“No, no, no, no,” I whispered as I stared at the new wall that now blocked the only exit from this cavern, at least as far as I was aware.

My lungs still felt tight and I could only speak in a breathy whisper, but the initial moment of shock had passed. Before I had felt almost nothing; now, I felt everything. Cold chills running up and down my scales, a churning discomfort in my stomach, and pulses of pure panic that kept stabbing through my brain.

The wall, that was the problem. Maybe there was a way through. I ran the last few feet forward and started attacking it madly, raking my claws against the smooth surface. When that did nothing I reared back and tried the claws on my feet, which were tougher. Still no impact.

Part of me knew that I was behaving irrationally, but I couldn’t help it. I was trapped. I couldn’t handle that, not again.

“Hey, hey,” Zander said from next to me, sounding concerned. I ignored him as I kept lashing out with my back claws. “Siren. Siren!”

Then his hand was on my shoulder, warm and steady. I jerked away and ran to the side, then crouched down to huddle into myself, tucking my head in so that the hard carapace on my back and limbs could protect me from the world. I was trembling all over and breathing fast and shallow. I could barely string two coherent thoughts together.

I heard Zander walk closer, but he didn’t touch me this time. Instead, he paused a few paces away. “Hey, it’s okay,” he said in a voice I could barely comprehend. “Just focus on breathing, alright?”

I drew in a long, shuddering breath, then let it all out at once. Another breath in, another breath out.

I kept breathing that way for a minute, perhaps two. Gradually my racing heart slowed its pace and my brain calmed down. Eventually I was able to uncurl my body from its defensive position and look out into the world again.

Zander was crouched a few paces away from me, arms resting on his knees. He had placed the flashlight next to him, so I could see our immediate surroundings a little, but his face was cast in shadow.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded once. My stomach still ached and my scales still prickled, but the feelings were manageable now.

“Good.” He leaned back and studied me. “Claustrophobic?”

“Something like that,” I murmured. A brief memory of a brightly-lit room and a locked door flashed through my mind. I pushed it away immediately.

“Hmm.” He kept looking at me for a few moments longer. Then he got up. “No need to panic yet. This ain’t good, but we’ve got options. I’ve got a few tools back in my sack that might be able to break through that wall.”

I nodded in agreement, breathing a little easier now. “And there are side passages,” I pointed out after a moment. “Maybe one of them leads to another way out.”

His teeth flashed in a grin. “See? That’s the spirit. Gotta keep things optimistic.”

I got up as well and followed Zander as he started making his way back down the hallway. We had both dropped our sacks when we ran for the exit, so we would have to go all the way back to the place with the vines to retrieve them. I could use the long walk to fully calm myself down and put myself in a rational frame of mind again.

I didn’t look behind me as we left.

~

The tools didn’t work.

I had suspected that would be the case given the Verdanti’s claims that their scientists couldn’t sample the external walls of the structure. But it was one thing to be told that, and another to watch with my own eyes as a diamond chisel entirely failed to scratch the surface of the wall. Even Zander’s short-wave laser gun had no impact on the material.

While Zander attempted to break through the surface, I stood a few feet off to the side so I could examine it more closely. I’d found a magnifying glass in my rucksack and I was using it to trace the details of the material. The more I looked at it, the more familiar it felt. Finally, after several minutes spent staring at the wall without blinking, it clicked.

“It’s like a shell,” I said out loud.

Zander paused his current attempt, which involved chipping the chisel against the seam between two of the hexagons to see if it would be weaker than the main surface. So far, it hadn’t been. “A shell?” he asked, puzzled.

“Or like carapace,” I said, tapping the hard surface that covered the back of my head in emphasis. “It feels more organic than mineral.”

He frowned and looked back at the wall. “That doesn’t make sense. Organic structures are usually weaker than metals and minerals, right?”

I shrugged. “Usually doesn’t mean always.”

He made a ‘hmph’ sound at that, but his eyes grew softer in the lantern light as he contemplated the idea. “Still, if this is a shell? Imagine the size of the original creature!” He tossed a grin towards me. “You ever visited Swoom? Big ol’ planet in the Golden System?”

I shook my head. I’d done a tour through the system before, but that particular planet had escaped my notice.

“There’s this giant species that lives there, the Dutils. Huge old squid-like beings, easily twenty times the size of me. Big fans of long-form poetry - you’d like them, probably.” I smiled slightly at that. “Anyway, the Dutils are the biggest species I’ve ever met, and even they would be dwarfed by this thing! Can you imagine what it must’ve looked like when it was alive?”

I could, actually. My smile grew as I pictured a gigantic creature slowly working its way through the forest, knocking down trees with the kind of ease that I would use when walking through tall grass. Perhaps it would be a little like a cross between a snail and a spotted toyak, mainly using the muscles on its neck to move but occasionally rolling its whole body forward to create a colossal impact. Now, what medium would be best to represent such a being? Oils, perhaps, to capture the shine of the body, though ceramic would be interesting for the shell -

I felt a stab of disappointment as reality hit me. I currently had no way to access my ship with its deep reserves of supplies. The idea would have to wait until we had found a way out of this place.

