“So what do you think?” Essa asked. Simon leaned closer to her monitor. Satellite photos of Majus were arrayed across the screen, with one in particular centered, a large portion of it circled in yellow to highlight Essa’s findings.

  “I think you found it,” he said, stepping back. “Send that to my tablet. We’ll need Nick to confirm, but if it’s the same mountain range, we’ll have locked down a significant piece of the puzzle.”

  “Already sent.” She rubbed her eyes and grimaced. “Thankfully this was something I could automate. Translating the Artifact’s newest garble is turning my gray matter into scrambled eggs. Looking at terrain images is relaxing by comparison.”

  Simon tucked his tablet underneath his arm and headed for the door.

  “Try to get some sleep, will you?” he said. “We need that gray matter of yours in top shape.”

  “No promises,” Essa shot back as he exited her office.

  To Simon’s immediate concern, his security officer, Daksh, stood waiting for him in the hallway just outside. By the look on his face, the tenor of this meeting would be quite the opposite of Essa’s.

  “Director,” Daksh said. “I’ve something you need to see.”

  He lifted his watch and whispered something to the AI. Simon glanced at his tablet as a window opened, filling with text. Simon scanned it, his excitement over Essa’s find making it hard to concentrate on something so basic.

  “This is just a letter to someone’s parents,” he said, stopping halfway.

  “Exactly,” Daksh said. “Dr. Pagle tried to break quarantine and send it this morning.”

  “How?”

  “By bribing the head of engineering. They pretended to agree and then forwarded it to me instead.”

  Simon sighed. It felt like a thousand pounds of weight had been slammed onto his back. His dream of following in the footsteps of his parents to manage a space station had been about pioneering into the unknown edges of science and exploration. Dealing with insubordination was very, very low on that list.

  Simon’s watch vibrated silently. He glanced at it, saw an alert he’d programmed so that anytime Nick’s vitals showed signs of waking, the station AI would notify him.

  “Excellent timing, Nick,” he muttered, then brought his attention back to Daksh.

  “No punishment,” he said. “Give Pagle a stern warning and then let it go.”

  “A blatant breach of protocol, and you can’t even muster a slap on the wrist?” Daksh asked. “I’m not sure that’s wise.”

  “We’re all stressed and scared, Daksh, and it’s not like Pagle was leaking classified data. It was a message to his family, to let them know not to worry, for shit’s sake. Now, let it go. I’ve got to see Nick.”

  “Right,” Daksh said, his mood souring. “Go on, then. I forgot how your brother trumps everything now.”

  Simon’s blood ran cool. He stepped closer to Daksh while straightening his spine.

  “Nick is our lone entry point into an alien world,” he said, fighting, and failing, to keep his voice even. “And that exploration is steadily killing him, so, yes, Nick is my highest priority right now, and it has nothing to do with him being my brother. Is that understood, Officer?”

  Daksh pulled back his shoulders, his face becoming a perfectly emotionless mask. Simon didn’t trust it in the slightest.

  “Perfectly, Director.”

  “Good.” Simon brushed past him. “Now, handle it.”

  *

  The lights were on in Nick’s room when Simon entered. His brother lay on his back, calmly staring at the ceiling. Waiting for him, he suspected.

  “Welcome back to the realm of the living,” Simon said, setting down his tablet on the nearby chair.

  “Glad to be back,” Nick said, voice muffled by the oxygen tube.

  Simon hit a few buttons on the heart monitor, bringing up a graph of the last half hour.

  “No skyrocketing heart rate, no lurching awake,” he said, and then began helping Nick remove the oxygen tube. “What gives?”

  “I didn’t die,” Nick said, rubbing his nose. “Believe it or not, for the second time now, I left the proper way.”

  “A good habit to keep,” Simon said, and he smiled. “Your heart rate didn’t go above 140 in the past hour or so. That’s got to be a record for you.”

  “Forget my heart rate. You won’t believe what I’ve learned. I can control lightning!”

  Simon grabbed his tablet so he could plop down in the chair and then scooted it closer.

  “Lightning?” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Nick’s reports of his activities within Yensere were scattered and inconsistent, to the absolute fury of many on the station, but the reports that existed had mentioned a Sir Gareth multiple times, and those encounters almost always ended with Nick being unceremoniously booted out to the real world. Listening to Nick detail a victory against this otherworldly knight, let alone through an absolutely bewildering method such as learning to throw lightning from his bare hands, put a wide smile on Simon’s face.

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  “Not bad,” he said. “And to think, it wasn’t that long ago you were half-naked and throwing rocks at people.”

  “Even clueless incompetents like me are capable of getting better,” Nick said, and grinned. That jovial attitude faded, and he glanced away. “Simon, there’s something I should have told you earlier.”

  Simon leaned back in his chair. His thumb brushed his watch, activating the recording software.

  “What is it?”

  Nick settled back into his bed, suddenly unable to meet Simon’s gaze.

  “It’s about Frost. She…she’s a visitor like me.”

  Simon froze.

  “From…here?” he asked, forcing words out through his lips though his brain felt as if it were made of molasses. The ramifications of someone else on his station entering the Artifact were too many. His mind struggled to contain them all.

  “No,” Nick said, shaking his head. “I don’t think so. Another planet, I think. Where, she refuses to say.”

  They, too, possess an Artifact.

  “Maybe she’s from Vasth,” Simon said, vibrating in his chair with excitement. “But that means these Artifacts, they’re connected somehow. A shared world? Or do they each possess their own, and travel between them…but such travel, this would involve information transmissions of such quantities and capabilities, they’re leaps and bounds beyond our understanding.”

