Maya Santos found Theo's hard hat first. It sat upside down in the snow outside the dome shelter, still spinning. Theo had been standing beside her ten seconds ago. Now a drag mark cut through the drifts and vanished into the dark. She was supposed to walk him home at shift's end. Instead she stood alone, counting the minutes before the graveyard shift closed and the night crew locked the gates behind them. The drag mark split into three. Snow had already begun filling the grooves. Maya knelt and traced one with her glove, but she couldn't tell which path Theo took and which the thing that grabbed him made. Her flashlight threw plain white light across all three. Useless. The horn blast would sound soon. Once it did, the trail would be gone, buried, and Theo with it. She ran to the shelter. The dome shelter held the crew's emergency cache: canned food, spare coats, and a shelf of gear nobody touched. Maya dug through a crate until her fingers closed on a heavy black flashlight. A red lens sat above the lamp. One word was stamped on its side: SCAN. Theo had laughed about it once. He'd called it the thing that smelled blood. Maya thumbed the switch. The red lens woke with a low hum. She swept it across the first drag mark. Nothing. The second mark. Nothing. She aimed it down the third path, and the lens flared bright crimson. A line of glowing drops lit up across the snow, leading away from the dome. Blood. Theo's blood, warm enough for the lens to catch. The horn blast ripped across the yard. Shift over. Behind her, the gate lock clanked shut. Maya didn't turn around. The red trail stretched ahead of her, drop after drop, climbing a slope she couldn't see the top of. She followed it. The drops led her past a leaning stalk of yellow flowers, their stems ringed with thin spikes. One flower hung torn, snapped at the base, as if someone had grabbed it falling and missed. Maya pressed on, boots sinking deep, the lens guiding each step. The trail ended at a dead rabbit. It lay stiff in the snow, two twisted horns curling back from its skull, white foam frozen around its mouth. The blood drops pooled around it and stopped. No more trail. Maya swept the lens left and right and found nothing but the carcass. Then she saw the second set of marks. They were not boot prints. Four long claws had raked the snow beside the rabbit, each groove wider than her hand. The claw marks ran downhill into a black gap between two rocks. Whatever dragged Theo had paused here to kill, then kept moving. Maya stood at the edge of the dark gap. She had the trail now. She also knew, for the first time, what she was chasing. She stepped down into the black.