Khadam closed one eye, stretched out her fist, and stuck her thumb up. From here, she could cover the rock formation with her thumb, the final remains of some ancient, lonely volcano.

All around, all she could see was water. For hundreds of miles, nothing but the blue-black depths of the sea and the wake that spread behind her like some white frothing road, disappearing into the horizon. Sometimes, there were clouds scraped across the sky, or enormous thunderheads that looked like colossal, floating beasts, too large to see their movements.

And then, there was the rock formation. It jutted up from the black depths of the sea, with no other ground around it. Strange. It towered above the water, and hints gray, fuzzy algae grew on the lower faces of the brown stone.

No birds, though. Nor crabs, nor crustaceans of any kind. Khadam had assumed this planet would support a wide variety of life once she left the deserts behind. But at least out here, in the open ocean, there was nothing but the dark shapes that moved under the water.

She put her thumb down. And squinted at the rock.

“It looks like Vikran’s nose. Don’t you think?”

“Who is Vikran?” Finder asked.

“Oh, that’s right,” Khadam said. “You wouldn’t know him. Well it looks just like his nose. It even has that hook in it, up there.”

Finder’s claws were clamped to the back of her bike. When Finder had first pulled her out into the ocean, she was afraid he would have to pull the whole way. But when they got past the waves, Khadam spent a few hours carefully - very carefully - rewiring the repulsors that were supposed to provide thrust. She almost dropped the plating into the ocean, which wouldn’t have been so bad except for the rust.

Thankfully, it was a simple fix. And without too much error, the thrust repulsors sprang to life. From then, Finder only had to cling to the bike, while she drove it over the vast, endless stretches of the black ocean.

“Is this Vikran still alive?” Finder said. “Do you know where he is?”

“No,” she said, answering both questions at once.

“Oh,” he sounded sad, and his face screen projected a pair of pixelated eyes and a mouth, drawn down in sadness. Sometimes, it was hard to remember that Finder was just a machine. She almost reached out, and touched his head. As if he needed reassurance.

They were sitting over the empty water, staring up at the slightly crooked rock formation. The sun was setting behind it. They had been riding for two days and one night, and Khadam had to impulse a steady stream of hormones to block her receptors, keeping her awake. It was starting to wear on her, though. An itching in the back of her skull. The mild anxiety of being alert for too long.

It didn’t help that the things in the water were so much larger than her. They made her sick with fear, when she saw them.

Out here, she felt naked. Exposed to anything that lurked below.

Finder could sense her quietness. He chirped, trying to pill her out of her shell, “Tell me about him. This Vikran. What was he like?”

“He was good, but not the smartest. But he always tried. Harder than anyone else in my cohort. And he had this stupid little laugh. Zor would tell jokes, and he would make that dumb chuckle. A-huh, a-huh. But if you really got him laughing, he sounded like a hyena. Do you know what a hyena is? Oh, nevermind. Vikran was… He always helped, if I asked… Even when Ribeiro gave us solo work. He always helped.”

Khadam had to stop there. Her smile tasted like tears. Her nose was running. She didn’t have the water to waste on this.

Before they left, Khadam impulsed a command to her implant. Marking this formation as “Vikran’s Nose.” A faded yellow indicator appeared in her vision, a large arrow with a numeral above, marking out the distance. In case I ever come back here…

The sunlight was strong here, and if she didn’t push too hard, the batteries could keep up this pace for weeks. Which, now that the rear thrusters were working, was more than enough distance to circle the whole planet several times over. Not that I’ll live that long without water.

“You sure we’re going in the right direction?”

Finder chirped in the affirmative. “East and east.”

“East and east,” she repeated. “Hold on.”

Khadam leaned on the bike, and pushed the throttle. It hummed to life under her legs, and in a lurching burst of motion, it leaped forward, screaming towards the horizon. She didn’t have a speedometer - too delicate an instrument to rig together - but her implant suggested they were moving multiple dozens of kilometers per hour.

Khadam leaned into the throttle until the bike started to vibrate. She wanted to go faster, and the repulsors could do it. But the bike was everything. Out here, in the open water. If the bike failed, that was it. Even Finder wouldn’t be able to carry her more than a few hundred meters.

