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Dys always scoffed when the colonists called Vertumna dangerous.
Guns were dangerous, but that didn't stop Anemone and Sol and so many of the other kids from playing soldier. Tang made cutting asides to him about dangerous xenobiology while decked out in full protective gear, her arms inside the negative pressure sleeves of a sterile box that was one bad stroke of luck away from a containment breach. Some grown-ups looked like they would faint if they even thought about Outside, so they stuck to the living quarters and the kitchens. As if the kitchen wasn't full of sharp objects, scalding heat, electrified equipment...
As if the living room wasn't where little Tammy—
He never argued back. It was too dumb to bother with.
He never stuck around for long, either. There was a certain relaxed simplicity in knowing anything could be a threat. The world outside the colony kept you on your toes, kept you from getting too complacent. And getting yourself killed because of toxic pixie beans, or faulty wiring.
That was alright. He didn't need them. Not when he had Sym.
He liked Utopia, too. The next time he packed his camping gear and glider and set off towards the Ridge, she told him to be careful and gave him a set of survey sites to check up on.
She didn't try to put him on a leash. And in a grown-up, that was the best you could ask for.
The Ridge had a perpetual cacophony to it that had the same effect on him as silence. The winds coursed up and down, whistling along cliffs and tearing at the stubborn flora that clung to them. As the noises filled his head, it replaced the irksome din that spread inside him whenever he returned to the colony.
Dys spent the week exploring. After he was sure he'd mapped out the region, he decided it was time to take a risk. He unfolded his glider and sought a spot on the edge with a clear view down to a steep ravine, and beyond it, a section of the Ridge they had yet to map out. Climbing back out of it would be tedious if not impossible, and contrary to popular conceit, Dys wasn't a complete and total idiot. He unspooled a cord on a grappling hook and spent some time securing it to the cliff, then tied the line to his belt. It was thin but durable. If it came to that, it would be his way back across.
He sent a message to Utopia to update her on his location, just in case.
Dys tested the grappling hook, the cord, the length of the cord, made sure it would unspool smoothly. That put the preparations to an end.
He took his glider and jumped.
The Ridge stretched itself beneath him. For an ecstatic moment, his body seemed to plunge, and then the wind pushed back at him and filled his wings with air. He sailed over the ravine. As he passed above it, he caught a glimpse of it — a crack in the earth, a knife-sharp abyss. Another cave network in the Ridge.
He was across. Losing altitude, and if he wasn't careful, the wind would toss him up and fling him against the nearest rock. It took some effort to control his descent, but he could see a landing site. A little hilltop that looked approachable enough, and he should have cord enough to spare. He steered the glider that way...
It was a good plan. He'd dotted all the i's. Much later, as much as Dys might kick himself, he would admit there wasn't much he could have done better except wuss out and not go exploring to begin with.
A flock of xenofauna burst from a nearby tree in a flutter of diaphanous wings and passed him in a blur. They dodged him as they parted fluidly around him. They did not dodge the cord.
Dys felt the moment the gentle tug of the cord trailing behind him became a yank and jerked him back in the air like a fish on a line. He was fumbling at the double carabiner that would release it from his belt, not quick enough. The creatures that got tangled up in the cord were desperately trying to beat their way free of it. As Dys struggled to regain control of his flight, a thorny treetop clipped his glider. The wind howled, suddenly quite close to him, and Dys spun wildly — straight into the chasm.
The rest of the fall was an adrenaline-blurred haze.
He knew he was alive. His arm was killing him.
Dys opened his eyes to near-darkness and took stock of things. His arm hurt, but he could move it. His everything hurt, but he could move it. Parts of his body were going numb, so he wiggled them to bring the circulation back. There was a sharp pull at his waist, his belt.
The cord. His feet weren't touching ground.
He was dangling. Beneath him: darkness. Distant daylight far above him, barely enough to make out his own limbs. His hands and knees were a scraped mess even if his protective gear had taken the worst of it, and the deep ache in his arm and ribs suggested he'd slammed sideways against the rock, not particularly gently. He must have slowed down his fall enough by scrabbling at the wall, or the whiplash would have killed him in an instant.
Well, it was a good thing that hadn't happened. Now what?
Dys stopped to process that odd sensation he experienced only rarely: the knowledge that his cool head and unhurried heartbeat were an engineered anomaly. Anyone else would panic; possibly do something stupid. Dys hung in there, weathered the discomfort of dangling on a cord, and wondered what to do next.
Call for help? Tch.
