The door to the console room slid shut behind her.

Kendra returned to the main chamber of the ruins and climbed the steps of the central platform. She found a secluded corner tucked behind the colonnade. There she sat against the warm yellow stone, resting her head in her hands.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “The machines saved me, but I don’t know what they think I can do to help them.”

As the hours passed, the machines failed to appear.

Kendra studied the ruins, following the blue markings that studded the buildings at eye level. The system that oversaw the caretakers had fed her data from nodes in the ruins—points in the circuitry where the machines collected information. She hadn’t understood the data, but it seemed to be information about the condition of the individual buildings.

She held her palm to the blue marks, trying to activate them the same way the caretakers had done with the hidden doors. Every so often, she found a node. The data remained incomprehensible, but she was gradually able to grasp that the nodes connected in a network throughout the ruins.

Over the days that followed, she developed a rudimentary map. Kendra knew the main chamber well, and she understood that the caretakers’ vents ran throughout the cavern walls. Noises and vibration came from an area higher within the plateau. Between the sounds and her new mental map, Kendra found her way through passages and behind the hidden doors that led to the cavern above.

It was a sprawling cave, though still smaller than the one below. Here, gray stone buildings rose from the floor. They weren’t built from the golden stone from Asteracea; instead they were made from the grayish rock of the plateau.

The machines were busy extruding a plaster-like substance onto the floors. Slowly, they laid a new foundation. Kendra glanced between the existing buildings—they were familiar. The tallest structure was nearly identical to the one they’d found in the abandoned cavern far below, down to the intricate carvings and carefully sculpted stone decorating the windows. Several buildings were copies of those that had been cordoned off and left to deteriorate in the cave the machines had sealed away.

But these buildings were plainly created from the natural stone in this cave. They were new. As she watched them, the machines began to drill into the wall. The vibrations shook the floor, and the noise intensified, echoing until Kendra covered her ears and dashed away. The hallways rumbled, and she hurried to escape the din.

Why would the caretakers build replicas of the ruins? Were they so keen to avoid the corrosion that their computer system had spoken of that they’d let the original buildings be destroyed?

She returned to the console room; there was only one way to know. Kendra held her hand to the points of light on the console.

The white empty space reappeared before her, and she drew in a deep breath. “I’ve been to the cave where the caretakers are constructing new buildings,” she said, translating her words to images. “Some are buildings I’ve never seen before, but others are replicas. Why?”

Images from that cavern filtered into view. Diagrams of buildings rotated in the air, while numbers and other incomprehensible data scrolled by.

Kendra pointed at the tall building with the most ornate carvings and stonework. “That one. I know I’ve seen another copy of that building in the cavern that used to be sealed. The storage capsule.”

“Inaccessible due to corrosion,” the system said.

“Corrosion, meaning those crystals. Isn’t your purpose to preserve and take care of the existing buildings? Because they were transported here from far away, weren’t they? I don’t understand why you would wall off all those ruins and reconstruct them elsewhere.”

The system did not reply, and the diagrams and images merely floated in the air.

Kendra grunted. “You said before that your linguistic translations were limited. Can you learn more of my language from my mind? In a way that doesn’t harm me, that is.”

“Yes,” the system said.

“Then do it. Carefully.”

Her forehead tingled again, a feeling that moved across her scalp and then to the back of her neck. The tingling intensified into a subtle vibration and then warmth. Though strange, it wasn’t unpleasant.

Her mind drifted back to her husband, to the home they had shared. She stood atop the cliff there, looking over the forest below. Then Jerome was there, wrapping her up in his arms, hugging her tight. A strange sensation accompanied the memory, like someone else was watching it, as though it was projected on a screen.

The system was in her mind, but it seemed uninterested in the memory. It rummaged around in her thoughts like someone flipping through folders, stacking books, and turning thousands of pages at once.

A book was tossed aside with a thump and hit the ground at her feet. She opened it and saw her husband again, as they picked fruit from trees in her parents’ backyard. They peeled the fruits and blended them with ice and a soft, sweet cheese.

