As soon as the interplanetary spell faded away, and our boots began to slowly sink into the soft, white sands of Noagh, I knew there was definitely something off about the place. Whether it was my instinct or just my perception being skewed by concern, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to stop until I knew my parents and our close friends were okay.

Ben and I had geared up for this. We’d packed some swamp witch spell supplies and healing potions, just in case. It was well after midnight by the time we reached Strava. The bluish moon cast its azure light all over the resort, which stood quiet before us, overlooking the beach and the ocean. I could see other small islands in the distance.

“The boats are still here.” Ben pointed at the small jetty just fifty yards away. All five vessels were tied to the wooden pillars, gently moving with the undulating waves beneath.

“That means they’re still on the island, somewhere,” I replied.

I walked over to the firepit, where fading embers were left. The flames had died completely, and the warmth they’d left behind was already dissipating. I heard branches break. I looked around, searching for the source of the noise.

Twenty yards to the west, six turquoise panthers came out.

“Don’t move,” I whispered.

They were big creatures, and quite a sight to behold. The males had a short white mane on the backs of their necks—they were also bigger than their female counterparts. They saw us, but didn’t seem fazed, and sauntered toward the water. One by one, they jumped in and started swimming toward the deeper fascia of ocean, where winged fish pierced the surface, flopping around before disappearing underwater again.

“That’s interesting,” Ben said, then came over. “They like to fish.”

“I imagine that’s where the blue fur helps,” I replied. “They can hunt underwater and blend in with that environment.”

“Come on, let’s check the house.” Ben sighed.

He made his way up the patio steps, then went inside. We checked all the rooms and common areas. All of the group’s belongings were still here, including their cameras and… Bowie. The metallic ball sat idly on a nightstand in what I quickly recognized as Mom and Dad’s room. The new message light was blinking on it, green and intermittent. They’d yet to listen to my voicemails.

Something clutched at my heart as I took my time to analyze every single corner of the room. It seemed as though they’d left in a rush. The bed wasn’t made. Their clothes were still in the dresser. The bathroom light was on. A large charcoal-colored towel had been left on the floor.

I heard Ben searching through the other rooms, but I couldn’t really move. Something had gotten my parents out of bed. Something must have happened, for them to leave like this. Mom was a stickler for keeping everything tidy, and they never would’ve left without Bowie unless it was urgent.

Curious, I picked the tech ball up and swiped across its surface. The control screen lit up green on a black background. They’d recorded videos and messages on it, along with hundreds of photos. I flipped through them, following the date and time stamp on each.

One of the videos started from the resort.

“Okay, I’ll start filming from here, just so we’ve got the whole trip to the cave recorded,” Mom said from behind the camera. Dad was in the frame, along with Lucas, Xavier, Vivienne, and the others. They were dressed in shorts, shirts, and hiking boots. The video had been shot at 6:48 pm, two nights ago.

I let the video play, following my family as they got out of the resort and followed Dad deep into the jungle. I recognized the concerned look on his face. That was his investigative expression.

“Derek, what did you find?” Vivienne asked him from off camera.

“I’ll have to show you,” Dad replied. “It makes no sense to tell you what it looks like. It’s better if you all see for yourselves.”

“Should we be worried?” Mom asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Dad muttered. “But we should check those Druid archives and ask around once we go back to Calliope. There were definitely creatures living here. Highly advanced creatures. With technology and culture and everything.”

My blood ran cold, though the news of this planet having once been inhabited didn’t come as a shock. We’d all seen the ancient structures they’d left behind. But my father had definitely found something else. Not willing to wait through the whole recorded trip until we went there ourselves, I fast-forwarded through the video until the first full view of a cave opening came up.

“Oh, wow,” I murmured.

“What’s up?” Ben asked, startling me.

I paused the video, then looked up at him. “Any sign of them?” I asked.

He shook his head, visibly concerned. “Nope. Nothing. Looks like they just up and left. They left everything behind… phones, cameras… I see they left Bowie, too,” he said, nodding at the tech ball. “There’s some dust settling, and their scent is fading. They’ve been gone for one, maybe two days now.”

I exhaled sharply. A part of me was already fearing the worst. The Novaks had terrible prior adventures. I took a deep breath and focused on the video, instead. I pressed the play button and showed it to Ben, too. We both stood there, in silence, as we watched our parents and family group enter the cave.

It was dark, but eerily spacious. The camera switched to infrared, unable to capture nighttime images like our eyes could. I spotted glowing blue cables on the walls, and so did Mom.

“Derek, what are those?” she asked.

“You’ll see in a bit,” Dad replied.

My jaw dropped when they reached a large, dome-shaped chamber with slick black walls. The camera followed the glowing blue cables as they spread out and fed through hundreds of metallic pods.

