Zack said, “At the moment, I’m really curious about where oxygen and water come from, and where does the heat go?” Zack was pointing at the bulges around the hips of Makali’s suit. “These seem to contain life support equipment.”

“Like what grew inside the vesicles,” Makali said.

Williams pointed to Valya. “Looks as though she’s got an extra bulge.”

“My bag,” Valya said. She was happy she hadn’t lost it but realized it was now useless.

“Him, too,” Williams said, indicating a smaller bulge near Dale’s hip.

Dale patted at it. “Feels like the T-square,” he said.

“So whatever we were wearing just got enclosed?” Valya said.

Zack shrugged, to the extent he could. “Seems so.”

“Where do we get food and water?” Makali said.

“Maybe they don’t have that capability,” Dale said. “Maybe these were just for emergencies. You aren’t supposed to be in them long enough to get hungry or thirsty.”

“Hell,” Wade Williams said, “even if they are emergency suits, good for X duration—we don’t know what X is for Architects. Could be twenty years. Could be twenty minutes.”

“All I know,” Zack said, “is that they fit us. So I have to assume the support systems match.”

Dale had more questions. “Which gets to a good point: How the hell did this happen? How did we wind up in human-sized space suits?”

Makali pointed back to the shattered chamber. “It’s like it was part of that Membrane thing. You dived into the ‘suiting room’ and it wrapped you up.” She wriggled a bit, which Valya interpreted as laughter. “I’m not suggesting that we used the preferred method of entry.”

“I don’t get how or why you could dump four different human beings in a vat and come out with four suits that fit them,” Dale said. “And, by the way, assuming we eventually get back to a pressurized environment…how do we get out of these things?”

“I’m still trying to figure out the system that could detect, identify, and retrieve a dead human soul from space,” Zack said. “These suits are a lot like the second skin that Revenants are reborn in.” To Valya, Zack seemed to be talking to himself. “The whole suiting business…that seems to be about a ten on which the soul retrieval is a thousand.”

He looked down the tunnel toward the light again.

But Dale grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him back toward the chamber. “Goddammit, Zack! Why don’t we crawl back in there! A hole big enough to let that much air out will let us back in!”

Zack and Makali took steps toward the chamber, where flaps of material still fluttered weakly. “What do you think?” he said to Makali.

“It’s not like this leak would empty the whole habitat,” Makali said. “The annex was sealed off from the Beehive proper.” She reached for one of the flaps. Before her skin-gloved fingers made contact, however, the entire chamber simply collapsed. “Get back!” Zack shouted.

It was a strange sight, almost in slow motion, the “tent” vanishing under a cascade of rocks and soil. There was no cloud of dust; in the vacuum and low gravity, particles simply fell to the surface.

There was a long moment. Finally Dale said, “I withdraw my suggestion.”

Williams spoke for the first time in a while. “Well, now what do we do?”

“We go out,” Zack said. “Uh, gravity might be less than you’re used to…try to slide rather than step.”

Before they could emerge into the harsh sunlight of Vesuvius Vent, they reached an intersection where four different tunnels branched off.

“Where do these go?” Williams said.

“We never had time to investigate,” Zack said. “We were too focused on this.”

He pointed to the Marker, a stone plate mounted at least two meters off the ground. Makali was already camped beneath it.

Valya had seen one brief image of the Marker, the first definitive sign that the Destiny-Venture and Brahma explorers were dealing with an advanced civilization. Keanu’s maneuver from flyby to Earth orbit had been one clue, followed by the existence of the ramp in Vesuvius Vent…but both events had other explanations. Not this 3-D-like image of a helical galaxy that shifted to a DNA helix, and who knew what else, depending on the observer’s viewpoint.

“God,” Makali was saying, “I wish I could get higher and see what it looks like from above.”

“From Architect height?” Zack said.

“Yeah.” She was clearly getting frustrated. “I’d love to see what that guy would be seeing.”

“You think it was different?” Dale said. “The basic image is the galaxy, our galaxy, we assumed.”

“And there’s not much point in showing another one,” Williams said.

“It’s not the galaxy image. There was also the DNA one, and a third that we decided was a schematic of Keanu itself.”

That news energized Zack Stewart. “We never saw anything like that, and I was here when we found it!”

“Bangalore got a ghost image from Lucas’s helmet cam hours after you passed by,” Makali said. I don’t think he even saw that angle—”

“What do you remember? It might be important.”

“Not much. A big sphere with a dozen squat tubes inside it, all connected by spidery lines.” She gestured in frustration. “But I can’t seem to find the right viewing angle.”

“Nothing we can do, then,” Dale said.

“There’s something else,” Makali said. “When we processed the galaxy image, we saw several illuminated or indicated points.” She turned to Williams. “Remember that?”

“Hell, no, we never got that far with it.”

“Oh. Well, there were at least six of these points, and they were all clustered. They were in our local stellar neighborhood, if you will.” She pointed at the Marker. “Now there’s only one bright spot.”

“So it’s changed in the past week,” Zack said.

“Oh, yes.”

“Was it damaged, do you think?” Valya said. “By the detonation?”

“Not damaged,” Makali said. “Affected, maybe.”

“What is this ‘detonation’?” Valya said.

“He means that the Destiny crew carried a small nuclear device to guard against alien organisms or actual creatures being brought back to Earth,” Makali said. “It was set off by Yvonne Hall.”

“I had no idea!” Valya knew there had been an explosion aboard the Venture lander, an event so devastating it had crippled the nearby Brahma spacecraft, too. But that was all. “Dale, did you know?”

“No. But I’m not surprised.” To Zack he said, “Let me guess: You didn’t know the thing was on board.”

“That would be correct,” Zack said.

Valya felt sicker than she had during her worst moments inside the object. It only confirmed the brutal things her Russian and later Indian friends and neighbors had said about the United States and its disregard for international norms.

No, she told herself. Don’t surrender to that emotion. Be a professional. “What about these bright spots?” Valya said.

Makali said, “We concluded that they told us where Keanu came from. Waypoints, stops along its galactic voyage. They seemed to match up with exosolar systems….”

“And what about now?” Zack said.

“Now I think it’s telling us where Keanu’s going.”

“Which is where? Back where it came from? Or the next stop on the journey?”

“Speaking of going,” Dale said, “what’s the plan?”

Zack indicated the different tunnels around them. “We should explore these shafts and see where they lead—”

“If anywhere,” Williams said.

“Well,” Makali said, “there are five of us and four branches.”

“I’m sorry,” Valya said, and she felt no shame in admitting it, “but I have no interest in exploring a tunnel by myself.”

“Fine,” Zack said. “You and Dale take that one.” He pointed to the tunnel on the far right, and quickly assigned the others, too. “We don’t have clocks,” he said. “And we have no idea how long these suits are good for. Take fifteen minutes or your best guess, see what you can see, and report back.”