"And… there," said Mishka, setting the casing back in and flicking a switch.

  The crystal at the top of the pylon lit up with green-gold light and began to hum, and all around the greenhouse the plants that had been drooping and wilting immediately began to pick themselves up and regain a sense of vibrancy. The air, which had been filled with a weird ashy, metallic scent, began to clear as the pylon cycled, making the room feel cool and fresh.

  "Wow," said Tiberius, using some kind of scanning wand. "The field is at a hundred and twelve percent – better than new. How did you do that?"

  "Brilliantly," smiled Mishka, adjusting her ribbon minutely.

  "Maybe you can help Astrid with her cage then," said Tiberius, jerking his blue head towards where the human woman was leaning against a windowsill lined with pots.

  Astrid was out of her heavy space-suit now, and was instead wearing the same shirt-blouse combination that seemed to be some kind of uniform, which now that she looked closer, had some kind of embroidered star on the breast and the words 'Stellar Horizons.' It looked tacky, but Mishka didn't find that particular surprising, after all, the researchers on the base had the temerity to make fun of her eminently fashionable crimson cloak.

  "Cage?" said Mishka, drawing said cloak back around her shoulders and clasping it under her collarbone.

  "Tiberius, she- she could be from a rival company!" said Astrid. "I won't have my finds stolen!"

  "Astrid, if a rival of Stellar Horizon's can make a better than state of the art Vivification Matrix from scrap in half an hour, they're fucked," he said. "Show her the damn cage – she might actually know what it is."

  Astrid gave him a death glare, before looking over Mishka, sizing her up. "Fine," she said eventually. "Come on then, Magician."

  The human led Mishka through back past the infirmary, through the central hub, by the habitation area, and back the storage area they had arrived in, where there was a corner filled with various artefacts and relics that the archaeologist must have found in the ruins. They all looked vaguely familiar, and Mishka racked her brains for where she had seen them before. It was odd that she couldn't recall, normally her memory was perfect. Odd, and mildly concerning. She supposed she hadn't slept for quite a while…

  "I found this about six floors under one of the larger buildings – two days ago," said Astrid, pulling a sheet off a large metal cage, which was surprisingly well-preserved and still gleaming.

  The cage was perhaps ten feet long, four feet wide, and five feet high, and had a solid, thick sheet of metal on its top and bottom. There were no obvious seams between the bars and the base or roof, indicating that this had been put together with delicate and precise arteficing. At the front was an open gate with a locking mechanism that still looked to be intact, as well as some writing around the rims of the metal floor and ceiling.

  Mishka frowned at the writing, which her symbiote, in defiance of its usual comprehensive understanding, did not properly translate. A few words here and there: 'population,' 'small,' and 'closed.' It seemed vaguely familiar, but she couldn't figure out where she might have seen the looping script before.

  She could feel that the cage was intensely magical, even at a distance. It was putting out some kind of suppression field, specifically targeting the energy of the Beneath. She wasn't sure, but she had a hunch that she wouldn't be able to open a breach anywhere near this thing.

  "Now you're beautiful," said Mishka.

  Needless to say, no one on the research base, or even from their civilisation had made it. Anything capable of blocking her people's magic was formidable indeed, and spoke of, if not Ursulan-equivalent knowledge of arteficing, then not that far beneath. That narrowed down the species who could have made it significantly.

  The magic itself seemed to be worked into the metal at a fundamental level. It wasn't so much that this was metal that had been enchanted to suppress Beneath energy; the metal had been so fundamentally altered, fundamentally fused with the magic that it was more accurate to say that this was a type of metal that itself suppressed the energy by its very nature.

  It was elegant in a way she had rarely seen since leaving her home. Back at the academy, a submission like this in her arteficing seminars would have gotten her a First even in her senior years. Mishka would have loved to meet the person that had crafted it, they could have traded tips.

  "Should I leave you two alone?" said Astrid.

