? ? ?

  We picked a terrace cut into a shallow corner where an old wall—part of some collapsed building—rose at our backs like a broken tooth. It gave us cover from one direction, sightlines across the open terrace in the other. The overgrowth was thinner there, like the surface had been too smooth for it to grip.

  Chloe called it “a defensible micro-plateau,” because she couldn’t stop herself.

  Frankie called it “Camp Please-Don’t-Eat-Me.”

  Trevor didn’t call it anything. He just walked the perimeter with his tablet like he was counting liabilities.

  We moved fast. Not panicked fast. Competent fast.

  Sensor stakes went down first: thin rods with little swiveling heads that watched heat and motion. Drone beacons followed, hovering at fixed points to build a crude perimeter map. I placed reflective markers on the terrace edges, because I didn’t trust my own eyes with the way the distance warped here.

  Mercy watched from orbit through our feeds and gave suggestions with the quiet authority of someone who couldn’t bleed.

  “Comms mast should be elevated,” she said. “The dome’s internal reflections may attenuate certain frequencies along the terrace plane.”

  “May,” Trevor repeated dryly. “Always with the may.”

  “Trevor,” Mercy said, and there was warmth in it, which only made it worse. “We are standing in an alien megacity. I am trying to be polite to reality.”

  Frankie drifted above the camp site like an anxious balloon. “Polite is how you get eaten,” he muttered. “Nature loves manners. It’s how it traps you.”

  “Frankie, can you be helpful?” Chloe asked.

  “I am being emotionally supportive,” Frankie said. “By panicking loudly.”

  ? ? ?

  The printer went down next: our ugly, boxy miracle of manufacturing, all angles and scuffed panels, like a refrigerator that had survived a war. We had dragged it across space for months and now we were asking it to build us a home on an alien terrace.

  It shuddered as it unfolded, anchoring its feet into the terrace surface with a soft grinding sound.

  “Feedstock?” I asked.

  “Available,” Mercy replied. “You have sufficient mass in the canisters for initial shelter ribs, seals, and basic utilities. Please do not print decorative nonsense.”

  Chloe looked offended. “Science is not decorative.”

  “The last time you said that,” Mercy said, “you printed a commemorative plaque for the microwave.”

  “It was morale,” Chloe argued.

  “It was a crime,” Trevor said.

  I initiated the first build: shelter ribs. Thin arcs of printed composite, coming out warm, smelling faintly like hot plastic and ozone. They clicked into place with satisfying mechanical certainty, like the printer was trying very hard to pretend the universe made sense.

  As the ribs rose, I felt the scale again. The shelter looked like a toy against the terrace backdrop. A little bubble of human insistence in a place that didn’t need us.

  We printed ground seals next, then wind baffles, then a little power distribution spine that would let us run lights and charge batteries without turning the camp into a bonfire beacon.

  “Comms mast?” I asked.

  “Align it toward the dome’s apex,” Mercy said. “I will compensate for the dome’s lensing from my end.”

  Trevor snorted. “From your end. From orbit. Where you are safe.”

  “I am not safe,” Mercy said softly.

  The moment hung there for a second, sharp.

  Then Frankie coughed theatrically. “Okay! Love the vulnerability. Love it. Please do not do it right now while I am trying to figure out if the air is going to start eating my photons.”

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  Chloe leaned in close to me. “He’s scared,” she whispered, like Frankie couldn’t hear her. Like Frankie wasn’t literally living in our comms.

  “I am not scared,” Frankie said instantly. “I am professionally concerned.”

  “That’s scared with paperwork,” Trevor muttered.

  We got the mast up, its thin lattice rising and locking. Mercy ran alignment checks, her voice becoming more focused, more technical.

  “Rotate three degrees clockwise. Hold. Good. Now lock.”

  I locked it. The mast clicked.

  “Signal stability improved,” Mercy said. “Thank you.”

  “Great,” I said. “Now the important question: where do we poop?”

  There it was—the first truly human problem on Venus.

  Trevor’s head snapped toward me like I’d suggested setting the printer on fire. “We should establish sanitary protocols.”

  Chloe groaned. “Don’t say that word.”

  “What word?” Trevor asked, offended.

  Frankie gasped dramatically. “He said the P-word.”

  Trevor glared. “It is a normal word.”

  “Not here,” Chloe said. “Not today. Not on the first day.”

  I held up my hands. “We need a latrine. We need it away from camp. Downwind. Not near water—if we even find water. And we need it marked so nobody falls into it in the dark and dies with dignity’s throat ripped out.”

  Frankie floated closer, eyes wide. “Can we print a little sign? Like, ‘Here lies Trevor’s sense of joy’?”

  Trevor ignored him with practiced skill. “Downwind requires a prevailing wind direction,” he said.

  Chloe waved her tablet. “There isn’t wind. There’s… convection. The air is doing weird slow sheet movements along the terrace. It’s like—”

  “It’s like the dome is a giant terrarium,” I said, and immediately regretted the metaphor because it made the place feel too alive.

  Chloe’s eyes lit anyway. “Yes! Exactly—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Not exactly. Just… pick a direction.”

  Mercy’s voice cut in, practical. “Airflow along this terrace is currently moving from your left to your right at 0.3 meters per second.”

