Chapter 3
JILLIAN
By the third day, the romance of alien world fieldwork has peeled away like sunburned skin.
It’s not that I’m disappointed. Not really. It’s just... this place is hell.
The air recyclers wheeze and sputter like arthritic lungs, every breath filtered through layers of static-laced purification that still leaves a taste like warm battery acid on the back of my tongue.
The suits are stiff and unforgiving, sealed tight to protect us from the radiation bursts, but so thick around the joints that it feels like walking through molasses.
Every movement is a negotiation. Every step a calculated risk.
“Just another glorious day on Purgonis,” I mutter, bent double under the weight of a sample kit, sweat crawling down my spine in sticky rivers. The inner lining of the suit clings to me like a second skin—one that absolutely hates me.
Ciampa’s voice crackles in over the comms. “Section Three is still uncharted, students. Make sure your scans are thorough.”
“Got it, Professor,” I answer, and I don’t even try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. It doesn’t matter. He never listens when we’re not in the room with him.
The ridge I’m surveying looks like it was belched out of the planet’s throat. Blackened slag, charred crust, steam venting through cracks that singe the soles of our boots if we step wrong. Glorious. I kneel beside a patch of warped rock, flicking on my compad’s scanner.
“Gamma spikes again,” I murmur, tapping through the readouts. “Higher than yesterday’s baseline.” The data pings back with angry orange flags. I make a note, wipe the touchscreen on my suit’s knee, and glance up at the horizon.
The sun on this side of the planet never truly sets. It just… glowers. A dull, amber smudge behind the magnetic haze, bleeding color into the thick, dust-choked sky. Everything glints weird here. Distorted. Like the light’s fighting the planet and losing.
Still, there’s something undeniably beautiful about it. Like a planet that refuses to die pretty. It snarls and burns and says, “Come on, then.”
I like that kind of energy.
I shift my balance and begin scraping a fresh sample into a containment vial when something sparkles in my peripheral vision. I pause, blink, tilt my head.
At the base of a half-melted basalt column, beneath a drift of scorched earth, there’s a flicker. Pale blue, almost iridescent. I shuffle closer, heart thudding, and push aside the slag with a gloved hand.
Crystals.
A vein of them, nested into the rock like frost flowers. They catch the ambient light just so, sending kaleidoscopic patterns scattering across the inside of my visor. Tiny, geometric structures pulsing faintly—almost alive.
“Oh, you gorgeous bastard,” I breathe, already forgetting how uncomfortable I am. I adjust my scanner, careful not to disturb them further. “You’re not in the database.”
The compad confirms it with a smug blank screen.
I grin, wide and wicked. This. This is why I signed up. Not to scrub data in a lab, not to triple-check simulations. For the chance to see something no human’s ever seen before. Something new. Untouched.
“Hey, Carson,” I call over the short-range comms. “You picking up these frequencies? Section Three. About fifteen meters from the east vent.”
Static, then his voice, tight and nasal. “Yeah, I got you. You found something?”
“I found the something.” I kneel lower, inspecting the fine webwork of mineral strands. “Crystalline structure embedded in high-heat terrain. Reflective diffraction patterns I’ve never seen before. These could be photonic. Maybe even self-replicating. You want to come see?”
He’s quiet for a second. Too quiet.
Then, “In a minute.”
I frown, leaning back on my heels. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he says too fast, then adds, “No. I mean—kind of. Can I talk to you?”
“Um. We are talking.”
“No. Like… alone.”
I glance around. The marines aren’t close, and the other students are still stumbling around their assigned sectors, most of them just pretending to do their jobs. The atmosphere’s too thick with dust for anyone to be listening clearly anyway.
“Meet me by the rover,” he says. “The one parked by the supply dome.”
“Ten minutes,” I reply, tucking the sample carefully into my case. “Don’t get eaten by anything.”
He doesn’t laugh.
Carson paces when I get there, which is unusual enough. His natural speed is ‘amble,’ maybe ‘waddle’ on an ambitious day. But now he’s got this manic energy, hands flexing, his eyes darting toward the marines like he thinks they’re bugged for surveillance.