“Whoa,” Ben breathed by my side, his eyes wide with shock.

“What the hell is this place?” I murmured.

Mom got Bowie closer to what looked like a computer mainframe of sorts, taking closeup shots of its panels. None of the symbols engraved into the screen edges seemed familiar, but the entire ensemble gave me the creeps.

“One thing is for sure: this thing here has something to do with the pods,” Mom said, pointing at the cables, then at the computer panel. “Have you figured out how to turn this thing on, by any chance?”

We watched the whole video, their entire survey of the weird-looking cave and its multiple chambers. They’d counted five hundred and five pods, all connected with those glowing blue cables to the computer panel mounted on a wall. We heard the hissing sound, the result of Claudia tugging one of the cables and accidentally pulling it out of a pod. We saw them leave the cave behind and come back to the resort.

“All right, we’ll pack up and get out, first thing in the morning,” Dad said to Vivienne and Lucas before retreating to his and Mom’s room. “I’ll see you all at 6 am.”

“Whoa. So they agreed to come back,” Ben concluded, staring at me after the video ended.

I nodded. “That was the night before last,” I said. “They were going to come back earlier to tell us about the cave and to get some survey gear.”

“We need to find the cave,” he replied. “It might have something to with their whereabouts… maybe?”

I shrugged. “Worth a shot. We’ll need to scour the jungle anyway. Might as well.”

We headed out through the back door, crossing the small garden path leading directly into the jungle. I replayed the video on Bowie, with the volume turned off. We used the recording to retrace the group’s steps, from the moment they left the resort.

About fifty feet into the jungle, however, I stopped.

“Telluris Draven!” I called out, then looked at Ben. “We forgot to check in with them.”

“They’ve got the telescope on us, anyway. And we’ve got Bowie now, too,” he replied.

“Yeah, but still. Best to be proactive about this,” I muttered, unwilling to repeat the past mistakes of our family members.

There was no answer via Telluris. I couldn’t feel him, either. That just added another dollop of anxiousness to the already-increasing cluster of raw nerves I was dealing with.

“Nothing.” Ben let a heavy sigh out.

“Telluris isn’t working,” I concluded, my stomach clenching.

Ben thought about it for a minute, then pointed ahead, somewhere deeper in the jungle. “Listen, let’s go check that cave out and do a search of the woods,” he said. “We’ve got the interplanetary spell to go back with. We can leave right now, if you want, but—”

“No, you’re right,” I replied. “Let’s do what we came here to do. Hopefully this isn’t another Neraka mess, where we can’t leave the planet.”

“How? There’s no one here, besides our people!” Ben groaned.

“I don’t know!” I shot back, raising my voice. I was letting my frustration and fear get the better of me. “Sorry. It’s just that—”

“It’s okay,” Ben replied, then gave me a sympathetic smile and pointed at Bowie. “Come on, hit play, and let’s go find our people.”

I chuckled, then let the video play. We followed the route that my parents had taken before us, going deeper into the jungle. We reached an area where the tree crowns were so thick and lush that they completely obscured the night sky. Insects chirped all around us. There were all kinds of animals prowling nearby, but none had the courage to approach us.

We eventually found the cave. We stopped in front of it, then looked around. Several weird-looking monkeys stared at us from above. Their coats were multicolored, their eyes big and blue. Had we not been on a mission to find our parents, I would’ve loved to spend some time to get to know these creatures a little better. They looked positively adorable, and there was a spark in their eyes that denoted a high degree of curiosity.

We checked the video again, frame by frame.

“So they went straight inside,” Ben said.

I nodded, then went in. He stayed close as we made our way through the main corridor. About fifty feet in, the glowing blue cables emerged from the walls and lined them toward the upcoming chambers. I could feel the cold air currents as they rolled out.

“They look so weird,” I murmured, occasionally glancing at the cables.

“Where do you think they draw their power from?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know, but if I were to make an educated guess, I’d say it’s either some subterranean source, such as a river or gas stream, or it’s solar, and there will be panels somewhere above the cave. You know, where the monkeys were,” I replied.

“Can you smell it?” he asked quietly.

“What? Our parents’ scent?”

He nodded. “It’s faint.”

“Yeah. I don’t think they came back here after the video,” I said. “The trail’s gone cold here.”

Ben sniffed the air again, then frowned. “Something’s off,” he whispered. “There’s something else.”

I caught the scent. It was sharp, almost pungent, and heavy, a mixture of sweat and citrus and a tinge of ammonia—or a similar substance.

“Not ours,” I said. “Foreign presence. Or… damn, could be local. Definitely not from our group.”

“It’s faded, too, though. Whatever it was, it was here at the same time as our parents, or shortly after,” Ben replied.