Right now, I needed to focus on practical things. I pulled my portable computer out of the pouch that rested against my hip and checked the time, then flicked my tongue out in contemplation. “Zander,” I asked, “doesn’t your species need to eat regularly?”

He had gone back to tapping away at the wall while I thought. Now he shrugged as he kept working steadily. “For regular Humans, sure, and I like eating well enough. But when it’s impractical -” he waved at the wall, clearly indicating ‘like right now’ - “I can set it aside.”

“And how does that work?”

He paused his work properly, then, so he could turn and look at me. “Well… you know how full-blooded Xinians work, right?”

I nodded. “Reality warping.”

“Yup.” He held a hand out in front of him and that shift happened again. The hand warped from its usual light purple to a light brown, then a dark green, then a deep black. “I can change any part of my body to be the way I feel it should be. If I get hungry and there’s no food around? I just tell my stomach it’s not hungry after all. Problem solved.” His hand shifted back to its normal color as he looked over at me. “How often do you eat?”

I smiled slightly and tilted my head to the side. “I’m similar, actually. I can get by perfectly well without eating. I only do it now and then, for fun.” I always made a point of trying the local cuisine in each new world I visited, but in my travels between planets I often went days, perhaps weeks without eating.

Well. Except for when I occasionally craved something delicious and went on a mint-eating spree. Was it my fault that the universe had developed so many unique ways of presenting such an intriguing flavor?

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In any case, Zander’s answer had reminded me of another question I had. I crossed my arms and looked up at him. “So you do have Xinian abilities. Why not use those to tell the wall to be softer?”

He frowned at that and looked back at the wall. “I’m not that good,” he said curtly as he started working again. “I can only change myself, not the rest of the world.”

I leaned back slightly. Since I’d met him for the second time, Zander had always been cheerful and warm, a pleasant kind of person to be around. Yet his last statement had been flat and cold. There was history there, I could tell.

Part of me wanted to ask what was wrong. But what right did I have to pry when I kept my own secrets so close to my heart?

At least that solved another puzzle I’d wondered about. “I suppose that explains why you’re purple and blue,” I said with a slight smile. “I’ve only seen Humans in shades of brown before.”

That made him grin and relax. “Would you believe I started looking this way when I was only four? I thought purple was the best color in the world. Why not make myself purple too?” He chuckled. “Though I went through this horrible plaid phase when I hit puberty. I think my father still has some pictures of me from then back at home. Stars, I was an eyesore.”

That surprised a laugh out of me, which made his grin grow even broader. “And that’s not even close to the worst stuff I got up to as a teen. So, this one time, I had gotten really into this ridiculously edgy Erupti band and decided I was going to be just like them…”

~

“Another dead end,” Zander said with a sigh as he shined his flashlight on the rough wall in front of us.

We’d eventually given up on breaking down the front wall and had started exploring the various passages in the carapace system instead. We were being logical about it, too. Zander had hundreds of little positioning beacons in his bag, so we placed one at every intersection to mark the way back. Our computers were still able to detect signals inside the cavernous system even if they couldn’t receive data from outside, so we were able to make a rough digital map of the space as we explored it.

I also marked each path that we went down with a bit of chalk that I had dug out of my bag. I wanted a backup system in place in case technology failed us again.

Now the two of us turned away from the dead end and headed in the opposite direction. We had already mapped out most of the first floor, but we hadn’t found much of interest. Just an old nest that some animal must have created in one of the earlier hallways, and one area where an interior wall had a giant crack down the middle that let us peer into an adjacent hallway. The second one was slightly exciting as it showed that the walls could break down. Yet we still couldn’t even scratch them with the materials we had on hand.

We were taking turns telling stories as we walked to help pass the time. I mostly told classic folktales that I had memorized long ago, but Zander enjoyed talking about his past escapades. As we walked back to the most recent intersection he told me about the time he’d visited the planet Aerita to learn the sport of skyboarding. Falling through the sky with nothing but an aerodynamic board didn’t sound fun to me, but if Zander’s broad smile was any indication, he had enjoyed it.

By the time he finished his story we had reached the intersection and turned down the second hallway. I marked the side of the hallway with a bit of chalk as he shifted to look at me. “Your turn.”

I hummed and scratched a claw under my chin. “Perhaps the story of the Lkthy hero Wrgfn? According to their legends, she walked across their largest sea to rescue her lost love.”

Zander wagged his head from side to side in a noncommittal way. Then he grinned in a lazy way. “Honestly, I’d rather hear a story about you. What’s your wildest tale?”

I looked back at him flatly. “I don’t have any wild tales.”

“Ha! I doubt that. No crazy teenage adventures? No wild nights after a local drug hit you harder than you expected?” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “No passionate romantic encounters?”

I looked away and scowled at the darkness ahead of us. “Clearly we lead very different lives.”

He chuckled at that and went quiet. At first I was content to keep walking, but after a while the silence itched at me. I had never been one to share the details of my life with others. Yet something about Zander made words spill out of my mouth before I realized what I was doing.

