An eerie quiet settled over the chamber as Alix regarded the stone cube.

It was strange the way it captured her attention so easily. Here she and Figaro were at the top of an alien temple, a view of an Aexon metropolis sprawled out from the door, escape a mere few steps away. Yet, once that elder Aexon had directed her gaze to it, Alix couldn’t tear her eyes from the stone cube.

Maybe it was the plainness of it that left her in awe. Unlike the other artifacts and architectural features she’d seen throughout the tiers of the temple, there were no hieroglyphs engraved upon the cube, nor mosaics or painted scenes. There were no gems, no tapestries, no creative indentations or markings. There was only the blank, gray stone of its six sides. The cube was just shorter than Alix by a few inches, making it about a meter and a half tall and a meter and a half wide.

The Aexon guards and elders had all fallen silent. They all looked at the cube with reverence and a trace of fear. The elder Aexon that had taken Alix by the hand released it now and slowly made his way to the cube. He pressed a paw against the stone. With a sigh, he squeaked out a command.

Four of the nearby guard Aexons exchanged a look, then hurried to the elder’s side by the cube. Each gripped a part of the edge of the side facing Alix and Figaro. They all wedged the claws of all six paws into the crack where the side met the others. One Aexon nodded at Alix with a clipped shriek.

“She says back up,” Figaro translated from his spot on Alix’s shoulder.

Alix took a few steps back toward the wall. She spoke to Figaro out of the corner of her mouth. “Should we be worried about what we’re about to see?”

“No idea.” Figaro shrugged. “It can’t be worse than a bunch of mummified rats though, right?”

The Aexon guards worked together to pull that side of the cube down. It hit the ground with an ear-splitting crack. Where that square stone had been, there was now hollow space, revealing the cube to in fact be a box. Every square inch of the box’s interior was packed with the bioluminescent material that the Aexons used to light their civilization, so the inside cradled an intense blue glow.

And, at the bottom of the box, sat a silver sphere.

“Yes!” Alix couldn’t stop herself from pumping her fist as she saw it, ignoring the looks she got from the Aexons. She poked Figaro. “This is amazing! This is it, this is what the whole temple is devoted to! All those crazy things we saw on the way up, it’s all in service in trying to figure out this thing!”

“Right, this thing!” Figaro jabbed a limb in the direction of the silver sphere. “This thing which is . . .”

“I have no idea. But I bet I can figure it out! And if I can figure the sphere out, I can figure out the rest of this place.” Alix walked over to the box, stepping onto the side that had been toppled and reaching down for the sphere. The Aexons watched her in fascination as she took it into her hands. Some of the guards even fell to their knees with paws clasped, as though they were in the presence of a holy relic. Alix wondered if any of the non-elder Aexons had ever even laid eyes on the actual sphere before.

The sphere was a little larger than Alix’s head, though it weighed heavily in her grip. The surface was smooth and metallic. It was cold to the touch. It was perfectly symmetrical, with not one bump or scratch out of place. Other than that, the sphere was featureless.

Figaro scurried down from Alix’s shoulder onto the sphere. He struggled not to slip off as he inspected the top, tapping at it. “Alright, rapid-fire guesses, go!”

“Pretentious bowling ball?” Alix ventured.

“Nope, no finger holes. Pretentious disco ball?”

“That’s ridiculous. Unexploded bomb of some sort?”

“Good God, it better not be. Modern art sculpture? Statistically improbable perfect geological formation? Data storage device? Robot egg? Rotating mirror?”

“This is hopeless,” said Alix, turning the sphere over in her hands as Figaro crawled back onto her arm. “We need more clues, more context. Ask the Aexons why they’re showing this to us. It’s theirs, after all. Maybe they know something we don’t.”

Figaro turned toward the crowd of Aexons and asked the question in their language. Raygun glanced at the elder, then began to speak, with Figaro translating for him.

“Huh, apparently there was debate over whether to bring you up at all,” Figaro told her. “I think that’s what he means, at least. I caught the words, ‘captive’ and ‘exchange’. They wanted to ransom you to the station, I’m guessing.”

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“Lovely,” Alix drawled.

“But the geezers vetoed it,” Figaro continued. His lenses extended to hone in on Raygun's mouth as the Aexon spoke. “Something, something, ‘flying object unknown’ . . . ‘long ago’. . . ‘explanation’ . . . ‘it’s yours’.”

“Mine?” Alix furrowed her brows, then understanding dawned. “Oh my god, Figaro. They think this is one of our station’s probes. They brought me here to explain what it is, or ransom me for the information, if Raygun over there had his way.”

“Oh! Well, that’s bad news for us, then. This sure as hell ain’t one of our probes.” Figaro folded two of his limbs. “This isn’t like any tech we’ve got on the station that I can think of. How are we supposed to give them an explanation?”

