The sand was too thin. It made the metal slippery under her feet.

Khadam hooked her arm under Finder’s spherical body, tensing her legs as she tried to push him forward. But the harder she pushed, the more her feet slid.

“Go,” Finder said. “You have to go without me.”

“Stupid… machine…” Khadam answered through gritted teeth, “Not... leaving... you.”

The entrance into the gate walker was still sealed shut. It was nothing more than a cargo aperture, with interlocking space-grade teeth, facing up towards the sun. She had felt it, though. Through the aerisnet. All she had to do was get close enough, and command it to open.

Nomads poured down the slopes of the basin, rivers of legs and mouths and chitinous bodies streaming over the hard sand. The air was buzzing with their clicking and chittering sounds. Some ran uupright, the tattered remains of clothes streaming behind them. Others wore nothing at all, and they ran like animals, their legs and arms pumping at the sand as they swarmed over each other. Thousands of red and black and brown bodies pouring down the slopes.

“If you die,” Finder said, “I have failed. My life does not matter. Leave me here, and I will try to hold them back.”

“Fuck that,” she said. “Put your claws out and help me push.”

His claws scrabbled for purchase on the smooth metal of the hull. Small, he might be for a drone, but he still outweighed more than her - especially without his repulsors.

Khadam wrapped her arms around one of his claws, and with all the strength left in her legs, she pushed. I am not doing this alone, she thought. I will not let you go.

Together, they pulled and pushed themselves across the thin sand, Finder’s repulsors shattered even further as he scraped over the metal ground. Step by step, away from the skeleton hanging on the pole. Towards the ship’s cargo door.

How far?

Open, she impulsed the cargo door.

Open, damn you. OPEN.

She felt the latch in her mind, as her impulses connected with the ship’s aerisnet.

A groaning rumble. A few grains of sand started to shift in the center of the basin as the cargo doors creaked. There was a long, shuddering moan, followed by the shriek of metal.

The door was opening far too slowly.

The first nomads had reached the bottom of the slopes. They were still distant, but they were sprinting. Sprinting. Grabbing at each other, each one wanted to reach her first. She could see their mandibles now, see the clapping, shivering motion they made as they tasted her scent on the air.

“Khadam,” Finder said. “Go. You can fit. If you have to wait for me-”

“Shut up and push, damn you!”

With a great heave, she tumbled over. Rolling forward on his body, his claws tucked underneath him. Khadam spilled forward, and together they reached the cargo door.

She didn’t even look. She rammed Finder’s body with her shoulder, shoving him into the widening gap in the ground. And then, she jumped down after him, screaming another impulse at the cargo doors: Shut the door now!

Khadam braced herself for a fall. But it was nothing. Only a few yards.

Someone had stacked something - mattresses? cardboard boxes? - just underneath the slowly-closing aperture, creating a soft platform that swayed dangerously as she landed. Finder had hit the same platform, and bounced off. He was still rolling somewhere in the darkness of the ship’s hold. But she couldn’t worry about him right now.

There was something wrong with the cargo doors. They had jittered to a stop, shaking dust and sand over her.

Close! She impulsed again, and she shouted the command at the same time. “Close the fucking door!”

Slowly - painfully - it began to screech in reverse.

Hooked feet grabbed at the teeth of the aperture. Legs, raining down at her. Too many to count. Swiping and clawing at the air above her head. A face blocked out the light of the sun, those glittering compound eyes staring blankly down at her. Froth dripping from the hair on its mandibles that shivered and snapped at her.

She screamed, she couldn’t help it. There were too many hooked feet and jaws catching at her clothes - she couldn’t fight them off. All she could do was flail and try to writhe out of their reach. The only thing that saved her was their own desperate, fanatical need to get at her - all at once. They squeezed into the gap in the aperture, even as it shrank. They clogged it with their own bodies, blocking out all the light from above. Clapping and snickering and clicking ferociously-

But the gap was closing, and the teeth of the cargo doors began to slice through them. Slowly, so slowly, it severed heads and limbs and chopped their bodies in half. Spilling alien fluid over her.