  "Was it was locked when you found it?" asked Mishka, running a finger over some kind of inlaid interface on the door.

  "Yes," said Astrid. "And totally empty. I ran every scan I could think of before I opened it – nothing."

  "Why did you open it then?" asked Mishka, taking out her magnifying glass and studying it. Ursulan runes appeared across the lens, highlighting and analysing and cataloguing the details of the metal.

  Astrid blinked, as if not understanding the question. "I… well, wouldn't you?" she said.

  Mishka tapped her thigh. Tap tap, tap tap-tap. She supposed she probably would have. Curiosity was one of her greater vices.

  "I've done every single test I can think of, it makes no sense," continued Astrid. "It's creating an energy field, but it has no obvious source of that energy. It's not drawing on the ley field or a store or anything. It's like it just… appears."

  "That's because it's drawing on the Empyrean," said Mishka.

  The Empyrean, the opposite of the Beneath. Higher, newer universes too pure and brilliant and bright for dwellers of the Real to fully comprehend anymore than they could properly understand the twisted depths of the Beneath.

  "The Empyrean? What? You can't be serious," said Astrid. "That's impossible."

  "At your civilisational level, maybe," said Mishka. "My people use it to power our hair-driers."

  "Oh yes, the mighty Ursulans," said Astrid, rolling her eyes. "I wasn't born yesterday, you know. Sure, you're more advanced than us, but if I had a credit for every time someone from a slightly more advanced culture came along and claimed to be an Ursulan, or an Eternal, or an Architect, or a Corvidian-"

  "Corvidian!" said Mishka, snapping her fingers. "I knew I recognised the text. That's why it doesn't translate! I thought I recognised the style – I studied them back at the academy."

  Her semiotic symbiote worked by tapping into the galaxy's latent psychic field, a kind of natural 'build up' of the unconscious of the various inhabitants of the galaxy. But it only worked for languages that were actually in use, or, at least, had until recently been in use.

  But her people had wiped out the Corvidians a hundred thousand years earlier, there was little to no one except a few of the more stuffy elders of her society that actually knew the language. Certainly not enough to produce more than the faintest trace of understanding.

  "Are you seriously claiming to be a Ursulan?" said Astrid. "They're a myth."

  "Ancient and xenophobic- sorry, 'isolationist,' actually," said Mishka, making air quotes. "You'd be surprised how often that gets confused with mythological by short lived species."

  Astrid regarded her sceptically. "Uh huh."

  "Believe what you like," said Mishka, tapping her lip. Tap tap, tap tap-tap. "And you're sure it was locked?"

  "Yes – I unlocked it myself, last night. I'm not even sure 'locked' is the right word," said Astrid. "It was some kind of geometry puzzle, took a while, but easy."

  A lock that required an understanding of geometry to open? That was weird. Even monkeys and crows and primitives could solve things like that.

  "Can I see the first scans you took?" said Mishka.

  "Oh, sure, why not. Apparently we're giving you full access anyway," muttered Astrid, moving across the store room and grabbing a folder. "Here."

  Mishka flicked through the documents, her eyes flying over the data. "Why would you make a cage like this and not put anything in it?" she muttered, tapping her foot on the floor. Tap tap, tap tap-tap.

  There was something wrong. Mishka wasn't sure what it was, but there was something wrong. It had clearly been designed to hold something, and something nasty at that. But then, why make the lock so simple to open? Why even put a lock on it?

  Mishka went back to the start and carefully went through the information, line by line, piece by piece. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with it. Everything pointed to there having been nothing in the cage at all. But the Corvidians had been implacable foes, the last serious ones that her people had faced before their mastery of magic and arteficing had outrun everyone and anything else in the galaxy. They had made that cage with intent behind it, with a specific purpose in mind, something that she felt should have been obvious, but somehow wasn't.

