The terrain had been a punishing blur of fractured rock and thorn-choked scrub for days — but all of it narrowed now to one valley. Rachel’s green-lit wound throbbed with a feverish pulse, her steps faltering more often. She gripped the cracked data log like it was her lifeline.“I think… we’re close,” she rasped.!Guruseb froze ahead, raising a hand. “The silence is wrong,” he murmured.We crested the ridge — and there it was. The launchpad. Rusted, leaning, a relic from before the Great Shift. The domed hangar loomed against the dying light, its surface choked with vines, the steel skeleton beneath scarred by decades of storms.But it was guarded.Dozens of mutant baboons prowled the cracked tarmac, their black eyes like pits, their temple chips glowing faintly — each pulse in perfect sync. Their patrol pattern was deliberate, mechanical. They weren’t searching. They were keeping something in.“They’ve claimed it,” Rachel whispered, voice trembling.No time for debate. !Guruseb slip

The main chamber of the Bone Archives breathed with its own slow rhythm. The walls shimmered in a deep, organic glow, like embers hidden beneath the skin of the rock, casting shifting shadows that crawled across the carvings. Every pulse of light revealed the intricate bone latticework embedded in the walls — fossilized ribs and vertebrae of beasts that had walked Mars long before human or ǂKhomani.The air was colder than the Martian wind outside, the chill clinging to my skin and sinking into my bones. My hand rested on the obsidian table where Rachel lay, its surface polished smooth but cold enough to burn my palm. That cold contrasted sharply with the warmth of her shoulder beneath my other hand — fragile warmth, the kind that could vanish in a moment.Rachel’s breathing was steady now, but I could still see it — the ghost of that sickly green glow burned into my memory.Ka!ri stood across from me, hands still stained with the stubborn residue of the parasite’s removal. She scrubbe

The descent into the Mars colony was a ghost-ride. Our speeder drifted through the thin Martian dusk, its engine muted to a low whisper. Ahead, the polished obsidian and crystalline veins of the inner city gave way to The Rim — the ghetto, the fracture in the dome where the planet’s wildness and human neglect met in a permanent stalemate. The Rim had always been a place of noise, heat, and unashamed survival. Now it was silent, choked beneath a red shroud that turned the horizon into a smear of rust.The dome here was old, patched with mismatched alloys, its curve distorted by years of micro-impacts and cheap repairs. Beneath it sprawled a labyrinth of stacked shipping containers, scrap-metal huts, and prefab habitats tilted like teeth in a broken jaw. Even from the air, I could see abandoned stalls where holographic signs flickered weakly, casting twitching shadows over streets that no longer moved.“Thermal scans show no sign of life,” Ka!ri’s voice crackled over the comms — clipped,

The meeting room felt too small, too loud, too heavy with words she didn’t want to hear anymore. Rachel pressed a hand to her stomach, willing the knot inside to loosen.“I… need a moment,” she murmured, her voice barely carrying over the low hum of voices.Ka!ri’s sharp eyes flicked to her, assessing. “Don’t wander far,” she said, then turned back to whatever point she was making to the General.Rachel slipped out into the open air beyond the council chamber.It wasn’t truly “open” — Mars’ sky was a filtered twilight beneath the city’s protective dome — but it felt vast compared to the suffocating weight of the meeting. The light of the Red Rock bled into everything, painting her skin in copper and gold. The air was cooler here, almost clean, carrying the faint tang of iron dust and the faint, electrical hum of the city’s power grid.She closed her eyes and drew in a slow breath, but her stomach still churned. The parasite’s bite was long healed on the outside, but inside… something s

The climb to Ka!ri’s sanctuary was a silent confession etched in stone dust and labored breath. No klaxons shattered the stillness, no war drums pulsed through the caverns—just the rhythmic scrape of my boots on raw basalt and the weight of every unspoken word between us, heavy as the planet's core. The path coiled upward like a serpent's spine, each narrow ledge slick with condensation from the colony's struggling atmospheric processors. My fingers left damp prints on the cold rock as I ascended, the thinning air sharpening every inhale to a knife's edge in my lungs. She reached the summit first, her silhouette haloed by the throbbing veins of iron-rich minerals threaded through the cavern ceiling. The bioluminescent strands pulsed in slow, hypnotic rhythms—amber one moment, blood-red the next—casting her in liquid fire and bruise-purple shadows. I halted three paces behind her, close enough to feel the radiant heat of her skin, far enough to pretend the scent of her didn't unravel me