She raised her eyebrows. “Good idea.” Again, she seemed a bit too surprised for his liking.
Rake closed the ship’s logs and opened the comms menu. Only one video message sat in the queue, and she swept it onto the larger viewscreen. She pressed play, and the recorded Drudger’s image appeared. Its shadowed face glared from the screen as it spoke, its words strikingly crisp compared to the garbage-disposal version he’d just heard from the others.
He took a step closer and squinted at the video, because something else wasn’t right. The lines of the Drudger’s neck and face and shoulders were too sharp, too rigid. Its skin was a deep, charcoal black with a dull, matte finish—no glinting metallic shine. The eyes he’d thought had been in shadow were in fact pools of inky, empty black. And there were not two eyes, but four.
His breath caught. “Rake—”
She shushed him with a silent hand wave, staring at the screen, brow creased in contemplation. But not surprise. She seemed stern, if anything. Maybe worried.
Cavalon’s heart beat hard and a feverish chill washed through him. It had to be a trick. Or some kind of mistake. Because if that “Drudger” had four black eyes, then it was not a Drudger. And the alternative was impossible.
Rake pressed play, and the message looped. She watched it carefully, then played it a third time, and it froze on the end frame when it finished. She crossed her arms and didn’t replay it again.
Cavalon stared at her. “You understand their language, don’t you?”
She nodded slowly, not taking her eyes from the screen.
“What’d it say?”
He wasn’t sure she intended to respond at first, but after a few long moments she answered quietly. “It said, ‘First you must’ … something.” She mumbled a few incoherent syllables. “Restart, I think. Yeah, restart. ‘First you must restart the station marked on the atlas.’”
“Restart the station?” he asked, voice thin. “Like the gate?”
“No, they have another word they use for the gates. Arc’antile. It said something more akin to … station or sector. Node, even.”
“What else did it say?”
“Then it said, ‘You have the … supplies,’ I think. Or ‘components,’ maybe. Then, ‘I’ll forward the remainder of the instructions shortly.’”
“Instructions? Like, orders?”
Her expression tightened, lines furrowing her brow. Her gaze remained focused on the screen, deep in contemplation. “No, it was instructions,” she assured. “There are different words for orders or demands. It meant … like, directions. Steps to follow.”
“Either way, that sounds fucking nefarious.”
“Yeah…”
Cavalon crossed his arms and stared at her. “You do not seem appropriately shocked.”
“This message could be decades old. We don’t know when it was recorded,” she said, voice steady.
“Yeah we do!” He pointed to the timestamp in the corner of the screen—mere days ago.
Her lips twitched as she glared at the evidence. “Timestamps can be altered.”
He scoffed. “Why would they bother to do that?”
She didn’t respond, continuing to stare at the frozen frame of the vid message.
“How are you not freaking out?”
“Relax, Mercer,” she said, voice suddenly harsh. “Not everyone jumps to the absolute worst case scenario and starts panicking.”
“They do.” His head rocked fervently, chin bobbing to his chest in an exaggerated nod. “They do about Viators. And what about that weird”—he flicked his fingers at the gold pyramid—“thing he was looking at? That looked like schematics, or a map. Is that the ‘atlas’ it mentioned?”