“She said she was hungry. We should get her some food.”

She went away with them to the upper floor.

Harley occupied himself with leadership tasks for a while, among them setting up a “food rotation” with Weldon and Nayar.

Every now and then he would stop and think, Come on, Zack! You know the drill! Don’t leave a buddy hanging! Check in! Come back!

When he rolled past the Woggle-Bug terrarium on his way out, he noticed that where there had been one…there were now two.

Odd. “Sasha! Shane! Anyone!”

ZACK

Dale said, “Zack, I think Wade’s stopped breathing!”

Hearing that message, three words compressed to one came unbidden to Zack Stewart: “Shitandgoddammit!”

They were within sight of Mt. St. Helens Vent, which meant they were no more than half a kilometer from a Membrane, and possible rescue. Or escape. Or improvement in their really difficult situation.

Given that, Zack didn’t want to stop. He truly didn’t want to have that reason to stop. “How do you know?” he said.

“He stopped talking ten minutes ago.”

Zack hadn’t noticed, largely because the skinsuit-skinsuit communications were spotty and he’d already grown used to relative silence from the rear of their little column. “Wade!” he said. “Wake up, please! Talk to us!”

No response.

He could hear a faint echo as Dale tried the same tack, with no better results. “I’ve got to tell you, he feels like dead weight.”

“Zack, for God’s sake, stop so we can check him!” That was Valya, her voice blaring inside Zack’s skinsuit cap. He hadn’t realized she was only a meter behind him.

Fine, he stopped. So did Makali, who was actually ahead of him.

They ran to meet Dale, then helped lower Wade Williams.

He’s right, Zack thought. Dead weight. To Makali, he said, “Can you see his eyes? Anything?”

“I’m trying. These fucking bug eyes…” Wade had given the skinsuit goggles the name, appropriately enough, from classic sci-fi.

“Do something!” Valya said.

Dale was growing more agitated. “It’s not like we can do CPR, honey!”

“Oh, shit,” Makali said, suddenly rocking back from Williams.

She had a piece of his skinsuit in her hand, from his head. “It just…peeled off!”

As Zack and the others watched, unable to take any kind of action, Wade Williams’s skinsuit began to crack and vaporize, as if melting from within. “Oh my God,” Makali said. “It’s just like the vesicle!”

Then Williams’s entire body shuddered and clenched, as if dumped in icy water. In a way, it was like that, as his skin came into contact with the extreme temperatures of Keanu’s nearly non-existent atmosphere—an effective vacuum—both unbelievably hot and chillingly cold.

“Help him!” Valya screamed.

All Zack could think to do was place his hands on Williams’s chest. He felt as though he were trying to keep the poor man from exploding. Williams’s blood was trying to bubble; skin, muscle, and bone were holding it in.

But not prettily. There was a second clench, then another rippling spasm.

A last breath escaped from his lips, turning to vapor, then icy crystals. Williams’s body immediately hardened, as if surrendering to the environment.

Zack uttered a silent prayer from his youth. Let the angels watch over him.

Assuming angels could turn their eyes to this part of God’s universe.

“Tell me he was dead before…that,” Valya said.

“I believe he was,” Zack said. “Terminally unconscious.” He believed it, too.

“Well, that’s that,” Scott said.

Allowing for the limitations of the skinsuit, Valya hit Dale as hard as she could. “How can you be so callous? The man just died!”

“Shut your face! I carried him! And now we’ve got to get moving!”

“Knock it off, everyone,” Zack said.

Makali helped to defuse the situation. “Dale, what was the last thing he said?”

“What’s the—?” Scott caught himself. He realized that Valya not only was shocked by what she’d just witnessed, she was terrified that she was next. “Ah, I think it was, once I had him on my shoulder, he said, ‘The view from here is tremendous.’”

“Good. Something to remember and tell his family,” Makali said.

Assuming we’re ever in contact with Earth again, Zack thought. Assuming we live past the next hour.

A lot of assumptions.

“I want to leave,” Valya announced. “My indicators are almost as blue as Wade’s!”

“Good idea,” Dale told her, suddenly Mr. Supportive. “Are we going?”

“One thing,” Zack said. Since Williams’s body weighed almost nothing, Zack elected to carry it. This wasn’t just courtesy or a desire not to leave a comrade on the battlefield—

The others hadn’t realized it yet, but Zack would never forget: People who died on Keanu didn’t necessarily stay dead.

They didn’t need to have died here, and apparently their bodies could be torn asunder, too.

What would happen to Wade Williams if his body were returned to the Beehive?

God help him, Zack took Wade Williams’s body with them as a science experiment.

“Zack,” Makali said, “Why did Williams’s suit fail so quickly?”

He would have loved to know that answer, though it was still fairly far down the list of Keanu questions he wanted answered.

“I can think of two possibilities,” he said, shifting the body as he turned to check on Valya, who was being hustled along by Dale. “One is that he was a lot older than the rest of us, and the suit burned up more of whatever that suit burned keeping him alive.

“The other is…” And here he hesitated, because it was a theory that had been taking shape ever since he and Megan had met the Architect. “The other is, Keanu is really old, on the order of a thousand years, maybe ten thousand years.”

“Yeah, I saw that alien ship. It looked as though it had been sitting there a long goddamn time….”

“I think that a lot of this place’s advanced, miracle technology is malfunctioning or breaking down or worn out.”

“So his suit just…failed.”

“One possibility.” He looked for Valya. She and Dale were ahead of Zack and Makali now. Yeah, I’d be hurrying, too. “Valya, how are you doing?”

He couldn’t hear her reply, but Dale Scott flashed a clumsy thumbs-up.

Even though the white tiles remained regular and flat, it seemed to Zack that they were walking uphill. “There’s the rim!” Makali said.

She ran forward, passing Valya and Dale.

“There’s no way down!” Makali announced that grim news as Zack, now feeling out of breath and worrying about his own blue indicator, reached the rim. He set Williams’s body down.

Mt. St. Helens Vent, on first, fragmentary glance, was larger than Vesuvius, and less symmetrical. Given the rockfalls and other features, it also looked older.

“What do you mean, no ramp?” Dale said. He and Valya had just caught them.

“What she means,” Zack said, “is that we can’t see a ramp yet.” He turned directly to Makali. “Right?”

But she didn’t answer…instead she began loping around the rim of the vent.

“Zack,” Dale said, “we need to get Valya out of that suit ASAP.”

“We all do.” He watched Makali growing more and more distant. She must have expected an obvious, easily accessible structure like the ramp at Vesuvius. (He recalled his own shock at seeing it…the ramp was the first undeniably artificial alien structure humans had ever seen, and Zack was one of the first to do so. How quickly that seminal, world-changing moment had gotten lost in the avalanche of later discoveries.) Given the distressed nature of the Mt. St. Helens walls, Zack wasn’t ready to announce that there was no ramp.

He had to remember, too, that for all her physical fitness and hearty Aussie cheer, Makali was still an academic with limited operational experience, much like Zack when he first joined the astronaut office. She wasn’t used to dealing with this kind of stress.