to Ketzal. She stopped with them after the first fifteen minutes, and then, the only things to echo back on them were the sounds of their own footsteps.

The tunnel itself had a ringing kind of hum in it, like air blown over the top of a bottle. It was mournful-sounding. Every once in a while, there was a thud, or a click, like something moving in the shadows. Eli was used to strange noises in tunnels. Most of the time, they meant nothing.

Breek was less steady. He was quiet about it, but every odd, discordant sound made his gaze skitter towards the shadows.

“Hey,” he asked, after one particularly strange series of clicking noises. “Why isn’t there anyone here?”

Ketzal turned at the question, but she had that starry-eyed look on her face that meant she couldn’t pay proper attention to anything, except maybe old artifacts.

“Here, in the caves?” She asked.

“No,” Breek said. “Well—on this planet. It’s habitable, right? So why isn’t anyone here?”

Ketzal shrugged.

“Not all habitable planets get habited,” she said. “They’re discovered, mapped, and forgotten. It happens.”

“So,” Breek said, “There’s not—a reason.”

“Not a sinister one,” Ketzal said. “That I know of, anyway. Stuff like that tends to spread a lot of stories.”

She was being reassuring, but Breek was not being reassured.

“But, like,” he said. “It couldn’t be like in those Beast of Blue 12 movies? Where people have tried to settle and something got them?”

Eli raised both of his eyebrows, and caught Ketzal’s look over Breek’s head.

“What?” Breek asked. “What did I say?”

Eli grinned.

“Kid, you wouldn’t believe us.”

“Wouldn’t believe what?”

“Eli killed the Beast of Blue 12 with an ion laser,” Ketzal said.

“Yeah, sure,” Breek said. “I’m serious. Tell me how we know there isn’t something here.”

“I’m being serious too!” Ketzal protested. “He did! It’s how we met! Eli, tell him.”

“Yep,” Eli confirmed calmly. “It tried to hurt my ship, so I stabbed it right in the eyes.”

“Yeah, sure. Really, though,” Breek said.

“Eli!” Ketzal said. “You’re not helping!”

“Don’t worry, kid,” Eli said. “If anyone had landed and never been heard from again, there’d be stories. They’d have been missed. If it happens more than once, it builds up a legend. There’s no stories about the monster of Greyscape.”

As soon as he was done speaking, every suit’s radio crackled to life with a staticky signal, overloud in the confined space. Eli flinched, reaching for the dial to turn the radio down. The noise was cut, but the voice droned on, a stream of nonsense syllables interspersed with static. The fluctuation was headache-inducing, and Eli shut his radio off. Breek and Ketzal, on their own time, did the same. The voice stopped.

Breek’s face had gone suddenly pale, but Ketzal was almost glowing with excitement.

“It’s a ghost signal,” she said.

“It’s a what?” Breek asked, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

“We’re close to something!”

“Close to what?” Eli asked, but she was already shooting off, going down the tunnel faster than ever. Eli jumped to try and keep up, if only to keep from being dragged by the tag-along line, and Breek broke into a jog to follow him.

At first, Eli didn’t connect the strange reverberation under their tramping feet with any danger. It wasn’t until the ground trembled and the walls of the tunnel shook around them that his stomach plunged and he halted, planting his feet on the stone.

“Ketzal!” Eli called. “Be caref-“

Breek slammed into him from behind, knocking them both over. There was a rumble, and a crash, and a sudden jerk as the line pulled taut around his waist; and then Eli’s mouth was full of dust and the ground gave out beneath him.

* * *

“This,” Breek said, “Is what broken ribs feel like.”

His voice was muffled, coming fuzzily to Eli’s ears. As Eli gained more awareness of his surroundings, he realized that this was because Breek just happened to by lying on top of him.

“Damn your ribs,” Eli growled, into a faceful of space suit. “Get off my head.”

Breek only groaned, so Eli shoved him. Breek continued groaning from a slightly different spot on the vast pile of rubble, his suit’s lamp making a dull vertical beam in the dust-choked air.

“Are you all right?” Eli asked.

“No,” Breek said, but he was already getting to his elbows, so Eli ignored him.

“Ketzal?” He called. “Ketzal!”

“Over here.”

