Kendra woke in an unfamiliar room. She blinked and rubbed the dust from her eyes. Her outer protective gear, helmet, and comms were gone, leaving only the thinner armor she wore underneath. She pulled herself to her feet, stumbling as she reached for the wall. She remembered the pain of rocks pinning her down. The rest was hazy.
“Bria! Seph?” she called and then coughed on the sand in her throat.
Kendra ran her hands through her hair, searching for wounds. She found none. Her long-sleeved top and trousers were free of rips and tears. Beneath her armor, her abdomen was dusty but uninjured. That was amazing; she expected to be completely covered in bruises at least. Was she lucky? Had a well-placed rock shielded her from the brunt of the impact?
She surveyed the room. It was small and rectangular, clearly constructed rather than natural. Carvings in the walls emitted a soft blue light, and upon closer examination, they resembled circuitry. The walls were studded with the same blue marks they observed in the main chamber, though these glowed while the others had not.
Nearby lay a rectangular vat of an unidentifiable golden liquid, which flowed in through pipes in the wall. The liquid was reflective enough for her to see herself in it. Her hair hung down in a mess around her shoulders, but she failed the spot any obvious scrapes or bruises.
She backed away. The liquid looked viscous, and she had no desire to touch it.
Vents were carved into the walls high up, suggesting an entry point for the machines. The room lacked an obvious door, but the circuitry clustered around a point on the wall. She held her hand up to it, wondering if it contained some sort of point for the machines to interface.
The wall slid open, and she jumped.
After she exited the room, it slid closed again, blending in with the rock. She traced her fingers over the solid wall; the hidden door was invisible to her eyes as it had been to their scanners.
She was in the sprawling central chamber of the ruins. The floor was intact, masking any trace that the crystals were ever there. Light spilled in through the new holes in the ceiling, but the stone previously littering the ground was gone. The passage outside was clear as well, though her feet still sunk deep into the sand as she walked. The wind buffeted the plateau, kicking up grit that stung her face as she combed the sand.
By the time the sun was setting, she located the place where they’d set up their field station. There was little left, namely indentations in the rock where they had anchored their tent. She crouched, digging through the sand, searching for anything remaining from their tent, any message left behind.
She found nothing.
Frustrated, Kendra collapsed inside the cave, the coolness soothing after hours in the heat. Someone had removed the equipment they’d left in the desert. But she had no way to contact anyone. The moons were visible through the hole in the ceiling, if barely; they were waning, with only thin crescents left. Her eyes fixed on the larger of the moons. Something was odd.
Upon their return to the ruins, the sky had glowed red with the early morning, and the moons had been full. It didn’t make sense for the moon phases to be this different. Kendra paced the ruins, trying to make sense of it.
She had been trapped under the rocks, which meant Bria would have sent the evac crew here. But in that case, she’d be on the medical ship now.
The cleanliness of the ruins suggested the machines had been there, though she hadn’t seen them since waking. Who else could have pulled her out and left her in that room? Had she been put into stasis? She lacked the characteristic malaise that accompanied time in stasis.
Even beyond that, whatever happened when the ceiling came down, it had hurt. She ought to have been scraped up and bruised. Physically, she felt little of note, no hunger or thirst. But there was no food or water in the ruins and no sign anyone was coming back.
The research station was far, close to thirty-five miles. But she knew the way, and she recognized the rock formations that marked the route.
She set out from the ruins.
The ground was solid and easy to traverse near the cliffs, and her nervous energy propelled her forward. She needed to know why she’s been left behind. Had her colleagues been unable to find her? It was standard practice to leave behind supplies if someone went missing. Food, water, some sort of beacon to send a message out.
The light from the waning moons was enough to illuminate the white sand, and it reminded her of snow. She had nearly reached the edge of the cliffs by the time the sun rose. Exhaustion was setting in, and she needed rest. Kendra slept through the heat of the day, nestled in a small cave in the cliffs. It went back only about ten feet, but it was cool and dry.
