Speechless, the twins exchanged a panicked look, and their hearts skipped a beat. Rising from a shadowy corner near the blast door´s hinges, a second small creature rose to its feet and blinked, as if it too, was unsure of what it was witnessing.

The thin, gray dwarf took a step closer to them and swayed shakily on the spot, clutching something in its hand.

Lori instinctively turned her flashlight back on, blinding the creature and revealing that what it was holding in its hand was some sort of long, thin pistol.

Sander did the same and, with both lights at full blast, Lori found herself confronting the little gray thing, full of adrenaline and questions… but saw that it was already talking to her brother and switched her mic on just in time to catch the end of a sentence.

“...doing… here?” the thing asked hoarsely, as if it hadn´t spoken for quite some time.

Amazingly, it spoke English… but its monotonous, panting manner betrayed a difficulty in verbalizing thoughts…

“What the fuck… What are you?” Sander swore, still bracing for a fight with his little pipe in the air, ready to swing.

The question seemed to put the little creature in a trance, and the short, gray being looked down at his body… his hands… before letting the gun fall with a clatter.

“Hey!” Sander barked, as the thing started limping towards Lori.

But the creature kept going... And after a few more steps, Sander pounced on his discarded weapon.

“Stay back!” Lori warned, as her brother sprang back to his feet while trying to get a grip on the pistol through his thick gloves.

But still the creature ignored them. Lori backed up as far as she could… yet, instead of cornering her, the little fellow just reached over and removed a previously unnoticed key from the damaged console, before lowering the button´s plastic casing.

All blinking ceased, and an almost inaudible hum vanished from the air around them, as if a massive tension had just been released. The dwarf then knelt down to lean against the console for support, as the last of the undamaged lights flickered back to life.

The corridor to their right lit up, and the twins couldn’t believe their eyes: leading away from the main desk, a grated metal walkway split two rows of yellowish tubes, each containing a fully grown replica of the two creatures currently slumped against the desk at their feet.

“What in the…” Sander wondered, without ever getting to the end of his question, as the full weight of their discovery slowly set in.

“Ready…”

Tearing their eyes away from the floating clone-tubes, the twins both looked back to the creature.

“Ready for what?” Lori demanded, summoning all her courage to take a step towards him.

But the question didn’t seem to make sense to him, as he simply looked back and forth between them with his dark, almond eyes.

“Terminate… my command.”

The twins made sure they’d heard correctly… and decided to change strategies, realizing that they might be less in danger than assumed. Lori lowered her voice, looking back down at what had now apparently become their captive.

“We’re not gonna hurt you…” she said, squatting down to the little man’s level.

Unable to decide which of her innumerable question she should ask first, Lori scanned the unbelievable room yet again and hesitated. “Uhh… Do you have a name?”

The small, gray man didn’t immediately answer... Getting a better look at the twins, he blinked his large eyes at both of them.

“21…12”

“What?” Sander asked again, confused to be hearing numbers.

But the creature had passed out, by sliding down his backrest to lie flat on the floor, next to his dead clone.

“Hey… What’s the matter?”

This time however, they received no response. Staring at the inert figures between them, Lori looked back to her brother and leaned in a little closer.

“Be careful…” Sander warned, as she reached out to nudge the tiny man.

“Hey…” she said, as kindly as her adrenaline allowed. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

Barely conscious, 2112 looked up through slanted, trembling lids and struggled to focus… but for just an instant, his huge, obsidian eyes managed to lock onto hers.

“Too… weak…” He said simply, mirroring the second corpse in the room by slowly curling up into a ball as well.

In so doing, the little man revealed a previously unnoticed wound in his side, that was still oozing a thick, dark paste.

Numbed by the absurdity of the situation, both Sander and Lori took a moment to consider their options… And Lori’s thoughts returned to the bloody painting. It couldn’t just be coincidence… there was something there.

Something hidden, and true…

Something important.

So, right as her brother started saying something about their oxygen levels, Lori grabbed the injured fellow’s petite shoulders. Shocked, Sander immediately fell silent as he watched Lori shake the creature back and forth.

“Wake up! Who painted this?”

Rattled from her assault, the small man’s eyes popped open in a daze.

“With the horns… What is that, in the middle of it? Did you-”

“It… called me.” the creature wheezed.

“It called you?” Lori repeated desperately, starving for any possible information to explain her own disconcerting visions.

“And… Why?” Sander chimed in, stepping out of the chamber to give the painting another look.

“For help…”

The little man looked up to Lori with a strange, almost hopeful look on his face.

“In your dreams?” she asked breathlessly.