  Had it been a cage for an Ursulan? A way to stop prisoners Voidwalking? That was possible, it would probably work. But why would it need to be worked into the entire cage? A pylon that projected a similar field would have been infinitely simpler, and there was nothing in the design that she could see that would have stopped an Ursulan just cutting their way through the bars with a conjured blade of plasma – something any adult Ursulan could managed. It wouldn't even take that long to do.

  "I need to see where you found this cage," said Mishka, handing Astrid back the folder.

  "Why?" said Astrid.

  "Because I feel like I'm missing something," said Mishka.

  "And that's bad?" said Astrid.

  "When you're as smart as me, yes it is," said Mishka.

  "Has anyone ever told you you're an egomaniac?" said Astrid.

  "Typically extremely jealous people, yes," said Mishka.

  "Fine, I suppose you can come out with me – but tomorrow," said Astrid. "Regulations say we can't be out during the asteroid's night cycle, and we're about to flip."

  Mishka clicked her teeth, but didn't protest. Click click, click click-click.

  She was missing something. What was she missing?

  ***

  Dinner was a lively affair, with all six of the crew gathered on one side of the central hub. Overhead, through the partly clear roof, the last rays of the blue-giant's cold light were fading as the asteroid turned its back to the massive sun. The star-field was amazing, and even if Mishka had seen it a million times before from a million different angles, she never tired of the glittering fires of creation.

  Aaron, the chef and 'head of housekeeping,' was a jolly green 'gretchen' man who cooked a rather delicious vegetarian meal, and who promised to give her the recipe – although Mishka doubted she would be able to replicate it. She aspired to be a good cook, but for whatever reason, even when she followed a recipe to the letter, it always ended up an undercooked or overcooked mess. Sometimes both. It was such an our of character and egregious flaw that she'd spent quite a long time trying to figure out if someone had cursed her at some point.

  Aaron was the same species as Petra – the erotic visual-novel reading enby doctor – and Mishka was told that gretchen, along with humans and alfs, were one of the major species within the 'Democratic Pescian Stellar Commonwealth,' or DPSC.

  The DPSC was a capitalistic polity that had formed out of several colonies who were all quite distant from the world's that had seeded them, and liked to think of itself as particularly free because they'd thrown off those chains. However, when Mishka had started asking fairly basic xenothropological questions about how democracy could co-exist in the long term with currency found herself very quickly labelled as an 'unrealistic, starry-eyed communist.'

  The Captain in charge of the mission, Charles, clearly didn't care for her overmuch, but apparently was willing to give her at least a little bit of slack for fixing the Greenhouse, and although Astrid was a bit leery of her, none of the others – Viktor, Aaron, Petra, and Tiberius – seemed to mind that she was there. Although that might have also been because there were two spare, empty quarters, so she wasn't putting anyone out. That, or perhaps after four months they were glad to have someone new to talk to.

  Mishka played cards with them for a while after the meal, a rather simple game that was largely probability based, but decided to turn in early after she sensed they were getting annoyed that she was winning all the time. At least, that was what she interpreted people whinging about 'card counting' to mean. Also, Mishka hadn't slept since before that unfortunate misunderstanding with the police on Gallax-3, some sixty five hours earlier. Hopefully with a good night sleep she'd be able to see the things she felt she was missing.

  The two free cabins were opposite each other, and she picked the one on the left. The glossy wooden door slid back to reveal a mostly tidy, unoccupied square space, some ten feet by ten feet that looked out onto the ruins beyond. There was a small en-suite, a bed, a cupboard that someone else seemed to be using to store their excess clothes, a handful of black and white aethergraphs of random people in various natural environs, along with a half-drunk bottle of water that whoever had last been in there must have left.

  The bed was a bit harder than Mishka would have liked, and the sheets a bit scratchier, but she had slept on far worse in the time since she had gone 'Walking, and she was just starting to doze off when there was a chime at the door.

  "Hello?" said Mishka, sitting back up. "Come in?"

