Kendra froze and stared at the pile of debris on the floor. A few feet away, Bria let out a rattling breath. Antony stood rooted in place, face blank. His right arm was gone, crumbled into sand and dust.

Seph was the first to move.

He guided Antony to a chair and crouched beside him, scanning what remained of his arm, starting at his shoulder and moving down. “Tell me how you feel right now,” he said. “Any pain, anything?”

“I—I don’t know.” Antony gingerly lifted his sleeve. Midway down his biceps, his arm looked as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to a statue.

Kendra knelt to scan the crumbled remnants on the floor. “Structurally, this material is indistinguishable from clay and rock.” She caught Antony’s eye, but his face was unreadable.

“I don’t understand,” Seph said. “Above this break, the tissue is normal. At the break, the tissue has been completely transformed. We should verify with the medical-grade scanner; we’ll get detailed baseline scans to determine whether this is spreading.”

Antony touched the scruff of his beard, his eyes unfocused.

“We’re going to figure this out, okay?” Seph said.

“Yeah.”

They set him up in the living area, where he sat perched on the edge of the couch, covered in sensors feeding into medical monitors. Aside from a racing heart, however, his vitals were normal. Kendra took a seat next to him, but his gaze remained fixed on the floor. As the minutes passed, his heartbeat slowed, and the scanners held no further information about what had happened.

After an hour, his vitals remained normal.

Evening came, and Kendra paced the lab. Bria sat in the office chair nearby, hugging her arms to her chest. They had examined the samples from Antony’s arm and found nothing remarkable—nothing suggesting that the rock and sand had ever been living tissue.

Seph hurried into the room, his hair riddled with cowlicks as though he’d been running his fingers through it. He laid his tablet on the bench and hung his head. “I sent the scans we took of Antony’s arm to the closest medical station. They don’t know. They said there’s no evidence they see of infection, nothing at all that would, you know, cause someone’s arm to break off.” He let out a short, near hysterical laugh.

“Are they sending an evacuation team?” Kendra asked.

“Yeah. They’re sending a ship to pick Antony up.” He shook his head, patting down his hair. “It was hard to reach anyone with that satellite. I put in multiple requests for it to be serviced ages ago, but the company who owns it kept stating its ‘diagnostics are within parameters,’” Seph said, making quotes with his fingers. He scowled. “They’d say the same thing if it crashed and left behind a smoldering pile of metal.”

Kendra folded her arms and shifted her weight back and forth. “How long until the ship gets here?”

“They contacted someone passing through nearby, but it’ll still be twenty-four hours.”

The chair creaked as Bria stood, advancing wearily toward them. “This expedition is over,” she said. “Once the med evac team sees Antony, I can’t imagine they’ll recommend we stay here. Leaving is the best course of action.”

Surprised, Kendra searched her face and saw only exhaustion there. It was the only reasonable conclusion, but she hadn’t expected to hear Bria say it.

Seph’s eyes widened as well. He opened his mouth and after a long moment, he spoke. “Yeah. The expedition is off. But I can’t stop thinking—I don’t want to leave here without a real, intact sample of those crystals. Those are what got into Antony’s arm to begin with, right? We never tried isolating them in a stasis field.”

“We could ask the med evac team to go back for a sample,” Bria said weakly.

Seph shook his head. “Bria, you know they won’t do that. They evacuate people. Anything outside that is at their discretion. They’d bag up a sample if there were one here, but they won’t fly out to an unstable area and excavate anything.”

Bria sank back against the bench, her shoulders drooping. Her hair hung down limp around her shoulders, still damp. She had disappeared for some time, returning with her hair wet and skin red, scrubbed under near-scalding water from the looks of it.

“Any samples we collected using normal methods didn’t survive the trip back here,” Kendra said. “If we collect a good sample, they have a better chance of treating Antony.”

“And not to cause undue alarm, but both you and he fell into that crystal pit,” Seph said. “And I breathed in a ton of dust from that cave today; our suits aren’t that protective. I’m not asking either of you to come with, but please, let me try. I’ll use the stasis field generators to keep them intact, keep them from affecting anything else.”

“You aren’t going alone, Seph,” Kendra said. “I’ll come too.”

“Of course I’ll come,” Bria said, her voice wavering. She clasped her hands against her chest; they were shaking.

