The days passed as they studied every inch of the stone temple. Each inscription was documented, each carving photographed and reconstructed into holograms for their records.

Bria, thankfully, was far from possessive of the microscope she’d hauled across the galaxy. Kendra and Antony analyzed stone samples at the research station, haunting the lab together while the other two worked on site at the temple.

In the early morning, Kendra woke to the sound of rustling in the other bed. She blinked into the gloom before rolling over to face Antony. He stared back at her, rubbing his eyes, his wavy brown hair curling in all directions.

“You awake?” he asked, voice rough. The hazy pink light washed over him, leaving his tan skin pale.

“Yeah.”

“Have you been going somewhere at night?”

“Just out into the lab when I can’t sleep. Staying in bed doesn’t help when I have too much on my mind,” she said, propping herself up on her elbow. “Equipment diagnostics are a great sleep aid.”

“It isn’t because of me?”

“No, sometimes I can’t sleep.”

Unconvinced, Antony studied her face, and she continued, “Hey. You’re fine. Space travel is rough on me. Takes time to get myself sorted out.”

“Oh. Alright.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I really don’t. But if we’re sharing a room, it’s going to be obvious when I freak out in my sleep,” he said. “It doesn’t happen all the time.”

“I know. I’m no stranger to nightmares and stress dreams, and we’ve only been here a couple of weeks. If you wanna talk, we can, but I don’t need an explanation,” she said.

“Okay. Thanks.” He paused. “I am glad you’re here, though. I didn’t want to be alone.”

“Yeah, I didn’t either,” she said. She touched her feet to the cool floor and stretched.

There was a knock at the door—it was Bria. She wore pajamas, curly hair in a loose braid that rested against her collarbone. Her appearance was casual, but her expression was clear and alert.

“Good morning, you two,” she said. “I realize it’s early, but some data we started processing last night is finished. I’ve shared the results with both of you. We were going to have a quick chat in the common area.”

“Sure, be there soon,” Kendra said, closing the door.

Antony yawned. “Man, it’s too early for this. If she’s in pajamas, I’m not getting dressed either,” he said, climbing out of bed.

Kendra and Antony followed the sound of chatter to the living area. Bria sat with her legs crossed, propping her laptop on her thigh. Seph was on the other end of the couch in his own pajamas, though he must have combed his hair.

“This is a phenomenal find,” Bria said, her tone enthusiastic but measured. Seph nodded vigorously, humming in agreement. It was odd watching them. Seph was lanky and thin, his body angular. Bria was tiny next to him, petite with soft curves and a heart-shaped face. And yet her personality was sharp, her eyes piercing.

“What is it?” Antony asked, taking a seat on the opposite couch.

“We compared the scans we took of the temple with the documented sites from Asteracea. It’s a convincing match,” Bria said.

“It’s pretty wild,” Seph said, grinning. “We’re talking about a culture, a world of cultures that rose and fell long before space travel. And Asteracea isn’t exactly close. How would one of their temples end up here, of all places?”

“Yeah, and it’s in better shape than the ruins on Asteracea,” Bria said. “But the style, the composition, the iconography, they’re all spot on.”

“Is your thing done processing yet?” Antony asked, gesturing at Seph’s hefty laptop. It sat on the coffee table, fan whirring with exertion. “I’m assuming not because it sounds like it’s going to blast off into space.”

“Eh, no. I’m analyzing the inscriptions from the ruins. So far it’s saying a 90% match with the glyphs recorded at Asteracean ruin sites,” he said, tapping at his keyboard.

“Do we know what the text says?” Kendra asked.

“Not much,” Bria replied. “Little of the language was ever translated. Best guess is it contains the names of flowers in the carvings, possibly poetry.”

“Yeah, let’s say we focus our study on the architecture and materials, not flower poems,” Antony said, his foot tapping against the floor.

Seph peeked up from his laptop. “Of course, we’re far from having enough information to satisfy reviewers regardless.”

“Well, sure, it’s early in the expedition,” Kendra said.

“What about sites outside Asteracea?” Antony asked. “Have you found any matches there?”

“Nothing convincing. The architectural features, composition, and motifs are most similar to Asteracean ruins,” Seph said. “Unfortunately, analyzing the inscriptions is problematic. My current analysis only compares our data with Asteracean sites. The entire linguistics database has over five million languages; you can’t download it locally unless you have a computer the size of a bedroom.”

