Kendra rested, sleeping fitfully in a secluded corner of the ruins. She didn’t want to meet the shadow, the corrosion that lay in the cavern below; she didn’t want to think about it. When she woke, the moons were high in the sky, and she steeled herself.

Then, she quietly made her way into the hidden room with the fuel, opening it using the interface points on her palm. Inside, she drank some of the fuel and dipped the container into it, filling it and then sealing it as best she could. Kendra carried the container of fuel on the strap she made as she crept through the main cavern, out into the desert.

This time, she would make it to the research station.

No one stopped her from leaving. Kendra followed the same path as before, walking in the shadow of the cliffs. She thought of past hiking trips. She had walked over twenty miles in one day before, though never with Jerome. He loved the woods and lakes, but it had been too dangerous for him to venture deep into the wilderness. His health had required that he stay where paramedics could reach him more easily.

When Kendra hiked for miles and miles, she went alone. She climbed low rolling hills and high mountains, resting in the shade of trees so massive that their trunks rent boulders when they fell. But she always carried an emergency beacon; she always had a backup way to contact someone if she was in trouble.

Here she was alone.

The sand slowed her progress, and whatever the caretakers had done to her body, she still was capable of exhaustion and overexertion. As day broke, she reached the cave where she had slept before. She opened the container of fuel and found it unchanged. Kendra drank from the container and curled up in the recesses of the cave.

She dreamt of Jerome. The clouds floated by in wisps as she stood at the base of a white cliff, looking up at their home and the pastel pink-orange sky behind them. Before her was the lake, with Jerome sitting at the end of the pier. She sat beside him, watched the sunlight glint off his curly, strawberry blond hair. He was hunched over a sketchpad, the pencil tiny in his hand as he drew the forest across the lake. They were talking; he was laughing, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

She woke, unable to recall their conversation. Closing her eyes tighter, she rested her head on her knees and tried to remember the wind through the trees, the muted sky, and the cool water of the lake. The seaweed tickling her calves. Anything but the desert and the images of crumbling clay.

The moons were waxing again, casting light over the sand as she reached the edge of the cliffs. This part of the planet lacked animal life and few plants grew here. She walked on, climbing the dunes when necessary, but otherwise keeping to the paths where the sand was shallow.

After hours, the sand grew deeper, rising in an immense dune that spread across the horizon. With no way around the mountain of sand, she climbed it, trudging on until she reached the top. There she saw the stone temple below.

Relief washed over her. She ran down the dune, sliding on the sand, slowing her pace at the bottom as she tromped over to the stone slabs to sit. Reaching the stone temple meant about seven miles to the research station. She opened the container of fuel and found the liquid darker and more viscous. Did the fuel degrade over time? It was open the air in the ruins; it didn’t make sense that it would decay so readily.

After drinking the fuel, she capped the container and started moving. The research station would have more tools available to her. She could contact someone and go into stasis if needed. And the rover ought to be there too. If nothing else worked, at least she would have a way back to the plateau.

Familiar rock formations emerged from the sand, marking paths where her boots didn’t sink quite so deep. She focused on each step to hold back the racing thoughts that swirled in her mind. Against the sand, a white dot appeared on the horizon. The ground was more gravel than sand here, and she picked up speed.

In her haste, she stepped wrong on the rock hidden under the sand. Her ankle rolled, and she crashed to her knees, banging them against the stone. The pain was dull, hurting less than it ought to, but her leg felt wrong. Cracks ran through it, with clay chipping from her ankle. Small hairline fractures traveled from her calf to her knee.

She opened the container. The fuel had decayed further into a brownish gray paste. Her hands shook as she spread it on the wounds. Instead of sinking in immediately, it took minutes for the skin to knit back together. Once her leg healed, she moved forward carefully. The research station stood in front of her, benign and familiar compared to the ruins. She entered a code on the keypad and the door unlocked.

The building was silent. The equipment in the lab was again draped in its plastic coverings.

“Hello?” she called. She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t receive one. She hurried through the building, finding nothing left in the rooms Bria and Seph had used. The room she and Antony had shared was empty as well, and she rested her hand on her old bed.

Kendra entered the computer room. The desktop powered on slowly, and she left to find the medical equipment. Out of a bin, she pulled the medical scanner and two stasis field generators.

The computer was still booting up, so she turned on the first stasis field generator. It was small, snapping onto her wrist like a watch. The display lit up, and she entered parameters for a test run. She lay down on the floor, set the duration for five minutes, and braced herself.