The air was deathly still, the ground uneven with rubble. A hazy beam of yellow light moved, swinging around wildly, and Eli could make out the lumpy shape of Ketzal in her too-large suit. His own lamp, he realized, had been crushed. It was no longer shining.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

“A little dazed, but fine,” she said. “I almost got squished by a giant rock. Are you okay?”

‘I almost got squished’ was not a good thing to hear at the best of times. Right now, it was only adding to Eli’s crushing awareness of everything that could have happened. He unclipped his tag-along line—half of it was underneath the pile of rubble between him and Ketzal.

“I’m stuck,” Ketzal said, sounding small and unnaturally confused, and Eli jumped up, hurrying over. She was trying to tug her line off without properly unclipping it, and blinking down in confusion every time it refused to come loose.

“Here,” Eli said, taking it out of her hands. “Let me. Are you dizzy at all?”

“No. I’m fine.”

He didn’t really know anything about head injuries, except that they made people a little off sometimes. Or a lot off. Or dead.

Heart pounding, he unclipped her line, then held up two fingers.

“How many fingers, Ketz?” He asked, but she was looking straight past him. “Ketzal,” he snapped, worried. “How many fingers?”

She glanced at him briefly, brushing his hand away in the next moment.

“Two. I’m okay, Eli, just a little shaken up. Look,”

Her gaze seemed clear enough. Relieved, Eli followed her gesture.

The dust had settled somewhat, allowing him to see further. They had fallen into a huge chamber. Above them, the hole that had broken in the floor of the tunnel gaped, dull and dark; but beyond that, the cave opened up into a realm of strange, clear light. The light rippled and reflected, shuddering against a dark vaulted ceiling with a life all its own, and the remaining airborne dust was a dark and dreamlike haze, obscuring the source of the light.

Breek had shed his space suit. He was a narrow silhouette against the glow, staring down into the glow and letting it reflect against his face.

“Look at the buildings, Eli,” Ketzal breathed, and Eli followed her vague gesture. Sure enough, past the rippling, glowing light, there were the hints of tall, strange structures, seemingly carved out of the stone walls. “This was a city.”

Eli nodded. He was less fascinated by the buildings, though, than by what, exactly, was causing the eerie light. He stood, helping Ketzal to her feet. She stood steadily enough. Eli started down the faint incline of rock. As the glow grew brighter, he was vaguely aware of Ketzal following along beside him, her lamp creating dull shadows against the chamber walls. When they reached the edge of the stone, she took in a hushed breath.

It was a pool. The water itself was alight, shimmering with the light of something fallen deep into the bottom of the lake. Eli squinted, trying to see.

He couldn’t believe his eyes.

Under the water, there was a pile of chrome larger than the Last Chance herself. Bars and coins and ingots and cups and bowls, pure and untouched in its bed of water.

It glittered. It shone. Light refracted through the pool and off the polished black walls, dancing slightly to some unheard tune, and Eli could feel the light of it on his skin, holding him still as the very stone.

Ketzal let out a little, half-choked giggle, and laid a hand on Eli’s numb shoulder. “We found it.”

* * *

On the surface of Loris, the machines had gathered. They had left their holes and their cubbies, their never-ending tunnels, to crowd around the new member of their company; a huge, boxy, beautiful thing that neither moved nor spoke. It was charred and dented by its dive through the stormy atmosphere, but its bones were unlike anything the machines had seen before, and it carried strange metals alongside familiar ones.

They chittered to one another, marking all its beautiful qualities. They ran dull metal fingers over its dented surface, collecting handfuls of cosmic dust. They tapped its sides, hoping to wake it up, and posed questions with undulating radio waves.

The ship did not move, and it did not answer.

It was dead, they agreed. Dead—but not useless.

The machines exchanged their fingers for lasers and claws, ratchets and pliers, and began to harvest what they could. One of them—it was the fastest with the ratchet, and the strongest with its fingers—was the first to peel away a sheet of travel-worn, dull plating. It came loose with a shriek and a clang, and the thing chittered happily as it skittered away with its prize. The plate dragged behind it, comically large, displaying its chipped paint to the cloud-darkened world above.

The paint formed curling, bright letters. They read: Chance.

This story is continued in Last Chance And The City Of The Undead.

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Enjoy this story?

You’re in luck, my friend! There are many more. Why not delve into one of these?

Jester

Justice And Sandwiches

The Curious Case Of B-712

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