It was right there in the surveyor manual, even if it made Dys roll his eyes. He'd been climbing the holes of Vertumna before the manual even existed. Had even helped write some of it. But there was a chance his bad situation could unexpectedly spiral into something terrible. The most dangerous symptom of impaired judgement was impaired judgement, after all.
The display on his PDA gauntlet was cracked, so he tried the other one. He tapped at it slowly and laboriously, his arm aching. Found the SOS tab.
He sent the message out and waited.
No signal.
Well, it had been a worth a try.
Now what?
He could try... climbing up. He still had the cord. Had enough rope and spare carabiners on him that he could probably jury-rig a Prusik knot, and inch his way up to the edge… or at least high enough for his SOS to go through.
Dys stared upward, at that distant patch of sky. Another flock of xenofauna passing overheard. He should have watched the area longer, gotten a feel for unpredictable variables before trying to glide through. Stupid. Too late for it now, though.
He tried to gauge the distance. Craning his head up, he switched the light on his PDA gauntlet from ambient to flashlight mode and pointed up, to the ascent. Fifty meters? More? It was hard to tell. If he'd paid more attention to the geography, he might have been able to estimate how deep he'd dropped from the length of the cord and the distance from the cliff to the chasm, but he'd gotten sloppy.
Climbing up was worth a try.
But even halfway through the convoluted, fumbling attempts to rig and secure the ropes with only his ambient PDA light for guidance, his injured arm and ribs were already screaming at the motions. Pulling himself up? This wasn't going to work.
Dys switched back to flashlight mode and pointed down, instead.
Below him, the craggy walls got darker, smoother… Some of the rocks looked too neat in their geometry in a way he'd come to recognise as the handiwork of the Convergent Domain. Their caves ran throughout the Ridge; he and Sol had explored them many times. If he walked through this one long enough… There might be another way out.
The bottom of the chasm wasn't far. He couldn't climb up, but he could rappel down.
Dys gritted his teeth and got to it.
Solane was going to be insufferable about this.
He could see it now. That one time Dys fell down a hole. Sol would milk it for all it was worth, bring it up every time Dys went out alone. Try to embarrass him in front of the younger kids, like Dys would care.
He felt a twinge that wasn't quite his arm, or his heart. He and Solane weren't friends, exactly. They barely liked each other. Too different. Sol had been cool when he was younger, but he barely left the colony these days. Dys wasn't missing him, and he wasn't afraid of being down here alone. Because he couldn't be afraid.
…But he had to wonder if that feeling was the closest he could get to fear. There was something nervous about it. Evasive. Like it was easier to think about the stupid aftermath and how he'd explain it to Solane and to Utopia, about how they'd all be laughing it off. Rather than…
The trail of bioluminescent lichen he'd been following petered out into the smooth surface of the wall. He increased the ambient light on the gauntlet just for a few moments to get a better look around. Better let his eyes adjust to the dark and conserve the batteries. He had no idea how long he'd have to make them last.
Even so, this felt different to the kind of Convergent remnants he was used to. He couldn't put his finger on it. A different style, different shimmer to the rocks that looked carved, but weren't? Subtly different angles to the architecture? His gut told him it felt older.
He ought to ask Sym about it, if he lived that long.
Dys kept walking — shuffling, really. His arm still hurt, but at least he had both feet on the ground now.
His compass still worked and the pedometer built into the gauntlet gave a fair assessment of distance travelled. From where he'd fallen and the layout of the ravine, if he kept bearing east, eventually he would emerge to where the surface of the Ridge dropped down, and there was a good chance of finding an exit there.
He kept walking long enough to get hungry, and then tired. He stopped to eat. He put his gauntlet into sleep mode and followed suit. He woke up groggy and his arm felt worse, but he woke up. No life-threatening injuries to sneak up on him, at least.
The same could not be said for fauna. He heard something scurry away from him as he uncurled inside his sleeping bag. Several somethings… as he whipped out his light, he caught a glimpse of large eyes and spiny scales. Not a xeno he knew well, but one he'd seen before. Oddly, that made him relax.
He was low on water, so he followed them. Xenos needed to drink, too.
Eventually, he reached a massive chamber. Even with the flashlight, he could not see the opposite wall. Far above him, what he first mistook for a distant patch of sky was strands of bioluminescent growth criss-crossing the ceiling.
The air was different here. Stale. But humid, too. He followed the sense of moisture in the air to sounds of a stream. There were a few xenos he could hear scuttling around him, disturbed at their watering hole. The smells were strange. He'd have to decontaminate the water thoroughly before he drank from it.