And where would that get her?

So, she went as fast as she dared over the endless blue-black ocean. The cryochamber suit was little help against the biting chill of the wind. The mesh pieces were warm as long as she stayed dry, but the bike road low, and the repulsors sprayed her with a steady mist. So, she had to hug the bike as she flew, taking her warmth from the core and the radiator fins.

Day became night, and the scar of light cast silver on the rippling surface of the waves. Hypnotic. Always changing. Never changing.

She was nodding off, struggling to keep her eyes open.

And then, movement caught her eyes.

There were ghostly shapes below her. Thousands and thousands of them. At first, she thought they were ancient strips of plastic washing adrift in a cloud. But then, she saw the way they flapped their angular wings. Sliding and gliding over each other in the water.

The water was full of them, so that she could not see anything but the layers of ghostly, square-shaped fins disappearing forever down into the black depths of the water. Flat and huge, each one’s wingspan longer than her body.

A few of them drifted to the surface, inspecting her with their featureless faces. Testing at her bike, with tube-shaped mouths that extended out of those fleshy, pale bodies. But Khadam would not let them get close. She squeezed forward on the throttle, spraying a jet of water behind her as she sped away.

One moment, she was surrounded. The next, they had simply disappeared.

Khadam turned around.

“What are you doing?” Finder asked. “East is that way.”

“I want to get a better look at them.”

But when she went back, she couldn’t find them. As if they hadn’t been there at all.

Eventually, Khadam couldn’t keep her eyes open. She put the bike at a lower speed, and told Finder to hold it steady.

“If anything happens, wake me up.”

He seemed uncertain about that, but he tried anyway.

Only she couldn’t sleep. Each time she tried, she woke up with a start. Maybe it was the light of the scar, haunting her. Making the vision worse than it usually was.

Once, while she was on the edge of nodding off, Khadam thought she heard Ribeiro’s voice. It was only the wind. Another, she swore there was an enormous shape growing underneath the bike, looking in the water.

Khadam impulsed more hormones. And when that wasn’t enough, she impulsed more, ignoring the warnings from her implant. Her scalp, her arms, her heart prickled with the pain. But it was enough to wake her up.

She took a deep, strong breath. And kicked the bike forward, pushing it to the edge of its control. Roaring across the water.

The sun was already rising.

And then, in the haze of the distance, there were dunes.

“We’re close,” Finder said from behind her, shouting over the hum of the bike.

How can you tell? She wondered. The dunes looked exactly like the ones she had left, days ago.

But as they got closer, she saw the dunes were covered in clusters of… stones? Mud? Or something else?

She pulled the bike up to one, and crouched down to touch it. It was hard, like cement. Porous, so that air could slip right into the rock, but water could not. Pieces of the stony notch crumbled off under her fingers, returning to sand.

“What is it?” She asked.

Finder didn’t know.

There were hundreds of them, scattered across the shore. And the further they went, the larger the notches became. Here, they were stones, growing into crumbling boulders. And here, the boulders stretched thin and tall, taller even than Khadam.

The taller they became, the more they crumbled. But that did not stop them from growing. Only a few miles east from where she had touched shore, the notches had become towers of cemented sand. Their shadows stretched for dozens of meters out, over the water.

There was no plan to their structure. They grew bulbous tips, or sharp points. Some grew fat and wide, before going tall. Others looked as flat as knives, until she was right next to it and saw that she could fit inside the larger holes.

More of them rose out of the beach, as far as she could see. As they grew taller, they grew further apart.

She came to bottom of one tower, craning her neck up to see its tip. The tower soared overhead, and the wind whistled through the empty holes, so that the whole thing sang an empty, tuneless song. Mournful, almost.

Naturally flowing striations ran down the sand towers, carved by the rain. Or carved to channel the rain away from the interior, she thought.

“Something built these things,” she said. “Someone lived here.”

“The nomads?” Finder asked.

Around the side of the tower, a huge chunk had cracked off the base, giving her a glimpse inside. Long, crawling tunnels ran crisscross through the trunk, leading to larger chambers. Hundreds of nomads could’ve squeezed inside at a time.