“Can’t you download a subset of the database? Say, only archaeological sites discovered during the first spacefaring age,” Antony said.

Seph’s eyes flicked to Bria. “Um, we could, but I think we decided it would be more efficient to check the whole database so we don’t miss anything. We were banking on having a better satellite connection.”

Bria folded her arms. “At this rate, we may have to settle for using a subset of the database. The satellite connection is too spotty for these data-intensive applications.”

“I did try to download it a few nights ago, but it failed. Something else was using a ton of data, but I didn’t think we had other applications running,” he said.

Bria’s lips tightened into a thin line, her eyebrows arched. “Can you try troubleshooting the network? Maybe it isn’t configured correctly.”

“Sure, but there are limits to what we can do if it’s a satellite issue.”

“Then put in a work request,” she said, expression cold. “I need to be able to contact my—we need to be able to communicate off-world.”

Seph exhaled audibly, fingers clenching the fabric of his pants. “I will check it out, okay?”

Kendra’s eyes flicked between them. They sat there in their cozy, pastel pajamas, on the edge of what she suspected would be a nasty argument. She glanced at Antony, who replied with a fractional shrug of his shoulders.

He cleared his throat.

“So, uh, why don’t we talk about the ruins? Why they’re here. No bad answers,” Antony said.

“Pirates?” Kendra said, partially to clear the tension. “Or rather, can we rule out pirates? It’s pretty hard to remove and transport an entire stone temple. It’s not something you’d do unless you had a good reason. Like monetary or cultural value, for example.”

“I don’t get the impression Asteracean architecture is worth much to people outside the scientific community,” Antony said. “When I learned about the planet, it was discussed as an oddity. A footnote to the history of early spacefarers.”

“From the satellite footage, we haven’t seen any evidence of modern inhabitation here. There’s also no evidence ruins have been taken from Asteracea recently. These ruins may have been here for thousands of years,” Seph said.

“Right. We don’t have evidence of scavengers or people living here in the past. Though, we should watch for evidence of inhabitation that may have been buried,” Kendra said.

“Antony, can you scan the sand with that drone of yours?” Bria asked. “Let’s see what’s under there.”

“Absolutely,” he said.

Bria’s suggestion rewarded them with three finds.

The first was a stray column lost from the temple, found several hundred feet away. The second find was a bit of broken pottery, and the third, a stone pedestal with Asteracean inscriptions, found in a crater miles from the temple. Though interesting on their own, their trajectory told a more intriguing story.

The sites formed a line pointing towards the cliffs many miles from their research station. Days of surveying the sand outside that line yielded nothing, and so the group turned their attention to the expanse of cliffs. Kendra and Seph ventured out to explore a point roughly in line with the previous sites. The sun burned down on them by the time they arrived. The grayish stone rose to the right, curving around the horizon.

Kendra hauled herself out of the rover, groaning and stretching. “There’s a reason I like the bikes better.”

“The rover is a quick trip to a bruised tailbone, isn’t it?” Seph said cheerfully, as he set up the robotic probes. Now out of the sun, he brightened the tint on his visor. He smiled, visibly more relaxed than she had seen him in the last few days.

“The stone here looks nothing like the temple,” Kendra said. “It’s all gray and dull purple. None of the brilliant gold and orange.”

“Oh, I agree,” Seph said. “By the way, did you and Antony finish your analysis of the rock samples from the pedestal site?”

“Yep, microscopic structure, age, and chemical composition all match Asteracean sites,” she said.

“That’s great!” he said, grinning. “Antony was starting an aerial survey of the cliffs. I asked about his method for scanning what’s under this sand, and he talked my ear off. Here I’ve been thinking he didn’t like me.”

“I think you two have different working styles,” Kendra said.

“That’s diplomatic of you,” Seph said, collecting samples at the base of the cliff. Seph used the joystick to manipulate the robotic arms to remove pieces of rock as Kendra typed sample information into a small tablet, printing labels for each container.

“Antony likes space to work on his own terms. Probably needs time to warm up and get used to working with this crew. Besides that, I think he’s he’s dealing with some stuff that has nothing to do with you,” she said.