Kendra inclined her head toward Bria. “Are you doing okay?”

She stared at her hands. “I wasn’t much help today. I should have listened to you and Antony earlier. What was wrong with me?” Bria hung her head. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t I listen?”

Kendra crossed the few feet between them and rested her hand on Bria’s shoulder. “This is beyond anything we expected. I wish you would have given us the benefit of the doubt, but none of us had evidence that this could happen.”

Bria exhaled a shaky breath. “I’m going to relay what we’ve said to Antony. It’s the least I can do.”

Communication from the medical station tapered off, and in the absence of further updates, Antony flatly told the others to rest.

Kendra slept poorly. When she dozed off, memories from her last expedition entered her dreams. She dreamt of cloudy, gray-green water and thick glass separating her from the depths where vague shapes moved, drawing nearer only to vanish again. The glass window was cold under her hand and as each moment passed, she expected it would break.

It didn’t.

Kendra gasped as she woke. Pulling on a sweatshirt and socks, she crawled out of bed and entered the common area. The lights were low, and Antony sat on the couch, wrapped in a blanket.

“If it’d help, I could scan your arm again,” Seph said.

Antony thumped his head against the back of the couch. “You did it ten minutes ago. And besides, I’ve got wires all over me. I’m just freaked out.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey Kendra,” Antony said.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Not at all,” Seph said. “I haven’t been able to sleep. Antony hasn’t either, and I was hoping maybe I could bore him to sleep.”

Antony snorted. “You definitely were not boring me.”

“In any case, I think I will try again to get some sleep or at least rest my eyes.” Seph stood, smoothing the fabric of his pajamas. “Goodnight, to the both of you.”

“Night, Seph. Thanks for staying up with me,” Antony said.

Seph nodded, giving him a tight smile. He waved as he headed down the dark hallway to his room.

Kendra sat beside Antony on the couch. “Well, I’m happy to keep you company. You sure you don’t want to go into stasis?”

Antony shook his head. “No. I’m afraid if I go into stasis, I won’t come out. Anyway, we’ve got everything rigged to send me into stasis if my vitals change or anything else … happens to the tissue composition of my arm.”

“Yeah, I understand. How long was Seph here?”

“A while. Bria sat up with me, although she seemed off. Nervous. Then Seph told her to sleep, and he stayed up with me. We talked a long time.”

“Was it good?”

He quirked a smile. “Yeah, it was nice. He is so anxious and awkward and freaked out, maybe more than I am now because I mostly feel numb. But he was good.” An unreadable mix of emotions passed over his face. “So, you’re going out to the ruins tomorrow?”

“Are you alright with that? With us going back for a sample?” she asked.

“I understand the reasoning,” he said. Antony’s eye flicked to what was left of his arm, and he grimaced. “Just be careful, okay?”

“We will. And then all of us are leaving this planet. Too bad they probably won’t let us room together on the medical station.”

“Not sick of me yet?”

“Course not. I’m glad we’ve been roommates here—I didn’t realize how much I missed having another person in the room,” she said.

Antony smiled, his shoulders relaxing by a fraction. “Did your husband snore?”

“A little. But I found it nice to have someone nearby. Comforting.”

“I’ve never had a long-term relationship with anyone,” Antony said, his brows furrowing. “Short term, sure. Never lasted long enough to get comfortable. I was always the one who messed it up.”

Kendra scoffed, pulling her feet up onto the couch and looking at him with a mock-serious expression. “I don’t believe that. I bet at least one of your partners messed up, too.”

He huffed, eying her sidelong. “Maybe you’re right.”

They sat in companionable silence until Kendra’s eyes drooped and she felt herself nodding off. She blinked, sitting up.

“You can sleep if you want,” Antony said. “Take some blanket.”

“Yeah,” she said, curling up and pulling the blanket over her. She rested her head on the pillow and closed her eyes.

Kendra, Bria, and Seph neared the ruins in the early morning. The full moons cast an eerie glow over the sand as the sky burned reddish-orange with the sunrise.

“We need to be careful,” Bria said, parking her bike in the shadow of the plateau. “The ground may be unstable.”

The rover pulled up beside Bria, and Seph’s voice rang out over the comms. “Antony, can you hear us from here?”