One of their heads fell in her lap. She screamed again. Her whole body jerked, kicking the head - with its still-snapping mandibles - away into the darkness.

Its last chitters died away somewhere in the depths of the ship.

Above, the sound of hundreds of clawed feet was muffled by the cargo door. Never had a full two-meters of metal felt so small.

Khadam threw back her head, laying on the soft cushion. The smell of mildew and must, filling her as she took huge lungfuls of air.

An old sound.

One she knew all too well.

A distant rumbling that seemed to shake the darkness itself. The roar of a storm crashing through the trees. Rushing towards her, and washing over her. Trembling. Cracking...

Changing.

As the rumbling became a pain on the sides of her face, she thought, So, it’s still here.

Something warm trickled out of her nose. Her eyes were itching and when she wiped them, she could feel the blood.

The vision began just out of sight. It was as if someone had turned on the emergency lights inside the ship, and now everything was glowing with a gray light that had no source. She could see the whole interior before her now - a cargo airlock, filled with the bones of old nomads. She was sitting on a tower made of crates and boxes, capped with two old mattresses, dried and cracking with age.

And when she looked up, she at the cargo door and the walls themselves, she had to remind herself: It’s not real.

It’s not happening.

Because there were cracks racing along the walls. Unzipping the metal at the molecular level. Flaking away in strange, geometric patterns. Becoming something else.

The change spidered along the hull of the ship. Splitting it apart, as the matter itself transformed piece by piece. Pixel by pixel. Chunks fell loose from the metal, and as if they were lighter than air, they lifted up into the sky that was aglow with a grim, gray light.

In the logical part of her mind, she knew she was still inside the ship. She knew the walls were still there.

But her eyes lied to her.

She could see the nomads, now, as the metal walls crumbled away. They were crumbling too. Their bodies, torn apart by the forces of the light.

Whose fault was this?

It didn’t matter.

It never mattered.

The wind was screaming through her thoughts, and the thunder was in her veins, beating against her heart. It cut through her, cutting her from inside, and she had to shut her mouth, to hold in her screams.

Because the Herald was here. A figure, floating in the sky, like a dancer on the wind. Shrouded in loose, silvery clothes, rippling as if blown by a gale.

Descending. Holding its arms aloft.

She didn’t want the Herald to know she was here. It couldn’t know. Have you been waiting for me, all this time?

The figure was staring at her. The dancer on the wind. Pulling back the hood of its cloak.

She had to force herself to turn away. To look away from the lie of its face.

And then, all the emergency lights in the ship flickered to life. It was just enough to snap her out of the vision, to give her just enough room to pull herself free. Her head was hammering, her heart was thudding in her ears, but she refused to sink back into that gray light.

It felt so real...

Her eyes could see, her ears could hear, her mind could feel reality slip into the world of the vision. The end of all things.

Enough.

She took in a slow, steadying breath. And as she exhaled, she imagined herself breathing out her own thoughts, and all the universe besides. Just like Rodeiro had taught her. And his mentor had taught him...

The vision that clung evaporated. A vague print of light, over the emergency lights of the ship.

She was alone again. Sitting up, panting hard, as if she could breathe away the headache that hammered inside her skull. The nomads were still scrabbling on the door above her, but they sounded so small now.

At least the walls were real again.

Khadam looked around, blinking away the last cobwebs of the vision that refused to bleed away. Shadows the color of smoke and ash, lifting around the corners of the walls, and off the debris below her.

The mattress under her was tilting, almost falling. Someone had stacked it on top of all this debris, and used it as a kind of ladder to reach the cargo door. But why anyone would want to go outside was beyond her.

Now, as she moved around, the whole tower of debris began to lean. The after haze of the vision made it hard for her to figure out what was real, and what wasn’t, as she climbed down from the stack of mattresses and crates and who knows what else, to reach the ship’s floor.

