It was on the way to level six that we heard it.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
I stopped climbing and held my hand to my ear, listening. The sound was faint but regular—liquid hitting a solid surface somewhere above us.
“You hear that?” Zara whispered.
I nodded, and we continued climbing more quickly. The sound grew louder as we ascended, and by the time we reached the landing for level six, I could see condensation on the walls.
“There,” Zara said, pointing to where a thin trail of water was running down the interior wall of the stairwell.
We followed the trail to its source—a door marked with symbols I couldn’t read but which Zara theorized indicated it was some kind of environmental systems room. The door was partially open, and we could hear the steady sound of dripping water inside.
The room beyond was filled with large cylindrical tanks and a maze of pipes and conduits. Most of the equipment wasdark and silent, but one unit in the corner was still functioning, humming quietly as it processed moisture from the air.
“Moisture evaporator,” Zara breathed, moving toward the working unit. “It’s been running so long that the collection tank long overflowed.”
She was right. The floor around the evaporator was covered in a thin layer of water, and I could see where it had been slowly seeping out of the room and down the stairwell for what must have been years.
Along one wall, hydroponic containers that had once held cultivated plants were now filled with mold and dead vegetation. But in a few of the containers, vivid green vines had taken root, thriving in the excess moisture. They were unlike any plant life I’d ever seen—thick, almost luminescent leaves that seemed to pulse with their own internal light.
“Is it safe to drink?” I asked, kneeling beside the overflow pool.
Zara had already pulled out one of her scientific instruments and was taking readings. “The mineral content is a bit high, but it’s clean. No bacterial contamination that I can detect.”
Without waiting for further analysis, I cupped my hands and drank deeply from the pool. The water was cool and slightly metallic-tasting, but it was the most welcome thing I’d experienced since we’d crashed.
Zara joined me, and we both drank until we couldn’t hold any more, then filled our water containers to capacity.
“This changes everything,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “With a reliable water source, we have more time, andif we find a food source, we can survive here indefinitely. Which wouldn’t be ideal, of course.”
“Long enough for rescue, anyway,” I agreed, though privately I wondered how long that might be. The lords of Destra would eventually send someone to look for us, but it could be weeks before a search mission arrived, and they could face the same problem with the storms that we did.
We continued our climb, both of us feeling significantly better now that we’d solved our most immediate survival problem. Level seven was another research area, this one focused on atmospheric monitoring equipment. Level eight was just empty.
It was level nine that changed everything again.
The door was marked with more of those incomprehensible symbols, but this time they were accompanied by what looked like a universal data storage icon. A records room.
Inside, we found exactly what the marking had promised—shelves upon shelves of data storage devices. Not the sleek, crystalline storage media used by modern civilizations, but the older cube-shaped blocks that had been popular eighty or a hundred cycles ago. There were thousands of them, organized in careful rows that suggested a comprehensive archive of some kind.
“This is incredible,” Zara said, moving between the shelves with wide eyes. “Whatever research was being conducted here, they documented everything.”
I was less interested in the historical significance and more focused on the practical implications. “Any chance these contain information about communication systems? Ways to contact the outside galaxy?”
“Possibly. We’d need to find a way to access them, but…” She picked up one of the data cubes, turning it over in her hands. “These storage formats were used across multiple species. If we can find a compatible reader, we might be able to learn what happened here.”
We split up to search the room more efficiently, each taking a different section of shelves. The data cubes were labeled, but in the same alien script we’d encountered throughout the tower. Without translation capabilities, we had no way of knowing what information each cube contained.
I was three aisles deep into the archive when I found it.
At first, I thought it was just another piece of equipment that had been knocked from its shelf. Then I saw the bones.
An alien skeleton lay crumpled in the narrow space between two data storage units, still partially clothed in the decayed remains of what had once been some kind of uniform. The fabric was too deteriorated to make out any identifying marks, but it was clear the body been here for years.
I heard her footsteps coming my way, and she was already talking about something she found, having begun the conversation before she even reached me.
“Zara,” I called softly. “Don’t come over here.”