  The door slid back to reveal Aaron, the small gretchen man.

  "Oh, sorry, didn't realise you were in bed already," he said, holding out a yellow sheet of paper with neat, curly handwriting on it. "I wrote down the recipe for you."

  "Ah, wonderful," said Mishka, gesturing to the chair next to the door. "Just with my cloak is fine. Thank-you."

  The short green skinned man crossed and placed it on the red garment.

  "Well, sleep well," he said, turning to leave.

  "Good night," she said.

  The air in the room was ashy and metallic, with a tang of… ozone? It was odd, and she made a mental note to bring it up with the Captain as she lay back and closed her eyes.

  Her last, sleepy thoughts, were rather strangely fixated on the number eight and why it was important.

  ***

  Mishka rubbed her pale forearm, staring at the angry red scratches. Eight lines, three of which were crossed out. She'd woken up with them that morning, apparently having made them in the night. She'd shut off the pain quickly, and she was already healing, but it was an odd thing for her to have done, and something about the number eight had her worried.

  "Hey, Magician, your toast is burning," said Viktor.

  "Argh! Stupid thing!" said Mishka, pulling herself from her ruminations and slapping the ridiculous, primitive toaster that seemed to only be able to either do nothing to the bread inside it, or else turn it into a charred mess. Some gears on the side of the device whirred, and the small pyromantic runes lost their glow as two carbonated pieces of toast shot up violently. She sighed, adding them to the small pile next to the machine before trying again.

  It was the morning after she had arrived, and after six or so hours of tossing and turning Mishka had awoken and paced the room. She felt more or less refreshed, but the feeling of missing something hadn't vanished.

  "Fighting krawshacks in your sleep?" said Viktor, taking her arm and peering at the scratches. "Or should I be jealous? I thought you and Astrid had something going on-"

  "Sorry?" said Mishka, frowning deeply. "Astrid?"

  "The scratches," he said, waggling his eyebrows. "You didn't have them last night."

  "You primitives have very strange ideas of romance," said Mishka. "Does the number eight mean anything to you?"

  "Eight? Apart from being before nine and after seven?" said Viktor, sobering somewhat. "No, not really. Why?"

  "I'm not sure," said Mishka. "I hate not being sure…"

  She trailed off, frowning as she tried to figure out what eight meant.

  "Hey Magician, toast," said Viktor.

  "Ack!" she said, ejecting two more slices of blackened bread from the infernal machine.

  She ended up eventually switching to cereal and a plant-based milk, but once all the plates and cutlery were washed away, she headed out with Astrid and Viktor.

  Viktor was tagging along 'in case they needed something heavy moved,' or, alternately, 'if they needed someone to stand around and look pretty,' leaving their three companions back at the base.

  The bright blue sunlight was streaming between the shattered buildings as they made their way across the dead city. Walking between the giant, ruined buildings was eerie, and although she could hear her own footsteps because of the air-shell, she couldn't hear Viktor or Astrid except through their vox-boxes.

  From the looks of things, whatever had caused the city to be abandoned hadn't been violence. There was no sign of any damage to indicate bombardment or even urban skirmishing. The only dilapidation had come from time. Perhaps it had been evacuated? That would explain the total lack of bodies.

  Her people's campaign against the Corvidians had resulted in many worlds being abandoned as the avian aliens had withdrawn their populations back into their strongholds as the tide had turned against their Alliance. Not that that had helped them, her people had simply been too good at warfare, and for all the Corvidian's ingenuity and genius arteficing it hadn't been enough to overcome Ursulan military doctrine and ruthlessness. The Corvidian's worlds had burned, blazing testaments to the cruelty and jealousy of Mishka's people.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Mishka felt her mood begin to darken, and she forced herself to turn her mind away from her people's dark and bloody past.

  "So how did you get here, really?" asked Viktor a quarter of an hour later.

  "Magic," said Mishka.