“What’s going on?” I ask, pulling my helmet off to get a full look at him.
He’s pale. Paler than usual, and that’s saying something for a guy who sunburns under fluorescents. There’s a bead of sweat clinging to his temple, and he keeps adjusting his glasses even though they’re not crooked.
“I think—I found something,” he says. “Something I wasn’t supposed to.”
“Okay…” I draw the word out, glancing over my shoulder. “What kind of something? Please don’t tell me you discovered Ciampa’s OnlyFans.”
Carson doesn’t crack a smile.
I sobered fast.
“I was going through the old geological surveys,” he says, voice low, “you know, the ones from the first expedition? Just out of curiosity. But the timestamped records—they don’t match the physical core samples.
Like, not at all. And then I found these discrepancies in the data uploads.
Edited entries. Gaps that’ve been spliced over.
It’s not just sloppiness—it’s deliberate. ”
“Maybe someone just screwed up,” I offer weakly, but I know even as I say it that I don’t believe it.
“I thought that too,” Carson says. “But then I traced the access logs. Every single altered file was accessed by Ciampa. Or Darwin.”
My mouth goes dry. “What would they even have to gain by faking core samples?”
“Funding,” he says, voice flat. “Purgonis wasn’t greenlit because of its natural beauty. It was supposed to be the biggest untapped mineral site since Novaria. Except… it’s not. Most of this place is geologically useless. Hostile, radioactive, barely stable. There’s nothing here worth mining.”
Except… I glance back at the vial in my kit.
Maybe not nothing.
Carson rubs his palms together. “I think he’s been making it look like we’re onto something big to keep the money flowing. And if anyone finds out—”
“You think he’d shut us up?” I whisper.
Carson hesitates. “I don’t know. But he’s not who we think he is. And Darwin—he’s not just a lackey. I think he knows everything.”
A chill rolls down my spine that has nothing to do with the wind.
Carson reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a sealed compad—older model, scratched, scuffed. “I made a backup,” he says. “Just in case. If anything happens to me—like, anything weird—I want you to have it.”
My fingers close around the device, hesitant. “Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one who’ll actually look into it,” he says, trying for a smile. It’s a ghost of one. “Hide it under my bunk. Don’t let anyone know you’ve got it.”
I look down at the pad, then back up at him. “You’re being dramatic.”
“Am I?” he murmurs, eyes distant. “This planet eats people, Jill.”
I shove the compad into my kit bag before I can second-guess myself. “Okay. Fine. But if this turns out to be a prank and you’re just trying to freak me out, I’m putting bio-stink gel in your helmet.”
Carson doesn’t smile.
He just nods.
Disturbed by his behavior and request, I decide to go to bed early. I barely sleep.
Every creak of the prefab walls, every faint hiss of the atmosphere scrubbers feels like a whisper meant just for me. Carson’s words echo in my skull—cut-up soundbites playing on repeat. Just in case. If anything happens. This planet eats people.
I want to laugh it off. Tell myself he’s just being dramatic. That maybe the isolation, the planet, the pressure of academic expectations—it’s all just getting to him.
But I don’t. I don’t laugh.
Instead, I lie awake, staring at the faint glow of my compad across the room, ticking out radiation warnings in dull pulses of orange and red. The heat regulator thuds and wheezes like a dying beast, pushing recycled air through vents thick with mineral grit.
Outside, the night air thrums like it’s holding its breath.
Then the world explodes.
I bolt upright in my bunk as the unmistakable scream of laser fire tears through the silence. The walls shudder as fusion charges detonate somewhere near the cliffs. Outside, boots hammer the gravel, shouting voices layered over the sharp percussion of weapons discharge.
“Odex! Odex—two o’clock ridge! Take it down!”
I slam my helmet on and wrench the hatch open, heart jackhammering as I stumble into the night. The air tastes like ozone and scorched metal. Dust swirls in thick clouds around the floodlights as marines fan out toward the west perimeter, guns raised, eyes wild.
“What the hell’s going on?” I shout, already jogging toward the commotion.
Grady, helmet off and jaw set, yells back without even looking at me, “Target sighted at the ridge—tall, fast, moving like a goddamn specter.”
