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In an electric flash and crackle, my muscles seized, and my vision flared white. As I crumpled backward like a dead weight, my left arm and the side of my head slammed into the control panel. My brain thrummed with electricity. It reeked of burning.

In the whiteness, the silhouette of a spacesuit materialized, looming over me. Several shadows clamped onto my arms with claws. One shadow dug its knees into my abdomen and crushed my face between its palms. I tried to scream, but only a ragged whimper escaped my throat. The tangle of shadows obscured my sight, swallowing me. A shadow snatched my hair and pulled; hundreds of points on my scalp prickled tight. Another shadow smothered my nose and mouth.

When I could feel my arms again, I lashed out at the shadows, thrashing as I braced myself against the control panel and the seat. I lunged for a silhouette—Mara’s spacesuit—but she sidestepped, and I plummeted onto the cockpit floor. A blow to the crown of my head plunged me into a murky confusion.

My wrists were bound behind my back—duct tape, I glimpsed, as Mara, crouched by my knees, finished wrapping my ankles. She straightened and hobbled backward. She stepped on the electroshock lance lying discarded on the floor and slipped, but the oxygen recycler clipped to the back of her suit arrested her fall as it struck the hatch.

Gauges of different shapes bulged on her belt like ammunition magazines. The suit’s chest inflated and deflated rhythmically. Mara unlatched her helmet and pulled it off, revealing her ashen face: mouth agape with baby-pink lips; livid, doubled bags under her eyes; strands of black hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. She leaned back against the hatch, gasping through her mouth, the corners glistening with saliva as she scrutinized me with intense, glazed eyes.

The cockpit reeked of sweat and burnt fuses. The shadows had congealed into a mass of human-shaped silhouettes, their hatred addling my brains, boiling me in a cauldron. Mara’s outline, as if traced with a thick black marker, pulsed and expanded.

No more anticipating how to defend myself, because I have you trapped. Thanks to you, the station doesn’t know we came down to the planet. With the tools of the xenobiologist you murdered, I will rip out your tongue, gouge out your eyes, bore into your face.

Mara crouched, setting her helmet on the floor. Exhaustion contorted her actress-like features, as if some illness burdened her with insomnia and pain.

“I thought I was marooned on this planet. I could have just called the station for rescue, but they’d fire me for nothing, and my pride would rather I suffocated than admit I needed help. Now I know—when we found the artifact, I should have tied you up then. Because you, being you, would just stick your nose right up to an alien machine that, for all you knew, could have detonated the outpost. And to understand what drove you to kill that xenobiologist, I imitated you. I stuck my nose up to that thing, and I saw my reflection. Now I know. Unfortunately, I know.” She regarded me like a comatose patient and waved a gloved palm. “Can you hear me? Did I scramble your brain?”

“I hear.”

My voice emerged as a rasp. I coughed. My mouth tasted of metal.

“And you understand?”

I nodded.

The black veil obscuring the cockpit stirred, rippling. Concentrated energy, like the air crackling before a storm. With Mara’s every gesture, the shadows shifted. Their bony claws crushed my thighs, cinching around my spine through suit, skin, and flesh.

A bead of sweat trickled down Mara’s forehead. She rubbed her face, swallowed. Her pupils constricted.

“Is that what you think? That I’ve convinced myself I’ve subdued you? That you’ll fool me until I let you go? That then you’ll finally strangle me? And even if the station calls it murder, no one will bother investigating, because most people who knew me would thank you for killing me.”

“I’m not thinking. When I try, my brain protests.”

Mara hunched down opposite me, reaching out to study the blow on my head, but halfway there her features pinched. She drew herself up, crossing her arms.

“I heard you telling me to come closer. Because you’ll break free, dig your nails into my corneas, and rip my jaw apart.”

My guts roiled; acid surged up my throat.

“You think I think things like that?”

“I feel this second consciousness… it betrays your thoughts as clearly as if you spoke them aloud. Maybe I’ll never understand how the artifact interfered with our minds, not just our language, but it’s a trick.”

I pushed my torso off the floor, sliding my back up the side of a seat inch by inch, trying not to provoke her, until my stomach settled. My head ached where she’d struck me. The throbbing in my skull clouded and inflamed my thoughts.

“You saw him. Jing. What I did.”

“I saw someone down there. I’d need dental records or DNA to be sure, but I trust elimination. I thought you’d claim it was an accident.”

“It was. I attacked the shadows. You feel them, don’t you?”

Mara took a deep breath.

“They’re pawing at me, trying to suffocate me. Products of my own besieged brain, I know, but I can hardly call them pleasant.”

“I wanted to keep it from affecting you. But at least now you understand.”

“Make no mistake. That xenobiologist is lying with his face beaten to a pulp in the second sublevel of an alien outpost because you are you.”

