When the gardening ended, things slowed down. Dulel repeatedly stressed for the labourers to be careful as they started clearing away the centuries of collected earth. His scanning gadgets made it clear where there was little risk of a shovel blade striking the ruin, but still he insisted on overseeing things closely. And Bers seemed to insist on keeping busy, leaving Ayna with her own company.

Finally she walked over to Dulel again and got his attention for a moment.

“I’m going to check the growth. The... mutoki. To get a feel for it. In case of trouble.”

Now that the justification was out of her mouth it felt rather weak, but Dulel just nodded absent-mindedly, engrossed in readings on a pad.

“Sure. Sounds good.”

Ayna headed west towards the nearest concentration of the growth. She left behind the working songs and beeps of gadgets and digging noises, and it really wasn’t that long before she could feel rather alone.

Before her was this rather fascinating version of plant life, and Ayna reached out and touched it for the first time. The crooked little limb she picked felt slightly softer than Terra-descended wood, though not to the degree that it felt like flesh, and there was definitely a harder core underneath.

Ayna then ducked underneath it and walked into the growth, moving with conscious caution until she got a feel for how noisy the ground was. Then stealth simply became automatic as ingrained instincts led her on.

She found herself suddenly wishing for the company of another Dwyyk as she ducked and twisted and overstepped through the tangled limbs. She could just have given that person a look and they would have understood. Ayna had no idea how to truly relate her feelings to the Addax crew or anyone else on this planet.

She was tense, on alert for the slightest hint of danger. And yet it all felt right. Every unheard step was a victory. This planet was nowhere near as deadly as Dwyyk, but the feeling was still there and this strange forest would claim her if she let it. Silence and alertness were survival. They meant being alive, and she was alive. Not in crowded streets or cramped station hallways, but in a natural environment. The huge basi-bushes back home weren’t entirely dissimilar to Wembella’s weird mutoki, and an odd sense of nostalgia filled her. Dancing with the wild wasn’t the time for distracted thoughts, but a small part of Ayna’s mind knew that once she got out, she would be doing some introspection.

It really wasn’t that long before she was able to remove her glasses and take it all in properly. The roof of twisting limbs had now thoroughly closed in over her head. This was deep and dark and old. Her instincts and upbringing recognised all of this as an enemy. But it was a familiar enemy, and one she respected.

She spent a few moments simply standing still in something of a clearing. Deep breaths filled her lungs with unfamiliar but living air, and she felt a strange kind of peace. With that, she had what she’d wanted, and she technically had a job to do, so she turned and walked back.

The roof above thinned. She covered her eyes up again, and had gone most of the way when the wind shifted. Ayna stopped in her tracks as she detected a familiar smell. She analysed it for a few moments, but there was no mistaking this one. She continued on as she had before and didn’t relax until she was some distance away from the growth.

Ayna turned and looked at it. She would be sorely disappointed if the locals didn’t have colourful folk tales about these wilds. Too bad she didn’t speak the language. Perhaps she could ask Bers to serve as a translator. The end result would be fairly broken, but that might end up adding to the feel of it.

But for now she had a more immediate concern. She returned to the dig site, finding the excavation proceeding apace and Dulel absorbed in readings. Bers didn’t have a shovel, and so with the plant growth out of the way he was simply strolling around, practising axe-swings at empty air.

“Herdis, where are you?” she asked into her comm.

“I’m north-west of the site. I’ve almost finished my circle.”

Ayna glanced towards the sun. There were about four hours of daylight left.

“Could you speed it up a bit? I need to show you something.”

“Alright.”

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Ayna sat on the boulder and waited. But she wasn’t bored anymore. She watched a dot appear in the distance and slowly grow until Herdis was standing beneath her.

“What is it?”

Ayna motioned for the woman to join her up on the boulder, then pointed to the west.

“If you really zoom in with your scope, do you see anything odd over there?” she said and pointed to the top of the western slopes.

“It would help if I knew what I’m looking for,” the woman said, but did look.

“People. Don’t you have a thermal setting?”

Herdis gazed through her rifle scope for a few silent seconds.