A crease appeared on his forehead as his brows drew together. “Still, I worry I put him off. I was stressed out about this trip, and it’s been reflected in how I handled myself. I wish that weren’t the case,” Seph said. “I don’t know him well obviously, but I remember him from conferences.”

“A few years back, we were at a reception,” he continued. “It was late, and people had been getting, you know, sociable. Antony was pickled, but he got going on this beautiful rant about sample preparation for electron microscopy. Admittedly, with the state I was in, I don’t remember the specifics, but he was fun to watch, giving a chalk talk in the middle of the hallway.”

Kendra grinned. “I wish I’d heard that.”

“You’ve known him for a few years now, haven’t you? Are you both from the same place?”

“No, not even close. My family’s from Aristida, on the other side of the galaxy. It’s rural, big on agriculture and forestry. He’s from one of the megacities on Urtica.”

“Urtica, isn’t that the planet with the ridiculous traffic?”

“Yeah, megacities with thirty lanes of aerial gridlock and everyone is grouchy. There’s a joke about it: ‘Urtica, where the traffic is so loud you can hear it from space.’”

Seph snorted. “I can’t say that sounds appealing.”

“Nope. I don’t think Antony loved it there either,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve known him over a decade now. When we first met, I thought he was a loudmouth with a bit too high an opinion of his sense of humor. But I liked him. We could talk like people.”

“Huh.” Seph stared down at the sample he was collecting, taking an appreciably long time to cap the container he held.

“What is it? Something you wanted to ask, Seph?”

“Well, it would be overstepping.”

“Yeah?”

“Were you and Antony together at some point?”

Kendra laughed, shaking her head. “No, we weren’t. I was married when we first worked together a decade ago.”

She paused, stowing the sample they had collected in her pack. “A few years later, we ended up living in the same university town. I had recently moved. He ended up asking me out months after my husband passed away.”

“Oh no,” Seph said.

“Yeah, and what’s more unfortunate is that he led with, ‘Hey, I heard you’re newly single,’” she said.

“He did not.”

“My god, I yelled at him—now it’s kind of funny. Later, I found out he heard from someone else that I’d gotten an amicable divorce. Some buddy of his mixed me up with someone else,” Kendra said. “He apologized profusely.”

“Yeah, that still sucks,” he said as they ascended the cliffs, following the natural trail created by the steps and columns of rock. “But you’re alright with rooming with him? Because, I mean, I would have been fine sharing.”

“I’m good, really,” she said.

After a few minutes, they worked their way upwards, hiking rather than outright climbing. Kendra grabbed Seph’s hand, pulling him up the steps, his backpack full of gear catching him off balance. He bumped into her, bracing himself against her shoulder.

“Thanks,” he said when they reached a larger platform in the rock and resumed sample collection.

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Of course, ask me anything,” he said.

“Did you have a lab?” she asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “I was lucky, getting a tenure track position nearly straight out of grad school. Not so lucky, though. My university shut down.”

“Shut down? The whole university?”

“Yeah. It was a mess. Anyway, things weren’t great after that.” He sighed. “I lost out on a couple decent positions because the timeline of my jobs made it appear that I’d been passed up for tenure. I wish I were exaggerating, but I was more or less told as much.”

“That’s rough.”

“That was a while ago. I worked on a couple large research ships, and then more recently with Bria, though I was an independent researcher in her lab. Not employed by her.” His tone sounded pinched, and Kendra nodded, not pressing the topic.

“Anyway, I was curious what kind of work you and Antony had done. I saw that you both were on solo expeditions before this,” Seph said.

“Yeah, I was on a solo expedition before this. They had funding for three researchers, but two backed out. To their credit, they gave me an out, but I went solo at the research site.” She shook her head. “I regretted it.”

“That research station was underwater,” Kendra said. “I was alone there, and getting to the surface was complicated. I couldn’t breathe the air. Most people living there couldn’t. I worked at the station for six months and then requested that they pull me out. They didn’t argue.”

“Antony had it worse, from what I can gather,” Kendra said. “He signed on with this company, working at a station high on a mountain. Subzero temperatures, hard time getting a signal out of that place. That’s what I know, but what I’ve heard is bad. Because I’ve heard that company has a reputation for refusing to evacuate researchers if it’s going to cost them too much money.”

Seph frowned, confusion evident on his face.