I pressed my lips together, erecting a wall against escaping words. I looked away from Mara’s eyes, concentrating on deepening my breaths. The muscles in my forearms were taut. Pain flared in my constricted wrists. This woman had fired an electroshock lance at me, beaten me, bound me, and now she was assaulting my character.

With her boot-tip, Mara nudged her helmet; it wobbled like a small boat.

“Although the jolts in my neurons, the shadows, and this other consciousness intruding in my mind unnerve me, the effect isn’t so different from how I’ve always felt around people. The two consciousnesses will learn to get along.”

“If you’re not exaggerating,” I said gravely, “I am truly sorry, Mara.”

She pushed damp strands of hair from her forehead and scrubbed it with the back of her glove, smudging it with dust. The corners of her lips sagged as if weights hung from them.

“Thanks for the sympathy.”

“Were you afraid I planned to do the same thing to you as I did to Jing?”

“Can you blame me for removing the opportunity?”

She limped heavily over to my seat and sat down sideways. As she leaned an elbow on the control panel, a shadow shoved my torso against the seat I leaned on; my lungs emptied. I shuddered, sinking into black water.

Mara had said we imagined the shadows, even if they affected us. I writhed onto my back, pushing with my heels until my head touched the cockpit hatch. My wrists throbbed, crushed tight. A shadow pressed down on my chest like someone sitting there, yet no physical presence had stopped me from moving. The artifact had hijacked my senses.

Mara regarded me from above, pale and cold like a queen enthroned.

“I wouldn’t have killed you,” I said. “You’re my friend.”

“Am I?”

Between the pulses of my headache, I tried to decipher her expression.

“To me, you are.”

“I like you. I tolerate you. But often, being around you feels like rolling in nettles, Kirochka.”

“Almost everything irritates you.”

“You’re incapable of seeing people as anything other than reflections of yourself. What you instinctively feel is right, you impose as right for everyone.” She shook her head, then leaned forward, her tone hardening as if she were tired of holding back. “You insist you have to drag me away from my interests, my studies, as if imitating your actions and hobbies would somehow make me impulsive and reckless too. Admit it or not, you think the rest of humanity are just primitive creatures evolving towards becoming you.” She jabbed a finger at her chest. “I need time to myself, Kirochka. Solitude. Reading. Designing one of my machines, or building it. You think people need to be prevented from thinking.”

Exhaustion was crushing me. I imagined another version of myself laughing, suggesting a drink or a movie, assuming Mara’s mood could be cured by a few laps in the pool. But my vision blurred. I blinked, swallowed to make my vocal cords obey.

“We’ve had good times.”

“The best were when I was enduring idiots and tolerating awful music.”

“You showed them you’re smart. Got half the tracking team to stop calling you ‘black dwarf’.”

“Yes, because those morons’ gossip was costing me sleep. You think I need to prove anything to them? They can believe whatever they want.”

Shadows crouched nearby, focusing their hatred on me, clawing at my skin, crushing my flesh with bony grips. They tormented me like chronic pain, but while Mara and I talked, I kept the torture submerged.

“Things went well for you, for a while, with that man you met. I don’t take credit, but would you have met him dining alone?”

The woman, deflated, blinked her glazed eye, rubbing it as if removing grit.

“You’re right. I miss things by focusing on research instead of acting like a savage. But I assure you, Kirochka, we’re too different for me ever to consider you a friend. Sooner or later, we’d stop tolerating each other.”

“We can bridge the differences.”

“You talk to fill silences. You pressure people for attention. You live for interaction. I could never sustain a friendship with someone like that.”

“Do you use me to get things?”

“Everyone uses everyone, if only to feel better about themselves. I just refrain from feeding illusions.” She drew herself up, as if recalling an injustice, and rebuked me with her eyes. “Besides, I didn’t stop running because I was lazy. I barely eat, and nobody’s chasing me in my apartment. Running bores me to death.”

“I wanted the company.”

Mara shook her head. Her tired gaze roamed the cockpit, as if seeing through the walls.

“When you called a few hours ago, I thought you wanted to drag me out drinking with you and the other pilots. I considered pretending I’d fallen asleep with the sound nullifier on. I should have.”

I contorted like a snake, sliding my back up the hatch. I leaned the oxygen recycler back, resting my head against the cool metal. Judging by the ache, when I undressed, my arms would be covered in lurid bruises.

“I consider you a friend. You listen when I need it. My professional peers, the ones who think they’re my friends, even my boyfriend—they’d tell me to shut up for ruining the mood.”

“When have you ever listened to me?”

“I want to. But I have to pry the words out of you.”

“Maybe that should have told you something, Kirochka.”

“That you hate me.”

She sighed, the effort seeming immense, like lifting a great weight.

“I don’t like human beings. I would have chosen to be anything else.”