The comms crackled, and Antony yawned loudly. “What is it? I was sleeping.”

Seph clapped his hand to his mouth. “Oh shoot, I’m sorry!”

Antony gave a short laugh. “I’m kidding; I haven’t been able to sleep.”

“Right, we wanted to tell you we reached the ruins,” Seph said.

“Are you feeling okay, Antony?” Kendra asked.

“Yeah, more or less.”

Bria glanced between Kendra and Seph. “Listen, we’ll collect samples of those crystals and head back afterward.”

“We’ll be back as soon as we can, alright?” Kendra said.

“I know,” Antony replied. “I’ll see you later. And thank you for doing this for me.”

“Of course, Antony,” Kendra said.

They approached the location of the first set of caverns they had visited within the plateau. The hole where they had seen the Asteracean building was even wider than before, and sand cascaded into it. It remained too difficult to descend into the cavern through the hole, so they headed to the entrance farther up the cliffs. With some maneuvering, Seph steered the rover on the path up the stone steps and into the tunnel. Inside the cave, more light streamed in through the cracks above. The rover hummed, its wheels crunching against the sand. Kendra and Bria walked beside it until they returned to the cavern with the pit of crystals.

Seph frowned as he surveyed the dimly lit cavern. “Let’s get this done,” he said. “Bria, do you want to calibrate the stasis field generators?”

“Yeah, will do.”

Kendra crossed the chamber, scouting the area for crystal samples outside of the pit. She reached the wall. The ground had shifted, and she braced her hand against the stone as she stepped over a fissure.

There was a glint of light.

Near her gloved hand was a small patch of crystals, each only inches long. They glinted with purple light, and as she touched the edge of one, it crumbled.

Unbidden, an image of her husband entered her mind. They were at the lake with his parents. Jerome sat out on the dock and fished through the morning, while Kendra caught a couple of fish in the first hour before boredom set in. She wandered down the beach and found a rock to sit on and watch the lake. Tall, purple seaweed floated and swayed in the water, and she put her hand in, watching the plants flow around her fingers.

Kendra pulled her hand away from the cavern wall. She returned to Seph, who scowled at his tablet. “This darn thing is taking so long. It’s been stuck at 79% for a full minute.”

“Found some crystal clusters nearby. They look like the active sort,” she said.

“Right, let’s get samples from those,” Seph said. He held up a sample collection bottle with the metal probes of a miniature stasis field generator attached to it. Holding the bottle over the crystal cluster, he turned on the generator, and it buzzed.

Using his laser, he cut the ends of the crystals away from the wall and capped the bottle, leaving them floating, suspended inside.

“That’s one,” Kendra said as they walked back to the rover.

“Hey,” Bria said. “I’ve got two more samples.”

“Good.” Kendra tapped at her tablet. A slew of warnings popped up and overtook her screen. “I’m getting some weird readings; might be seismic activity,” she said.

Bria braced her hand against the door of the rover as the floor shook. “It feels like there’s something coming from the desert. Maybe from the other ruins.”

Kendra lurched forward and caught herself as a tremor shook the cave. “That came from nearby.”

A sharp crack rang out and dust billowed toward them. It came from the adjacent caverns, where crumbling rock from the ceiling piled up in heaps. Seph jogged across the room the moment the shaking stopped. After the air was clear of dust, he stood in front of the cave entrance. Rocks covered the passageway.

“It’ll take hours to dig out this way,” he said, the frustration evident in his stiff shoulders and clenched fists.

Bria ran toward them, waving. “Look here, you two! Another passage opened.”

There was a jagged break in the wall about two feet apart. The edges of the wall crumbled, bits of plaster still falling onto the ground.

“Another fake wall,” Seph said. With a click, Antony’s drone detached from its base and flew through the gap, scanning the tunnel before them. The tunnel was neat and square, not natural. “There’s a breeze; fresh air is coming from somewhere. The passage looks big and clear of rubble. Do you want to chance it?”

Kendra and Bria exchanged a glance, and both nodded.

“Based on the length and direction, it likely leads to the main cavern, perhaps the lower area,” Bria said.