He came to a slippery edge and stood there for a while, investigating with the flashlight in his gauntlet turned to full power. The spring emerged bubbling from the cracks inside the walls and spilled into a small underground lake. Its water looked black in the flashlight. Slimy-looking algae dotted the slabs of rock he could see poking out of it.
The rocks looked strange, irregular. Most constructions of the Convergent Domain he'd found had looked perfectly preserved, sometimes in near-working order. But these… they looked like they'd been ripped apart. Like something had wreaked havoc in this room.
He swept the flashlight further, to the edges of the room. The odd protrusions on the walls. They looked like broken glass… or the same material used in those vats he'd seen. The kind Sym used to regrow his body when he had to. They had the same basic shape, even if these ones were much larger. No trace of energy remaining. Whatever organic material it once housed was long gone, the fluids drained. Of course, this place could be thousands of years old. Who knew what it had looked like in its heyday?
Dys powered off the flashlight back to a dim ambient glow and began his careful climb down to the water.
Not careful enough. Maybe it was the dark — after his inspection with the bright flashlight, his eyes had lost their adjustment to the dark again. His foot slipped on something slimy as it gave way underfoot, pulling him painfully off-balance.
He slid down to the water gracelessly and landed on his butt in a big splash. His arm flared up into a white-hot ache that a moment to subside. At least he hadn't broken a leg or twisted an ankle. Dys cradled his bruised side and sat there, cold and damp, waiting for the pain to pass.
The air had changed again. The pool was black and still. It surface carried the faintest stench of flesh.
Dys froze; his heart sped up a fraction in his chest. This many years exploring Vertumna had instilled in him a keen sense of when something was dangerously wrong. Here it was — the hairs rising on his neck, the rush of adrenaline; his hand had drifted to his stun gun and now stayed there. The LED on his gauntlet was still set to 'dim'. He made no move to change it — illuminating the darkness didn't seem like such a good idea, right now.
He waited.
Nothing happened for a long time. The plink-plink-plink of water, dripping somewhere far above. The stream warbled as it fed into the lake. The lake itself was quiet. Too quiet, in a way. He couldn't shake the weirdest sense that it was watching him.
He sat still long enough that the xenos began to scuttle around him in the dark again. A few of them ventured towards the lake, giving him a wide berth.
They drank uneasily, but without hurry. One of them waded in, much deeper than the others, to pick at the algae growing on a slab of stone.
Something in the water moved towards it.
Dys watched, entranced and immobilised by an overwhelming sense of self-preservation as that thing broke the surface. A glimmering mound of flesh peeked, almost shyly, from the waters, but it struck in the blink of an eye. Red tendrils whipped out. The xeno was pulled in with a smothered shriek, and once again, the lake was still.
The other xenos scattered, squawking with alarm. The water surface rippled; darkened. Something in there was feeding.
It was now or never.
Dys stood up slowly but decisively, painfully aware of the way the water splashed around him. He backed away, back up the slope, and nearly lost his footing; kept it.
The creature rose up from the water at the same time he did.
He stopped. It stopped. He wasn't quick enough to get away; he knew this.
So Dys simply stared at it.
His eyes had adjusted to the dark again. In the ambient glow of his gauntlet LED, in the distant, sickly light of bioluminescent fungi, he saw it. It was amorphous — a single, uncertainly shifting tangle of flesh in a proteinaceous, crimson colour. It made him think of muscles, raw and red, or ancient worms writhing in the sea.
It had an eye. Or something like it. He knew when he was being watched.
"Hello," he said. Here on Vertumna, you never knew for sure.
Slowly, like the pull of a tide, the thing kept moving. It inched towards him through the water. He saw the tendrils stretch, saw how far they ran. Somehow he knew that he was only looking at a fraction of its mass.
The lake was dark, almost unnaturally unmoving. He wondered how much of it was occupied by this… thing. A den? A reservoir?
It had an eye, and teeth. So many teeth.
"This is probably how I die, then," Dys kept speaking calmly, because honestly, he might as well. His voice was almost hilariously monotone to his own ears. That strange feeling again — like being on the outside, looking in. Was he about to die because he had no sense of fear? The others… would their fear have saved them? Solane, Utopia… literally anyone else would have run screaming from this place minutes ago. Might never have come here to begin with.
"What are you, then?" he said, as the horrid massive thing crept closer. He smelled digested and repurposed biomass on its many drooling, gleaming maws. "I've never seen anything like you before. How long have you been down here, eating stragglers? I suppose you're going to eat me?"