Flashes on the communications monitor distracted me. Though Mara was still speaking, her words faded to a murmur beneath my notice. The headache pulsed, reddening my vision. Why did the monitor alert snag my attention? I snapped fully alert. It meant an incoming call.

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Body Betrays Itself” by Pharmakon.

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Paralyzed, I choked. I sucked in a lungful of hot air and collapsed to my knees before the xenobiologist. I pressed my hands against his suit’s chest. I pounded on him. No one would recognize Jing from what was left of his blood-drenched face. I stammered, repeating, “no, no, no,” while my fingers traced the helmet’s dents, the jagged shards of the broken visor jutting from the frame.

Pooling blood submerged the ruin of bone and flesh that was his face. When I tilted Jing’s body, the helmet spilled a tongue of blood onto the stone floor, slick with sliding globules of brain matter.

I staggered back, fists clenched, shuddering violently as if seized by frost.

Jing’s right hand was clamped around the handle of an automatic core drill. Perhaps the xenobiologist had approached to help me.

I shut my eyes, covered my visor with a palm. I pictured Jing standing beside me, an echo asking if I needed help. No, I hadn’t killed him. When I opened my eyes, the corpse lay sprawled on its side, the dented helmet cradling the ruin of his head.

Jing hadn’t known he was dealing with a live nuclear device. The flood of that feeling had swept over me. Had I seen the xenobiologist stop beside me? Had I decided to smash his face in with the crowbar?

I stumbled about, gasping for breath. My brain felt like it was on fire, seizing with electric spasms. Red webs pulsed at the edges of my vision, flaring brightly before fading. Before I knew it, I’d crossed the room that contained the construction robots, and was sprinting up the ramp. The oval beam of my flashlight jerked and warped, sliding over the protrusions and crevices of the rock face. My arms felt like spent rubber bands, especially the right, aching from fingertips to shoulder blades. Every balancing lurch, every push against the rock to keep climbing, intensified the ache.

I passed the first sublevel. My breath fogged the visor; I saw the flashlight beam dimly, as through a mist. My hair, pulled back at my nape, was soaked through, plastered to my skin.

I burst onto the surface, into the emptiness of the dome. I staggered, kicking through the sandy earth. I gasped for air and ran. I pictured myself training on a circuit—something that relaxed me at the academy after piloting, just as going to the gym with Mara relaxed me on the station—but now I was running from the consequences, from an earthquake tearing the earth apart like cloth. If I slowed, the fissure would overtake and swallow me.

I vaulted over the embankment to the left of the esplanade, where I’d hidden before, landing on my knees and one forearm. I scrambled backward, kicking up dirt, and pressed myself flat against the embankment’s exposed rock face.

The radio. I navigated the visor options until I muted my comm signal. When the notification confirmed I was off-frequency, I jammed my fists against my knees, my mouth stretched wide in a scream.

I drew a ragged breath. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead onto the visor; the material wicked them away, like water hitting hot pavement. Mara would have reached the cockpit by now, found me missing. Nothing could make Jing’s death look like an accident. How would my friend look at me? What would she think when she found out? She’d think… because I killed the xenobiologist… I might kill her too.

I buried my helmeted head in my forearms. I welcomed the dimness. How had I let this happen? I knew I should have destroyed the artifact—just as I knew I had to fight back when those shadows grabbed me, tried to rip me open with their claws. I’d struck the shadows with the crowbar before I’d even consciously decided to. On other expeditions, while waiting for scientists and soldiers to emerge from some dense alien jungle, I’d monitor their radio chatter, trusting my instincts to warn me if I should suggest aborting the mission. Just as piloting was like flowing in a dance of thrust and gravity, the way dancing came naturally to others, I imagined. Now my instincts screamed at me to flee, to run from this embankment away from the ship, to strike out across the planet, heedless of survival. My instinct had been supplanted by another. And I knew the difference.

I peeked around the side of the embankment. The scarred esplanade remained deserted. The crystalline dome watched the minutes pass like some ancient ruin.

If Mara found out the artifact made me kill Jing, maybe she’d understand the danger, agree to destroy it. I was counting on her reasoning, on that cold logic that had so often irritated me. But if I waited too long to face her, she’d suspect my motives.

As I straightened up and stepped, dizzy, onto the esplanade, an electric spike lanced through my neurons, blurring my vision. I stumbled around until it subsided. I stopped before the central crater, hunching over to examine its charcoal-gray cracks and ridges. Crushed bones.

I activated the radio. The visor display indicated it was locking onto Mara’s signal. She’d see mine pop up, too, unless she was distracted. In the center of my darkened visor, the arctic-blue star shone through the thin atmosphere like a quivering ball of fluff.

“Where are you, Mara?”

“Cockpit.”