Nothing happened.

No time passed, and she felt none of the characteristic nausea from leaving stasis. She tried again to the same effect. Her chest burned with irritation, and she set the stasis field generator on the table, instead of throwing it across the room.

She tapped at the keyboard. The emergency distress signal was meant to be foolproof and, in a moment, it was broadcasting a message to the satellite. She waited, tapping her foot on the floor.

NETWORK NOT FOUND, it responded. She growled at it, opening the satellite network diagnostics. The program spat back error after error at her. Kendra rebooted the network, and a progress bar appeared. She stared at it, head in her hands, as it crept along, stalling on 32%.

She turned to the other stasis field generator. This one consisted of four small posts that she arranged on the floor, while a tablet controlled the stasis field parameters. She grabbed a metal cup sitting near the computer and placed it in the middle of the posts. She powered on the field, setting it to suspend the cup a few feet above the floor.

Blue light washed over the area within the posts and the cup froze in the air. She reset it to delay by a minute and take effect for five minutes. She waited, counting down until she saw the field initializing. Kendra braced herself as the light washed over her.

It fizzled out.

Kendra sat up, rubbing her temples. She grabbed the container of fuel and set it inside the stasis field. Again, the field initialized only to fizzle out. It made no sense. She thought back to their lab meetings. Antony had said he tried to catch a machine in a stasis field, hadn’t he? But the machine had disabled the field.

“Something about their tech is incompatible with our stasis field generators,” she said. “But why would the fuel be the problem?”

She shook her head, returning to the chair and watching as the progress bar hit 98%.

99%.

100%.

The network rebooted. Her mouse hovered over the button to retry the distress signal when new logs appeared.

It wasn’t the network. The satellite itself was malfunctioning. As she skimmed the logs, she saw the satellite had stopped working a few days after they last entered the ruins. Kendra slammed her hands down on the desk.

This signal depended on the satellite. Without the satellite, there was no contact with anyone outside the research station. With her comms or helmet, she might have broadcast a signal far enough to alert a passing ship. But her equipment hadn’t survived.

Kendra rubbed her hand over her face, rocking in the computer chair. The others were gone. Evacuated. The med evac crew should have left documentation. Files and folders crowded the desktop screen, threatening to make her eyes glaze over. Finally, she spotted a folder called ‘documentation.’

There was a report. Antony and Seph had left with the first med evac team. Antony, thank god, was still stable at the time—the longer he was stable, the better his odds. Bria had stayed behind to pack her equipment and wait for the second team to reach the planet.

Kendra’s eyes widened. There was a description of the cave-in. Bria and Seph had escaped in the rover, and then the med evac team arrived and returned to the ruins with Bria. It described in excruciating detail what they had found when they scanned Kendra underneath the rubble.

She had died.

The machines hadn’t healed her, they had brought her back from the dead. But she wasn’t a machine. Her body wasn’t made of metal, although the interface points in her hands appeared to be. Her skin still felt like skin until it was damaged.

Kendra powered up the medical scanner, closing her eyes as its light passed over her. At least it didn’t just fizzle and shut itself off like the stasis field. The results, however, were confusing.

No, she wasn’t made of metal. There were metallic components within the interface points in her hands, but no circuitry ran through her. The right side of her skull held a plate that was not made of bone. The machines must have reconstructed her skull.

She set the scanner down and stared at the floor. Whatever they did to bring her back, it affected her entire body, or she wouldn’t need to drink that fuel. She opened the container. The fuel was now a foul brown paste. Whether it could even heal her in this state, she didn’t know.

She leaned back in the chair, closing her eyes as her mind raced. There were too many things she didn’t understand. She needed to know how the fuel worked, how her body healed, how she could leave this planet. Kendra headed for the garage.

The rover was there, dented and scratched, but intact. She sat in the driver’s seat and opened the garage, taking a moment to suck in a deep breath and exhale slowly. The rover would work; it would get her back to the ruins. She wasn’t going to die here.

The rover powered on.

Kendra slammed her hands against the steering wheel and punched the air. She had a way to cross the desert. She had transportation. More options.

She dashed back into the building. In the lab, she opened drawers, grabbing kits and tools to take back to the ruins. A pack of centrifuge tubes. Slides and pipettes. Kendra piled them up in the storage compartment in the back of the rover.

Whatever the machines had done to bring her back had altered her biology. But she was still herself. Still a researcher. She would find a way off this planet.