A creature blocked the passage—a tall, multi-armed being Zack recognized as a Sentry, the same kind of alien that had killed Pogo Downey.

And Megan Stewart.

RACHEL

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t move.

And something nasty was happening to her face.

Suddenly she inhaled, choked, coughed, spit, and, terrified, began to thrash.

Okay, you can breathe! She was hot, still couldn’t see, but air was coming in, going out.

A gooey film covered her eyes. The same goo pinned her like an insect in a science experiment.

For a moment. With a bit of effort, she was able to tug her right arm free of the goo and wipe her eyes. The only difficulty was that someone or something kept bumping her and, strangely, wiping her face.

“Stop that!” she screamed, though she heard nothing and started coughing again. Finally she got both hands free and cleared her eyes.

She was still in the passage, more or less sitting up, though cocooned in a settling, hardening, drying sea of goo…and Cowboy was flailing around in it, too.

He barked. At least, his gooey muzzle opened twice. No, she couldn’t hear. Goo in her ears, too.

Her first move was to grab the dog. He seemed terrified. No wonder; he’d been in the dark for hours, and now he’d been swept up in some kind of tsunami. “It’s okay, boy, everything’s okay,” she said, knowing the words made no sense, but hoping the sound of a human voice would calm the animal.

And when he grew calm, so would she.

A human touch seemed to work. The dog began licking her face again. Normally this would have been annoying, but this was not a normal situation.

She did more work on her ears, wiping away some of the goo, improving her hearing considerably. “Pav!” she called. “Zhao! Where are you guys?”

With the tunnel so filled with plasm and the sound so deadened, she didn’t expect a response.

They might be dead, she realized. Before long, she might be dead, too.

Then Cowboy barked—she could hear him now—and struggled out of her arms. He began digging at a mound of goo to her left…which quickly revealed itself to be Pav, who was shouting in Hindi.

Zhao was to Pav’s left. They were both alive, trying to extricate themselves.

Rachel dug in and helped. Allowing for a considerable amount of struggle as well as grunting and groaning, it went quickly. Rachel realized that the goo was not only hardening, it was drying out, turning to powder.

Pav was able to stand up and hug her. “Thank you,” he said, his voice muffled and old-sounding.

Cowboy bumped up against Pav. Though there was almost no light, they could see that the dog’s coat was crusted with goo. Flakes fell off every time he moved.

And even with all this activity around him, Zhao just sat there, head down. “Come on, get up,” Rachel told him.

“We have nowhere to go,” Zhao said.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rachel said. She and Pav tugged Zhao upright. “Are you just going to sit there and wait to die?”

“At the moment, that seems to be the practical choice.”

Rachel understood his feeling. In that first instant after regaining consciousness, feeling herself trapped, blind, deaf, she had considered simply…letting it all go.

Some force inside her had taken charge and made her fight. And now she was glad she had. Yes, the situation was grim. But everything about her situation on Keanu was that way.

She would be letting her father down if she simply died. Maybe it was that simple.

“We’re walking,” she said. “That way.”

That way was simply farther down the passage in the direction they had just been carried by the wave of goo. It didn’t seem smart to go back the way they had come.

She just hoped they would find an escape before their little supply of water ran out, along with their energy.

The good thing—the only good thing—about the goo was that in an hour’s time, it dried up and flaked off, leaving little residue.

The bad thing—being buried continued to have a bad effect on Zhao, who seemed numb. Rachel and Pav had had to wipe the stuff off him; he wasn’t much help. Even after he could breathe and stand up, he was pretty much a zombie.

After an initial burst of enthusiasm about being alive, Pav wasn’t much better. “Do we just keep walking until we drop?”

“If the only other choice is sit here until we die, yes.” She realized she had to do better than that, even for herself. She patted Cowboy, who was happily walking with them and not getting one step ahead. “The dog seems fine. Maybe he found water or a way out.”

“If he did,” Zhao said, emerging from sullen silence, “why is he still trapped with us?”

For a moment, Rachel wondered if she and Pav and Cowboy wouldn’t have been better off if Zhao had never emerged from the goo. Even back in the habitat, her initial impression of the man hadn’t been positive. He was a spy and a foreigner.

Until Rachel ran into the beings that built Keanu and killed her mother, Zhao was the closest thing to an alien she had ever met.

“When I figure out how to ask him,” she said, “I’ll let know you.”

An hour after their bath in plasm goo, Rachel and Pav looked and felt the same as they had before.

The passage looked the same. There had been no further appearances of the gravity marble. The dog had been content to trot with them, bumping into their legs for reassurance. Things weren’t exactly good…but they could have been worse.

And Pav had resumed talking. “Hey, Rachel, how far do you think we’ve walked?”

Rachel knew a human could cover half a dozen kilometers in an hour, with a steady walk. But their progress had not been steady. On the other hand, they had easily walked for three hours. “I don’t know. Ten kilometers?”

“How long was the habitat?”

“Less than that, from where we started.” There was no point ignoring the obvious problem. “But we haven’t been going in a straight line.”

“Yeah,” Pav said. “We could be going around the end of the habitat.”

“Right!”

Zhao spoke up now, too. “Or completely away from it into the interior of the NEO.”

Rachel had an idea, something her mother had taught her. “Would that be so bad?”

Zhao turned to face her. His expression showed disbelief bordering on anger, which was an improvement over his zombie-like silence. “If we want to return to human beings with human food, yes.”

“How do we know there isn’t water and food elsewhere in the NEO?”

“We don’t!” he said. “We don’t know anything!”

“Oh, we know a little, don’t we?” she said, making sure to keep walking, dragging Zhao and Pav and Cowboy with her. “I mean, look,” she said, waving at the passage around them. “We know that somewhere, there was a race of beings that just wanted to let the universe know they existed. So…they took one of their moons—”

“Whoa,” Pav said. “We don’t know this was one of their moons.” With the authority only a sixteen-year-old boy could assume, he said, “Planets like Earth can only have one.”

“Turns out Earth used to have a good-sized second moon,” Zhao said.

“That’s just a theory,” Pav said. Rachel smiled to herself, not that anyone could see her expression in the near-darkness. Pav’s getting into the game.

Zhao said, “A theory with more foundation than your assumption that the Architects originated on a planet like Earth.”

“Fine,” Pav said. “But am I wrong if I say that, somewhere in the galaxy, there’s a race that has the power to leave its home planet, fly across space, reach this planetoid, and put some kind of engine on it to move it into orbit around its home planet? Or that they spent a century or five centuries hollowing it out, creating habitats, rewiring it, replumbing it?”

Pav smiled, clearly enjoying his fantasy. “Or that they put some kind of shithot miracle motor inside it, anti-matter, maybe? And then they put some of their people aboard and sent it into space?”