“Okay,” Seph said and used his laser to widen the gap enough for the rover to pass through. The tunnel was clear and straight, save for two left turns, and the drone illuminated the path ahead. Sounds echoed, crunching of sand under boots and the hum of the rover’s motor. The rumbling had ceased temporarily. After about twenty minutes, light entered the tunnel. A sizable hole in the plaster marked the end, and Seph cleared the exit with the laser.

They emerged in a passage with natural light coming in through tiny openings far above. It rejoined an brighter tunnel on the far end of the main cavern. Finally, they stood before the sprawl of golden ruins.

Humming filled the air. Cracks had opened up, and small crystals crept upward onto the floor. The machines flew frantically, scanning and cataloging the damage. A machine filled the cracks, printing new material into them.

Another machine noticed them and flew over in an instant. It crowded around Seph, who grunted and swatted it away. “Hey, get away from our samples. I don’t care that you don’t like them.” Another neared them, wrapping its metallic arms around the rover as if to pick it up, but it failed to get it off the ground. Seph accelerated out of its grasp.

Dust fell down from the ceiling, and the tallest spire of the main ruins swayed. A crash announced rock falling from the top of the spire, clattering against the nearest building. Kendra’s eyes focused on the tower, and she didn’t see the rocks falling on the other side of the cavern.

Seph yelled in frustration and she turned to see a rock covering part of the passage outside. “It’s not that big; we can move it,” Kendra said.

They grabbed hold of it as a tremor ran through the floor. Rock rained down from the ceiling. A sharp stone split the floor, opening a fissure and revealing hundreds of small crystals. “We still have to move this rock,” Kendra said. Seph nodded, but Bria stood transfixed.

Near her, larger crystals emerged from the fissure, swaying more like water than stone and casting a warm, purplish glow over the room. A tall crystal swayed toward Bria, and she reached her hand out to touch it. She failed to react to the sharp grinding sound that filled the air. Kendra dove at her, pushing her out of the way as a rock hit the ground, fracturing on impact into innumerable pieces. Pain shot through her leg and she winced, bracing on herself on her hands.

Bria was crying. “I saw something in there.”

“I know,” Kendra said, crawling over to her. “It’s okay.”

Seph’s face appeared out of the dust. “Are you two alright?”

“Yeah, I am, I’m sorry,” Bria said.

“We gotta go, okay? This place isn’t stable.”

Seph pulled Bria to her feet and the three of them grabbed hold of the fallen rock, moving it a foot to the left to clear the path for the rover. He hopped back into the rover, but two machines hovered in front of him, blocking the exit. “Get out of my way!” he shouted at them.

Bria jumped. “These machines can interfere with stasis fields, can’t they?” She batted them out of the way. “Get out of here!”

Her hand caught one with surprising force, flinging it backward. Then, a rock tumbled from the ceiling and something screeched. The other two machines returned, pointing their arms and making odd whirring noises. A third machine lay on the ground, trapped under the fallen rock. Its arms writhed feebly, and it shrieked, sounding more like a trapped animal than a machine.

Kendra glanced at the machine and back at her colleagues. “You two go. I’ll catch up in a moment,” she said. “Alright machine, I’ll help you.”

“I’m moving the rover before they come back,” Seph said, as the other machines followed her. “We’ll be nearby.”

The rumbling continued as she stepped over rocks and crystals to reach the machine. Her leg ached. She lifted the rock with a grunt and it raised itself from the floor, chirping at her.

“You’re alright? Good,” she said.

Bria waved to Kendra from the small adjacent cave. The room vibrated, the light from above illuminated the dust falling down from the low ceiling of the passageway where the other woman stood.

Kendra waved back, but the pain in her leg grew and she limped. Bria reached out to grab her hand as she approached. Rocks poured down between them. Through a gap, Kendra saw Seph crawl out, yelling and clawing at the rubble. Fallen rock trapped Bria’s leg. Seph struggled to lift the rock enough for her to twist her leg out, and she screamed as she did.

Kendra struggled with the wall of rock in the way, trying to move enough of it to squeeze through. “Are you two okay?” she yelled through the gap.

Before either of them could reply, a tremor shook the room. Creaking filled the air. The ceiling crashed down around her, stones piling up on all sides of her, locking her in place. Then the room tipped sideways. Something was pinning her, and she faded out of consciousness.