  "Well, sure, we all got here via magic," said Viktor. "But the rest of us needed a honking great Voidship."

  "She's obviously got a stealthed vessel nearby," said Astrid.

  "Why obviously?" said Viktor. "I looked Ursulans up last night on the database – legend said they could just appear on worlds. Blockades, planetary shields, didn't matter – they'd just show up, shoot whoever they didn't like, then vanish again. Course, it didn't say anything about them wearing fishnets – so we can't be totally sure they were the same as Mishka here."

  "It's also total bollocks," said Astrid. "Undetectable FTL transit without a ship? Nah. They just had cloaks and liked theatre."

  "So… Magicians?" suggested Viktor. "Like Mishka?"

  "Shut up, Victor," said Astrid.

  "Do you really believe that everything in the universe must be intelligible to someone of your level of development?" said Mishka. "A strange stance to take for an archaeologist studying a civilisation aeons more advanced than her own."

  "Alright, then how did you– they, dammit," said Astrid. "How did they do it?"

  "We know how to breach the skien of this universe, and enter the Beneath," said Mishka. "The principles involved are far beyond you."

  "Even if you could do that, how does that help you travel without a ship?" said Astrid.

  "The Beneath is made up of old universes, slowly slipping down into the fires of creation," said Mishka. "It is, amongst other things, compressed. A few steps in there can be light years out here, although it's not quite that simple."

  "That's- that's preposterous," scoffed Astrid.

  "I told you you wouldn't believe me," said Mishka.

  "Fine, keep your secrets, you weirdo," said Astrid, stopping and nodding at a ruin to their right. It was a large, stocky, fortress-like building, and had rough text gouged above the entranceway. Mishka stared at it for several long seconds, before, very reluctantly, the words began to make sense. "This is the place."

  "It says 'Keep out – Danger,'" said Mishka.

  "You- you can read it?" said Astrid.

  "Only a little, and it's hard," said Mishka. "Translation symbiote, only really works properly with living languages."

  "Not at all ominous," said Viktor. "I'm sure glad we didn't take a super secret cage from a place labelled 'Keep Out – Danger' and open it."

  "That cage was empty," said Astrid. "And it's been, what, nearly a hundred thousand years since this place had anyone living here. Anything they caged in there would be long dead."

  'Click click, click click-click,' went Mishka's teeth.

  "Not convinced?" said Viktor as they began to make their way into the yawning darkness. Both he and Astrid pulled lightsticks from their belts, while Mishka snapped her fingers and summoned a warelight. The shine lit up the large, square room that had once had barriers and desks and lifts and all sorts of things you found in modern buildings, but all of which had either crumpled or cracked. It was a testament to the building quality that the structure had survived a hundred millennia.

  "There are many things that could survive that length of time alone in the dark," said Mishka. "And that cage was designed to either hold something… exotic."

  "There was nothing in the cage," said Astrid. "You saw the scans!"

  "Yes, I did," said Mishka, staring down at the mostly healed scratches on her arm.

  Eight, minus three… five what did that mean? Some kind of code? Some kind of frequency, perhaps? Eight point five was within the band of long-wave aetheric transmissions…?

  She played with her bracelet for a moment, and static reverberated within her shell of air. She let it play as they descended down a set of ancient stairs, passing from the vaulted room deeper into the earth. She strained her excellent, and, yes, cute, bear-like ears, but she couldn't detect any kind of order in the random chaos. She switched to five point eight, barely usable for transmission, but short range it could work…

  Nothing.

  She shut it off, continuing to ruminate as they descended lower and lower into the great abandoned halls, passing through doors that had recently, presumably by Astrid and Viktor, been ripped off.

  "Here, this is where I found it," said Astrid.

  "We found it," said Viktor.

  "Right, yeah, Viktor helped," said Astrid.

  They were in a medium sized room, off from a hallway, six floors beneath the surface. There was a visible mark where the cage had been, as well as the very faded remains of what looked like ritual circles surrounding it – worn and faded, but still legible.