She departed in the early evening, when the temperature returned to a manageable level. As she left the cliffs, the wind picked up, sending sand biting at her face. It stuck to her lips and crunched between her teeth.
Though she followed the path through the rock formations where the sand was shallow, the desert still slowed her pace. She stumbled when the sand grew deeper. Kendra glanced back at the cliffs on the horizon. It was a view she remembered from every trip to the ruins, and it marked the halfway point to the research station.
Dunes emerged in front of her. Her boots sank deep into the sand with each step, and a strange numbness spread through her skin. She was used to the burning in her thighs from hiking up rocky stairs, but the sensation felt blunted. And she wasn’t thirsty, despite being awake for nearly two days without eating or drinking.
Kendra sat down at the top of the dune. Her abdomen itched like her clothes were full of sand and dust. She lifted the bottom hem of her shirt and saw skin that cracked like parched earth. Deep gouges extended from her hip to her ribcage, the skin more like clay than flesh. As she brushed her hand across it, a piece of clay-like skin flaked off and fell to the ground.
Revulsion washed over her.
The skin farther from the gouges appeared normal, though that provided little relief. The cracked tissue moved as she twisted her waist back and forth; it was still somewhat malleable. It wasn’t stone, but something was clearly wrong, and more tiny chips fell away as she moved.
From nowhere, a memory entered her mind. Bria was crying. Kendra couldn’t see her; she only remembered pain and darkness. She clenched her fists in a vain effort to contain her panic. Her skin split, and blue light glowed from the cracks in her palms like the circuitry in the ruins.
The machines had done something to her. What, she didn’t know.
The vision of Antony’s arm falling to the ground was seared into her mind. There had been nothing they could do. If her whole body was affected … she couldn’t think about that.
The machines did this; maybe they had answers. The alternative was to head for the research station and hope she could contact someone or put herself into stasis. That was a lot to hope for if her body was falling apart.
She stood at the top of the dune, searching the horizon for the research station she knew was too far to see. Then she began the slow walk back to the ruins.
Kendra sank to the ground against the wall of the cavern, clutching her knees to her chest. She sat, frozen, as she stared into the gloom and listened to the soft noises echoing through the chamber. Fear settled in her chest.
Far off, a soft scraping noise came closer and then stopped. A light blinked. The machine approached and reached for her hand with a metal arm. There was a jolt, and thoughts entered her mind.
The machine showed her parts of the ruins she had never seen. They had been doing construction in the upper caverns, and she was given a progress report, a strangely matter-of-fact sequence of diagrams showing buildings and carvings and columns. Kendra imparted a question in return, an image of her abdomen and the decay there. The machine gently grabbed hold of her shoulder and pulled her up. It led her back to the chamber where she woke, opening the hidden door with a press of its arm to a point on the wall.
Then it flew to the pool of liquid, and a thin tube emerged from its arm. It drew up the liquid through the tube and blinked its lights at Kendra. She cautiously touched the substance. It was greasy and viscous. Her eyes on the machine, she smeared a handful onto her abdomen, and it sank in like water on cracked dirt. The terrible cracks knit back together into skin.
Lifting its arm again, the machine gestured for her to connect with it, and its thoughts entered her mind again. The liquid was nutrition, fuel that could repair her body. She cupped her hands together and drank from the pool. The fuel’s texture was foul, oily and strangely smooth, but it didn’t taste of anything. Kendra scooped handful after handful of it into her wounds until the skin was fully intact. She took another drink and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
A second machine entered. It floated up to her, blinking and bumping her shoulder in a gesture that was almost affectionate. Dents and scratches marked its metal shell—it was the one she had pulled from under the rock.
“I need you to tell me what happened,” she said, lifting her hand to the machine and repeating the question as best she could in images. The machine chirped and floated away, turning back to make sure she was following. They moved down a hallway and through a second door that required the machine to interface with it before it opened.
Blue light suffused the room, emanating from swirling shapes and patterns carved into in the walls and floor. Some resembled the carvings from the other ruins, with shapes of flowers and leaves overlapping each other in intricate designs.
