Kaia Venn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Kaia Venn had chased her drone across half the planet, and now it wanted to dig. Moth hovered a foot above bare rock, spinning in place, its lights flickering toward the ground. Kaia crouched beside it. She was born on the Veil. She could read its storms, its predators, its poisoned plants. But she couldn't read this. The little drone kept pulling toward something under the surface, and until she followed it, she would never learn what the planet was hiding from. She grabbed Moth and shut it down. It fought her grip like a trapped insect. For three days it had done this, always at the same patch of ground, always straining downward. Kaia's compass sat cold against her hip. It pointed at the rock too. It always pointed at whatever she feared most, and lately it never wavered. So she went to the one person who might explain it. Elias Rook's workshop smelled of dust and hot wire. The old man sat hunched over a battered receiver, silver beard catching the lamp light. He didn't look up when she entered. "You brought the drone," he said. "I can hear it screaming from here." "It's not screaming. It's malfunctioning." "How certain are you that it's a malfunction?" He turned, blue-gray eyes sharp. Kaia set Moth on his table. Elias leaned close, then went still. His receiver, silent when she walked in, began to click. Slow at first. Then faster. "That's not the drone," he said quietly. "That's the ground answering it." Kaia pulled her scanner from her pack. She had built it herself from salvaged tuning rings and a cracked lens, made to read the paths Moth traced underground. She set it beside the drone and powered it on. The rings spun. The lens focused. Numbers scrolled across the small screen. "Feed me its output," Elias said. She did. He watched the pulses land on his own paper chart, marking intervals with a stub of pencil. Three marks. Pause. Seven marks. Pause. Three again. His hand slowed. "This isn't noise," he said. "It repeats. It's a path. Coordinates." He tapped the last cluster. "It's telling the drone where to go. Down. A long way down." Kaia stared at the numbers. All her life the colonists called this planet home. Her mother had vanished into it. Elias believed the colony was bait for something the Veil feared. If she followed these signals underground, she might find the trap the planet wanted her to set. She fed the coordinates into the scanner. It locked. A single point glowed on the screen, far beneath their feet, at the base of a flooded cave system the first colonists had sealed and forbidden. "Well," Elias said. "You wanted to know what it's hiding from." Kaia clipped the scanner to her belt. Moth twitched once, then went calm, pointed at the door. "Then we go under," she said.