  "Hmm…" said Mishka, waving her hand and making her warelight zoom up towards the ceiling and begin to shed far more light, illuminating the details. She squatted down the study the ground. "You didn't say anything about these."

  "Those? I mean, they're just decorative – surely," said Astrid. "Ritual circles require constant conscious management."

  "Under normal circumstances, yes," said Mishka, carefully moving around the edges.

  She really wished her symbiote was working better, she could hazard out a symbol here or there, but not enough to really get a feel for what the intent of the ritual had been. There was 'restore' and in another place 'perception' but it didn't make sense. Then again, that was to be expected – rituals were even more difficult to read than normal text, after all, they were abstract and symbolic. Whatever it had been for, the magic sustaining it had long since failed.

  She turned her attention to the walls, they were worn, but text had been gouged deep into them. From the look of it, by whoever had defaced the stone over the entraceway.

  "And you didn't say anything about these either," said Mishka, tracing a hand over the wall.

  "You didn't ask," said Astrid in an exasperated voice. "And you didn't say you could read the language either. If you had-"

  "Shh," said Mishka, putting her finger to her mouth.

  Astrid reeled slightly, her mouth opening and closing a few times, before she huffed and crossed her arms. "Go on then, what does it say?" she said. "There are only four phrases – repeated over and over, by the way."

  "Hard to make out…" said Mishka, running a finger over the ancient lines of text. "A warning, perhaps. This is 'City for millions,' and this is… 'All alone?' And here, 'Darkness forgets' or, no, 'forgets in the dark' is better. And the last…" She considered for a moment. "I cannot remember what is lost."

  There was something very wrong. She wasn't sure what, but she was missing something. Something simple. Something obvious, staring her right in the face. Why couldn't she see it?

  It wasn't just that. Her mind felt sluggish. As if something was affecting it. Which was impossible. Well, not impossible, but unlikely. Her people had never been natural psychics, but they had over the millennia alchemically altered themselves extensively into a pretty good approximation of it – albeit psychics heavily slanted towards defence.

  She needed to meditate. Clear her mind. Find some space to just… think.

  ***

  Ding.

  Mishka opened her eyes. "Come in," she said.

  She was back at the base, sitting cross-legged on the small bunk and trying to order her thoughts.

  The door slid back, revealing Tiberius, the expedition's enchanter and maintenance merman. He was gingerly holding a piece of shredded metal, and his blue-face was marred with a deep frown.

  "Hey, so I was just doing some maintenance on the transmission relay – damn things been on the fritz," he said. "And… well, I've never seen damage like this from wear and tear."

  Mishka frowned and accepted the piece of metal. It was part of a power circuit for channeling mana and regulating it for use in sensitive devices. It had been quite neatly slashed in half.

  "Sorry, I know it's probably nothing," said Tiberius.

  "No you're… you're right, this is odd," she said. "This was cut. When did the problems start?"

  "Morning before you got here," he said. "Probably around the same time as the Greenhouse. I wanted to check with you before going to the Captain, since you seem to know your stuff."

  Mishka turned the slashed circuit in her hand. Sabotage? But who on the crew would do that? They would be stuck out in the middle of nowhere just as much as the rest of them.

  She moved to the door and opened it. Then she paused. Had she forgotten something? She sniffed, frowning slightly at the strange, familiar smell of ash and burnt metal. She shook her head, it didn't matter.

  A few moments later she was back in the central habitat. Charles, Petra, Viktor and Astrid were all there – the entire expedition. She knew that they were beginning to sense that something was wrong, although, given their more primitive brains, they couldn't really articulate it as well as Mishka could. Not that she fullygrasped what was happening…

  "What's that?" asked Charles, nodding at the circuit in her hands.

  "Huh?" she said, pulling herself from her thoughts. "Oh, right – this is a circuit of the transmission relay. I was… having a look at it."