  He realized Nick was staring at him and paused.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You don’t know about Vasth. It’s a beginning-stage terraformed world two gate hops away. It initiated quarantine about a month ago, and then yesterday, we received confirmation the gate on their side was completely destroyed.”

  “Destroyed?” Nick asked, suddenly more alert than he’d been in days. “Why? By who?”

  “We don’t know.” Simon hesitated. They had one clue; he wasn’t sure Nick was ready for it yet, but he had little choice. He could not delay any longer.

  “While I think on what it means for there to be more than one visitor to your mysterious little world, I want you to take a look at this.”

  Simon grabbed his tablet, clicked through to a folder, and then loaded an image. He flipped it around to show Nick. His brother leaned closer, trying to analyze what he was seeing. It was a satellite photo of Majus and its dull black rock, showcasing a lengthy mountain range. After a moment, Nick startled.

  “The mountains to the west of Meadowtint,” he said.

  Simon grinned slightly; at least one theory was panning out, a small bit of good luck.

  “We’re dealing with unknown timelines, but when you described those mountains, that felt unique enough that I set Essa to scan the terrain in a search, and there they were.”

  Nick leaned back into his bed.

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “I think it confirms your Yensere is set on Majus. Whether it is an exact re-creation, a smaller simulation, or merely using the planet as an inspiration, we cannot yet say.”

  “As it was…” Nick frowned. “Yensere is full of life and people. Majus is gone. Completely empty, no atmosphere, no buildings, no water…”

  “But there are signs of water,” Simon insisted. “We’re unsure how long ago, but we’ve seen geological evidence of oceans. Majus and Yensere are linked, if not the same place—I’m sure of it.”

  “Then, what happened?” Nick asked. “What destroyed their world?”

  Simon’s chest tightened. No dancing around it now. He rotated the screen away from Nick, tapped some keys, and opened a different picture.

  “I think this was somehow involved,” he said, and spun it back around.

  Nick’s entire demeanor darkened upon seeing the photo from Lemley’s thumb drive. A hard edge entered his brother’s voice, one strange and foreign to Simon’s ears.

  “What is that?” he asked quietly.

  “A picture taken from the quarantined planet of Vasth. It’s in their sky, just like in Yensere’s sky. Planetary Director Jakob Lemley brought this with him on a thumb drive, exiting their quarantine mere days before their gate’s destruction. He tried to have us killed. The Artifact—he feared it, somehow.”

  “What do you mean, a planetary director tried to have us killed!?”

  Simon put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Nick. I didn’t want to trouble you before, with all that you’ve been experiencing. But now…”

  Simon told Nick everything, starting with Lemley’s arrival, the attempt to detonate the oxygen tanks, the ensuing dark quarantine, and then ending with Essa’s confirmation of the Vasth gate’s destruction.

  “‘An accident near the oxygen tanks,’” Nick said when he finished, and his disappointment could not have been heavier. “Why didn’t you trust me with all this when it happened? Why lie?”

  “I don’t know,” Simon said. “Have you looked at yourself in a mirror, lately? This Artifact world is a burden on you, a heavy burden. I didn’t want to make things worse on my little brother.”

  “And so you coddled me instead.”

  “It’s not coddling! It’s called partitioning responsibilities. You have yours, and I have mine, which includes ensuring you survive all the shit this Yensere inflicts upon you.”

  Simon immediately regretted the outburst. He slumped in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Nick. You deserve better than that.”

  His brother shifted in the bed, then gently reached out to hold his forearm.

  “No, it’s fine. I held back about Frost, too, so I have no room to act insulted. Just…please trust me, all right? I may be your little brother, but I’m a part of this station, and a pretty big deal when it comes to learning about the Artifact, if I say so myself.”

  Simon chuckled, wishing he could be as easygoing about all this as Nick.

  “Fine. You’ve got my full trust. So back to the topic at hand.” He gestured to the photo of Vasth. “Do you have any ideas about this? Something I might not have considered?”

  Nick stared at the black sun.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Are they connected, you think? Created by the Artifact, somehow, or maybe summoned?”

  “If the Artifact is malevolent, it hides it well,” Simon said. He flicked open another folder, this showing a picture of the Artifact in the station holding bay. He zoomed in to show Nick faint violet glyphs shimmering across its sides. While the research team had discovered traces of those glyphs within the first month, they’d never glowed, nor had anyone been able to make any sense of them…at least until recently.

  “The Artifact has clearly woken up,” Simon continued. “And we’re making progress in translating these glyphs…or more accurately, the Artifact is allowing us to translate them. They’ve been shifting and changing, forcing us to go line by line in an order its creators absolutely predetermined. Perhaps it’s a test of our language abilities, perhaps it’s just a game, we don’t know. But we’ve managed to translate a full sentence: ‘The youngest among you will be chosen.’”

  “So that’s why it was me,” Nick said. “But chosen for what?”

  Simon shrugged.

  “Go to Yensere? Live inside its digital world? See Majus as it was thousands of years ago, with a little ‘magic’ added for flavor? It’s all guesses, but I feel like we’re getting closer.”

  Nick stared at the photo of that black sun wreathed with blue fire.

  “Not close enough. The people of Yensere insist that black sun means their doom, and now it appeared over Vasth not long before their gate was destroyed. Get me something to eat and drink so I can go back in. I’ve got an idea of who might have some answers.”

  “And who is that?”

  His younger brother grinned at him.

  “Before the Sinifel and the Alder people, before the black sun brought the very first cataclysm, there were the Majere. So after I grab myself a bite to eat, I’m going to see what Violette knows about them.”

  Simon arched an eyebrow. “Violette?”

  “Oh. Right. So let me tell you about this incredibly sweet but also slightly terrifying little scholar we met named Violette…”