With a faint smile across his thin lips, he nodded his large head and tried to say something else… but was immediately overtaken by a coughing fit.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The little body shuddered under her hands.

“What? I didn’t-”

Interrupting her frantic questions, the groggy little man pointed behind them, to the locker-room they had just crossed.

“Bath...”

Lori turned to follow his finger to the bunker´s entrance and was about to ask if he was talking about the mural… but by the time she looked back to the creature, he had already fainted again.

“Shit… OK, come on!” she grunted, sliding her arm beneath his small, gray body to scoop him up. “Move it!”

Sander jumped out of the way as his sister charged by, only to watch her go from door to door in the antechamber, while still carrying the creature in her arms like a large baby.

“Bath… bath… That´s a bath, right? Help me open this!” she demanded, having finally found an installation that sort of resembled a Jacuzzi.

Sander hurried over and helped Lori place him in the tub… just as a green light on the wall above their head lit up. At the same time, a pair of nozzles began filling the pool around him with a viscous, golden liquid until his little gray body was fully submerged.

Releasing his head last, Lori let the creature slip beneath the surface, only to watch him settle on the bottom of his tank. Now surrounded by better lighting, the twins noticed that there was a faded number tattooed across its chest that read 21 above the right pectoral, and 12 above the left.

“Is it dead?” Sander asked, as they both stared at the apparently lifeless corpse.

“I don’t know…” Lori answered, still running too much information though her mind to fully grasp what they were witnessing. “I don’t think so.”

“OK… This is too much, we gotta bounce.”

Hearing her brother’s slang helped ground her a little bit, and Lori knew Sander had a point… checking her stats, Lori saw that they had about another two hours of oxygen.

“Yeah... we uhh… we should go,” she replied, as she did some quick calculations in her head. “What about this?”

Lori nodded towards the little body in front of them, just as it gave a little twitch.

“We tell… every- everyone,” Sander swallowed nervously, before trailing off… “and then, I don’t know…”

Thinking it over, Lori felt strangely protective of the creature… but, as if reading her mind, Sander reminded her.

“It had a gun, Lori...”

He held up the weapon, and Lori noticed its actual purpose.

“Yeah… That’s a soldering gun, Sander.”

Doing a double take, Sander recognized that what he’d been threatening the creature for the past ten minutes was in fact, a simple tool.

“Jesus Christ…”

He closed his eyes briefly, in awe of his own stupidity, before tossing it next to the tank in a frustrated clatter.

“Whatever! Look: we’re done here… and it´s really going to suck for us if they come home to an empty ship.”

Before Lori could answer, a loud sucking noise filled the room and the liquid around their little gray companion started siphoning away. Lori noticed that the injury on its flank seemed to have coagulated into a crusty scar and wondered if it had healed inside as well.

As they broke the surface, the humanoid’s eyes then twitched as it looked blearily towards them, before mouthing softly:

“Take me… with you.”

It closed its eyes again and went limp… and Sander had had enough.

“Of course! Of course it says that…” he huffed, rolling his eyes as the last of the liquid left the tank and the small, gray body settled back on the bottom.

“We need to show this to Quentin,” Lori muttered, her brain racing.

“I don´t know, Lori… It’ll probably die if you take it without a suit.”

Instead of quarreling, she just gave him a long look.

“We need to show this to Quentin… Dead or alive,” his sister muttered, her brain racing. “Come on, let´s get it on the rover.”

Carefully extricating the little body from the pool, the twins carried their sopping new companion though the bunker´s atrium and back up the stairs, waddling to the Landshark as fast as the surprisingly dense cargo permitted.

They put the extra passenger in the back, with Sander doing his best not to crush 2112 in sitting down… and their load secure, zoomed off towards the Firmament to face the inevitable fallout of their inexplicable meeting.

“So… how are we doing this?” Lori asked, as the ship came into view.

Sander mulled it over as they rumbled onward and came to the conclusion that it might be best to ease everyone into the situation.

“We should probably go chill inside… and when they get back, say we found something,” he mused. “It will be freaky enough already, without us literally holding E.T. in our arms!”

“So, what… just leave him here?”

“It´s not like anyone will steal him…” her brother shrugged.

Looking at 2112´s prostrate form, Lori figured he was at least in better condition than when they found him and decelerated, mindful to leave the rover slightly hidden behind one of the Firmament´s thrusters.

“Don´t want to give Mom a heart attack…” she smiled to Sander, who had already called down the dock.

Bet a few hops later, when the siblings rose into the common room to disrobe, they were stunned to find the entire crew in various states of undress, back early from Peepah´s burial. And before they had even removed their helmets, both parents opened fire.

