Chapter 6
TORVEN
Iwoke to the sound of wind still howling outside the tower, though it was notably less violent than the day before. For a moment, I was disoriented, unsure where I was or why every muscle in my body ached. Then awareness returned, along with the warmth of another body pressed against my side.
Zara Rivers.
She was still asleep, her face peaceful and slack.
Her full lips were parted. Sometime during the night, she’d moved closer.
Her hand rested on my arm and her head nearly touched my shoulder.
Her blond hair had come loose from its ponytail, falling across her cheek in waves that caught the dim light filtering through the window.
She was pretty, but not in a way that was considered conventional by human standards—what little I knew of them.
Zara had the look of someone who was a little wild.
Some would say, a little off. Her eyes tended to flash all around when she was thinking through something.
She overexplained things. She did not worry about things like her hair, which she seemed to do battle with on a daily basis.
In sleep, however, the determined set of her jaw had relaxed, revealing the delicate curve of her bone structure.
Her skin was pale, almost luminous in the morning light, with a faint flush across her cheekbones.
Dark lashes twitched against her cheeks.
There was something vulnerable about her when she slept, and it was so different from the slightly scattered but sharp-minded scientist I’d come to know.
She looked younger and smaller than when awake—though that might have been because she was curled against my side like she was seeking warmth and protection.
The sight of her sleeping so peacefully beside me sent an unexpected surge of protectiveness through my chest. I found her unbearably attractive.
I knew I should move away. Put some distance between us before she woke up and realized how close we’d gotten during the night.
Instead, I found myself studying her face, noting the little details I couldn’t observe when she was awake because I didn’t want her to catch me staring at her. So, I stared now.
I couldn’t bring myself to regret our proximity. For the first time since we’d crashed, I felt something other than grim determination and fear. There was warmth here, and comfort, and the kind of peace I hadn’t experienced in years.
Focus on what matters, I told myself, forcing my attention away from Zara’s sleeping form. Check on the crew. Figure out our next move.
I carefully extracted my arm from beneath her hand and checked the multi-scanner strapped to my wrist. The device had been running passive scans all night, searching for any sign of the escape pods’ emergency beacons.
Nothing.
I cycled through the different frequency ranges, hoping against hope that I’d missed something. The scanner’s display remained stubbornly empty. Either the pods’ beacons weren’t functioning, they were too far away for the scanner to detect, or…
I didn’t want to think about the third option. I muttered a curse, staring at the empty readings.
“What’s wrong?” Zara’s voice was thick with sleep, but alert. She pushed herself up on one elbow. Her brown eyes immediately focused on my face with concern.
“Still no signals from the crew,” I said, lowering the scanner. “The emergency beacons should have a range of at least fifty kilometers. If we’re not picking up anything…”
I didn’t finish the thought, but I could see in her expression that she understood the implications.
“How long do those beacons typically last?” she asked, sitting up fully and running her hands through her disheveled hair.
“Seventy-two hours on standard power cells. Longer, if they’re rationing the broadcasts.” I checked the time display on the scanner. “We’ve got maybe fifty-five or sixty hours left before they start shutting down to preserve power.”
Sixty hours to find them, or to find some way to contact the outside galaxy. The weight of that deadline settled on my shoulders like a physical burden.
“We’ll find them,” Zara said quietly, and there was something in her voice that made me look at her more closely.
“Or they’ll find us. Cleo is not one to just wait around for someone to rescue her.
Knowing her, she’s building her own transmission station and ordering your crew members around.
She has impressive programming skills.” She arched her brows. “And mine are not too shabby.”
She was trying to reassure me, I realized. Despite being stranded on an alien planet with no guarantee of rescue, despite having no training for this kind of survival situation, she was trying to make me feel better.
It shouldn’t have mattered. Professional relationships didn’t include emotional support. But something warm unfurled in my chest at her words, and I found myself nodding.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”
We started our day, such as it was. I divided out some small morsels from our remaining rations while Zara folded up the coats we’d used as blankets. The portions were smaller today—we needed to stretch our supplies as long as possible.
“How thirsty are you?” I asked as we sat cross-legged across from each other to eat. I studied her face as she spoke and didn’t like what I saw. Her lips were already showing signs of dehydration—dry and slightly cracked.
“Critically,” she said. “At my current rate of activity, I’ll be in trouble by the end of the day. Lucky for you Destrans that you’re not as dependent on water.” She nodded toward me. “You have lami.”
Ah, the liquid that our Solas produced was nourishing enough to the Destran body that it could replace all food and water. And its healing properties meant sickness was unheard of. What I wouldn’t give for a bucket of it right now. “If only I had some with me.”
She winked her nose. “Your supply didn’t make it through the crash?”
“If it had, I’d have shared some with you.”
She frowned. “That’s a nice thing to say.”
I shrugged. “It’s true.” Destrans could survive longer without water than humans, but lack of water or lami would eventually take a toll on me. “We need to search this tower systematically. If there was a research station here, they would have had water storage, recycling systems, something.”
“Agreed. Let’s hope we find evidence of them at the lower levels.” She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “That looked like a lot of stairs and I’m not the most…athletic person, you know.”