The shadows intercepted the transmission, projecting their hatred at me. It distracted me from Mara’s tone—was there suspicion coloring her voice? I waited a few seconds. Would she demand an explanation? Why was she silent?

“Good,” I said. “Stay there. I need to talk to you.”

As I climbed the slope skirting the hill towards the ship, the reality of my decision hit me. I was about to lock myself in the cockpit’s confined space with Mara. Her shadows would envelop me, sink their claws into my skin, force themselves down my throat to suffocate me. I wanted desperately to rip off my helmet, wipe the sweat from my face. I needed a shower, a moment to think.

I located the ship’s tower. Several meters ahead lay three cargo containers and scattered tools. Inside the cargo hold, chunks of the robots and the materializer were heaped like scrap in a landfill.

I scrambled up the boarding ladder to the airlock hatch. Opened it, scrambled inside, sealed it shut. The chamber pressurized with a series of hisses and puffs. I unsealed my helmet. Holding it upside down, steam poured out as if from a pot of fresh soup. I gulped the ship’s cool, filtered air and opened the inner door to the cockpit.

“Mara.”

Empty. Indicators blinked. On the monitors, ship status displays and sector topographical maps cycled. Lines of text scrolled.

My seat held a roll of electrical tape. As I turned it over in my fingers, an electric jolt made me clench my teeth, squeeze my eyes shut. My neurons hummed.

The door to the airlock chamber clicked shut with a heavy mechanical thud. The thick metal muffled the hissing. Leaning back against my seat’s headrest, still clutching the tape, I froze. The air grew heavy. The cockpit lights seemed to dim, the edges of my perception closing in. A dozen shadows waited in the airlock chamber, their concentrated beams of hatred probing the metal door, seeking to burn me.

The door slid open.

I tensed, lips parting. What could I possibly say?

Mara emerged sideways through the gap, head bowed. As she stepped through, she shouldered the door shut behind her. The glowing diodes and bright screens of the control panel glinted on her helmet’s visor. She whipped around to face me. Her right arm shot out, leveling an electroshock lance. The two silver prongs at its tip lunged like viper fangs.

---

Author’s note: I originally wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

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I edged a handspan of my helmet over the side of the embankment, to keep watch on the entrance of the shell of hexagonal panels. With the planet’s rotation, the star’s descending angle had lightened the blackness of the opening to a steel gray. I waited, lying prone, sunk a few centimeters into the sandy earth. From the gloom within the dome, I sensed the hollow vastness, the floor furrowed with the scars of ruts where maintenance robots had engraved circular tracks.

My helmet’s indicator notified me it had located Mara’s signal. I took a deep breath and waited for the woman to emerge. As if an army were cresting a hill, I sensed the shadows approaching. My heart hammered, and blood roared in my ears. I would stay out of sight.

From the gloom at the dome’s opening, a spacesuit frayed into view, venturing onto the esplanade, the containers following. I scooted sideways so the embankment hid me, and avoided breathing heavily lest the radio transmit it.

I peeked out. The woman and the containers had disappeared. And Jing? I had lost his signal.

Mara’s measured voice burst into my helmet.

“How goes it, Kirochka?”

I flinched, stirring the sandy earth, feeling the urge to leap up and sprint. Shadows were approaching from the opposite side of the embankment. They would surround me, press in on me, crush me against the earth until I suffocated.

“Something like that,” my voice trembled. “I’m in the cabin.”

“See you in a moment.”

What was keeping Jing? How could I wait for him to show himself? I had to seize the chance to break the artifact before Mara could stop me.

I scrambled up, slipping, spraying spadefuls of earth. I crossed the esplanade and plunged into the dome’s gloom. After descending the ramp about ten meters, I remembered to switch on my flashlight. I sprinted in a descending spiral, bracing a gloved palm when needed against the central pillar or the uneven rock wall. I filled my burning lungs with fresh, recycled air. My leg muscles throbbed.

A honey-colored light bathed me the instant I tripped. The maintenance robot tumbled through the air and bounced off the wall. I cartwheeled down the spiral, slamming against the excavated rock as my flashlight beam flared white off every surface my helmet struck. I slid prone down the ramp, bracing myself against the central pillar with my hands to stop.

I coughed. Sat up. My body’s tremors made the flashlight beam quiver. I shook the dust and sandy earth from my gloves. They were scuffed. Bristling fibers poked through the padding.

A chill ran through me from head to toe. I checked the oxygen levels on my lens. No leaks. On my vital signs display, my pulse fluctuated in the triple digits.

When I got up, I descended the ramp carefully, but within seconds, I was running. We had stolen the other robot, so I wouldn’t trip over that one.

The lens indicator alerted that it had locked onto Jing’s signal, and I slowed my pace. I breathed through my nose, but sweating as if in a jungle, I had to flare my nostrils to their limit to draw in enough air. I felt my way down the spiraling ramp.

