Home.

Our steps got heavier. The toll of endless traversing, the lack of sleep, the soreness of our muscles, the seeping absolute zero temperatures, the lack of proper nutrition...

All those factors piled up against us.

Our minds could not afford to simply submerge themselves in unconsciousness, our eyes were constantly scanning the horizon for any signs of danger.

Our back, and our left. Those were monitored almost constantly.

The deepening shadows around the distant wreck gave the impression to hide brimming eyes within their void. Something watching our steps from afar.

...

We wouldn't know for sure though. All we could attempt was to make sure whatever was inside did not get any thoughts about getting its ugly, deformed head out of the ship.

Narrowing his gaze at the deformed spine of the ship, with his rifle in hand, Kev's steps quickened. Theirs had to follow.

...

Trudging through the barren landscape, my mind... it was still reeling from whatever I had seen...

The humanoid, crystal hybrid had been profoundly alien to anything I had ever heard or seen. The surface of Pluto, its depths too, harbored hundreds of different species of creatures of flesh and fiber.

Miners knew all of them. They had seen all of them.

Still, the eerie similarity to a living man. The aggressive growths of shards through its skull and back... It didn't make any sense. Such a thing was not... It should not be possible, there was no such creature living on either of the two moons.

What worried me... It was not just the presence, the unnatural, the uncanniness of their existence. Neither its inhuman speed nor its devastating swipe... The true menace. The true implication of its presence.

I had yet to understand the true magnitude.

...

We were always careful to maintain at least five kilometers of distance from the crash site. None of us approached the downward incline formed by the impact, bet neither of us could help themselves put gaze at the pronounced decline every couple of minutes.

We couldn't shake the feeling that something was deeply wrong with everything... The thousands of wrecked interstellar ships that littered the planet's surface were evidence of that.

Taking the round trip around the depths of the crater may have been the sanest choice, but it greatly increased the duration of our trip.

There was no one, we could not contact anyone. The nets of satellites remained in orbit, and the lights of both cities still shone in the distance. However, was anyone still standing behind them?..

I could not shake the impression, behind those lights, there was really no one anymore... There was someone shouting in horror somewhere far away in the vacuum, but we would never hear it.

That alone was terrifying.

...

Kevin was lost.

I could see it in his sharp stare as we walked right beside each other. Right as the falling happened, chaos ensued in our surroundings, as heavy cannons fired. Then under the ground, tunneling, searching for someone who was supposed to be dead...

Kevin had not even once faltered.

He was the most level-headed man I had known, but even he had no answers to the questions that were plaguing them.

The sighting of the shard-incrusted abomination had changed something...

What though?..

No one could really tell.

...

The sight of the wreckage started dimming into the distance, we continued heading south, guided both by the map of stars and the still-lit lights of the distant city.

[ Damn itgt- ]

Mack said out loud. His communication cut mid-sentence as the battery of his suit ran out, halting the renewal of air. Starting the timer for his demise...

He had been the outlasting one. Together with Martha, they had been the only ones with abled batteries for a while now.

Now there was only one of us abled by live support. Yet there was a new candidate to use the only other emergency oxygen container...

Time was short. We knew we still had a distance to cover before they could reach the vague proximity of our destination, and the sun was already setting in the sky.

Our energy levels, both mental and physical were rapidly deteriorating. We could already feel it... There was no replenishing rate. Even if each of us consumed one of the tasteless, grey rations every hour. That would not be enough to keep us going for much longer.

That was a hopeful thought experiment...

In the foregone time, Mack, Martha, and Vaam had managed to eat three rations each, Kevin had only eaten one. His appetite had never been much for a miner, but even that was dangerously little for someone his size. He would start debilitating slowly.

We could not afford that.

| Kev, eat another. |

I uttered in closed communication so that none of the younger would hear.

| I'm good. |

That shit again... I clenched my teeth.

This had not been the first time we'd had this conversation in the last couple of hours. I had hesitated to insist before, but now I didn't care that much at all. My golden-colored eyes locked onto his.

My still bloodied lips parted as I uttered in low voice.

| If something happens to you, there's no doubt we will all die. |

His unrelenting steps seemed to stall for a second, before continuing their drumming.

| You and I both kn- |

---

Their thoughts were interrupted by a sudden crackling over their communication channels.

[ Hey guys... Something ahead. ]

Martha said, her voice tense. By the time my head turned to face whatever, Kev's body had already lowered to the ground, his frigid right eye staring down the center of the scope. His left hand lifted with his palm raised, indicating us not to move an inch.

We did not hesitate either though. We immediately went on high alert, our hands instinctively reaching for their lesser weapons. Be it knives or simple pistols.

We had all learned the hard way that on Pluto, danger could come from any direction. This time, it decided to appear just on our path.

Are we engaging?

That was the question at hand. Its answer would come in the pulling of a trigger.

My attention immediately settled on the distant, rhythmic movement of what could be best described as a living chain. A reaper vine, we called. A creature that lurked under the layers of ice, growing and feeding on the little biological matter naive enough to enter its domain.

Something was wrong with it... Its movements were chaotic, and disengaged as if it was struggling to drown.

We soon saw.

The creature's rugby-ball-shaped body rapidly escaped the crutch of the frozen land, as it convulsed in agony.

We did not move. Not until its purposeless movements halted with what I imagined to be a low whimper.

...

The beast had died. How? That, we had yet to know.

Kev lifted himself from the ground, putting his rifle put back on the harness on his chest. With an enigmatic stare, his steps carried forwards toward the clearly dead animal. We too sheathed our weapons.

Reapervines had plenty of sure-kill spots along their body. But only one of them was visible from the surface of the ice. It was a dimly glowing protrusion, one blinking, imitating the pulse of tall living glow grass.

Even if unlikely, when shooting to kill, aiming for that exact spot was imperative...

Stepping over the hard bone tendrils that served as its deadly weapons. Kev kneeled, his hands grasping the protuberance down next to the beast's dented beak.

All of us froze in place...

The mark of bullet fire was far too obvious. A clear shot had been fired through the creature's weak spot, rendering it mad and forcing it out of the ground that had once protected it.

Someone had engaged the creature, and it had not been us who fir-

[ God... ]

I jerked back, my ears mistaking one voice for another. For a moment, I really did think sh-

[ You are all fine. ]

That... That did sound like Cass.

My body turned around, and behind me, just a couple meters away, was Cass.

Her violet-parched older mule had been parked a long way back, she had used her suit's hand-made propulsion to hover her way to us. Now, her two arms greedily warped around the bodies of both kids. Her voice turned shaky with emotion.

[ You guys did make it back. ]