“Why did no one come back to the dig?” Saqr wondered, as they sat around the table in the center of their camp, waiting for Lavim.

  “Would you?” Dr. Delecta asked. “After your agent promised to activate their weird artifact and then never spoke to you again, and all communication with the dig went silent?”

  “True,” Olivia agreed. “Sounds risky.”

  “Maybe this ZK was hiding in Dr. Wana’s dig,” Siladan suggested. “Waiting for a follow-up message from Islim. When it didn’t come ZK had to leave with the rest of the dig.”

  “Went back to Coriolis, dug around, found no one had returned,” Adam proposed.

  “If you wanted to come back you’d make sure you assembled a solid team,” Al Hamra said. “You’d assume something nasty had happened, or that the guard caught Islim. So you’d lie low, wait to find out if anyone came back and if they were looking for you, and once you were sure it was an accident at the dig site you’d form a team. Maybe word would already have gone around the mercenaries on Coriolis that the site was deadly. It could take time.”

  “Or your goal was simply to stop the dig,” Olivia suggested. “So, successful. No need to investigate.”

  “You’d think whoever financed this dig would try to set up another one,” Siladan said, frowning at the artifacts. “These things are very valuable.”

  “You’d still have to wait though, wouldn’t you?” Al Hamra persisted. “Your entire dig crew disappears and a week later you’re sniffing around for another? People probably wouldn’t be interested in joining up.”

  “We know it’s safe,” Siladan said, “Kind of. We could go back in there, get Islim’s talisman and try to figure out where the wire went.”

  “No,” Dr. Delecta said flatly. “I’m not going back in.” She looked around, saw general agreement, glanced to Adam for backup. “We don’t know what triggered the Sentinel, and if Olivia’s right there could be six of them in there. I don’t want to die like that.”

  “I don’t want to die at all,” Olivia added, and the matter was decided. They waited in silence for Lavim to come out of the shuttle, staring at the artifacts and muttering about the intense heat. While they waited Al Hamra picked up the causality stones, the wooden box and the glasses and made his excuses, disappearing into the relative cool and comfort of his tent to begin investigating them.

  “He doesn’t want us watching,” Dr. Delecta observed in a cool voice, and then they fell silent, shuffling feet and hands impatiently as they waited for the Mystic to unravel the mysteries of the Dark. Olivia sat tense and still with her eyes closed, obviously trying to sense some sign of Al Hamra’s powers at work, perhaps hoping to notice them the same way they had all felt the sinister presence of his command power on the bridge in Coriolis station. Across from her at the camp table, Dr. Delecta stared at the tent with a focused intensity, her eyes fixed on Al Hamra’s shadowed form where it hunched over the items. The rest of them fiddled and fussed quietly, uncertain about whether speech or the sounds of campsite activity would disturb Al Hamra’s enigmatic meditations. Finally Adam stood up and began cleaning up dirty dishes, apparently unphased.

  “Did you feel it on the bridge?” Dr. Delecta asked him quietly, taking the small sounds of dishes being collected as permission to disturb the silence.

  He nodded. “I felt it. I can feel the Dark, the psycho-sculpts didn’t turn that off. It just doesn’t scare me.”

  The conversation stopped there and they fell back into uncomfortable silence, broken only by the small sounds of Adam tidying up and the constant, irregular buzzing and whining of the swamp’s myriad insects. Eventually Lavim Tamm emerged from the shuttle and hustled along the line of lights to the insect exclusion zone, bringing some fresh foods on a tray that he set down on the table. Lavim still moved with diffident uncertainty around the Firebirds, unsure about his place on the team and perhaps acutely aware of how timid he looked to them, and so it took him a moment to notice the subdued quiet of the team.

  “What’s going on?” He eventually asked as he laid out bowls of fresh fruit, looking around at the quiet table.

  “We found out what happened to your team,” Dr. Delecta told him, voice gentle, and gestured for him to sit next to her. “And we have a question for you. Do you want to hear what we found?”

  Lavim sat on the bench next to her, looking around at the team, and after a moment’s hesitation gave a little nod, which Siladan took as permission to begin his explanation. He described the situation with academic precision, stepping through each point of their incursion into the hill and explaining what they found with dispassionate precision. Occasionally Dr. Delecta interjected to soften the details of some of the more grotesque and vivid descriptions, ensuring that Siladan’s clinical accuracy did not disturb Lavim too much. Lavim nodded along, making one or two remarks at different points of the story to indicate where he had been and how their findings matched his own experience, and eventually the tale reached its conclusion.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “So it was a Portal builder guardian,” Lavim concluded in a small voice, “And maybe I activated it when I pulled the statuette out of the alcove.”

  Siladan nodded judiciously, and Dr. Delecta gave him a sharp look. “Not necessarily!” She contradicted the boy. “We don’t know what activated it. It might have been the box Islim used, and Al Hamra is trying to understand it now.” She gestured back at the motionless form of the Mystic, still silent in his tent, and threw a frown at Siladan, trying to wordlessly encourage him to show a little discretion in his approach.