I reached the entrance to a basement and peered in, exposing only a handspan of my helmet. I had expected to find the first sublevel, with the exposed mineral vein and the materializer, but I must have rolled past it tumbling downhill. Two of the construction robots lay gutted, and the third was missing an arm.

I hastened, walking just short of a run, to the back of the basement, where my flashlight beam mingled with the artifact’s tangle of levitating energy. I leaned against the curved, ribbed metal of a strut and scanned the entrance ramp. Perhaps Jing was dismantling the materializer on the first sublevel. Mara would have discovered I had deceived her.

I hunched before the undulating membranes of purple and pink energy. I probed the invisible shell containing the energy, as if hoping to find some crack through which to pry it open like a pistachio nut. I threw a punch, but the shell held. My hand ached as if I had struck a wall. When I gritted my teeth and struck again, a jolt shuddered up from my hand to my back.

I backed away. Bit my lower lip, refraining from growling. Jing would hear.

I took a running start and kicked the shell. It held. I kicked and kicked it until I slipped and fell flat on my ass. The radio would transmit my panting.

I swept the floor with my flashlight beam, searching for something that could help. I peered through the doorway to the adjacent basement area. Deserted. I ran to the dismembered ruins of the robots with their viscera of cables and circuits. Jing had left behind his crowbar and a meter. I gripped the crowbar.

I positioned myself in the middle of the basement and aimed my flashlight at the artifact. I brandished the crowbar, sprinted, and delivered a heavy blow against the shell, but the impact jarred the crowbar from my hand; it struck my shoulder and clattered to the floor. I trembled, seething. I hunched over, drew myself in, clenched my fists, and a growl escaped my lips, exploding into a guttural scream. My eardrums ached.

“Kirochka,” Jing said over the radio, startled. “Do you need help?”

I picked the crowbar up off the floor. I struck the artifact again and again, gasping for breath between each blow. The shell resisted as if, instead of being made of some penetrable material, I faced a repelling energy field. It would prevent me from breaking through, just as on a microscopic scale, atoms would never truly touch.

I leaned a forearm against the artifact, suppressing a gasp. Behind me, several shadows burst into the basement like an invading army through breaches in a rampart. I scrambled around the strut to my right, putting the artifact between myself and the spacesuited silhouette blocking the exit. My flashlight beam dazzled Jing, while his forced me to squint. The shadows coalesced into a wall, blocking my escape.

Here you are, of course. Acting on your own, against the majority decision. When I met you, I sensed you were unbalanced. That thing has damaged you because you’re too stupid to realize you should keep your distance from an unknown object, and now you intend to deprive humanity of a discovery that could lead to unimaginable technologies. You’re a miserable egoist, whatever your name is. An idiot who can barely pilot, clinging to that frigid scientist because no one else would bother paying you any attention.

I lashed the artifact with the crowbar. The phalanges of my hand screamed as if the blows had opened some fissure, yet I struck and struck again.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Jing circling the artifact. I was dizzy, short of breath. The shadows flowed together shoulder to shoulder, hemming me in between them and the infinite volume of rock at my back.

A jolt shook my neurons, bleached my vision white. I shook my head. I pressed the tip of the crowbar against the invisible shell and, trembling down to my toes, leaned my weight onto the artifact as if I could force open a crack through which that tangle of energy would spill.

“You’ll break it, despite what your colleague decided,” Jing said.

“No, I’m just hitting it with the crowbar to see if it sounds like a gong.”

“You were right. Taking the artifact to the station would be madness. It should stay here, studied only by a small group of scientists, in quarantine. Never mind who gets the credit. But if you break it… maybe you’ll prevent a disaster.”

I coughed, spraying the inside of my visor with saliva. The air inside my helmet had grown sauna-hot, and my body was slick with sweat. I gripped the crowbar with both hands, spread my legs to brace myself, and lashed the shell. Each blow resonated through the fibers of my arms, making them vibrate like taut strings.

Deafened by a torrent of noise from which screams and roars emerged, the shadows surged against me. They climbed onto my back, pressed me down against the artifact. Through the suit, their bony claws seized my thighs, dug into my breasts, clamped against my head like a vise, probed my mouth, clawed at my uvula. I roared and lashed at the shadows again and again. With each impact, my arm muscles caught fire.

The shadows flew away from me at tens of kilometers per hour, as if ejected into space during a decompression. I stood on two trembling legs. My vision had clouded red. The crowbar hung from the end of my limp right arm, and when I let it fall, it bounced with a muffled thud.

The red haze was evaporating. I blinked, panting. Sweat dripped onto the smoked lens as the material struggled to defog. I leaned against the artifact’s invisible shell, which supported me solid as no object humans could ever build.