We found the domed chamber and froze in the doorway the moment we laid our eyes on its contents. I instinctively clutched Bowie in my hands. My heart started racing, and beads of cold sweat instantly bloomed on my face.

The cables fed into metallic pods and a computer mainframe of sorts, as per the video. But there was one crucial difference between what our parents had recorded, and what we were looking at. The three hundred pods were all open. Their lids were set aside, and steam kept rolling out from inside.

“Holy crap,” Ben breathed, then rushed inside.

I followed, then we split up and toured the room, carefully checking every pod and cable connection. The interior of each metallic egg was padded with sponge-like and fabric materials. There were trace impressions of creatures that had been staying in each pod. Most of them were slightly taller than us, from what I could tell.

“These are biosystems,” Ben said, his eyes wide with shock. “They were conservation pods. There were people of some kind living in these things, in some kind of stasis.”

“What makes you say that? The stasis part, I mean.”

“Well, according to the video, these things have been here for a while,” Ben replied. “And Corrine said it, too. Any intelligent civilization would look for a way to preserve specimens and save its species in the face of potential extinction. This could be one such instance,” he explained, then pointed at the inner walls of a pod. “I mean, look at this. It’s made for comfort, long-term living like this, lying down. The glowing cables power each pod…”

There were circuit and command boards inside each pod, on the left-hand side. Upon further inspection, I came to the conclusion that Ben was dead-on with all of it. Chills ran down my spine.

“You’re right.” I pointed at the small exhaust holes and control buttons. “These replicate a living environment. In and out shafts, for oxygen and carbon dioxide, respectively. Temperature and humidity control switches. Those are the only symbols I recognize, as they seem to be universal.”

The two switches had the stylized image of a flame and water drops engraved onto their surfaces. “Yeah, it doesn’t take a scientist.” Ben sighed. “So, there was something living in these things.”

We stared at each other for a while.

“Five hundred and five somethings, to be precise,” I replied. “There are two more chambers like this, from what Dad says in the video.”

Ben looked at the round doorway, then nodded. “Let’s go check them out.”

We didn’t need to see the rest of the video again, for this part. The chambers were adjacent to the main one and linked via the same glowing blue cables. There were a hundred pods in one grotto, and a hundred and five in the other. They all looked the same, their top halves off and revealing the soft, padded interiors.

We roamed through the rest of the cave but didn’t find anything else of interest. I sighed as we went back inside the main room, then looked down and froze. Ben watched me quietly as I crouched and brushed my fingers against the moss covering the cave’s floor. There were footprints pressed into it—thousands of them, going in different directions.

I got down on my knees and sniffed the floor. The same citrus scent hit my nostrils. I looked up at Ben. “Whatever was in those capsules got out, shortly after our group was here,” I said.

“I hate to say this, Rose, but you were right,” Ben replied. “Something definitely happened here.”

“And it might’ve spilled into the resort, somehow,” I added, then got back up, resting my hands on my hips. “What now?”

“Let’s check outside,” he said.

We made our way out, then climbed on top of the stony mound where we’d seen the colorful monkeys. There were dozens of nests there, made with twigs, waxy leaves, and patches of fur. There were fruit peels and hard seeds discarded here and there.

“Primates live here, for sure,” I said.

“The ones we saw, right?” Ben asked, and I replied with a nod. He frowned as he moved between the nest clusters, then crouched and gently lifted one off the ground. “Rose, come see this,” he said then.

I carefully moved toward him but stilled at the sight of black glass panels hidden beneath the nests, visible only after Ben had lifted one.

“Let me guess… solar panels?” I asked, my voice trembling.

“Mm-hmm. I think they’re all over this mound,” he said, pointing toward a distant edge. “They’re not all covered, though. You can see some farther on that side, clearly. My guess is whichever panel captures the sunlight, it spreads it through the others, and then the circuit stores it underground and fuels the pods.”

“This is some serious tech,” I replied.

He nodded. “We definitely need help here. We can’t do this ourselves.”

Ben was right. This was a new and unexpected development. Our parents, uncles, and friends were missing on a planet that was presumably uninhabited. There were strange pods that they’d found all clean and sealed—which were now opened, with five hundred and five unknown life forms out there, somewhere.

We had no way of reaching Mom and Dad, either. And the two of us were not enough for what had suddenly become a search mission. Then again, we had no definitive proof linking the creatures in the pods to our group. After all, Corrine and Ibrahim alone could fend off pretty much anything on their own. Adding all the vampires and Lucas and Kailyn’s fae powers into the equation, it still worked out in their favor.

Maybe our people were somewhere else entirely. Or maybe they were with whatever creatures had been hibernating in those pods. There were no signs of struggle anywhere—not at the resort, and not in the cave, either. Nothing torn or broken. No blood of any kind. I was beyond worried at that point.