“I’ll help you if you get tired.” I finished my ration and stood up, offering her my hand. “Ready for some climbing?”
The staircase that spiraled up the tower’s interior was in better condition than I’d expected. The metal steps were solid, and the handrails were secure, though everything was coated in the same layer of dust and grime that covered the rest of the facility.
We climbed in companionable silence, saving our energy for the physical exertion. The tower was taller than I’d realized from the outside—level after level stretched above us, each one revealing more abandoned rooms and corridors.
Level three held what looked like living quarters—small chambers with basic furniture, all of it covered in dust and showing signs of hasty abandonment. Personal belongings were scattered across floors and tables, as if people had grabbed what they could carry and left everything else behind.
Level four was some kind of laboratory or research facility. Complex equipment lined the walls, much of it damaged or cannibalized for parts. Whatever experiments had been conducted here, they’d ended abruptly.
Level five contained more living spaces, these ones larger and better furnished. Probably quarters for senior researchers or facility administrators.
It was on the way to level six that we heard it.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
I stopped climbing and held my hand to my ear, listening. The sound was faint but regular—liquid hitting a solid surface somewhere above us.
“You hear that?” Zara whispered.
I nodded, and we continued climbing more quickly. The sound grew louder as we ascended, and by the time we reached the landing for level six, I could see condensation on the walls.
“There,” Zara said, pointing to where a thin trail of water was running down the interior wall of the stairwell.
We followed the trail to its source—a door marked with symbols I couldn’t read but which Zara theorized indicated it was some kind of environmental systems room. The door was partially open, and we could hear the steady sound of dripping water inside.
The room beyond was filled with large cylindrical tanks and a maze of pipes and conduits. Most of the equipment was dark and silent, but one unit in the corner was still functioning, humming quietly as it processed moisture from the air.
“Moisture evaporator,” Zara breathed, moving toward the working unit. “It’s been running so long that the collection tank long overflowed.”
She was right. The floor around the evaporator was covered in a thin layer of water, and I could see where it had been slowly seeping out of the room and down the stairwell for what must have been years.
Along one wall, hydroponic containers that had once held cultivated plants were now filled with mold and dead vegetation.
But in a few of the containers, vivid green vines had taken root, thriving in the excess moisture.
They were unlike any plant life I’d ever seen—thick, almost luminescent leaves that seemed to pulse with their own internal light.
“Is it safe to drink?” I asked, kneeling beside the overflow pool.
Zara had already pulled out one of her scientific instruments and was taking readings. “The mineral content is a bit high, but it’s clean. No bacterial contamination that I can detect.”
Without waiting for further analysis, I cupped my hands and drank deeply from the pool. The water was cool and slightly metallic-tasting, but it was the most welcome thing I’d experienced since we’d crashed.
Zara joined me, and we both drank until we couldn’t hold any more, then filled our water containers to capacity.
“This changes everything,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “With a reliable water source, we have more time, and if we find a food source, we can survive here indefinitely. Which wouldn’t be ideal, of course.”
“Long enough for rescue, anyway,” I agreed, though privately I wondered how long that might be. The lords of Destra would eventually send someone to look for us, but it could be weeks before a search mission arrived, and they could face the same problem with the storms that we did.
We continued our climb, both of us feeling significantly better now that we’d solved our most immediate survival problem. Level seven was another research area, this one focused on atmospheric monitoring equipment. Level eight was just empty.
It was level nine that changed everything again.
The door was marked with more of those incomprehensible symbols, but this time they were accompanied by what looked like a universal data storage icon. A records room.
Inside, we found exactly what the marking had promised—shelves upon shelves of data storage devices.
Not the sleek, crystalline storage media used by modern civilizations, but the older cube-shaped blocks that had been popular eighty or a hundred cycles ago.
There were thousands of them, organized in careful rows that suggested a comprehensive archive of some kind.
“This is incredible,” Zara said, moving between the shelves with wide eyes. “Whatever research was being conducted here, they documented everything.”
I was less interested in the historical significance and more focused on the practical implications. “Any chance these contain information about communication systems? Ways to contact the outside galaxy?”
“Possibly. We’d need to find a way to access them, but…” She picked up one of the data cubes, turning it over in her hands. “These storage formats were used across multiple species. If we can find a compatible reader, we might be able to learn what happened here.”
We split up to search the room more efficiently, each taking a different section of shelves. The data cubes were labeled, but in the same alien script we’d encountered throughout the tower. Without translation capabilities, we had no way of knowing what information each cube contained.
I was three aisles deep into the archive when I found it.
At first, I thought it was just another piece of equipment that had been knocked from its shelf. Then I saw the bones.
An alien skeleton lay crumpled in the narrow space between two data storage units, still partially clothed in the decayed remains of what had once been some kind of uniform. The fabric was too deteriorated to make out any identifying marks, but it was clear the body been here for years.
I heard her footsteps coming my way, and she was already talking about something she found, having begun the conversation before she even reached me.
“Zara,” I called softly. “Don’t come over here.”
“What did you say?” she replied, just as she rounded the corner and stopped short beside me.
“I said—”
“Oh,” she said in a very small voice. “Oh, no.”
When I turned to look at her, her face had gone completely pale. Then, to my complete shock, she fell apart.