We Leapt Into the Sky

Chapter 11

Kendra froze and stared at the pile of debris on the floor. A few feet away, Bria let out a rattling breath. Antony stood rooted in place, face blank. His right arm was gone, crumbled into sand and dust.

Seph was the first to move.

He guided Antony to a chair and crouched beside him, scanning what remained of his arm, starting at his shoulder and moving down. "Tell me how you feel right now," he said. "Any pain, anything?"

"I—I don't know." Antony gingerly lifted his sleeve. Midway down his biceps, his arm looked as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to a statue.

Kendra knelt to scan the crumbled remnants on the floor. "Structurally, this material is indistinguishable from clay and rock." She caught Antony's eye, but his face was unreadable.

"I don't understand," Seph said. "Above this break, the tissue is normal. At the break, the tissue has been completely transformed. We should verify with the medical-grade scanner; we'll get detailed baseline scans to determine whether this is spreading."

Antony touched the scruff of his beard, his eyes unfocused.

"We're going to figure this out, okay?" Seph said.

"Yeah."

They set him up in the living area, where he sat perched on the edge of the couch, covered in sensors feeding into medical monitors. Aside from a racing heart, however, his vitals were normal. Kendra took a seat next to him, but his gaze remained fixed on the floor. As the minutes passed, his heartbeat slowed, and the scanners held no further information about what had happened.

After an hour, his vitals remained normal.

Evening came, and Kendra paced the lab. Bria sat in the office chair nearby, hugging her arms to her chest. They had examined the samples from Antony's arm and found nothing remarkable—nothing suggesting that the rock and sand had ever been living tissue.

Seph hurried into the room, his hair riddled with cowlicks as though he'd been running his fingers through it. He laid his tablet on the bench and hung his head. "I sent the scans we took of Antony's arm to the closest medical station. They don't know. They said there's no evidence they see of infection, nothing at all that would, you know, cause someone's arm to break off." He let out a short, near hysterical laugh.

"Are they sending an evacuation team?" Kendra asked.

"Yeah. They're sending a ship to pick Antony up." He shook his head, patting down his hair. "It was hard to reach anyone with that satellite. I put in multiple requests for it to be serviced ages ago, but the company who owns it kept stating its 'diagnostics are within parameters,'" Seph said, making quotes with his fingers. He scowled. "They'd say the same thing if it crashed and left behind a smoldering pile of metal."

Kendra folded her arms and shifted her weight back and forth. "How long until the ship gets here?"

"They contacted someone passing through nearby, but it'll still be twenty-four hours."

The chair creaked as Bria stood, advancing wearily toward them. "This expedition is over," she said. "Once the med evac team sees Antony, I can't imagine they'll recommend we stay here. Leaving is the best course of action."

Surprised, Kendra searched her face and saw only exhaustion there. It was the only reasonable conclusion, but she hadn't expected to hear Bria say it.

Seph's eyes widened as well. He opened his mouth and after a long moment, he spoke. "Yeah. The expedition is off. But I can't stop thinking—I don't want to leave here without a real, intact sample of those crystals. Those are what got into Antony's arm to begin with, right? We never tried isolating them in a stasis field."