  "Ah, yeah, right, I asked you to look into that, didn't I?" said Charles. "And? Get it fixed?"

  "No… and I think this has been sabotaged," said Mishka, handing it to him. She frowned. Why hadn't she fixed it again? Oh, right, she'd been meditating. Of course. "That, or it's the weirdest break I've ever seen."

  "Let's… let's not leap to any conclusions," he said. "It could just be an unusual fault, as you said."

  Mishka shrugged. "Oh, right – before I forget, the air recyclers are broken in my quarters I think. This metallic, ashy scent keeps on cropping up. Happening anywhere else?"

  "Not that I've smelt," said Charles. "You're the only one who can fix things here – you should take a look."

  Mishka clicked her teeth. There was something… something… she was missing something.

  She looked down at her arm. Eight, with four crossed out. Like it had always been…

  No.

  No.

  It hadn't always been like that. She'd searched the aetheric bands eight point five and five point eight for signals. She remembered doing that. But why would she have done that instead of eight point four and four point eight? Sure, her head felt muddled, but not that muddled.

  Eight. Five. Four. Counting down? But counting down what? What had been five, and then four?

  She ruminated, staring at the scrap of metal which she had found…

  Had found…

  Her eyes widened. When had she been working on the transmission relay? She hadn't, she'd been her quarters? She had been meditating, and then she had been standing and it had just been there, in her hand. Had she meditated for a while, gone and fixed it, and then gone back to meditating? No… that didn't make sense. And she wasn't even sure where the damned transmission relay was in the base.

  Sure, she'd been under a lot of stress… actually, had she? What was stressing her out more than usual? She felt stressed, but she had no idea why. And she didn't just forget things, even when stressed. She had an excellent, borderline flawless memory. Which meant-

  "Dinner's ready!" came Viktor's voice from across the room and interrupting her train of thought.

  Dinner…? Why did that seem important?

  She made her way slowly across to where Viktor was serving up some rather over-boiled vegetables.

  "Sorry, I'm a pilot, not a chef," he said with a laugh. "You'd have thought they'd send a chef, eh?"

  A plate of steaming, mushy, washed out vegetables was put in front of her. She stared at them. This was wrong. The night beforehand the meal had been excellent…

  "What did we have last night?" she asked, one of her hands straying down to her skirt's pocket. The recipe. She had gotten the recipe, hadn't she?

  "Huh? Oh – it was some kind of stuffed pepper thing, wasn't it?" said Charles. "Fair bit better than this – no offence, Viktor."

  "None taken, this is awful," said the alf man cheerfully. He scooped some root-vegetable into his mouth and grimaced slightly.

  "And who made it?" said Mishka, carefully taking a written recipe from her pocket and unfolding it. Yellow paper, neat handwriting.

  "That… huh, I'm not sure," said Charles. "Petra?"

  "No," said the small gretchen enby. "Not me. I'm no better than Viktor."

  "Then it must have been you, Astrid," said Charles.

  "I… guess?" said Astrid, massaging her temples.

  "What's the first step of making it?" asked Mishka. "The meal from last night."

  "The- the first step?" said Astrid.

  "Yeah, what did you do first?" said Mishka.

  "I… I… don't know," said Astrid. "Damn, I think I'm getting a headache."

  "And did you write the recipe out for me?" asked Mishka.

  "Huh? No, why would I have?" said Astrid.

  "Because someone did," said Mishka, turning the recipe around.

  "Oh, well, I must have," said Astrid. "I just, um, forgot – that's all."

  "You didn't," said Mishka. "Because this isn't your handwriting. I've seen it; it's worse than mine."

  "But- but if it's not hers… then whose is it?" said Petra, tapping hir fork against hir plate nervously: 'clink clink, clink clink-clink.'

  There was a long moment of silence over the table. Mishka felt like she was right on the cusp of something. That there was something just out of view, something she couldn't see-

  "Oh ha ha, very spooky," said Charles. "Cut it out Mishka, things are tense enough without you adding fuel to the fire."