Something about it made her skin crawl, to think about all their chitinous bodies, folded together in such a cramped, dark place.

The eastern face of each structure was covered in the gray fur of algae. Dry, and matted. Every single tower they passed had the same algae on the same eastern face.

Farms? Did they cultivate all this?

Well. Whoever had built these had left a long time ago.

She stayed on the beach that night, at the edge of the shore. She wanted to stay away further inland, far away from the ancient sand structures, but Finder warned her about getting lost. “I’ve mapped the coastline, but I don’t know the interior. And the signal is coming from ahead.”

So, she stayed in the shadows of those ancient, abandoned sand structures. Using the metal hull of her bike as a shield against the wind. Khadam had slept sitting up with her arms wrapped around herself. She didn’t think she’d be able to fall asleep, but the moment she leaned back, she was out.

She did not wake until the sun was high overhead, peeking over the edge of her bike, and blinding her. First, she was disoriented. She thought she was back at the dune camp, still working on her bike.

And then, she shot up.

“Finder?”

No response.

Her mouth was so dry, it hurt to speak. Damn it. Why had she left her canteen? She looked around. A dozen of those towering, alien structures staring down at her. Marching away into the distance.

“Finder!” she shouted, her voice croaking with the effort.

Khadam checked a few things on her bike - a piece of faring was missing from one of the repulsors - before straddling it, and igniting it. It rose jerkily underneath her, the repulsors guttering back into life.

A shape dislodged from the closest sand structure, maybe twenty meters up. Finder’s spherical silhouette hovered down to her, growing larger. He was flying carefully, as if he was afraid to drop whatever was in his claws. The piece of faring.

“Khadam!” he clicked brightly, “I found water. At the top. Dew drops. I grabbed one of your spare parts and here you go.”

Water.

Khadam planted a big, dry kiss to the left of Finder’s face screen. “I have never loved anyone as much as I love you right now.”

Finder’s face screen lit up, pink and red glowing at the edges. Sweet embarrassment. “I am doing my best.”

“Your best is good enough,” Khadam said, carefully taking the curved piece of faring filled with perfect, crystalline water. She sniffed it first, and getting no smell, she tipped it back and tasted it.

Nectar of the gods, she thought. Could there be anything sweeter?

It was gone in three gulps. But it was enough for now. Khadam licked the inside of the metal faring and then put it away.

“How old do you think they are?” Khadam nodded at the structures above. Their shadows were on the other side, stretching far out over the sea of dunes.

“Hundreds of years old,” Finder said. “Judging by the decay in the structure. They’re held together by a kind of dried glue. I don’t know where anything finds glue on this planet.”

“Factory warehouse?” she asked.

But Finder didn’t seem to think that was possible. And then, he changed the subject. “We’re close, Khadam.” His screen narrowed, as he focused on the horizon, where the structures marched away along the beach. “I think you should be as alert as possible.The signal is close.”

She nodded.

Finder clamped to the back of the bike, and Khadam kicked the machine forward, speeding over the wet, sandy beach. A gentle spray of water followed in their wake.

The structures were as large as skyscrapers here. Some of them had multiple tips, like spires reaching into the sky. And somehow, they looked healthier. Or at least, they were crumbling less.

Then, she saw why.

A long strip of land jutted out from the beach, making a peninsula in the middle of the ocean. Dozens of towers and enormous hills made of that same, sandy cement covered this peninsula. With so many structures, it almost looked like the skyline of a city. At the very center of the skyline, the widest tower she had seen so far reached like a clawed hand into the sky.

Even from this far away, even through the haze of water evaporating from the ocean, she could see that it was crawling with nomads.

“That’s it,” Finder said. “Look.”

He extended one of his claws, and pointed - not at the city made of sand, but at the peninsula itself.

It took her a moment to see it.

The shine of metal, where the ocean’s waves had washed away the sand. It was the size of a small island, and all those towering sand structures were by it’s size.

The peninsula was a ship.

And not just any ship; that was a gate walker.

A way off this life-forsaken planet.