Chapter 106: Deeper Vein
Steam from the stew pot fogged the tent. Wind pushed like it wanted to get in and didn’t know how to ask. Obi bit a ration bar and tried to convince his stomach that it was food. Hikari logged the sample IDs with the care of someone who trusted order more than luck. Raizen stood at the pad’s edge, listening for a hum that pretended it wasn’t there.
Then, the comms snapped awake like someone slapped them.
"- Team One" Alteea’s voice cut through, breathless, then gone, then back. Behind her: sirens, thin and metallic, rising and falling like a machine learning to sing. "Do not panic. That noise is not yours. Wraith alert, West... Unrelated to your position -"
A muffled shout on her end: "No, stack the east line - east-"
"Lighthouse?" Hikari said. "Your feed is -"
"Ugly" Alteea responded, the word almost a laugh. "Back to you. Two miners from Team Delta moved toward the deeper vein at dawn. They’re not responding. You three - move. Right now."
"You three?" Obi asked, thumb to his chest like he had been personally attacked by arithmetic.
"Raizen, Hikari, Obi" Alteea said. "Ichiro and Esen went to get firewood, I think - no response on ping. I can’t spare a drone right now. Go."
Feris was already on her feet. "Send me."
"No" Raizen said, before Alteea could. "If something follows us back, the camp needs a wall that hits back. That’s you."
Feris hated being right about being useful. "Bring me something to punch."
"Preferably not me" Obi said, slinging a coil of rope and snapping a clip to his belt. "If you must, left shoulder. Less sentimental."
Alteea’s sirens dipped behind her breath. "Keep comms open. If you see anything that looks like a story, don’t believe it. Move."
They moved.
The ridge above camp wore morning like a lie. The light had the right color and the wrong aim. Shadows sat a finger off from where objects made them. Their earlier prints looked softer than they should, as if snow had fallen. It never had.
Obi kept his tone bright and useless. "Fun fact: scenic death traps always have excellent views. It’s how they get you."
"Quiet" Raizen cut him off, not in the mood for any joke.
The wind sock on the far crane pointed upstream. The wind on their faces came the other way. Hikari glanced at it, didn’t comment. Her slate showed static moving in a pattern that wasn’t static. She shut it off and turned it on again to prove it wasn’t the slate.
At the second marker, the drift had climbed to the post’s ribs. They stepped wide and made new prints.
"Sun’s in the wrong place" Obi murmured.
"It isn’t" Hikari said, eyes still on terrain. Then, a beat softer, "I know what you mean."
They crested a low ridge and looked down into the basin. The deeper vein site revealed itself in reluctant pieces: scaffolds half-buried, two lights still shining, cold blue. Crates tipped over with their insides tidy ropes and clamps. No tracks. No visible movement. No idle chatter. The snow drifted in the lazy way wind drifts when it has decided you’re not worth hurrying for.
"Delta?" Raizen called, pitched to carry without bouncing.
The echo came back wrong. It arrived a half second early, then corrected itself, embarrassed.
Obi rotated slowly, visor up, scanning. "No tracks in. No tracks out. Which is a bold design choice."
Hikari crouched by a tipped crate. A datapad lay wedged in a corner, half-buried, screen cracked but blinking. She wiped frost with her sleeve and coaxed it to life. A heat map flickered up - two bodies, moving right, fifteen minutes ago. The recording stopped in a flat line.
"They were here" she said.
"Then they still are" Raizen said.
He didn’t look at the map again. He watched the slope line beyond the basin lip, where snow broke clean and then changed its mind. He listened, and in the hollow behind his ear something whispered with his own voice, a word he hadn’t said yet.
Don’t look.
He froze. Breathed. Looked anyway. There was nothing there except snow and the idea of something that could have been.
"Did you -" he began.
"Hm?" the answer came quickly.
They moved along the basin edge, boots testing the floor. The lights crackled. The hum under the snow tried to learn that pitch and failed, then tried again. Raizen thumbed his mic off and back on, just to hear a normal click.
A glove sat fingers-up by a shallow drift. A lamp still burned, its flame wobbling as if someone had just walked past. A hammer lay in a small hollow, frost just starting to write its first line along the handle.
"Left again" Hikari said. "The map ends here, but the disturbance keeps going."
"What disturbance?" Obi asked.
"The kind you only see when you stop trying to" she said.
They rounded a rock shoulder where the wind forgot to work. Sound thinned. The world felt upholstered.
Obi leaned into a joke and let it die on the vine. "I don’t like -"
He didn’t finish. None of them needed the sentence.
Raizen’s slate caught a line of heat that didn’t belong to them. It stuttered, split into two, then folded back into zero. He didn’t show it. He filed it under things that make you slower if you share them.
"If it’s pretty, leave." he repeated, as much for himself as for them.
"It’s not too pretty" Hikari said.
"Good" Obi said, and, somehow, smiled.
The basin narrowed into something like a small throat. The snow on the right looked poured, surface so even it seemed disrespectful to step on. Raizen took the left edge and tested with his heel. Solid. He moved. The others matched his pace and placement exactly. Rope to people. No names. They were all wondering how the show got so deep, but then imagined a snowstorm, and everyone decided not to say anything.
A single line cut through the evenness. Not a track. Not a drag. A faint arc like something had passed so fast the air remembered after the snow did. Raizen watched it with the corner of his eye and did not change his step. He’d learned that some attention was an invitation.
"Beacon" Hikari whispered, pointing with her chin. A tiny orange dot blinked from under the snow up ahead. She knelt, brushed it out with two fingers. The casing was warm. She didn’t say that out loud.
"Delta" Raizen called again, softer, as if you could convince an echo to be decent.
Silence came back properly this time. No embarrassment. Just the kind of quiet that has made up its mind.
They topped the lip.
At first there was nothing to see. Just a shallow pocket of ground where the wind hadn’t bothered to lay a hand, tools in place like people had set them down with the intention of picking them up again. The kind of stillness that feels staged.
Then the angle changed.
Bodies. Two of them.
Face-up. Eyes open. Snow on lashes. Not buried, not dragged. Laid out in a neatness that made Hikari swallow hard because the alternative was to speak.
"What in the-" Obi started, and his voice cracked, and he let it.