Dr. Veronica Strand's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Veronica sorted the archive boxes by type, her fingers moving fast across the labels. Weather logs went in the east chamber. Crew recordings in the west. The building accepted everything she brought, its walls pulsing gently with each addition. She worked until her arms ached, counting backward from ten whenever the fog crept in. The next morning, she dragged a metal examination table from the crashed station to the archive entrance. Its surface gleamed under the alien sky, crystalline tools embedded along its edges. She needed a sorting station—a place to examine fragments before they went inside. Too many times she'd stored things wrong, forgotten what went where. The table would help her process each piece properly. She set down the first memory crystal and watched it catch the light. The embedded tools hummed to life, displaying the fragment's contents across the polished surface. Weather data from three years ago. She labeled it carefully, her hand steady. One fragment sorted. Thousands more to go. But now she had a system, a way to fight the fog before it won.