Oh, no.At the thought, Jase felt a sharp twinge that bloomed into a full-blown ache in his groin. Again. Drat.Screwing up his nose, he hummed something tuneless, just to have something to do instead of thinking how much he had to pee but couldn’t. (Well, he could.There were buttons and dials and hook-ups, right?)

Of course, right. He wasn’t a total moron. Still, gross. Jase tried thinking about sand dunes and deserts and hot red suns. Except his groin complained and his mind wouldn’t cooperate and his thoughts kept darting back to glasses of water and full bathtubs and swimming pools and blue, blue oceans.

Walk, Jase.Jase crunched over rock. Just walk.As long as he didn’t jiggle too much, walking wasn’t too bad. But, boy, what a dumb idea, coming out alone. His mom would have a cow if she found out. He didn’t know how mothers, or people hadcows and, truthfully, it was kind of a dumb expression. Probably Pahl would know where the slang came from. The Naxeran knew all these old slang expressions from all over the galaxy, but mainly Earth. Things like have kittens,or stiff as Herbert,or he’s not operating on all thrusters. Have a cow.

Thinking about Pahl made him feel bad. Jase had snuck away without telling his friend anything. In fact, he’d avoided the Naxeran all day, since the breakfast they’d had with his own dad and Pahl’s uncle. (Su Chen-Mai never ate with them, and that was fine with Jase.) Pahl’s uncle and his father talked about their work but in ways that puzzled Jase, as if there was more behind every word they said. He knew that if he concentrated very hard, he’d figure it out. Once, he’d tried: chewing his food, emptying his mind. A meditation trick his dad taught him, something Jase had used in school when he was nervous about a test. Only lately, before they’d come to this place, Jase discovered that instead of his mind getting empty and blank, like a bank of endless white clouds stretched across the sky, he saw pictures. Fragments of pictures, really: colors, a sensation of movement. Nothing he could really describe. And he heard words, only garbled like the way the voices of his parents had been when he’d been small and they had argued.

So he’d tried it that morning at breakfast—to see if he could get at the words bubbling beneath the stream of his dad’s conversation. He’d caught something. A picture, very coherent, of a big room made of red stone and a blue sky (a blue sky in a stone room?)but then his dad had given him a strange look, as if he knew. Instantly, Jase had clamped down, focusing again on the tart taste of his Maltaran orange juice.

Through it all, Pahl had eaten and chattered about nothing in particular. Jase hadn’t told him about what he’d seen in his dad’s mind. (If that washis dad’s mind he touched. Jase wasn’t sure.) Pahl was okay, except there was something scary about him. Like there was a yawning black hole and that was Pahl and there was nothing in the hole: no light, and no escape either. (Like when the ship had slid into orbit around the planet, and Jase almost got sucked inside Pahl.)

Not just sucked inside. Jase trudged, swinging the flashlight in a listless, mechanical, to-and-fro arc. Pahl had reached out…and grabbedhis mind, dug in with thought-claws, and then Pahl had hung on, pulling him down into that horrible black nothing in the center of his soul, and Jase had been so scared, he thought he’d just managed to save himself…

Jase’s left foot came down on a fall of loose scree, and suddenly, Jase was slipping, sliding. His hands flew up; his flashlight spun away. Reeling, Jase lurched right, made a wild grab at a boulder. He missed.

Jase gave a ragged cry. His helmet banged against a boulder and sent him pitching sideways. He hit the ground, his left shoulder crashing into solid rock and Jase screamed. He flipped, cartwheeled head over heels, like an acrobat who’s mistimed his roll. His back slammed against the mountain, hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs, and then he was glissading, feet first, out-of-control, skittering down the rocky chute, hurtling down the mountain. Somehow, he rolled right, and then he saw a huge boulder rush at his face. No, not his faceplate, not his faceplate! Screaming, Jase threw his hands up to protect his face, arms crossed, palms out.

That probably saved his life—or, at the very least, his faceplate didn’t shatter. Jase felt a hard, bone-shattering jolt in his forearms and then a bolt of pain that rattled his helmet and shivered through his limbs. He felt his body jerk and then fold at his waist, and he came to a sudden stop.

For a moment, he couldn’t do anything except focus on breathing. He gulped air. He felt queasy, sick to his stomach. He closed his eyes, working hard not to vomit. Shaken, he clung to the rock, waiting for the dizziness to pass. As he did so, he realized he didn’t have to worry about not peeing in his suit—not anymore.

Slowly, Jase pried open his eyes. He lay in an awkward twisted heap, his head down, his waist corkscrewed so that his left hip was pointing up and his right dug into the ground, his body literally folded around a hump of black rock. Maybe a meteor: The surface of the rock was scored with tiny pits. Lucky he hadn’t broken his neck. He felt the throb of his blood galloping in his temples, and his brain felt bruised. He was afraid to move. His shoulder hurt; his left hip hurt; his right leg was killing him. Maybe he’d broken something.

He planted his palms against the large boulder and pushed. The movement sent a lightning flash of pain sizzling down his spine. He grimaced, moaned, but kept the pressure up until his body rolled and he lay flat on his back.

It was then that he saw it: to his left. A flash of white. Something moving.

Jase froze. Every muscle went rigid with fear. Sliding his eyes left, he made out rivulets of small rocks pattering soundlessly along the ground to pool along his left side, like water backing up on the opposite side of a dam.

Someone was coming. Some thing.Ghosts, ghosts, those white ghosts! The hairs along the back of his neck stiffened with alarm. Cold sweat glazed his face, his chest, the undersides of his arms. Have to get away, have to!But he couldn’t move.

Slowly, not wanting to look but knowing he had to, Jase turned his head and looked back up the mountain. He almost cried aloud in relief.

A suited figure was picking its way down the slope.

Environmental suit—Jase watched as the figure bobbed around the rocks— that’s an environmental suit.

In another moment, Pahl dropped to his knees by Jase’s side. Jase saw Pahl’s lips moving beneath his frills, but Jase couldn’t hear a thing. His comm unit—Jase reached his right hand up and fumbled at his suit for the control—he hadn’t activated his comm unit.

He caught Pahl in mid-sentence. “…you hurt?”

“I’m okay,” said Jase, not really knowing if this were true but just so grateful not to be alone, he would have said anything. His shoulder still throbbed, and the back of his head hurt. “That is, I think I’m okay. I don’t know. I slipped.”

Then he had an awful thought. “What about my suit? Can you see my suit?”

“It looks okay. All your indicators are green. Can you sit up?”

Jase started to nod but stopped as a wave of vertigo left him nauseated. “A little dizzy,” Jase said, swallowing back something that tasted sour. He made a face, closed his eyes, and waited for the blackness before his eyes to stop spinning. “I hit my head.”

“Did you black out?”

“No. That is, I don’t think so.” What he didn’t tell Pahl was that he was feeling a little heavy and stupid, the way he did right before he went to sleep. Somehow he knew that was a bad thing because that meant that maybe he had a concussion.