Across the room, the lights and circuitry were concentrated on a rectangular structure that jutted out from the wall. Kendra approached the console. It was made of rock inlaid with circuitry but lacked buttons or an obvious display. The machine that led her here trilled softly before departing.
A cluster of lights on the console drew her eye, and she reached her hand toward the interface point. Static electricity ran through her fingers as she touched the console, intensifying into a sharp jolt as bright light flooded her field of view. The light coalesced into a white space surrounding her. Lines and shapes flowed through the air, and her neck burned as though someone watched her.
“Is anyone there?” Kendra asked. “Do you understand me?”
“Purely linguistic translations are limited,” a voice replied. “More data is required.”
“Who am I speaking with? Are you an AI?” she asked.
Kendra’s forehead burned. The voice replied in words that felt like they’d been carefully picked from her thoughts.
“Curator. System governs preservation of artifacts,” it said slowly.
“Can you access any external networks, satellites, or other communications systems?” she asked. Kendra associated a mental image with each word: the computers back in the lab, the link to the satellite, their comms. She envisioned packets of data flowing to a satellite and then out into the universe.
The system responded with a nauseating series of images, as though dragging her through a maze at high speed. Data passed from each node in the ruins to the computer. She saw the main cavern followed by other caves and ruins she didn’t recognize, but nothing suggested a link outside the plateau.
“Enough,” she said. “So this system is closed; you can’t connect to anything outside the ruins. What about me? What allows me to interface with the system?” She focused on her memory of the light in her hands and the cracks in her abdomen.
The images offered in reply were confusing. The machines built and repaired the stone walls, interfacing with the ruins and communicating amongst themselves. They used their fuel to repair themselves and remain functional in order to take care of the ruins.
A word entered her mind: caretakers.
“The machines, you call them caretakers. I can understand they repair the ruins. But I need to know what happened to me. What do you want from me?” Kendra asked. Frustration surged through her, and it was difficult to ask her questions in a way this system understood.
Her scalp prickled as the system sorted through her mind like a person riffling through a pile of papers. It responded with images from her own memories. She and Bria measured the ruins in the desert. She and Seph climbed the cliffs. She and Antony sat together on the roof. Then, she and Antony were falling into the pit of crystals, and before they hit the ground, he was standing in the research station as his arm fell to the ground.
A jolt passed through her, a warning, a sign of danger superimposed over the crystals and the ruins.
“Corrosion,” the system replied.
“But what are they? Why are they corrosive?” she asked. “We’ve seen the caretakers remove them, coat them in plaster and take them away.”
“We cannot destroy energy,” it said. “Only contain.”
“So you—the caretakers sense an energy from them, which you try to contain. To keep them away from the rest of the ruins.”
“You, Kendra,” it said, “remove corrosion.”
“You’ve been in my mind. In my memories.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is that why you and the caretakers helped me? Because you can understand from my mind that I was here to research the ruins. To learn from them. But I don’t know what the corrosion—what those crystals are. We were never able to understand them.”
Her forehead buzzed as her memories played before her. She stood beside Antony in the room they shared. “I’d do anything to keep seeing things like this,” she said. “Learning things no one else in the world knows.” Then she sat on the roof with him. “I want to keep doing this. Seeing places, discovering new things.”
And then she was in the cave as the ceiling fell around her. She felt a sharp pain as she was enclosed in stone, entombed, unable to tell whether it was dark or her vision was fading. Then the pain turned dull, fading into nothing. A wisp of a thought entered her mind: There’s so much more I want to see.
Kendra gasped. She hadn’t remembered those moments until now. “But what did you do to save me?”
“Restoration,” the system replied. “Restore ruins, restore Kendra.”
She frowned. “But what does that mean? Your restoration wasn’t compatible with my biology—it’s not exactly normal for someone’s body to turn into dust.”
“Kendra restored,” the system replied simply.
Her head ached as the white blankness in front of her dissolved back into the console room, and she sank to her knees.