“I tried my hand at romance in my third century.” I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was looking at me again, but I kept my eyes forward. “On a few planets, actually, with perhaps a dozen different species. I kept trying to find someone who could make me feel… different, I suppose.” I let out a tiny breath and shrugged. “The physical part never did anything for me, and the connections didn’t feel real. So eventually I gave up on it, focused on my work instead.”

Stars, I could feel that he was still looking at me. How did he do that?

“How about your own species?” he asked. “Ever try with them?”

I shot a glare towards him. Yes, he was watching me, and his brown eyes were filled with interest. “You’re fishing for information,” I accused him.

“Nah,” he replied calmly, though there was a twinkle in his eye that cast doubt on his response. “It’s an honest question. Some people just have a harder time connecting with beings that don’t share their species.”

I looked forward again and flicked my tail up so that I could hold it in one hand. “... there aren’t any others like me,” I eventually whispered, keeping my eyes forward.

Zander paused before he replied. “Oh,” he finally said in a faltering voice. He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced down at me, his eyes soft. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Bright lights, sterile equipment, and dark red eyes flashed through my head. I shook my head quickly, both in answer and to clear the thoughts.

“Okay, that’s fine.” He reached out and patted my shoulder. “You just tell me if you ever change your mind, Si.”

I blinked at that. Si? No one had ever given me a nickname before, not even the beings I had tried to love all those centuries ago.

I decided that I liked it.

~

Hours passed. Days passed. I told Zander how I first discovered my love of the arts, when I wandered into a painter’s studio and found myself absolutely frozen by the range of colors and concepts displayed on the walls. He told me about how he taught himself cliff diving as a child, how it was the first thing that gave him the urge to reach for new heights at every opportunity.

We found a few points of interest in the carapace caverns. An area deep in the center where the walls spiraled into a core room, one that was strangely warm despite the absolute lack of any heat source. A few places where the outer walls seemed to change just slightly in texture compared to their surroundings, though they were still as impenetrable as ever. A giant, gaping room in the back half of the caverns that spanned all fifteen levels of the structure, with strange swirling patterns left behind on the floor and ceiling.

We found the strange vines again as well. More of them grew all along the sides of the structure, and the further back we went, the larger they got. We didn’t dare to touch any of those vines, just in case, but we did store the one vine Zander had already pulled out in a nested set of no-contam boxes.

We needn’t have bothered. Because eventually, after four and a half days of nonstop walking, we finished mapping the entire cavern. And we didn’t find a single alternative exit.

“Dust and ashes,” Zander muttered as we stood at the final dead end. The blinking lights on the computer screen made it clear: there were no other paths for us to explore.

I let out a long, tired sigh. I had prepared myself for this outcome as time had passed and our escape became less and less likely. We were well and truly trapped, and there was nothing I could do to fix it, not this time.

Still, I was not going to panic. I would behave like a rational being.

“We’ll have to wait for help from the outside,” I said as Zander glared at the wall ahead of us. “If it ever comes.”

He took off his hat and ruffled his short blue curls. “Dust and ashes,” he repeated, gripping the brim of the hat tightly.

“Yes, I know,” I replied mildly as I leaned sideways against the wall. “I don’t like our odds either. If the Verdanti team couldn’t find a way to sample this carapace before, and if we couldn’t cut into it? Perhaps there is simply nothing that can be done.” I slashed my tail in the air behind me in frustration. “Perhaps we’ll both be stuck here forever.”

I was being flippant as a way to vent emotions, but a part of me was quietly miserable. What if I was right? What if there was no way out, and we ended up stuck in this place for hundreds, no, thousands of years? It was a horrible thought that could not be borne, so I pushed it away quickly.

Zander grimaced as he turned back around to look at me. “We won’t be stuck here forever,” he said with a grumble.

I tilted my head to the side in a silent question.

He ruffled his hair again, then slapped the hat back onto his head with a sigh. “My father,” he said shortly. “I talk with him, oh, every decade or so. When he doesn’t hear from me he’ll come looking.” He grimaced again as he gestured toward the wall. “He could tear this thing apart, no problem.”

Right, reality warping. I nodded my understanding. “So we have a backup plan. That’s good.”

Zander just grunted at that and turned back towards the hallway. “Let’s head back to the entrance. We can set up a camp there and talk over our options.”

I let him take the lead so I could watch him as he stalked forward. He was walking faster than before and his shoulders were hunched down. He was frustrated. But why? He was lucky enough to have a father, and better yet, a father who would eventually come save us from this horrible situation. What was so terrible about that?

Well, I supposed I would have time to find out. Even if the Verdanti could find a way to free us, they had their hands full with the pandemic at the moment and had very good reasons to avoid this place. They wouldn’t focus on freeing two wayward immortals until their own problems had been solved. Even in the best case scenario we wouldn’t get out of this cavern for another year, perhaps two.

I kept my eyes on Zander as I flicked out my tongue contemplatively. We were stuck together for the long haul, then.