  “Banu has a theory,” Saqr put in, watching the boy quietly from across the table. “Maybe the items hidden in the alcove had a secret clue about how to find one of the lost Horizons.” She paused as Lavim expressed his surprise, then continued. “We think the items were placed in that room to make sure no one used them unwisely. So we want to know if you remember what the map on the wall looked like. Siladan wants to show you a picture.” When Lavim indicated it was okay she gestured to Siladan, who showed Lavim a picture of the wall map on his tabula, carefully cropped to remove any bodies or gore from the surroundings. “There was a thin wire that connected the broken parts on the bottom left to the map on the top right,” She explained, moving her finger around the area of the tabula where the map of the Third Horizon was still mostly intact. “Can you remember which star it was connected to?”

  “That’s a map of the Third Horizon?” Lavim asked, eyes wide as he stared at the tabula, and out of his view Olivia rolled her eyes to indicate her exasperation at the boy’s ignorance, attracting a slap from Dr. Delecta. When Saqr nodded, Lavim pointed uncertainly to a point in the loop of gems lying at the bottom of the map. “I think it was here,” he told them.

  “Are you sure?” Saqr asked him, glancing around at the others with wide eyes. He nodded, looking at her in confusion.

  “What’s wrong?” He asked. “Did I make a mistake?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Saqr assured him. “It’s just that … that’s Taoan.”

  Taoan, the system the Ghazali had been heading when it was intercepted. The system now under lockdown, where something terrible had happened to the Tsurabi gas mine, and from whence, they guessed, the malignant but beautiful butterfly-shaped ship had come to ambush the Zafirah in the Dark Between the Stars. They had not explained this part of their history to Lavim yet, expecting that he would leave their ship soon enough and not wanting him to take their secrets with him.

  “You think they’re linked?” Olivia asked Saqr, reaching in to expand the picture and focus on the part of the map Lavim had pointed to.

  “It seems like a big coincidence, don’t you think?” Saqr asked. “Something terrible happens in Taoan, and about the same time something terrible happens here, connected to a map that points at Taoan.”

  “That ship…” Siladan began to say, but then seeing Dr. Delecta’s sharp glance stopped speaking. Lavim looked at him quizzically but said nothing.

  “There’s lots of digs happening all across the Horizon at any time,” Adam pointed out. “Chances are at some point something will go wrong. Let’s not go jumping at shadows.”

  “This wasn’t a dig, though,” Siladan replied. “It was vandalism. Smashing a map to get at an item, even though the map is incredibly valuable.”

  “Or because it’s incredibly valuable…” Saqr said quietly. “If Dr. Delecta’s theory is right the vandals have made sure we don’t know what the broken map showed, and we weren’t meant to ever recover the objects from the alcove.”

  “Lavim,” Dr. Delecta said gently, seeing his confusion, “We think that some people were trying to find out what the map showed, and we think maybe the statuette you recovered contained information about the map.” She avoided too much detail about the function of the statuette, and Siladan nodded approvingly as she skirted details. “We think whoever gave Islim the box was either trying to stop this expedition, or sabotage it and steal the results. We don’t know the details, or exactly what information they were looking for. But it was very valuable to someone, and we think it concerned one of the lost Horizons.”

  He looked around the group with wide eyes and a stunned expression. “So you see,” Dr. Delecta continued, “We want to keep this secret for now. Maybe someone will come back to the dig site to get what was in there, but maybe they already heard that it was being traded in Coriolis. Maybe Merez wanted to sell it to them, but the Draconites stole it from him before he had a chance.”

  “So maybe the Draconites know how to travel to a lost Horizon?” Lavim asked, looking from Siladan to Dr. Delecta in horror.

  “No,” Dr. Delecta shook her head, “Because the Draconites didn’t see the map, which is destroyed. Only you remember what it looked like. But they maybe have part of that information. So for now,” She looked around at the others, seeking their approval without voicing the request, “It’s probably best that you stay with us, until we are away from Coriolis and your connection to the dig is far in the past.” She nodded once for emphasis when the others did not object to her suggestion.

  “Okay,” Lavim said with easy haste. “I don’t have anywhere to go anyway, and at least with you guys I have work.” He stood up as he said that. “Speaking of which, I’ll go and get some more food.” With that he was off, hustling along the path towards the ship.

  “Adam,” Dr. Delecta said in a quiet voice, and without fuss or comment he set off after the boy, walking quickly but calmly to catch up with him. Seeing the concerned glances from the rest of the team, she added, “Just in case. I think we can trust him, but let’s keep an eye on him for now.”

  As they nodded agreement Al Hamra emerged from his tent, walked over to the table and sat down. He looked serious, face pale and drawn, and sat down with a sigh. Saqr handed him a cup of jasmine tea, and they all waited for him to sip a little and relax before he spoke.

  “I did it,” he said. “I know how these things work. And I have learnt a new power.”