“What the fuck…”

The words seemed to echo in her helmet as she stared at the door in disbelief.

Turning to her brother, who had hung back in frustration and was now slowly trudging down the slope behind her, Lori started to motion towards her incredible discovery… but Sander interrupted her by batting her arms away.

“What’s the matter with you? Oxygen! Remember?” his hands danced beneath his scowl, demanding an explanation.

Upset to have been pushed around, Lori surprised him by shoved back.

“What?”

But all she had to do was point. Sander followed her finger, saw the little door… and froze, as million questions raced through his head. After a slight pause, he spun back around to confront her.

“What is that?” Sander glared, unnerved by the unexpected discovery. “How did you find this?”

“No… I just-”

“Then we shouldn’t be here… Come on, let’s go!” Sander gesticulated wildly, swinging his arms and looking around like a guilty child.

But while Sander started to fret, Lori couldn’t help but feel drawn to the peculiar little doorway… and took a few steps closer.

“Lori! Stop! What-”

“Shut up Sander!” she signed back with an eloquent middle finger, in response to her brother’s drama.

Leaving Sander to his worries, Lori gave her oxygen levels a quick check and reached out a hand to touch the door, feeling her adrenaline spike the closer she got… The door shot open with a hiss and Lori tumbled back in shock, as her brother did the same, a few yards away.

Landing slowly on her butt in the low gravity, Lori settled herself and got back on her feet for another tentative step.

The door hissed open again… and with a deep breath, Lori entered the dark passage.

A second airlock appeared immediately before her, and with a click, Lori aimed her flashlight through the round window in its center. The beam sliced through the darkness to reveal a little hallway, leading to series of concrete steps that snaked out of view.

With a look over her shoulder to make sure Sander was still there, Lori let the first door shut behind her.

“God damn it!” Sander cursed into his dead mic, as he watched his sister vanish into the hillside. “What are you doing Lori…”

Squeezing his way between the two large rocks near the entrance, Sander ducked through the doorway and lit his flashlight as well, just in time to see his sister descend a spiral staircase. The pressure stabilized, and he burst through the second door just as she came hurrying back up towards him, a finger pressed to her facemask in a plea for silence.

“Lo-”

Disturbed by his sister’s erratic actions, Sander shook his head rapidly and backed up, looking down the hall and half-expecting to see someone chasing her… Instead, all he noticed was that a blinking, red light kept illuminating the lower level.

Blink… blink… blink…

Switching her flashlight off, Lori made Sander do the same and they were plunged back into darkness.

“What… is… this?” Sander mimed as basically as he could, now that their light sources had dwindled.

Lori lifted her hands to shrug and once again approached the lower floor, hugging the wall until she was close enough to peek around it. Sander followed cautiously… and from his higher step, leaned over his sister to see what exactly she was looking at: On the other side of an antechamber that seemed to serve as some kind of locker-room, a throbbing, silent light spilled out from a parted blast door… But before Sander could yank Lori back upstairs, she had already stepped out from behind their corner.

“Lori!” he whispered uselessly, hesitating to go further. “What the fuck!”

Not that she would have listened to her brother, had she been able to hear him… In fact, the only thought going through Lori’s mind was how impossibly familiar everything felt.

From the low, wide benches to the empty shelves, to the squat little lockers… The déjà-vu washed over her while she tip-toed across the room, as if she’d already played this world in a long-lost video game, a lifetime ago.

Realizing bitterly that the moment to resist his sister’s craziness had passed, Sander grabbed the nearest object he could weaponize, and slowly shadowed her… armed with a section of aluminum pipe that he’d removed from one of the lockers.

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Lori turned to wave her brother over and, as Sander scampered closer, she peeked past the reinforced door to the bomb-proof chamber within. But before she could take another step, Sander grabbed her to point at one of the walls with a frantic look on his face.

Under their twin flashlight beams, Lori found herself staring in awe at a sprawling mural, cast across the bare cement wall from floor to ceiling… as peeling vines and spiraled, leafy roots all converged towards a smudged, twisted figure in the painting’s center unlike anything she´d ever seen. Except in dreams.

Sinewy haunches, thick forearms… and dark, sorrowful eyes set deep within a crown of flowered antlers…

Lori lost her focus as strange emotions washed over her, but quickly caught herself and shook out of it. But before she could take a step closer to inspect the weirdly coagulated fresco, Sander grabbed her by the shoulder and tapped his wrist angrily.

“We need to go!” he glared “Now!”

A glance to her suit´s data told her that they indeed only had another ninety minutes of oxygen… and with a labored groan, Lori tore herself away from their mesmerizing discovery to join her brother, who had already scampered back to the stairwell.

In an instant, Sander had reemerged from the little door and, panting in the newfound light, waited to clear the boulders before confronting his sister.

“Holy shit! What was that place?” he yelled, tossing caution to the wind and flipping his radio on, to better express his exasperation. “Did- How did… did you know where to find it?”

