The dome emerged from the storm like a monolith of alloy and reinforced glass, so vast it seemed to drink in the wind around it and leave a strange pocket of calm in its shadow. It was only then, standing beneath it, that I truly understood just how massive the structure was. Thick reinforced panels rose overhead like the ribs of an ancient behemoth, scarred by years of exposure to the harsh elements, yet still standing firm against them as if they could endure for years more.
But for all the majesty of its construction, there was a creeping dread that seemed to permeate the air around it, tightening my gut the longer I stared.
And yet, after making it this far without suffocating to death, the others somehow still had the energy to joke.
"Hey," Ella said over the comms, her voice carrying just enough levity to cut through the tension, "anyone else feel like we're walking into a horror movie?"
Henry let out a tired chuckle. "If something jumps out at us, I'm blaming you for jinxing it."
I rolled my eyes and tuned out the rest, but I couldn't deny that the silence around the dome felt wrong.
As we approached the massive entrance to the city, the wind howled louder, as if furious we'd managed to make it this far. Built into the eastern wall was a massive airlock, large enough to admit supply haulers and thick enough to survive whatever Mars decided to throw at it.
At the front, Ella pulled up her display panel and worked quickly, copying the access code from the mission file and entering it into the keypad beside the hatch.
A sharp beep answered her.
Then came a deep mechanical hiss as the outer door slid open with a slow rumble, revealing a dim corridor lined with flickering emergency lights.
"Yes," Ella breathed, almost laughing with relief. "We made it."
With the promise of breathable air somewhere beyond the lock, Henry and I wasted no time dragging Owen inside with barely concealed urgency. The moment all of us crossed the threshold, the outer door sealed shut behind us.
The storm was cut off at once, leaving behind the hollow silence of the airlock. After hours of wind, static, and screaming metal, the sudden quiet felt almost unnatural.
Still, there was comfort in knowing the structure was sturdy enough to keep us safe from the elements, and some of the tension finally eased from me. That was when I truly felt how heavy my suit had become; now that the adrenaline was beginning to wear off, every ache settled back into place, as if my body had been waiting for the noise to stop before reminding me how much it hurt.
Ella stepped toward the wall panel beside the door and pulled one of the levers down. "This should seal the outer lock completely and start decontamination," she said.
With a low hum, the system came alive. Tiny nozzles hidden in the walls rotated into place and released a fine mist over our armor. The soft hiss of it, paired with the steady mechanical rhythm of a system still doing its job, was strangely comforting.
It meant something here still worked.
A green light flickered above the inner door, and Ella stepped forward to pull the second lever.
Another door slid aside, revealing a narrow passage and, beyond that, yet another sealed entrance. Layered safety systems. Redundancy stacked on redundancy. Whoever had built Colony Alpha had expected Mars to kill people the moment they grew careless.
So it took some time to make it through all three chambers, but when the final doors slid open, I couldn't help the wave of relief that came at the sight of the skyline beyond.
But we weren't alone.
Standing just beyond the entrance to the grand dome were four figures in battered suits, each of them looking as wrecked as we felt, maybe worse. Unlike us, though, they had their helmets off, which made it easy to recognize one of them as none other than Captain Grayson of the Dauntless-class explorer.
She stood out immediately. Broad-shouldered and powerfully built, she carried herself with the kind of presence that drew the eye without effort. Her deep blue eyes held a sharp, searching intensity, and her curly blond hair caught the scattered emergency light in dark gold strands.
It was good to see she was alive.
The other three, though, were unfamiliar to me.
"Atlas," she said, exhaling as if my being alive solved at least one problem. "What's the situation with the third squadron? Did they make it?"
I shook my head.
"From what I can tell," I said, "we're the only ones who made it out of the crash."
The words tasted bitter. If it hadn't been for whoever dragged me from my stupor in the hangar bay, I would've been among the dead too.
Grayson lowered her gaze for a moment, then looked past me to the others. "I take it this is everyone who made it out in time?"
I nodded.
Only then did I take a better look at the group with her.
One of them was an older man with graying hair and deeply lined features, dressed in what appeared to be a Mark Three suit, the kind usually reserved for medical staff in the Fifth Regiment.
Noticing my glance, he gave me a quiet nod.
Then movement at my side pulled my attention away just in time to see Ella collapse to the floor, utterly spent.
Beside her, Henry let out a long breath. "You know," he muttered, "I half expected something to be horribly wrong with this place." He looked around the dome, frowning. "But with everything seeming to be in working order… I just don't understand where all the colonists went."
I followed his gaze.
The structure was intact, and since we were breathing just fine, the atmosphere systems were clearly still functioning. Which meant the colony hadn't suffered a total systems failure.
So where was everyone?
As if reading my thoughts, Grayson stepped closer, her expression grim. "From what we've seen, there's no one here."
