Read Chapter 5: Dead Man's Debt

The rover crested the ridge and there it was: Cache Three, a silver blister half-buried in the regolith, exactly where Command’s old survey maps had promised. Elena killed the headlights, letting the dim gray of lunar noon wash over the approach. She didn’t trust it.

“Sixty seconds,” Jack muttered, checking the suit telemetry on his wrist. “We’ve got sixty seconds of margin before we’re breathing recirculated farts.”

“Charming.” Elena killed the engine and was out the hatch before the dust settled. Her boots crunched across the frozen dirt, each step a reminder that they were out here on borrowed time—or borrowed air, which was worse. The cache’s locking mechanism was old, a manual wheel instead of the standard electronic latch. She grabbed it and hauled.

The wheel gave with a groan of tired metal. The hatch swung open, revealing a neat stack of oxygen tanks, still sealed, still gleaming. Relief hit her so hard her knees nearly buckled. She yanked the first tank free, checked the pressure gauge. Full. Then she checked the one beneath it. Full.

“We’re alive,” she breathed.

Behind her, Jack was already threading a fresh canister into his suit’s port. He made a small sound of satisfaction, then froze.

“Elena.”

His voice had gone flat. She turned, bracing for another micrometeorite warning or a leak in her line.

He was staring at a panel on the inside of the cache door, where someone had taped a folded sheet of thermal paper. The ink was smeared in places, lunar dust clinging to the adhesive corners. Jack peeled it off and held it up.

It was Dr. Reyes’s handwriting. Elena knew it from a hundred memo printouts in the lab. But the words didn’t read like a memo.

*If you’re reading this, the base is down and I’m likely dead. I’m leaving this at every cache point I can reach. Listen to me: Sector C did not fail on its own. The explosion was deliberate—timed, targeted, and designed to look like an accident. We found the detonator in the subfloor venting three hours before the blast. There’s a saboteur on Copernicus.*

*I tried to raise Command. No response.* *I’m not sure they don’t already know.*

*Trust no one but yourselves. Get to Relay 7. Send the truth.*

*For what it’s worth, I always believed you, Elena. Marcus was right about you.*

Elena read it twice. The third time, she couldn’t finish. Her hands were shaking.

“Sabotage,” she said, the word hollow. “She says—she says it was sabotage.”

Jack lowered the paper. His face was unreadable behind the visor. “Reyes was paranoid. She trusted no one, ran the base like it was a fortress. That note could be stress, confusion.”

“That note is in her handwriting, Jack. She was the most meticulous person on the base. She didn’t imagine things.”

“People in crisis imagine things all the time.” He folded the paper carefully, tucked it into a pocket on his thigh. “We still don’t have a reason.”

“What if you do?” Elena’s voice came out sharper than she meant. “What if you know something—about Liang, about the secret project?”

Jack’s jaw tightened. “That’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?” She took a step toward him, the fresh oxygen making her dangerously bold. “You carry a hidden comm unit. You froze when I asked who to call. You flinch every time I bring up the crater field—not because it’s dangerous, but because you know something’s wrong there. What aren’t you telling me?”

For a long moment, Jack just stared at her. Then he turned, crouched by the cache, and began pulling out a spare toolbag—one of three, she saw now, neatly labeled in the same methodical hand. He worked the straps in silence.

Elena was about to press further when her eye caught something on the cache door’s lower hinge. A small etching, barely visible in the low light—a circle, crossed by two arcs, with a dot at the center.

Her blood went cold.

She knew that symbol. She had one identical to it, on a pendant, hidden in her personal locker back at base—the only thing she’d kept from Marcus.

Marcus. The colleague she’d left behind on Mars. The one who’d trusted her, and who’d died because she’d misread the seismic data. The one she’d been fleeing when she applied for this posting on the Moon.

He had drawn the same symbol on the back of his hand the last day she saw him. *When you find a path, leave a mark for me,* he’d said, smiling. *In case I’m behind you.*

She’d thought it was a joke.

Now Reyes’s note echoes: *I always believed you, Elena. Marcus was right about you.*

Marcus was right about her? Right about what?

She reached out, fingers hovering just above the mark. Don’t touch it, she told herself. Don’t react. Jack already thinks you’re hiding something. If he sees you recognize it—

“You know what that is?” Jack was watching her, his posture stilled.

Elena pulled her hand back, shook her head. “Dust. Ice.” She forced a shrug. “Nothing.”

He didn’t buy it—she could see that in the set of his shoulders. But he let it go, hefting the bag of gear and swinging it onto his back. “We’ve got full tanks now. That’s twenty-four hours of air. Enough to reach Relay 7 and then some.” He paused. “But only if we take the crater field route.”

“Jack, we already argued about this. The terrain is unstable, the charges—”

“We don’t have time for the safe road anymore.” He tapped the note in his thigh pocket. “If Reyes is right, the explosion was timed. Which means whoever set it knows we’re still alive. Knows we’re out here. The longer we take, the more time they have to finish the job.”

Elena’s thumb brushed the pendant-shaped hollow in her chest, where the chain should have hung. Marcus, she thought. What did you get me into?

And then, louder: “The crater field. Fine. But we go my way through the western edge, and I control the route.”

Jack nodded once. “Deal.”

He turned and walked toward the rover, the cache door groaning shut behind him. Elena lingered for three more seconds. Long enough to memorize the symbol. Long enough to know she couldn’t ignore it.

Marcus had left her a path. But to what?