  "Why are things tense?" asked Mishka. "What's making everyone so tense?"

  "I mean, you know…" said Charles vaguely, waving a fork idly. "Things breaking, thinking we might have to go home… tense."

  There was another long moment of silence.

  "There is something wrong here, very wrong," said Mishka. "Can't you see it? Recipe's written by people who don't exist, the transmission system being sabotaged?"

  "What?" said Petra. "What's this about transmission?"

  "Nothing," said Charles quickly.

  "Here," said Mishka, drawing the circuit out of her pockets. "See-"

  "Mishka, enough," said Charles forcefully. "This isn't funny. That part just broke. Stop- stop making things up!"

  Mishka drummed her fingers on the table: tap tap, tap tap-tap.

  Was he right? Was she just going a bit nuts? Part of her wanted to believe that, but… no. No, there was something going on here. She looked at her arm. Eight lines, four crossed. Four… four people on the expedition? But there had always been four people on the expedition. She knew that, she could remember that. Then what were the crosses for?

  She rubbed her face. She was right on the edge of understanding, she was sure of it. But it was still just out of reach…

  The meal was terrible, and although the others were making an effort to laugh and be cheerful, Mishka could feel that it was forced. They'd rationalised the inconsistencies around the recipe away, around the broken transmission relay, but they were on edge. They could, some small part of their primitive minds, also perceive that something was wrong. The air hung heavy, and everyone's eyes held a darkness in them she didn't remember from the previous night.

  After dinner, she went to investigate the cage again, crawling across the cold metal floor and inspecting every inch of it with her magnifying glass.

  "What are you?" she muttered to it. "Are you doing this?"

  She checked and checked and checked for some kind of psionic influence, but if anything the cage should have suppressed any such effect.

  "Find anything?"

  Bang.

  Mishka hissed as she rubbed her head where she had smacked it on the top of the cage, looking back over her shoulder to see Viktor standing there with a goofy look on his face. In his hands he had a bottle of some kind of dark green liquid.

  "No," she muttered. "What is it?"

  "Thought maybe you'd like to have a drink with me?" he said, holding up the bottle. "Was saving it for a special occasion."

  "And meeting me is a 'special occasion?'" said Mishka, raising an eyebrow.

  His grin widened. "Smart and sexy space magician falls out of the sky? Sure, seems special," he said.

  Mishka laughed. "I'm three hundred and seventy," she said. "Alfs live, what, to a hundred and ten? Tops? You're like… forty?"

  "Fifty two," he said. "But thank-you for the compliment."

  "I'm old enough to be your distant ancestor," said Mishka. "Would you flirt with your great-great-great-great-great grandmother?"

  "If I had cute bear ears I might be more worried about such a scenario," he said, tapping his pointed ones. "But in their absence…"

  Mishka studied him for several long moments. He wasn't unattractive, and she did quite like his sense of humour. A drink could be nice…

  "Or not," he said, his smile faltering a bit. "That's fine – just thought I'd ask. No hard feelings, yeah?"

  And this investigation was getting her absolutely nowhere. And, sure, the recipe was weird, but maybe she'd picked it up somewhere else? And that broken part in the transmission relay could have been just a weird looking fault. Those happened all the time.

  She rubbed her head. Damn, now she was getting a headache. Maybe it was time for a break. Whatever weird, maybe mind-altering powers the cage was possibly producing, it could wait until morning.

  "No, hold on," she said, smiling. "I'd love a drink."

  A.N. This is an episodic work, structured as several standalone-ish novellas of around 15k works that string together to form a longer narrative. My is four chapters/one month ahead of other places for

  Shattered Moon, which you can read here on Scribblehub or as a free member on my .

  Lions after Slumber which is currently only up my which has the first chapter up for free members, and four additional chapters for supporters

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