She let the words settle for a moment before continuing.
"But I don't intend to sit around waiting to see if more survivors wander in. Without spare oxygen stores, we wouldn't last long outside anyway. So for now, our best option is to hunker down and wait for rescue."
Though the look in her eyes told me everything she wasn't saying.
Rescue wasn't coming anytime soon.
Not after what had happened to the ship.
And that raised a far more pressing question.
"Captain Grayson," I said, "what happened while I was asleep?"
She gave me a tired, humorless look and rubbed at her brow. "Please," she said, "call me Amelia. I'm not captain of any ship anymore."
I nodded.
Taking a slow breath, she continued. "To be honest, I don't know what went wrong. One moment we were sailing smoothly, and the next something tore through the hull like it was nothing."
I glanced toward the distant flames and grimaced. "An asteroid?"
She nodded.
But that didn't sit right with me.
Any asteroid large enough to do that should have been picked up by our scanners long before it got close, let alone reached the ship.
Then, out of nowhere, a sharp voice cut through my thoughts.
"That's bullshit!"
Everyone turned.
A man was striding toward us, his movements tense and uneven, like he was only barely holding himself together. He looked on the verge of hysteria, with sunken brown eyes and messy black hair that made it seem like he hadn't even tried to pull himself together since the crash.
"You and I both know that was no asteroid," he snapped. "No asteroid has wings the size of a building."
Amelia let out a slow sigh. "Ethan," she said carefully, "it's common to be disoriented after coming out of stasis. Hallucinations aren't exactly unheard of."
But he wasn't having it.
"That wasn't a vision," he hissed. "I'm telling you, it was a monstrosity."
For a moment, no one said anything.
Then Amelia pinched the bridge of her nose. "Benjamin, could you please? I don't have time for this."
"I'll take care of him," the older man said with a small nod.
Still fuming, Ethan shoved Benjamin's hand away and stormed off.
Once they were out of immediate earshot, Amelia exhaled and ran a hand back through her hair.
"Sorry," she muttered. "He's… not taking the crash well."
I watched Ethan go and nodded, "Something like that isn't so easy to get over."
She nodded, but her expression stayed troubled. "It still concerns me."
At that moment, a smaller girl with short, messy hair jogged up and handed Amelia a tablet.
"These are the flight logs," she said quickly.
Then she noticed me watching.
Her whole posture seemed to shrink. "I-I mean… the logs from the last few hours," she corrected in a rush. "The ones you asked for."
Amelia chuckled softly as she took the tablet. "You did great, Emily."
Then, noticing the girl's uneasy glance my way, Amelia smirked. "Don't worry about Atlas. He won't hurt a fly."
Emily looked far from convinced, and when she risked another glance in my direction, her emerald eyes widened slightly. I gave her a small smirk, which only seemed to make things worse.
She stammered out one last unnecessary apology before quickly retreating.
"Don't mind her," Amelia said, watching her go. "She's a little nervous around people."
Then her attention dropped back to the tablet. She studied it for a moment, but the longer she looked, the deeper her confusion seemed to grow.
"Nothing seems out of order," she murmured. "At least not from the system side of things." Her brow furrowed. "But the impact log says we were dragged back for a moment."
I frowned. "Dragged?"
She gave a small, frustrated shake of her head. "That's what it reads like. I can't make sense of it."
Then she exhaled and lowered the tablet. "Whatever happened, we can figure it out later. Right now, we need to get a handle on our situation."
"I think that's a wise choice," I said.
Then I turned my attention to the three I had brought in with me. "Captain, we have an injured man we pulled from the ship. Can you have your medic take a look at him?"
Her eyes flicked toward Owen, and she nodded. "And once again," she said with a tired huff, "I'm not captain anymore. Just Amelia."
A faint smirk tugged at my mouth. "Alright. If you insist."
She gave me a look, then turned to Benjamin. "We've got an injured man here. Can you take a look at him?"
Leaving Ethan to stew in whatever spiral had claimed him, Benjamin gave a quiet nod and moved to Owen without complaint.
Now that that was taken care of, I left them to it and finally looked out over the colony around us.
My eyes drifted slowly across the structures rising from the dust, all hard lines and practical shapes, built by people who had valued function over comfort simply because Mars had never given them the luxury of choosing otherwise. From there, my gaze wandered to the steel walkways stretched between the buildings, then higher to the support beams disappearing into the curved shadow of the dome above. Dim emergency lights flickered weakly here and there, painting dull patches of red across walls, empty windows, and long streets swallowed by darkness.
But what struck me most wasn't what I could see. It was what I couldn't hear. There was no chatter of distant voices, no clamor of workers going about their day. Just silence. Dead, heavy silence.
My gaze lingered on the windows, each one like a dead eye staring back at me, before drifting down to the streets below, where the gloom pooled so thickly between the buildings that it felt less like shadow and more like something alive.