“You haven’t done a solo expedition to anywhere remote, have you?” Kendra asked.

“No, I’ve never done a solo expedition. This is the smallest team I’ve been on,” Seph said.

“There’s a grading system for solo expedition contracts. When it’s fully isolated, the contracts are short, like four to six months. Sometimes a year, though, they have to pay you bank for that. Antony was there for a year and a half,” she said.

“Do you think he got stuck there?” Seph asked, disturbed.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I know that company was getting a bad reputation, and Antony hasn’t talked about it. But regardless, that kind of isolation is hard.”

“Yeah, I can imagine. He looks older than the photos of him I saw,” Seph said. “Though the salt and pepper suits him.” He pivoted away from her to collect another sample, though she thought she caught a flush on his cheeks.

They climbed the last stretch up to the summit.

“Wow, what a view,” Kendra said. The cliffs stretched out before them into a dark strip punctuating the sand of the desert. The open sky was vast above them. Farther away, the cliffs grew higher, more pointed and mountainous. They extended up into unusual formations, with pillars and spires piercing the sky.

The two walked along the top of the cliff, collecting samples at a more leisurely pace. A few hundred feet away, a deep crack split the surface of the cliff, leaving a dark pit.

Seph peered into the chasm.

“That’s deep,” Kendra said.

“Y-yeah.”

She shined her suit’s flashlight into the pit. It illuminated a few feet of rock, but the light dropped off after that. The darkness there was inky, almost purple.

As she drew nearer, she saw shapes far beneath her in the chasm. Streaks of bluish purple swirled through the darkness like an oil slick. When she unfocused her eyes, bright shifting spots appeared in the dark, like the swirling center of a nebula.

She was filled with an irrational revulsion and strange curiosity. Kendra leaned in, edging her hand nearer to the almost palpable darkness. Her gloved hand hovered over the chasm. She inched closer and felt a rush of air like a sigh.

Jerking her hand away, she moved back from the edge. Rocks clattered behind her as Seph retreated. She faced him. Sweat dripped down Seph’s cheek under his visor, plastering his blond hair to his forehead.

“Hey, are you alright?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Vertigo, I guess,” he said, stepping back. “Have to sit down for a moment.”

“Yeah, let’s be careful up here,” she said as Seph backed away. Kendra started to follow him, but she turned to the pit, shining her flashlight in it once again. The light illuminated the outlines of stone columns and nothing more.

Kendra’s legs ached after spending the day exploring the cliffs, and she fell into bed long before Antony. She woke in the night to sounds her sleepy mind couldn’t understand.

Antony shifted and murmured in his bed. He let out a muffled groan and his hand shot out toward the wall to brace himself. Stubbing his fingers, he yelped.

“Hey,” Kendra said. “Are you okay?”

Extricating himself from the twisted blankets, he sat up. Light glinted off the sweat on his forehead. “No. Not really,” he said. “I need air.”

“Want company?”

He nodded.

Kendra pulled on a hoodie and followed him. After a quick stop in the kitchen, they climbed the ladder to the roof of the research station, opening up the sturdy hatch at the top. The roof was flat and relatively free of sand. On the side opposite the hatch, the solar panels jutted out, their dark surfaces reflecting the moonlight.

Antony sat down with a grunt. He stirred his drink with a small spoon and took a sip. “Thanks. This helps.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “Always reminds me of home. Makes me feel better.”

He nodded and paused, staring up at the stars.

“Have you ever noticed that Seph’s pants don’t fit?”

Kendra huffed. “Not really. Please don’t mention it to him.”

“Yeah no, I wouldn’t do that. But his appearance is so deliberate otherwise. I mean, his hair is perfect every time I see him, and he’s got to be doing something to his skin. But his pants are a size or two too big.”

“Are you talking like you haven’t accidentally brought the wrong clothes on an expedition before?”

“Obviously I have. It’s just an observation. I mean, I don’t know how to dress myself under ideal circumstances, let alone work in the middle of a desert and look and smell nice all the time,” Antony said.

“That doesn’t sound like just an observation.”

He scrubbed his hand over his cheek. “I mean, I’m a little jealous. It’s like he isn’t trying to avoid aging, but by god he’s going to do it gracefully.”

“He’s only a couple years older than us though, right?”

“Yeah, still.”