“Is this some kind of prank?” Barney barked, a piece of paper in his gloved fist and their radio in the other. “I was just about to call… Where the hell were you?”

About to divulge their entire endeavour, Lori paused in bewilderment.

“What?”

She went to read the note… but before she could, Sander yanked it away.

“Look, I left a something saying where we were going… I don´t know, it was all I could think of at the time!”

“Yeah, it says That bitch Lori has left… something, something,” Evelyn proclaimed, snatching the balled-up page back from her son and struggling to read his scribbled handwriting aloud. “Your penmanship is atrocious, Sander… underground bunker that we found on a water run-”

“For a secret,” Sander explained under his voice, as the Russians lapped up the family scene with gales of barely suppressed laughter.

Evelyn paused and made him repeat.

“Huh? What´s that?”

“The… that´s what I wrote in the note.”

“Ah, OK: That bitch Lori has left.. for a secret…underground bunker that we found on a water run. She is having crazy dreams.” Their mother frowned angrily. “What in God´s name is that supposed to mean? No coordinates, no location… You might as well have done nothing!”

Slowly becoming the ship´s focal point of feminine ire as Lori took stock of his belated betrayal, Sander pleaded out indignantly in his own defence.

“I- what was I supposed to do? She just ran off!”

“OK, OK… calm down and start from the beginning: Where is this bunker?” Quentin asked, detached from the internecine politics of the Schwab household. “What does it look like?”

With a glance to his sister, the teen realized he was unable to articulate 2112´s existence satisfactorily.

“We found some… thing- Look, you´re still kind of dressed,” he commenced, cutting to the chase. “Maybe it´s easier if you just come and see... I don´t really know how else to say.”

“All of us?” Pavel inquired, not particularly impressed by the offer of prolonging his day. “Belly tired, African food is very strange…”

“You´re going to want to see this...” Lori promised “It changes everything.”

Intrigued enough to put their annoyance on pause, their parents stomped over to the dock and reattached their suit´s hardware together, followed by Quentin and the Russians, with a queasy Pavel bringing up the rear…

“This had better be good,” warned Barney, lowering the platform. “So, where is this little clubhouse?”

The Landshark´s fresh tire-tracks caught their attention, as he and Evelyn disembarked to wait for their children and they ducked around the ship’s flank.

“Typical… those brats didn´t even put the rover away!” he snorted.

But when he hit his flashlight, the man´s sneer vanished at the sight of a short, gray person, sprawled across the vehicle´s trunk!

“Holy…”

While Barney tried to get a word out between trembling lips, Quentin bumped into him from behind… before also spying the Landshark, and yelping like a wounded puppy.

“Sorry… oh shit!” the captain cursed, jumping back so abruptly that he nearly landed on his ass.

“Everyone just back up… ” Barney started, speaking as though they were in the presence of an extremely delicate bomb. “Just-”

“He’s not dangerous dad. He’s hurt,” Lori answered as calmly as she could, pushing to the front of the crowd and pointing to the scar on 2112´s flank.

In search of an explanation to their apparently extraterrestrial discovery, Quentin stared wildly from face to face, looking to the others with bugging eyes…

“What is this devil?” Matvey whispered, standing half-crouched behind Sander despite dwarfing him.

Sergei leaned in tentatively, running his eyes all over the strange, almost glossy body and inhaled to say something… but instead just ended up swallowing a few times, his eyes as large as saucers.

“And if you want to be upset, I did it. I found him… and I’m the one who wanted to bring him back,” Lori continued, lowering her head. “Because he asked…”

“Where…?” Quentin asked hoarsely, as if what he was seeing had sucked all the air from his lungs.

He coughed and repeated his question, but Lori had heard.

“Look, can we go inside? I’ll explain everything… he needs our help.”

Caught between the Firmament and the gray little being, their host hesitated.

“You’re sure it’s alive?”

“Is boy?” Pavel asked to no one in particular.

They looked closer and saw that the little body at their feet was almost imperceptibly twitching… but had smooth genitalia, just like a barbie doll.

All of a sudden, 2112 opened his eyes and Lori felt the group recoil around her.

“Guys, I think it’s OK…” she started, taking a tentative step forward.

But Evelyn quickly snatched her arm, as the little man pointed to their ship.

“Stay here!” she growled, without taking her eyes off the creature.

2112 then placed his hands together in prayer and stared at Quentin, as if to ask permission to board. They all turned, awaiting his decision… and with a sigh, their captain shook his head.

“Fuck it… I’m a gambling man, let’s go,” he shrugged. “But if you got space-cooties or something, so help me God…”