Another stack of books slid toward her and toppled, the pile spilling across the white floor. The pages of a dark green book flipped open, and she saw her home. The roof sloped gently before her, the rounded windows open, curtains billowing inside. Her forehead burned. More books hit the floor, as whole stacks were removed from the shelves and rummaged through.

“Enough,” Kendra said, and the sensations stopped. “It’s too much.”

“Your mind was not harmed,” the system said. “Furthermore, we filled in additional linguistic and semantic data.”

She nodded and closed her eyes for a long moment to steady herself. “Tell me then, where did you come from? My colleagues and I believed these ruins might have originated on a planet we called Asteracea. We don’t know its real name, but I can show you its location and characteristics. I want to know if you came from that planet,” Kendra said.

“Some of our data has been lost, including early logs.”

“But you’re here to preserve the architecture in the ruins, right? Did you come to this planet in the capsule with the buildings?”

It paused, as if considering. “That is accurate. This system’s purpose is to act as a curator. However, the presence of corrosion has hampered our ability to perform this duty.”

“Right, you can only contain the corrosion. So you wall it off, keep it far away from you because you don’t know how to remove it. But I don’t know how to remove it either.”

“You, Kendra, arrived in order to study the ruins. Interested in their documentation and preservation,” the system said. “Preservation requires removal of corrosion. That is within your purpose as a researcher.”

“Then share everything you know about the corrosion with me.”

“Data limited. Contact caretakers for further assistance,” the system said.

And it closed the connection.

Kendra stepped back, blinking into the blue glow of the console room. She threw her hands in the air. “Come on! I don’t believe for a second that you’re telling me everything you know.”

But the console only glowed softly in reply.

That night, Kendra slept on a stone slab within the golden ruins. As the pink morning light filtered into the cavern, she woke feeling drained, like she’d just relived her comprehensive exams from grad school long ago.

She sat hunched on the stone, running her hands through her hair and tucking the loose strands behind her ears. Remarkable as it was that the ruins held an AI, the system wasn’t particularly trustworthy. It seemed to have helped her primarily because it believed she could remove the corrosion. The system struck her as almost cagey when she had asked for more information, cutting the connection immediately.

She found the caretakers in the cavern with the replicated buildings, where they were creating a new colonnade. A machine chirped as she approached, and she raised her palm to its arm.

“I need to know more about the crystals in these ruins,” she said, envisioning them and imparting the mental image to the caretaker. “Where do you put the corrosive materials?”

The machine trilled and led her through the stone hallways, to a vent four feet off the floor. She hoisted herself into the vent and followed it, smacking her elbows on the sides of the passage. As the path sloped downward, she slid and caught herself before the vent opened into a small cave. The machine chirped and bumped her shoulder before returning to the vent and vanishing out of sight.

The cave was twenty feet across, round, and lit by thin rays of light coming in through the ceiling. She climbed out of the vent and her feet hit powdery sand. It covered the floor, sinking low in the middle of the cave as though passing through a funnel. As she edged around the room, the sands shifted, sending rocks tumbling into the hole.

Rubble dotted the sand. Amid the debris sat crystals that the machines had tossed here. Some had grown larger, climbing up onto the walls and hanging from the ceiling. They glowed eerily and within them, Kendra saw towers, like the skyline of a faraway city.

Cracks marked the floor, meeting in a hole near the far wall. Kendra knelt and peered below. Light glinted off something, and she spotted a metal clasp from her protective suit. Finding footholds, Kendra climbed down into a long tunnel, where the light came solely from the purple glow of the crystals studding the floor. She picked up the suit and found it torn and unwearable. Her helmet was noticeably absent, and she followed the path as it sloped downward, steep enough that anything falling from the cave above may have rolled this way.

The visor from her helmet lay cracked in a pile of sand, rocks, and a handful of plastic shards that may have belonged to the helmet itself. Hope fluttered in her chest. The helmet had its own emergency beacon, and if it worked, she could transmit a signal.

The purple glow intensified as she followed the dark passageway, and as she climbed another steep slope, her foot collided with something on the ground. Half of her helmet lay there, shards of plastic and wire sticking out where it had splintered apart. She picked it up. The helmet was too sturdy to have been cracked from the fall.