“No people,” she then said. “I see some signatures, but it’s clearly just animals. Now what is this about?”

She shouldered the rifle.

“I smelled carrion,” Ayna told her. “Human carrion. On the wind.”

Herdis breathed deeply in through her nose but showed no reaction.

“Eh, no offence but my nose is quite a bit better than yours,” Ayna said. “But there’s no doubt. I know that smell. There are bodies over there.”

“Plural?” Herdis said.

“I think so, yes.”

“Hm.”

The woman looked away from her and back at the slopes.

“And you want to go investigate?”

“Since we will be working nearby for a while I think that might be wise,” Ayna pointed out.

“Yes,” Herdis said. “It would.”

She looked through the scope again.

“I don’t think the vehicles can get us there. It is too steep and too rocky. We would have to go on foot. I would say a northern arc would be the smoothest way through the growth.”

“Yeah. For a big, clumsy baseline like yourself.”

They excused themselves to Dulel, who acknowledged them without looking away from his data, and asked Bers to keep an eye on things. Herdis borrowed a chopping tool and then they were off.

The second trip through the wild had a significantly different feel. She was now walking with someone who didn’t know how to be quiet, at least as Ayna understood the concept, and there was death in the air. Ayna’s priorities shifted from simply not being noticed to being on alert for sudden attack. They both had guns, but those only mattered if you had time to get a shot off.

Herdis couldn’t weave through the way Ayna did, and so the woman frequently resorted to chopping through the growth. Though the need ended when they came across a path someone had already cut through.

Ayna touched the stump of a severed limb. She might not know the local flora, but surely this was a very recent wound. More recent than the source of the smell.

Herdis looked thoughtful.

“What is it?” Ayna asked.

“I watched the valley during my walk,” the woman told her. “I saw a figure in the distance, well away from the dig. It was Saketa, on foot.”

“Oh. Was it around here?”

“A bit to the south, or I wouldn’t have seen her for the growth,” Herdis said. “But she was heading westward. At that moment, at least. She could have been going around some obstruction.”

“It seems awfully coincidental if she didn’t do this,” Ayna said and touched the stump again.

She looked at the ground. She wasn’t a master tracker, but the hints of footsteps seemed to correspond with the strange woman’s size and weight.

They kept on going and saw no reason not to make use of a path made easier by someone else’s efforts. The breeze stayed favourable and Ayna’s nose led them. They reached the slopes before too long and the growth began to thin out a bit.

They found the bodies beneath a cliff’s edge, in a slope just barely even enough to walk in. Though the growth was at its thinnest here the surrounding rocks helped hide the four unfortunates from view. Ayna and Herdis had to clamber around one of them to see the bodies.

There were four of them. Ayna estimated they’d been young adults, and dead for a maximum of one month. Two had suffered horrific slashing wounds and a third had a badly broken skull, although that could have been postmortem. Ayna glanced upwards, and neither she nor Herdis bothered saying out loud that they’d probably been dropped from the edge. To hide them.

It was the fourth body that really grabbed her attention. It was easily the least decayed of the lot, so the odd burns that dotted the man’s skin were readily visible. In Ayna’s completely amateur view it almost looked like they’d started on the inside.

“You’re the medical person,” Ayna commented. “What do you think of those burns?”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Herdis replied, her voice and manner that of a detached professional. “And I have scraped people up from all kinds of accidents.”

She leaned in close, examining a mark on the man’s cheek.

“I’m not even sure those are burns.”

“And why why WHY have they not been preyed on?” Ayna asked.

She’d once seen people move the body of a woman who’d died in a space station’s duct system and not been found for a couple of weeks. That’s what this all reminded her of. There had been nothing going at these people’s flesh except for the bodies’ internal chemicals. Aside from some light nibbling on one woman’s outstretched arm. Ayna couldn’t help but notice that it was the furthest body part away from the burned man.

“No radiation or dangerous chemicals,” Herdis said, examining a sliver on the sleeve of her suit. “Or this would be lighting up.”

Ayna shook her head.

“This is... weird.”

“Yes. Yes it is.”