Read Chapter 17: Two Paths

The airlock cycled with a hiss that felt louder than it should have, given how quiet the station had gone. Elena stripped off her helmet and let it clatter onto the bench, her breath fogging in short, sharp bursts. The cold followed her inside, clinging to the suit fabric like a second skin.

Jack was already at the console, one hand braced against the edge for support, the other scrolling through readouts. He didn’t look up when she walked in. “Sixty-two percent life support. We’ve got maybe three days if we’re careful. The rover’s power cell is shot—can’t get a charge out of it without a full refurb.”

“I know.” Elena peeled off her gloves and tossed them aside. “I was there when you left it.”

“Then you know we’re walking back unless I can scavenge something.” He finally turned. His face was pale beneath the grime, and he was favoring his left leg more than he had an hour ago. “You found something out there?”

Elena hesitated. The signal was still playing on a loop in her head—a weak, pulsing burst from the west, too regular to be static, too deliberate to be coincidence. She pulled the recorder from her belt and set it on the console. “Triangulate this.”

Jack raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue. He tapped the screen, pulling up the station’s mapping software. The signal resolved into a point fifteen kilometers west, on a ridge line that didn’t show up on any of the standard survey charts. “Unmapped. Could be a natural formation. Could be a buried structure.”

“Could be Liang.”

The name hung between them. Jack’s jaw tightened. He didn’t say anything for a long moment, just stared at the blip on the screen. Then he shook his head. “We don’t have the fuel or the oxygen to chase ghosts, Elena. We’re at sixty-two percent. That’s not a buffer—that’s a countdown.”

“We’re not going to fix the rover by sitting here.”

“No,” he agreed. “I’m going to fix it.” He pushed away from the console and moved toward the station’s maintenance hatch. “You’re going to stay inside and make yourself useful.”

Elena’s hands balled into fists at her sides. “Useful. Right. Because analyzing a distress signal is a waste of your precious time.”

He stopped at the hatch, one hand on the latch. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” She stepped closer, the anger from the greenhouse flooding back—that same argument, bone-tired and frayed at the edges. “Every time I bring up Liang, you shut it down. Every time I try to find out what actually happened out here, you steer us back to survival. And I get it. I do. But you’re not the only one who’s lost people, Jack.”

Something flickered in his eyes. Pain. Guilt. She couldn’t read it before it was gone, buried under the same stone-faced calm he wore like armor.

“Fine,” he said. “You want to split duties? Do it. I’ll be in the service crawlspace, trying to patch together a power cell from a station that’s been stripped to the bones. You can play detective on that signal. But if we’re not ready to move in eight hours, we’re not moving at all.” He yanked open the hatch and disappeared into the dark.

Elena stood there, breathing hard, listening to the clang of tools and the muffled curses that followed. The heat of the argument faded, leaving something colder in its wake. She turned to the console and pulled up the signal data.

It was weak—very weak. A narrow-band transmission, barely more than a whisper against the noise of the lunar surface. But it wasn’t random. It pulsed on a repeating frequency, one she recognized from the deep-space network protocols. She filtered out the interference, boosting the gain until the wave form resolved into something intelligible.

Text. Short, encoded bursts arranged in a repeating loop. She cracked the encryption with relative ease—it was a standard geological survey cipher, one she’d helped develop years ago on Mars. That alone sent a chill down her spine.

She decoded the message and read it three times before she let herself breathe.

*SURVIVOR AT RIDGE 7. SECURE LOCATION. COME ALONE. NO PILOT.* *— MARKUS*

Elena’s hands went cold. Marcus. He was dead. She’d watched the feed eleven years ago, watched his suit depressurize in slow motion, watched the numbers plummet until there was nothing left to watch. She’d held his multi-tool in her gloved hand hours ago, flecked with dust from a crater that shouldn’t exist.

This wasn’t a ghost. It was a lie. Liang knew her history, knew her grief, and was using it like a scalpel. But the ridge was still there. The signal was still real.

She checked the timestamp on the transmission. It had been repeating for six hours—long before they’d arrived at Relay 7. Whoever had set it up wanted her to find it, wanted her to believe.

She looked up at the maintenance hatch. The clanging had stopped. She could hear Jack’s voice, low and muffled, muttering something to himself. He was down there working on the rover’s power cell, risking his leg and his oxygen to get them mobile again. And she was about to make a call that could strand them both.

The dilemma churned in her gut. Follow the signal and risk walking into a trap with no backup, no rover, no way back. Or trust Jack, head to the base, and try to make contact with any survivors—leaving Liang free to keep pulling strings.

She pulled up the map again. The ridge was fifteen kilometers west. The base was twenty kilometers east. Their oxygen could get them halfway to either before they’d have to turn back.

“Eight hours,” she said aloud, to no one. “Eight hours to fix a rover and decode a death threat.”

She stared at the blinking cursor on the screen for another long moment, then began cross-referencing the signal’s origin point with Marcus’s Mars path data—the data she’d kept buried in her personal files for over a decade.

The ridge wasn’t random. It was directly beneath the coordinates of the relay satellite that had gone dark on the night of the Mars incident. The same satellite that had transmitted—and then erased—the final footage of Marcus’s last moments.

This wasn’t just a trap. It was a confession.

And Liang had been waiting eleven years for her to find it.

Elena’s hand hovered over the console. She could delete the file. Erase the signal. Pretend she hadn’t seen it, and let Jack lead them back to the base with clean hands.

But she couldn’t. Because if Liang knew about the satellite, then Liang knew what had really happened on Mars. And Elena had spent eleven years blaming herself for something she still didn’t fully understand.

She turned toward the hatch, about to call out to Jack, to tell him what she’d found. Then she stopped.

The noise from the crawlspace had changed. It wasn’t the rhythmic clank of tools or the frustrated mutter she’d heard moments ago. It was a clatter of something metal hitting the deck, followed by a sharp gasp of pain.

She crossed the room in three strides and dropped to her knees beside the hatch. “Jack? You alright?”

Silence. For one sickening second, she thought he’d passed out. Then his voice came through, strained and tight.

“I’m fine. Let go of my leg.”

“Your leg?” She peered into the dim crawlspace, trying to make out his shape. “Jack, tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s just the brace seizing. Give me a minute.” He grunted, and there was a series of clicks. “Or two. I’ll get the cell patched. Just… go do your thing.”

Elena sat back on her heels. On the console behind her, the decoded message glowed pale blue against the dark. *COME ALONE. NO PILOT.*

She didn’t believe it. Not enough to follow the signal. But the final line of the transmission—the one she hadn’t decoded yet—nagged at her. A secondary data packet buried deeper in the signal, encrypted with a higher-grade code. It would take her another hour to break, maybe more.

And in that hour, Jack would be down in the dark, grinding his teeth against a pain he refused to name.

She looked at the map one more time. The ridge waited, patient and patient and patient.

Then she saw something that made her stomach drop. The ridge wasn’t just under the old dark satellite’s footprint. It was also directly on the flight path of the shuttle that had carried the sabotage cell’s equipment to the lunar surface—a shuttle whose manifest she’d flagged six weeks ago, before the accident, before everything.

“You knew,” she whispered, finally understanding. “Liang, you knew this station was already compromised.”

The console beeped. The secondary packet had finished decrypting on its own—a shortcut she hadn’t meant to trigger.

The message was three words.

*HE WAS THERE.*