Could the caretakers have destroyed it when they removed it from her head? Unlikely. It had been pulverized, with small fragments of rock still embedded in it. She rubbed her hand through her hair. If the force of the collapse had done that to her helmet, how could anything have saved her? The thought sent a pang of anxiety through her.

Kendra turned the helmet over, searching for any remnants of its communications systems or the emergency beacon. But this section was missing much of the internal wiring; only the outer shell remained. There was no beacon, nothing that could help her.

Kendra dropped it and covered her mouth as she let out a muffled scream. She needed equipment, something that could send a signal out of here. Or anything that could give her a more straightforward answer about what was wrong with her body. She needed to get back to the research station.

As she continued along the passage, the chances of finding any more of her equipment faded. It was unlikely anything falling from the cavern above would have gone this far.

Strange swirling patterns marked the walls, making the stone look more like dark rivers than rock. She ran her hand over them and found them cool beneath her palm. The flowing curves of stone looked designed, not random. As she examined the wall, it felt more like viewing a mural than a geological formation. An exhibition of art in a museum.

Then the passage opened into an immense cavern. Purple and blue light outlined the silhouettes of crystals growing from the walls. The clusters were massive, each crystal at least as tall as she was. Kendra shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. She crept forward as quietly as she could.

The cavern grew brighter as far off light filled the area with a brilliant pink haze. Crystals pointed forward to three immense stone towers. The glossy stone here had that same strange, organic quality, like someone had drawn swirls and curves into lava as it cooled.

The towers themselves had a presence to them that was too lifelike, and her neck burned as though someone was watching her. There was an intelligence that filled the cavern. It buzzed through the air. As she circled the columns, a dark space caught her eyes.

The light ebbed and flowed like someone breathing. The darkness shifted, and she realized what she saw resting among the crystals at the base of the towers wasn’t an absence of light, but a palpable, almost physical shadow.

She was possessed by an irrational urge to reach out and touch it, to see if something was there. Imagined sensations entered her mind, like running her fingers over a velvet curtain. She kept her hands clenched at her sides. Her boots crunched against the stone of the floor, sending a small rock clattering. It was a quiet sound, but a sound nonetheless, and the light shifted again.

The darkness of the shadows intensified, like a hole opening up out of nowhere. She retreated, slowly nearing the wall behind her, when something poked her back. It was a large crystal growing out of the ground, and she braced her hands against it to keep from tripping.

A soft purple light gathered at the point of contact between her palms and the crystal. Her gut lurched like she was falling, and emotions that weren’t her own rushed through her. A deep despair hit her chest so suddenly that she gasped, falling to one knee.

It passed through her like ice water drenching her from head to toe. Images entered her mind faster than she could comprehend them, like flying through clouds, like crashing. Her chest ached, and she held her hands to her sternum as though it could stop the pain. The shadow at the base of the towers stirred and bright purple light spilled into it like ink running in water. She felt a horrible, unmistakable sensation that something was watching her.

She backed away into the darkness, following the edge of the cavern until it opened to another small passage. Every few feet she glanced behind her, expecting to see that darkness rushing after her, but nothing followed. Finally, she halted.

On one side of the passage, tiny streams of white sand rained from above. Relief flooded her as she saw light that wasn’t from the crystals. A rocky pillar rose to the ceiling. She climbed it. Sand fell onto her face, and she spat it out of her mouth. She poked her head up through the cracks in the rock and saw another cavern that the caretakers must have used as a dumping ground. Across from her, she spotted a vent. Kendra collapsed against the wall, letting out a shaky breath.

Nothing followed her here, and she searched the cave for anything that might be of use, any other pieces of her equipment. The sands held nothing familiar, but she retrieved a small plastic container. It was intact and had a small lid. She could fill it with fuel.

Kendra gathered a pair of flexible, braided wires and attached them to the container so that she could carry it over her shoulder. She jumped up into the vents.

She would take the caretakers’ fuel and head for the research station.