Alan Diver heard the rats before he saw them. Three days since the Valdris broke open on this planet, three days of taping cracked ribs and sketching trails in a notebook, and now a chittering wave was closing on the ridge behind him. He had been working east, toward where he thought the ship's medic might have crawled from the wreck. The plan was simple: find the medic first, then the others, then a place they could defend. The plan did not survive the sound of claws on stone. He ran. Every breath stabbed under the tape. The rats came over the ridge in a knot of brown fur and pale caps, mushrooms sprouting from their backs like crooked crowns. They tracked by scent. He knew that already from two nights of watching them work a deer carcass in a circle, noses down, eyes half-blind. He spotted the dead beast at the bottom of the slope. It was the size of a truck, ribs open to the sky, flesh gone soft and gray under a crust of fungus. Alan crawled inside the cage of bone and pulled rotted hide over his legs. The smell punched the air out of him. He pressed his hand over his mouth and counted the rats' feet drumming past above. Then something inside the carcass scratched back. A wet, deliberate scrape against the inside of a rib. Alan rolled out the far side and ran again, retching. He almost missed the obelisks. Two slabs of black stone stood split in a clearing, crawling with vines and heavy purple fruit. The smell hit him from ten paces out, sharp and foul, like onions left in standing water. The rats hated smells that weren't meat. He tore a handful of berries down and crushed them against his neck, his chest, the tape on his ribs. Juice ran into his collar and stained his hands black. He grabbed more and smeared them through his hair, then jammed a wad of pulp into the seam of his jacket where his sweat had soaked through. The pack came over the rise as he stumbled away from the gate. The lead rat skidded, snapped its head side to side, and turned toward the carcass instead. The others followed. Alan kept moving, lost his footing on loose scree, and went down the slope on his back. His ribs screamed. He slid maybe thirty feet and hit something that did not move. It was a wall, but it was not stone. Pale light pulsed under his palm. He pushed himself up and found a hollow shell of crystal half-buried in the hillside, openings worn into its sides like windows. Inside, the light was steady and soft. There were chambers. There was a floor. There was room for six people, maybe more. Alan stood in the doorway, hand pressed to his ribs, and started counting cots in his head.

Alan leaned against the inside wall of the crystal shelter and felt the tape on his ribs give a slow, sticky peel. He had maybe an hour before the strip slid off entirely. Without bracing, every breath would knife him, and he could not climb back out for the medic doubled over. He pressed his palm flat against his side and made himself think. The shelter pulsed under his hand, soft and warm, like something asleep. He limped to the pile he had dragged in that morning. It was wreckage from the Valdris: a cracked panel, a coil of insulated wire, a med kit with half its seals burst, a strip of cargo webbing. He pulled the webbing free and laid it on the floor. The old tape went into a wad in his pocket. He would need something rigid to hold the ribs while he wrapped, something he could lean into without using his hands. In the next chamber he found a beetle husk the size of a footlocker, dried and hollow, wedged against the wall. He kicked it. It held. He dragged it to the center of the room and tipped it on its side so the curved back faced up at chest height. A bracing post. He could press his ribs to the shell and let it take his weight while he worked. He needed a splint. The cracked panel was too long. He looked down and saw the floor scraps near the doorway, a cluster of broken crystal shards the same material as the walls. He picked through them until he found two flat pieces the length of his hand. He wrapped each in a strip torn from his undershirt so the edges would not cut him. Then he set them against his side, leaned his full weight into the beetle shell, and started winding the webbing around his chest. The first pass crushed the air out of him. He counted to four and pulled the second pass tighter. By the fourth wrap the shards sat flush against the cracked bone and the pain shrank to a dull, manageable burn. He tied off the webbing with his teeth and one hand. He stood up straight. It held. He took a full breath and the brace held that too. Alan looked at the doorway and the gray light beyond it. The medic was still out there, somewhere east, and the rats would be moving again by dusk. He picked up his notebook, slid the half-burst med kit into his jacket, and stepped out of the shelter. Behind him, the crystal walls pulsed once, slow, as if marking the time he had left.

Alan walked east from the crystal shelter with his notebook open and a pencil stub in his teeth. The ground sloped down through wet moss and broken stalks. He kept his steps short to spare his ribs. Two hundred paces in, he stopped. A bootprint sat in the mud at his feet. Crew tread. Fresh enough that water still pooled in the heel. He knelt and sighted along the print. It pointed north, away from the medic's last known direction. He found the next print, and the next. The stride grew longer each time. By the fifth print the toe dug deep and the heel barely touched. Someone running. Not walking lost. Running. He followed the trail to a rusted signpost at the edge of a clearing. The metal arms had been bent by hand so every one pointed the same way north. Purple juice ran down the post in thick streaks. Someone had crushed handfuls of the rat-diverting berries against the metal and dragged them across each arm. The smell would carry for hours. Alan touched a streak. Still tacky. He wrote in his notebook: marker, deliberate, less than an hour old. At the base of the post he found a communicator. The screen was webbed with cracks, the casing split down one side, but the antenna still pulsed a slow blue. He turned it over. A name was scratched into the back plate with a knife: BREN. The junior engineer. Alan thumbed the channel wheel. Static, then a single recorded loop in Bren's voice, flat and even. "North is clean. North is clean. North is clean." It played and played. Alan switched it off and held the weight of it in his palm. He stood and looked at the prints running north. Bren had not wandered. Bren had marked a path and called others to follow it, away from the medic, away from the shelter, into ground Alan had not mapped. The berry smell on the signpost would pull every survivor who knew the trick. Alan pictured the medic catching that scent and turning the wrong way. He closed the communicator in his fist until the cracked glass bit his palm. He did not know yet whether Bren was lost in the head or leading something. Either way, the answer was the same. The trail had to go. He braced his ribs against the post and worked the arms back one by one until they pointed nowhere true. He scraped the berry pulp off with a crystal shard and buried it in the moss. He kept the communicator. If Bren was still Bren, Alan would need the channel. He turned east again, toward the medic, and started walking. The notebook had a new page now. At the top he wrote one word and underlined it twice: Bren. Below it: find before anyone else does.