I skid to a halt near the edge of the blast zone. Scorched rock smolders in jagged chunks, the fusion charges having ripped divots into the already fragile terrain. Smoke curls upward, backlit by flickering floodlights that make the shadows dance like specters.
But it’s not the fire or the shouting that roots me in place.
It’s what I saw.
Just before the thing vanished—whatever it was—there was a shape against the ridge line. Silhouetted by the red shimmer of the magnetic haze. Towering. Broad-shouldered. Almost… human in profile. But too big. Too fluid. And those eyes—
Gold. Not glowing. Not artificial. Alive.
And then it moved. Not away like a predator cornered or an enemy routed. No. It… paused. Like it was watching us as much as we were watching it. Calculating. Curious.
There was no roar. No threat display. It didn’t even bare teeth. Just that beat—a frozen second where the world held its breath and it turned slightly, like it was making a choice.
And then it was gone.
“Is anyone hit?” another marine barks. “Was it armed?”
“Negative,” someone else replies, breathless. “Didn’t return fire. Just bolted.”
I walk a few paces toward the edge of the ridge before Grady’s arm shoots out to stop me. “No civilians past the line,” he snaps.
“I saw it,” I say quietly.
He squints at me, sweat beading along his brow. “You what?”
“I saw it,” I repeat, louder this time. “Just before it disappeared. It wasn’t charging. It didn’t even raise its arms. It just stood there. Watching.”
Grady scoffs. “You don’t know Odex behavior.”
“Neither do you,” I shoot back.
He points to the scorched gravel, the mangled rocks. “Odex don’t need a damn reason to kill. Last time they showed up here, we pulled teeth out of what was left of three students.”
I feel the weight of that. I do.
But still…
“This one didn’t attack.”
Grady waves me off and shouts over his shoulder, “Ridge sweep! I want bodies or at least a blood trail. Move!”
The marines scatter into formation, the sharp click of their boots fading into the static-laced night. I linger at the edge of the blast zone, eyes still scanning the cliffs. My pulse is slowing, but not by much.
It’s not adrenaline anymore. It’s unease.
Carson appears beside me a moment later, face tight. “What the hell happened?”
“Someone spotted an Odex, they say.”
His eyes go wide. “Here?”
I nod slowly. “Yeah. But Carson… it didn’t attack.”
He gives me a sharp look. “Are you defending it?”
“No,” I say, unsure. “Maybe. I don’t know. It just didn’t feel right. The way it looked at us—it wasn’t rage. It was more like… analysis.”
“Are you saying it was intelligent?”
“More like I’m saying it didn’t feel like an ambush.”
The compads flicker with updates: Perimeter breach. Defensive posture authorized. Patrol rotation increased. Risk rating: Elevated.
I feel that risk settle into my bones.
Back at camp, the atmosphere doesn’t ease.
Even after the marines return empty-handed—no tracks, no signs, no confirmation—their tension doesn’t bleed off.
No one admits it out loud, but they’re spooked.
It takes a lot to unnerve guys like Grady.
But he’s coiled tighter than a spring now, barking orders and pacing the command tent like a caged animal.
Later, after lights-out is called and the base goes quiet again, I find myself outside my bunk, wrapped in a thermal jacket, staring at the sky.
The haze shimmers above like oil on water.
Colors ripple in the upper atmosphere, caught in the weave of the planet’s fractured magnetic field.
It’s almost beautiful, in a haunted kind of way.
The stars are faint here, just barely piercing through the muck.
But enough to remind me this place is still part of a universe.
Still under the same night sky as everything else.
I wrap my arms around my knees and breathe in the sharp, mineral-heavy air. My visor is off now. It’s safe enough inside the camp’s perimeter. Or so we hope.
Somewhere in the cliffs, that creature—Odex or not—is probably watching.
I can feel it.
That same sensation I had before—on the first night here—settles over me again. Not fear. Not exactly. But a pressure. Like someone’s eyes on my back.
Except… it doesn’t feel malevolent.
I don’t know how to explain it.
It feels like the planet itself is holding its breath again. Like something’s waiting.
And for the first time, I don’t feel like the observer.
I feel like the observed.