For a colony that should have held hundreds, maybe thousands, the silence felt deeply wrong. The longer I looked, the more oppressive it became, as if the whole place had been abandoned in the middle of a breath and never exhaled.
A chill crept down my spine.
I took a slow step back, then turned away before I could convince myself that something might be looking back at me.
By the time I faced the others again, Benjamin had already finished his examination.
"He'll live," Benjamin said at last, straightening from his work. "I'm not seeing any signs of major internal trauma. Most of what I'm picking up points to a concussion, along with significant exhaustion and oxygen deprivation. With rest, he should regain consciousness on his own."
Nodding, Amelia turned to the rest of us, the brief relief already gone from her expression. "I want a clearer picture of this colony's condition," she said. "Power, life support, structural integrity—everything. We need to know what still works, what doesn't, and whether this place can keep us alive."
"I suggest we split into teams," I said, looking between the darkened halls and the surrounding structures. "We'll cover more ground that way."
Amelia considered it for only a second before nodding. "I think that's wise."
The idea clearly didn't sit well with the others, but what other choice did we have?
So with Owen stable and the colony waiting for us beyond its silent corridors, we gathered what we needed and headed out to see just how bad things really were.
The biosphere was massive, once designed to mimic a safe, livable environment for long-term habitation. Now felt like a grave. The wind still screamed somewhere outside, muffled by layers of steel and reinforced glass, but in here the silence was worse. It was too complete, almost as if something were preserving it.
Unable to bear the oppressive silence any longer, Henry finally spoke. "Do you think anyone made it out?" Then, more quietly, almost to himself, he added, "I just can't imagine how this even happened. There was no distress signal. No malfunction reports. They just… vanished."
I let the silence hang for a moment before answering. "Let's just hope that whatever happened to them doesn't happen again."
He nodded, but didn't have much to say after that until the tablet on my forearm pinged softly, informing us of our destination.
"Atmospheric Control Center's just ahead," I said, motioning toward a circular structure partially obscured by support beams and overhead pipes.
Expecting it to be locked, Henry stepped forward and tried the door, only for it to let out a low groan and swing open into darkness.
Giving me a look, he stepped inside cautiously.
Lights blinked on overhead in response to our movement, slow, flickering strips that lit the room in a pale white glow and revealed machinery lining the walls, along with consoles all displaying the same steady readouts.
I had expected something to be broken.
But nothing was.
If this wasn't damaged, then what happened?
"Looks like it's still running," I said, eyeing the readouts across the control panel. Oxygen levels, circulation, filtration—everything's in the green.
"Yeah," Henry agreed, stepping up beside me. "Still, I'll double-check. Better to be safe than dead."
I followed his lead. Together, we checked the valve integrity and pressure seals while he rattled off system names and expected readings. Eventually, he stopped and looked up.
"Looks like everything's in order," he said, exhaling with just a touch of relief.
"Let's hope it stays that way," I replied, reaching up to unlatch my helmet. The seal hissed as I removed it and took my first breath of filtered Martian air.
It was clean and dry, with a faint chill.
But it was breathable.
I toggled the comms. "Life support is functional. Everything checks out."
A pause.
Then Amelia's voice came through, slightly muffled by storm static. "Copy that. Start heading to the center."
"Alright, let's go."
Back outside, we moved sector by sector, staying meticulous in our sweep until we entered a residential block shaped like a cluster of domes, each linked by narrow extendable corridors.
A teddy bear, worn but well-loved, lay abandoned near the entrance.
I stopped and knelt to pick it up. My gloves brushed against the faded fabric.
"I don't know what people were thinking," I muttered. "Bringing kids here."
Henry glanced over, his helmet tilting toward the bear. His eyes lingered on it for a moment.
"Yeah," he said softly. "It doesn't sit right."
We didn't dwell on it.
There wasn't time for sentiment.
"Let's split up," he suggested. "We'll cover more ground."
I nodded and moved down one of the corridors alone.
The rooms were in disarray, with tables overturned, lights flickering overhead, and drawers left hanging open. It wasn't just abandoned. It looked panicked, as if someone had torn through these rooms, trying to grab whatever they could before fleeing.
But it was the footprints that caught my attention.
Dozens of scuffed boot marks cut through the dust. Some small, some large. Yet they all shared the same unsettling detail.
They stopped abruptly.
Not at a doorway. Not at a window. Just… stopped, as if whoever had made them had simply ceased to exist without ever leaving the room at all.
A chill settled in my gut.
With nothing else to find there, I stepped back out of the side structure—probably some kind of repair station, judging by the tools still humming quietly on standby—when Amelia's voice broke over the comms.
"Everyone—" there was the faintest hitch, "regroup at my location. Now."
The words were steady enough, but beneath them was a quickness in her breathing, the kind that betrayed someone fighting to stay calm.