My vision cleared. Jing lay supine on the floor, his visor shattered. Behind the breach in the dented helmet, an eyeball had sunk into a gory mass of black hair strands, pulped flesh, cartilage, and bone. Chocolate-brown blood had spattered the rock and welled from the pulp of his face as if from a sponge, filling the helmet’s bucket.

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Gyroscope” by Boards of Canada.

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Mara covered the lens of her helmet with one palm, and slumped her shoulders. Jing backed away from the artifact, his fingers tightening around the pry bar. The woman took a breath. She made sure our eyes met.

“Perhaps it would help you to rest until we fly back. In the cockpit. Listen. When you loaded the material onto the ship, did you go aboard to check the radio?”

Was she asking me about communications now? What did it matter? Was she trying to annoy me?

“No, I didn’t check it,” I said dryly.

“Who knows how much time we have left. We’ll haul the remaining material as fast as we can, and figure out how to free this artifact.”

“Wait. You intend for us to take it?”

Mara confronted me with the cold anger that hardened her features whenever she spoke of her superiors.

“You promised me this outpost would contain unknown artifacts that would launch my career. I didn’t believe you, because you were basing it on fantasies, but you stumbled upon the truth by chance. This artifact will secure my career for the rest of my life. It will justify to everyone who meddles why we risked so much coming down to this planet.”

I leaned on the wall to push myself up, but the effort sent a jolt flashing through my brain. I stopped and clutched the side of my helmet. My heart was pounding. If I overloaded my limbs with commands, I risked my neurons short-circuiting.

I swallowed hard. Catching my breath, I faced Mara.

“Whatever that thing triggered feels like malice. You want to bring it up to the station and endanger thousands of people?”

“Kirochka, think. When we get back, you’ll need to file your report on the survey of this sector. Even if you avoid mentioning the artifact, another science team will explore this outpost and take the credit. Someone will get the artifact off this planet, and it’s going to be us.”

I felt dizzy, slick with cold sweat, as if I were incubating some disease. The shadows focused streams of insults and threats on me. I needed to flee, to get away from Jing and Mara drilling me with their stares.

“Fine.”

I took two steps toward the exit, but they were blocking it. I lowered my gaze to the polished rock floor, to my boot prints, and wanted to close my eyes, sink into blackness.

“Move aside, please.”

I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye Jing and Mara moving around a support strut, putting the artifact between themselves and me. I edged toward the doorway and stopped. The xenobiologist’s mouth hung slightly open, and the woman watched my movements disapprovingly, as if I had insulted her.

“Don’t repeat what I did,” I said. “Don’t press your face against the shell of that thing, don’t look inside.”

“I wouldn’t have done that in the first place,” Mara retorted.

“Once you’ve loaded the rest of the material onto the ship, we’ll figure out how to deal with this thing.”

Her voice took on a cold, professional calm.

“I understand you need to rest, but there’s barely any of the outdated tech left to dismantle.”

“Before you try to move the artifact, talk to me first. Please, Mara.”

She pursed her lips. Was there any emotion behind her icy eyes? Did my anguish matter to her?

And why should I care? You’re stupid, Kirochka. You live for risks, a genetic flaw that threatens everyone around you, one I’ve exploited to launch my career. I need you because you can pilot. Once I’ve got the artifact onto the station and they know I discovered it, I’ll forget you exist. You’ll go on getting drunk with your stupid friends, or tangling yourself in the sheets with that boyfriend of yours, and I’ll refuse to answer your calls. I’ll get this artifact off this planet whether you like it or not.

I blinked, trying to clear the sweat stinging my eyes. My legs were trembling. The shadows crept inch by inch along the sides of the room, flanking me, and when they reached me, they would crush the breath out of me in their embrace.

Jing placed a hand on Mara’s arm. She shot him an annoyed look. The xenobiologist gave me the kind of smile one might offer a terminally ill patient.

“Kirochka. That’s your name, isn’t it? If you need help, please, just ask. Anything. We’re in this together.”

I nodded and turned away. I needed to get away from them. I crossed the basement, where the construction robots stood idle, following the oval beam of my flashlight as it slid across the floor. I ran up the ramp. As I moved away from the artifact, from Mara and Jing, the shadows receded, hanging level with me, trapped in the rock. If I stopped running and looked back, in the distance, the invisible eyes of a wall of silhouettes would watch me go. Seconds later, the shadows vanished as if I’d never felt them.

My leg muscles burned. Jing and Mara’s transmission, arguing about how to dismantle a construction robot, became choppy, then cut out as the indicator in my helmet lens showed I’d lost their signals.