Down here, there were empty nomad shells, abdomens and legs, and wires, and what looked like pieces the rotten remains of fabric. Nuts and bolts and screws and washers scattered across the ground, where someone had dropped a hardware repair kit and just left it there.

“Finder?” She called out.

The opposing door of the airlock was still open, and she could see the interior of the ship, and all those emergency lights running away down its length. Its mouth stuck open like some bestial maw, waiting to swallow her.

She climbed inside.

The vast cavern of the gate walker was littered with trash. Plastic and fabric strewn over the drone bays. Metal and machine kits scattered between the huge crates of the cargo hold, with wires and carbon fiber skeletons chopped and hacked to pieces.

She walked up the mezzanine steps that ran alongside the hull, until she was looking down on that vast cavern. From here, she could see the slots for the gates’ arms - those semicircular rings of metal used to channel the energy needed to move matter from one space to another.

She could see numerous rings down there, each one laying quietly where they had for thousands of years.

All the gates she could ever need.

It was the most beautiful thing she had seen, since the day Finder found her.

“Finder!” she called again, “I found the gates!”

He was here somewhere. But why wasn’t he answering?

Khadam took the open steps down from the mezzanine, and was about to call out Finder’s name again, when she heard a voice.

A human voice. Talking so rapidly his words almost blended together.

“The others. I don’t know what happened to them. Joira said not to open their chambers. Whatever you do, he said, don’t touch them. They’re asleep. Let them sleep. Forever. I went to look at them and-” the voice choked up. A pathetic, mewling sob. “Oh, help me. Joira, if you can hear me please come back. I told you not to go. I told him not to go. He went up to the Light Dam to see if he could fix it, but I haven’t heard from him.”

She followed the voice to the ground level of the ship, where the metal floor slanted ever so slightly to the right. Finder had found a terminal in the wall, and was watching something there. There was a man. Greasy black hair that hadn’t been cut in months. Bags under his eyes made him look older than he was, and grimey lines of stress outlined his skeletal face.

She had never seen someone look so unwell. Not even her old mentor, Rodeiro, had looked that bad at the end. His face was too close to the camera, and his eyes kept dilating. As if he was watching something off screen.

“It’s been two months. Two months since he left. Joira, if you can hear me...”

“Finder?” she said over his shoulder. “I was calling you. Didn’t you hear me?”

“Oh! Hello, Khadam!” he said, as if he had just gone for a walk. As if they hadn’t just fallen into a derelict gate walker on some planet filled with aliens who were trying to kill them.

What’s wrong with him? She wondered. Maybe part of his core was damage when he fell. She leaned down behind him to check his chassis, but he turned around. “You need to see this. They were here, Khadam. Other humans.”

He gestured with a claw at the terminal, at the man with the black hair.

“Do you know him?” Finder asked.

“No,” she said, thinking of the rotten skeleton on the pole outside. “Do you think he’s the one we passed, getting in here?”

The video was still playing. The man was running his fingers through his greasy hair. Pulling at the knots.

“I can hear them. Her, and all the others. She hates me. I sent a drone through the airlock, and I used the speakers on it. I tried to talk to them. They went mad when they heard my voice. They started tearing each other apart.”

He heaved a shuddering breath.

“The gates don’t work,” he said. “The ship was full when we left, but the reactor - all the cells - empty. I don’t know… I don’t know how to fix it. And the whole grid is down and I don’t know how to do anything. Joira,” he moaned. “Oh, Joira, please come back.”

No light in the reactor.

Khadam’s heart sunk. That would make her job so much harder. But maybe...

The man jerked around, as if he was looking at something behind him. He was young, only a few hundred years old, if that. Maybe as young as Khadam.

Then, he was shouting at someone else. Someone that Khadam couldn’t see.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

He looked back at the camera, his eyes wild with fear.

“If you can hear me, anyone. Help me. I’m not alone down here.”