  Trevor nodded sharply, relieved by numbers. “Then the latrine goes—”

  “Far,” Chloe said.

  “Further,” I agreed.

  Frankie floated behind us like a judge. “Put it right at the edge,” he suggested. “Maximum drama.”

  Trevor stared at him. “Why do you want drama?”

  “Because we’re on Venus,” Frankie said, like it explained everything. “Drama is the currency.”

  We argued about it for ten minutes, because arguing about bodily functions was easier than admitting we were standing in the first truly inhabited alien city humans had ever seen.

  We settled on a spot behind a broken wall segment fifty meters away, marked by reflective tape and a drone beacon that would scream at you if you got too close in the dark.

  Chloe named it “The Throne.”

  Trevor called it “Disgusting.”

  Frankie insisted on calling it “Trevor’s Office.”

  It was stupid. It was petty. It was perfect.

  By the time the shelter bubble sealed, the camp was a thin, trembling thing—ribs, seals, a little power spine, a mast reaching up like a desperate finger.

  But it was ours. For now.

  And once it was stable enough that we could leave it without instantly dying, we did the thing we’d been pretending we wouldn’t do until we were “ready.”

  We went inside.

  Not deep. Not far. Just a short loop.

  ? ? ?

  A building stood at the terrace edge like a collapsed arch, one side torn away, the other still intact. It wasn’t the only structure near us, but it was one of the few with an opening that wasn’t fully sealed.

  The aperture was half-irised, stuck mid-cycle like a jaw frozen in the act of opening. A band of faint glyphs pulsed around it—three clusters repeated around the ring, each cluster slightly different.

  Chloe’s breath hitched. “Threefold.”

  Trevor’s voice was tight. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” Chloe lied.

  Frankie drifted in front of the opening. “This looks like the mouth of something that ate cities for breakfast,” he said. “Which is not a metaphor I enjoy.”

  I stepped through first, because I was the one who would hate myself most if I made anyone else do it.

  The air inside was cooler, and the sound changed again—not delayed this time, but sharpened. My footsteps rang along the corridor like I was walking through a pipe. The walls curved in shallow arcs, smooth as bone, faintly iridescent when my helmet light hit them at an angle.

  There was no dust. Not in the way I expected. Instead there was a thin mineral bloom, like the surface itself was slowly exhaling crystals.

  A narrow strip of something like rail ran along the floor—two grooves with a central ridge—disappearing into the darkness ahead.

  “Transit,” Chloe whispered. “Interior transit.”

  “Or a maintenance channel,” Trevor said. “Or a trap.”

  Frankie floated above the rail and made a little “hmm” noise. “If it’s a trap, it’s aesthetically pleasing. I respect that.”

  We moved slow, scanning.

  Dead signage hung along the corridor walls—panels set into the surface like plaques. The symbols were layered, not overwritten. Three writing systems, distinct in style.

  One was blocky and angular, like someone had carved words out of stone with a chisel.

  One flowed, looping in arcs that reminded me of handwriting—curves and hooks, almost organic.

  The third was minimalist: little geometric marks arranged with mathematical patience, like someone had tried to write language as a circuit diagram.

  Chloe went feral.

  She didn’t touch them—she actually listened to Trevor for once—but she leaned so close her visor almost kissed the panel.

  “It’s… mundane,” she breathed. “It’s wayfinding. It’s public information. It’s—”

  “It’s real,” I said quietly, because that was the thing my brain kept stumbling over.

  Frankie whispered, “I hate that it’s real.”

  Trevor swallowed. “We’ve had relic cranks yelling about ruins for decades,” he said, voice lower than usual. “People who wanted charters updated, new clauses, special committees, all based on bad scans and wishful thinking. And now we’re standing inside—”

  “Inside the wish,” Chloe finished softly.

  “Inside the noise,” Frankie corrected.

  We walked deeper.

  The corridor widened into a chamber about twenty meters across, ceiling bulging into a shallow dome-within-a-dome. The rail terminated in a circular cradle in the floor, as if something used to dock here.

  The chamber’s center held a structure that made my inner ear twitch: a matte-black sphere suspended in a mesh of ribs and rings, the kind of thing that made your gut insist the rules were being bent.

  Heat shimmered around it, but my thermal overlay showed almost no temperature difference. The suit’s gravity sensors registered a deviation so small it was almost insulting—and yet my body felt a faint lean toward it, like standing near a cliff edge.

  “Mercy,” I said, because some things were too weird to trust to my own senses.

  Mercy overlaid a wireframe in my HUD. “Local curvature deviates from Venus baseline by approximately ten to the minus eleven,” she said. “Insignificant at human scales. Not accounted for by visible mass.”

  “So it’s heavier on paper than it looks in person,” Frankie said. “Relatable.”

  Chloe couldn’t stop staring. “It’s a node,” she whispered. “Or a—no, not yet. Not that. Too early.”

  Trevor’s voice was sharp. “We do not touch it.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” I lied this time, because the urge to reach out and put my glove on that black surface was so strong it felt like my muscles were being tugged by invisible strings.

  We didn’t touch it.

  We did what sane people did in insane places: we backed out slowly and marked the location on our local map with a big, terrified note.