I emerged outside and sprinted across the empty dome. Halfway across, I switched off my flashlight. When I exited onto the open ground outside, I bent over with my hands on my knees. Sweat spattered the inside of my helmet lens. I looked around, at the ring of slopes enclosing the crater, and the crags of the distant, looming mountains. How could I stand being cooped up in the ship’s cockpit waiting for Jing and Mara? I’d lie down on this sandy ground, out of sight, and give myself a few minutes to figure things out.

I hurried away from the landing site. A break in the terrain formed a small embankment. I jumped down into it. When I landed, my boots kicked up dust. I lay down on my side, careful not to put pressure on my oxygen recycler in case it came loose. Before me stretched nearly a kilometer and a half of wasteland ending in an upward slope.

Even though I was away from Jing, Mara, and the artifact, I was consumed by the anxiety that I’d made an irreparable mistake—an anxiety related to the moment when, taking a curve too tight, I’d crashed Bee, my racing ship, into an asteroid, and thought the collapsing cockpit had crushed my legs. That other consciousness crouched in my mind like a tarantula in its underground lair.

How could I have just left Mara and Jing down there? That woman needed to understand, to unravel mysteries. What if she copied me, thinking she could avoid my mistakes? If we took the artifact to the station, how long before someone else looked inside and discovered their reflection? Scientist after scientist would poke around, only to snap awake with their minds under siege.

But Mara was right. I would be forced to file the survey report for this sector. They’d collect the photos and topographical data in their databases. Even if the station found out about our illicit sortie, my friend would board the ship only once the artifact—the winning lottery ticket needed to stop her superiors stealing opportunity after opportunity from her—was waiting in the cargo hold.

What if I acted first, stopped this before we had to argue about it? I could destroy the artifact. Mara would hate me, maybe forever. She’d treat me with the same disdain she showed most people. But if I let that thing end up on the station, sooner or later the woman would convince herself she could study the undulating membranes without being affected.

I scraped my fingers through the sandy earth. Would I really destroy it? Yes. No matter how advanced the technology was, what good could come from something that materialized shadows projecting such hatred? I would smash that artifact, and it would spill onto the ground in a puddle of translucent, purple and pink matter, like a stranded jellyfish.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

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Jing appeared to my left. His profile regarded the object with the expression of someone wishing they were ten kilometers away.

I placed a hand on the shoulder of his suit.

“Some kind of exotic creature?”

The xenobiologist closed his mouth and shook his head.

We waited for a while, in case the artifact reacted to our presence, before settling. Mara scanned the struts with the multimeter. Jing circled a strut and approached her.

“A power source? A generator?”

“No. These struts are fed by the external wiring.”

“So they do more than just support the artifact?”

“Support the artifact? It floats between them. And the outpost has more than enough power from stellar energy. Batteries are full.”

Mara crossed her arms. The artifact’s undulating veils were mirrored in her helmet’s lens.

“Let’s see. The aliens built the outpost at the base of this crater because they detected a vein of that mineral, which they used to build the robots and, I imagine, repair damage.”

“You think they dug this thing up?” Jing said.

“That the algorithm the robots follow to maintain this installation stumbled upon the artifact while drilling the vein, dozens of meters below the surface? I think they found the artifact on another planet, or adrift in space. Maybe they were programmed so that if they found a strange artifact, they should settle on a nearby planet, call home, and wait for their owners to arrive.”

How would we take the artifact? I imagined prying it from the struts with the crowbar, but were they even holding it? The veils of purple and pink energy floated like some weather phenomenon forming between fronts of cold and hot air.

I crouched down to the artifact’s level, and when I leaned in to make out the details, my lens bumped against something. I startled as if a lamp had fallen on my head while I slept. I had felt an invisible shell. I slid my gloved palms over the curved surface. Solid and uniform like a crystal ball. The struts were holding it.

I pressed my helmet’s lens against that invisible shell, which held firm. Inside, the undulating energy membranes crisscrossed like ghosts. If they represented some pattern, it surpassed my ability to recognize it. When I focused on a point on the membranes, some overlapped, but when I shifted my gaze, those same membranes receded into the background of the image.

My eyes ached. My mind complained with an animal alertness, unable to reconcile the tangle of energy with the dimensional combinations under which it had evolved. I was contemplating vastnesses of space, miniature universes.

At one point on the undulating membranes, I glimpsed microscopic seams between which an image was forming. My face, just as the bathroom mirror would show me. Skin bronzed by several stars. In those eyes staring back unblinking, irises the color of clear water speckled with navy blue. The curves of those lips, chapped by temperature changes mission after mission, had parted into a slit. My wheat-colored hair tucked behind my ears except for one loose lock.

The face receded into a black background. My ears bothered me as if air were pressing on the eardrums from inside. The undulating membranes distanced themselves from my full-body reflection, that floated in the blackness. The reflection wore my threadbare flight academy t-shirt, the one I slept in, and my pajama shorts. Beneath my shapely calves, bare feet stood on a void.

