Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

Egede had noticed. Egede noticed most things eventually.

"You talk to the dark," Egede said, at the junction, not unkindly, while Aravena was kneeling to the unit.

"You talk to the imager."

"The imager doesn't answer."

"Neither does the dark," said Aravena. "Log. Shift fifty-eight. Upper junction. Party of three. Nothing so far." The unit hummed, once, low. "The unit answers."

"The unit's built to."

"So might they be," said Aravena, and did not know why they had said it, and went red, and Egede let it go, which was a kindness, and went back to the far wall.

Later in the shift Egede called them both over to the imager, because there was a thing on the playback worth seeing, and there was.

It was the margin, from the top of the shelving, the way the imager saw it when the party's light was swung that way: broken ground going down into dark, and, at the bottom of what the light could reach, two warm shapes, large, still. Adults. The party had seen the shapes a hundred times and never nearer. On the playback the light swung, and as it swung the rocks on the shelving threw their shadows out across the ground below, long and moving, the way shadows move when a light does. The two shapes did not move when the light's edge reached them. They moved when the shadow reached them. A rock's shadow swung across the ground toward them and they were gone, both, back into the dark, by the time it got there.

Egede ran it again. Same thing. Egede ran the one from the shift before. Same thing: the light could touch them and they held; the moving shadow could not.

"They don't like the shadows," said Aravena.

"Nobody likes shadows."

"They live in a place with none," said Nakagawa.

Egede and Aravena looked at the survey lead.

"None that move," Nakagawa said. "Think about it. The light down there is the fungus, and the fungus has no cycle and does not go anywhere. Nothing below the roof has ever moved a shadow. A shadow, to them, is a thing that stays where it is. Then we come down the passage swinging a light, and every rock we pass throws a shape across the floor that gets up and walks. We are the first thing on this world that has ever done that." A pause. "I would be wary of it too."

Aravena thought of the light held low, at the bottom of the passage, every shift, facing the dark. Held low so it did not throw anything. Aravena had done that without thinking why. It had seemed like the polite way to hold it.