No answer. He hadn't expected one, except… the thing was shifting, its many tendrils writhing curiously, as if rearranging its configuration. Like it was trying to understand what he was saying.
"I've got food," he said. "Except… I don't think you'll be very happy with protein bars. They're really dry, but they don't take up much space, and…"
He trailed off. He didn't have much time left. An animal was still an animal, and curiosity would only last so long. What made him kick himself was that he'd left a neat trail here for Utopia, Solane, or anyone else who might come looking and run straight into this thing. Retrace his steps right back to the thing that killed him, and die a horrible, grisly death. Stupid. He should have stuck to his old habits and gone solo instead of telling the rescue party where he was going. He could only hope Sym would warn them away before anything happened.
"Are you a Gardener?" he asked.
No answer, still. The thing was rising, spreading, towering above him. Dys swallowed and reached into his pack, so very slowly. It was a dumb idea, but it was worth a try. It might just be the last one of his dumb ideas, though.
He unpacked the biggest meat-flavoured protein bar he could find and offered it to the creature on a flat palm. This little trick had saved him from a unisaur. Maybe it would save him twice.
The reaction was unhurried, but decisive. The globular mass extended as it reached toward him. A clot of tendrils reached for his hand and Dys almost shrank away. It really was a dumb idea. But it was too late now.
It gobbled the protein bar off his palm and it didn't stop there. Dys bit his lip and clenched his jaw when he felt teeth.
A sharp, scorching pain as it snapped its jaws. It took two fingers.
And retreated.
Dys staggered back, lightheaded. He clutched his hand. The pain was… pretty bad, but he'd had worse. He wasn't about to faint, and bleeding out didn't seem like such an urgent problem. Now what? Now what?
He should run. Throw something at it to distract it, make a run for it. It had to be slower out of water. If he ran now he might still make it with his other limbs intact—
Something was happening to it. The writhing, shifting… but it seemed directed. As Dys watched, the squirming wad of flesh seem to grow tighter, more compact. Much more compact. A size as unassuming as his own, now, and a shape that almost seemed like—
"No," he muttered, with horrific wonder.
It tilted its head at him, lifted a glistening red hand. Inspected it, like it had no idea what human beings use them for.
He really should run. That little voice was niggling and insistent. A smothered stub where his sense of fear used to be.
He took a step back, then another.
The thing raised its arm now, manipulating the limb with awkwardness. He tensed, ready to bolt, or dodge, or—
Its fingers curled. It pointed.
Dys gaped at it. It was pointing at one of the tunnels leading from the cavern. The gesture was unmistakably human, in a macabre sort of way.
"Thank you. I think I'll go now," he said flatly.
Dys backed away some more, then turned his back once he was far eough and walked away, clutching his hand, watching his footing on the slippery rocks. He could see the slopes of the lake better now, a thin red crust of bones and ossified remains of flesh.
He walked towards the tunnel the thing had pointed at, and as he left, he swore he heard it try to speak.
He got his fingers back, at least. The wonders of modern medicine. But Sol kicked up a stink and Utopia wouldn't let him hear the end of it for days. He warned her away from the cave, told her what he'd found.
Even if he didn't understand it yet.
But he asked Sym, next time they saw each other. Dys had never seen Sym look so cross before.
"You're very lucky that you're still alive," the Gardener said softly, stroking Dys's hair like he was a child who'd gotten lost. He must be really upset if he forgot how much Dys hated being fussed with.
"What was it?" Dys could only ask.
"An old project… a prototype. We wanted to understand living things better. I didn't think you'd stumble on it, but clearly I have underestimated you again."
"Understand them better how?"
Sym's smile was rarely this inhuman, like a poorly-fitted mold. "How does one understand anything? By picking it apart. But it was too destructive, too insatiable… it wanted change, and knowledge."
"That thing wants knowledge?" Dys stopped to think about it. The way the thing had watched him. The biomass it took from him—
"You have a saying in your culture… you are what you eat, yes?" Sym looked pained. "That's what it wants. To be."
A chill ran through him. He held out his hand, inspecting the fresh regenerated tissue. It was pink and tender and the fingernails were soft.
"The project. Did it work?" he asked.
Sym's smile was sad. The Gardener sat closer, leaned against Dys's side and closed his spidery hand reassuringly over the newly-minted fingers. His silky hair was soft and curled like tendrils curiously around Dys's wrist.
"I'd like to think it did," he said.