“No, I don’t know…” Lori mumbled, still running too much information though her brain to fully grasp what they had just witnessed. “I don’t think so.”

“You don´t think so?” he paused, staring her up and down. “Are you losing your mind? Lori, what the fuck is going with you today? You zoom off towards that… arc-thing, you drag me down here-”

“Oh shut up!” she snapped, hurt by his sharp words. “I didn’t drag you anywhe-”

“Yeah, no… ‘cuz I should just abandon my sister and let her explore underground, alien-moon-bases alone, right?” Sander shook his head at her. “Lori! Like… what the hell? Let’s get out of here!”

“This wasn’t planned asshole,” Lori spat, a single tear pearling on her cheek.

Overloaded by their discovery, Sander could only shake his head in a disapproving, nervous tremor... And despite his anger, Lori knew that her brother had a point. She turned away, unable to stand his accusatory stare any longer and they both fell silent once more…

“I told you what I saw, when we crashed…”

“Oh… Yeah. The crazy dream-shit. Monsters and-”

“Yeah. That was the monster!” she pointed to the bunker behind them “Painted all over the wall back there!”

Sander watched her pull one of her arms out of the suit´s sleeve, to wipe away her tears from behind the visor.

“I know, it´s freaking me out too… What do you want from me?”

But Sander wasn´t about to be suckered into a pity party.

“God damn- No! I don’t want this… adventure!” Sander spread his arms theatrically and looked around with wild eyes. “I- I…” he gasped, almost laughing at their ridiculous predicament. “I don’t even know what to say! And you, talking about dreams…” he continued, before exhaling nervously. “No… I can´t. I’m out.”

“What´s that supposed to mean?”

“Fuck it. All of if… Your dreams, this mess… whatever. I’m going to go find the balloons.”

Feeling quite vulnerable as her brother stomped back up the rocky slope towards their crash site, Lori shot a final look towards the little door and hurried after him, her pupils still readjusting to the glare.

After scooping up their booster from beside the arch, the pair then spent the next twenty minutes crisscrossing the debris field as if they were mowing a lawn, occasionally kicking whatever piece of junk got in their way, or appeared to be hiding something.

Lori lost focus as she once more tried to process everything… and was reminded of the fact that they were basically combing through a graveyard, by the abandoned Runners that dotted the moon´s skyline at random intervals.

Eventually, and only after prying the case open with the tip of his boot, Sander managed to pull out a pile of braided, tan noodles from part of the Beginner’s Luck’s half-buried hull.

Wrapping the heavy, synthetic cloth around his arm, he began digging the rest of the inflation system out from beneath a pile of rubble while Lori dusted it off for inspection. Soon, the twins had strapped everything to the booster and drove off in silence.

Still rattled, Sander quickly peeked over his shoulder, just to make sure that they weren´t being followed... and felt a swell of resentment rise up in his chest, at the extra stress his sister had brought to an already difficult day.

“You can never just leave shit alone…” he muttered, baffled by the conversational floodgates that his comment had reopened.

“Promise you won´t tell anyone about this, OK?”

Turning incredulously towards his sister, Sander couldn´t believe his ears.

“Are you insane? This is huge! We hav-”

“Sander, please! They´ll never let us go back there if you freak everyone out!”

“Wait… go back?” he gawked, as they gained speed. “Lori: I never want to go anywhere like that, ever again! What´s the matter with you?”

“I just- I can´t explain it… that- there´s something there for me. For us…”

“What could possibly be there for us?”

Casting around for a better way to justify her incomprehensible, yet magnetic attraction towards the little bunker, Lori felt compelled to repeat the obvious.

“What about the painting-thing, man? Come on… There´s no way it´s just a coincidence!”

“Oh, yeah… the scary, dream painting: OK, I can´t wait to go solve that mystery,” Sander snarled sarcastically, while almost hitting a rock.

“Look where you´re going! And it´s my turn to drive…” Lori reminded him. “Remember?”

“Jesus Chri-” he shook his head.

But after a quick check of his oxygen levels, Sander realized that they were about to run low and decided to hold his tongue, unwilling to further waste his supply in a sterile disagreement… Letting the booster glide to halt, he simply turned to stare at his sister.

“What?”

“It has bad vibes. Something… happened there.”

And despite her feigned confusion, Lori could sense that Sander was right, at least on some level.

“OK, fine… we´ll tell them,” she conceded with a sigh. “Just- please, Sander… at least, let me do the talking. All right?”

After switching places, the remaining minutes of their return flew by in a wordless truce… until suddenly, they they were back in range of the Firmament’s frequencies and their helmets lit up.

Lori eased up on the joystick and, as Sander perked up from his post-adrenaline stupor, they both noticed a pair of familiar silhouettes ahead of them, framed by the Firmament´s glowing -and slightly tilted- entrance dock.