The reflection tilted its head. It turned and looked around. It ventured into the darkness, growing dimmer with each step, while groping as if searching for a wall, until, reduced to a miniature, the reflection merged with a black vastness.

A whiteness dazzled me. I glimpsed above me two people in gold and white spacesuits. Their lenses reflected the beam of my flashlight. I had sat down on the floor and leaned my back against a wall.

An avalanche of anguish overwhelmed me. I felt lost in catacombs, stalked by shadows looming a few steps away, silently promising to tear me apart.

I slid the heels of my boots on the floor until I stood up. I stumbled to the opposite side of the basement, away from the figures in their spacesuits. As I distanced myself like a frightened horse, the wave of hatred those shadows focused on me eased. Behind the lenses, I made out the faces of Jing and Mara. What were they doing here?

In the center of the basement, the struts held an invisible shell, and the energy membranes it contained mutated in watery undulations.

“Kirochka, what’s wrong with you?” Mara asked.

“I don’t know.”

The woman approached, and a tumult of shadows closed in around me. I screamed in a sharp tone that had never left my mouth before.

“Get away!”

Mara and Jing looked at each other as if to ascertain if the other thought I was joking. The woman faced me, frowning.

We find an unknown artifact and you decide to stick yourself right up against it. What else could I expect from an imbecile like you?

A presence orbiting my consciousness had spoken to me, sounding at times from the left, from the right, from ahead, from behind. I shuddered as if frozen. My heart anticipated a bombardment.

“Who said that?”

As Mara and Jing approached, the ring of shadows stretched their hands towards me, wanting to snag my skin with their bony claws.

I raised a palm and warned them, shouting an interjection. Why were they approaching? Did they want to distress me?

You wander through life assuming everything will turn out fine, that whatever happens you’ll know how to save yourself and land ready to repeat the adventure. But you reveal yourself for what you are. An incapable idiot.

Mara took two steps back. She scanned me as if shrapnel from an explosion had riddled me and she were assessing the damage.

“There’s a before and after you touched the artifact, Kirochka. Specify what’s wrong with you.”

Her voice, filling my helmet via the radio and pouring into my ears, irritated me like a scratching fingernail. I wanted to demand she lower her tone or shut up. I gripped the sides of my helmet. I longed to take it off, cover my face with my palms, and breathe deeply.

“How did I end up against the wall?”

“You leaned in to look inside the artifact. Half a minute later, you backed away hunched over until you hit the wall and slid to the floor. I thought you were playing one of your jokes on us. For a while, you just looked around absently.”

I remembered wandering through a growing blackness until I had disappeared. After a cut, Jing and Mara had loomed before me. The blackness had spilled from the artifact and embodied itself in shadows.

The woman fumbled with the instruments clipped to her belt as if they hid an answer.

“Have you really forgotten?”

“That thing affected me, Mara,” I said gravely.

She crouched beside me and rested a forearm on her knee. She squinted against the wash of my flashlight beam.

“Who told you to play around with an unknown artifact?”

I endured the anguish, an acid corroding my chest, but the shadows pushed me against the wall, grabbed my undershirt through the suit, clenched my hair into a fist, covered my mouth. I jumped sideways, away from Mara.

“I told you to get away. Why are you approaching again? Didn’t you understand me?”

The woman, still, lost the color in her face. She glanced towards the energy membranes the artifact contained.

You enjoyed walking along the edge. Your races. You volunteered for risky missions because you live for that excitement, and the more you consume it, the more you need to risk. But you slipped on the precipice and plunged off.

A presence crept through my brains, slid down its slopes, separated the folds, and nested in the sticky warmth.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said. “Nobody asked for your comments.”

Mara stood up and backed away, holding me with her gaze. She unclipped the multimeter, along with another meter I didn’t recognize. Jing watched as if waiting for a doctor to revive someone. The woman distanced herself from the artifact as far as her arm could reach, and analyzed the invisible shell.

“It’s not emitting anything.”

“That you know of,” I said. “Maybe it emitted something and stopped.”

In the stretching pause, instead of silence, I found those shadows silently repeating how much they hated me, that they would torture me to death. Wherever I looked, I glimpsed shadows.

My spine shuddered in chains of tremors. I slipped away to the corner farthest from Jing and Mara, and the shadows diminished.

The woman wrung her gloved fingers as her gaze pierced the artifact’s energy membranes.

“Can you explain? What changed?”

I took a deep breath and relaxed my voice.

“When you get close, I feel several shadows swollen with hatred draw near as if to suffocate me. From this corner, they wait at a certain distance. And someone is talking to me. Someone in my head.”

“In what voice?”

“None. Like another consciousness stuck to mine.”

“Do you understand what it’s saying?”

I nodded.

“Nothing good.”

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Climbing up the Walls” by Radiohead.