“Maybe he hit the jackpot on lifespan extension,” Kendra said. “I know treatments are unpredictable when it comes to hair and skin, but people get lucky. Hit thirty and spend a hundred years like that.”

“Or he takes care of his face.” He tilted his head toward her. “You look good, too. Not much gray, but you’d look good either way.”

Kendra broke eye contact, fixing her gaze on a point on the horizon. “Thanks. Just genetics, I guess.”

The wind picked up, sending sand blowing across the dunes in the distance. Kendra burrowed deeper into her hoodie, pulling the cuffs up over her knuckles.

Antony sighed. “I ought to be grateful. I’m about as healthy as I can expect. Even my grandparents hit 200, so I should be in good shape.”

He ran his hand through his hair, fingers tracing waves of gray. “I feel old and sad, and Seph is gorgeous. If I could get along with him, if I weren’t so messed up in the head, I might even—I don’t know.” He sighed, drumming his fingers along the side of his mug. “His personality is too different from mine.”

“I don’t think you two are that different, but I hear you. Did you know he’s worked on those huge research vessels?”

Antony squinted, his lip curling. “Those have never appealed to me—can’t deal with the crush of people. Tiny cabins with eight researchers to a room. Bunk beds. It’s like undergrad, except everyone has a PhD.”

“Some of them, even the academic ships, mandate uniforms for everyone. Everyone’s got the same space suit, the same ground suit, even standard issue pajamas,” Kendra said with a grimace.

“Yeah, that sounds awful.” He chewed his lip. “You can spend years going from expedition to expedition. Some with no space for personal property, no creature comforts, and you end up with half your belongings scattered across storage containers all over the universe.”

“Yeah, then years pass, you gain a few pounds, lose a few pounds. You get your clothes out of storage and bam,” she said.

“Your pants don’t fit,” Antony said.

He was quiet. Kendra looked up at the sky, where the planet’s two rocky moons were visible amid an astounding number of stars. The moons were bright, closer than those she’d seen on any other planet, and their light illuminated the white desert sand.

“Have I been waking you up?” Antony asked.

“Not much. I hear you moving, but I don’t mind that. It’s nice to know someone else is nearby,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah, I get that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Antony sighed. “Seph was acting weird when you two got back from the cliffs, and I ribbed him about it. But then it was obvious something had freaked him out. I get it. Those peaks and rock formations at the top are unlike anything I’ve seen before. I took the drone up there while I was surveying the far part of the desert, and the images are stuck in my head,” Antony said.

Kendra studied his face; it was somber, the lines around his mouth deep. “Seph and I found this crevasse in the rock, and I guess he got vertigo. Or call of the void. Intrusive thoughts about falling in,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “Did you see anything up there?”

“A trick of the light, I thought. But I don’t know. It almost felt like someone else was there with me. Like a presence.”

“I’ve had dreams about these cliffs,” Antony said. “Tonight, it was dark, and I flew up to the cliffs, to those spires. The closer I got, the more they looked like buildings. A city. And there was a nebula around them, towering clouds of gas.”

He huffed. “Now that I’m describing it, it doesn’t sound like anything. But it felt empty. Like total emptiness, a complete feeling of desolation. And that was terrifying.” Antony stared into the desert. Kendra followed his gaze to where the cliffs lay, far out of sight. “You were isolated, weren’t you? In your last expedition.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Kendra said. “Underwater. I’d never do that again. Couldn’t stop imagining the glass cracking. I spent too much time checking it or staring into the water, thinking I saw something out there.”

“But what did you do to keep yourself together? Or are you just better at that than I am?”

“I don’t know that I am. I fell back on old memories a lot. Holidays with my family. With my husband. Drank a lot of this, pretending it was my mom making it, and that it didn’t come out of a bag,” she said, holding up the mug.

“Did it help?”

“I don’t know. It kept me sane, but it felt like I was treading water. Not moving forward.” Kendra hugged her knees, resting her chin on her arms. “I wanted an expedition, not to be trapped in a room. I need to see new things. Learn new things.”

“I admire that about you, y’know. I like this work, but you find wonder in it. Not just in the ruins, but in all of this,” he said, gesturing to the empty sand.

She leaned back, angling her head toward him. “I want to see as much—to experience as much as I possibly can. I love coming out to places like this.”

“It makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” she said.