“I’m working on that.” Alix frowned. She stared down at the sphere. “Did they say how old it is?”

“Well, they also threw out the word ‘ancestors’, so I’m guessing it’s Old with a capital ‘O’. Maybe even ancient, at least by their standard.”

“And they said it flew?”

“Yup.”

“Then it must need a power source. There’s no charging port that I can see . . .” Alix paused, glancing at the interior of the box again. She blinked against the blue glow. It was brighter even than the amount the Aexons used to light the chamber they were all standing in. Why would they bother to pack the inside of a box with a light source?

Alix held the sphere right up to her nose and squinted. Up close now, she could just barely see faint grid lines on the metallic surface. Just like that, it clicked.

“It’s solar-powered!” she said. Her mouth curved into a grin as she turned her head to explain it to Figaro. “When they first got it however long ago, they must have noticed it only worked with enough sunlight exposure. They probably figured that any light would be enough to charge it, so they packed its storage cube with the blue stuff.”

“Whoa.” Figaro extended his lenses again for a closer look. “Do you think they remember that’s the reason?”

“Who knows?” Alix shrugged. “They’ve obviously mythologized the sphere by now. They wouldn’t have any way of separating whatever actual facts about the sphere their ancestors were able to glean from the layers of myth that got woven in later.”

“That’s wild.”

“No kidding. But at least now we know what to do.” Alix straightened and tightened her grip on the sphere. “If we’re going to figure out what this thing does, we need to get it charged up and working, which means we’re gonna need a lot of sun.”

Figaro threw two limbs up in the air. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Boss, but there’s not a whole lot of that down here.”

“Which is why you’ve got to negotiate with our little buddies here to take us top-side,” said Alix. She smiled and waved at the Aexons.

“Oh lord.”

“Yeah, try not to drop any vowels this time.” Alix shot Figaro a thumbs-up. “I believe in you!”

“Glad one of us does!” Figaro shot off a tiny salute. He hopped off Alix’s shoulder and scurried to the crowd of Aexons. Alix watched anxiously as he addressed them. A myriad of expressions seemed to cross the faces of the Aexons over the course of Figaro’s speech. Alix thought she spotted confusion, wonder, fear. Raygun had two sets of arms crossed, huffy and dismissive throughout. The elders listened wide-eyed. Finally, Figaro finished speaking, and the Aexons all turned to each other and launched into a noisy argument.

Figaro scuttled back over to Alix and crawled his way up to her shoulder.

“Well?” she asked.

“I stumbled through that about as well as a drunken caveman, but I think they understand that we need to get the sphere into sunlight,” said Figaro.

“Great!”

“I suppose,” said Figaro. “They seem pretty split on the idea of leaving here with it . . . so why don’t we?”

Alix turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean let’s split! Skedaddle! Look at them, they’re all distracted, even the trigger-happy one! If we cut and run right now, we might get enough of a head start to lose them.”

“We could,” Alix said softly. She looked at the doorway. Ratlantis twinkled blue below. For all she knew, this could be their last opportunity to escape the Aexons. “But I don’t think we should.”

“What?”

“If you feel like the right thing to do is go, then I understand. I won’t stop you. But it seems wrong to leave. They brought us here for help! If we leave, we lose the chance to establish decent relations with the only other sentient species on this planet,” said Alix. “And besides, we’d be walking away from a huge mystery! Don’t you want to know what this thing is?”

“Aw, here we go again,” Figaro grumbled. “You and your stupid mysteries! This is just like the time we got stranded on that island on Meliad II, ‘cuz you just had to know where those idiot crabs migrate every year.”

“By ‘idiot crabs’, I assume you’re referring to the endangered Diamond-back Sandslipper, which made for one of my best entries in the Compendium. And we were only stranded a week and a half, you big baby.”

“A bird tried to eat me.”

“You can’t expect to be in our line of work without something trying to eat you every now and again,” Alix told him.

“Or kidnap you, apparently.” Figaro threw half his limbs up in helplessness. “But fine! We’ll stick it out and satisfy your curiosity! I think our window of opportunity passed, anyhow.”

He was right. The Aexons seemed to have come to a consensus. The elder that had first approached Alix chattered to a nearby guard, who then pulled a roll of parchment from his belt. He handed it to the elder. The elder unfurled it and waddled over to show it to Alix and Figaro. It was a map, identical to the one Figaro had stolen out of the satchel. Only the elder pointed now to a tunnel drawn at the top of the map. He tapped his tiny claw on the page and squeaked.

“Aw, goddammit,” Figaro huffed. “That sounds like a helluva long hike.”

“Huh? What do you mean? What did he say?” Alix asked.

Figaro sighed. “He said we’re going to the top of the world.”