"We're on our way," I replied. I gave Henry a look, and he fell in beside me as we followed the map coordinates toward the colony's industrial core.
That was when we saw it.
At first, I thought it was just another piece of equipment, maybe some kind of mining tower. Then I realized the scale of it.
The thing was massive, like a monolithic structure raised for some forgotten god.
It rose out of the earth like an obsidian blade, matte and absolute. Light didn't reflect off its surface. It didn't glint. It didn't even cast a proper shadow.
It just… absorbed.
And from it came a low vibration that hummed through my chest, as if my heartbeat had found a second rhythm.
As I drew nearer, I lowered my rifle slightly, finding nothing else in sight. Even so, my fingers stayed wrapped around the grip.
Ella was already there, crouched near the base of the structure with a scanner she must have scavenged from nearby, her brows drawn tight with concentration.
Amelia broke the silence. "Ella. What are we looking at?"
The scientist shook her head slightly, her eyes never leaving the device.
"I… don't know," she muttered. "According to every reading, it's not here."
Henry blinked. "Not here? I mean, I see it."
"So do I," Ella replied. "But the instruments don't. It's like…" She hesitated, searching for the words. "It's out of sync with our world. It's not emitting light, not reflecting it, not giving off any heat at all. It's just… phasing in."
I stared up at it.
It didn't make sense. Nothing about it made sense. It wasn't wrong in any way I could properly describe. It was wrong in the same way silence feels ominous when you're expecting noise.
Then I noticed Owen was finally awake.
Without a word, he stepped closer to the thing, his gaunt frame going still as he stared at the structure with a kind of quiet that seemed to hold him there. It gave me the chance to really see him.
He looked young. Far younger than I would've expected. If I hadn't known better, I might have guessed he was no older than seventeen. But there was too much weight in his expression for that, too much history etched into the lines of his face. His cyan eyes seemed to take everything in without needing to say a word, and his messy black hair only made him look more drawn, more fragile, as if he somehow belonged beside the monolith in a way I couldn't explain.
Then, after a moment, he shook his head, like he was trying to clear some strange feeling from it.
Ella rose, though her gaze never really left the monolith. "It's physical. That much I'm sure of, since it ruptured through the surface. So I'm thinking it was probably buried here for centuries, maybe longer. But I need to run a ground-penetrating radar scan. If we're lucky, the facility nearby should have one. Either way…" She let out a breath. "We need time."
Her eyes drifted toward the horizon, where the last light of day was already fading.
"And we need shelter," she added. "Sun's going down, so we should set up camp before dark."
"I'll check the nearby buildings for food," Benjamin offered, already turning toward one of the storage units.
"Alright," Amelia said, then turned to the rest of us. "Let's set up camp here for the night. Ethan, help Benjamin with the meal. Henry, Atlas, make sure the perimeter's clear."
Nodding, we moved without another word. After everything we'd seen, sleep still felt distant, but the routine helped. It gave our tired minds something to do besides looking at the monolith looming behind us like a silent judge.
After a dozen minutes or so, Benjamin made his way back. "Found supplies!" he called from within a squat, boxy structure near the edge of camp.
From there, setting up didn't take long. We pitched the tents in a tight semicircle nearby, laying out tarps, ground pads, and power cells. It wasn't much, but it would hold for a night.
Off to the side, Ella was half-buried in wires and sensor rods. She'd scavenged a ground-penetrating radar rig from one of the science depots and was already mapping the subsurface terrain.
I watched her from our makeshift table, little more than a salvaged flat top balanced across a few metal barrels, resting my arms across my knees.
"What do you think about calling it a night?" I asked, watching her move from one point to the next.
"Just a couple more points to scan," she replied without looking up, driving another probe into the dirt with a soft thunk.
"Alright, have fun," I said, pushing myself up and heading for the tents.
I powered down my suit, the systems hissing as the pressure lines disconnected. A faint chill touched my skin as I peeled out of the exoskeleton and stepped into the Martian night air.
By the time I joined the others around the fire pit, which was little more than a ring of heating coils set beneath a flickering light, they had already started digging into whatever Benjamin and Ethan had managed to throw together.
Dehydrated rations. Rehydrated stew. Protein bars with all the appeal of compressed gravel.
But it was warm.
"These rations aren't too bad," Henry said between bites, lifting his bowl. "Reminds me of the old stuff my dad kept in his storm shelter. Same weird texture."
"Yeah, not exactly gourmet," I replied, "but right now, I'll take anything that isn't freeze-dried disappointment."
Amelia chuckled softly. "We'll earn a real meal when we get back. For now, let's just try not to starve."
There wasn't much else to say after that.
When dinner was over, I took first watch. My time passed in near-total silence as I watched the quiet buildings around us, acompained by nothing but my thoughts and the faint vibration of the monolith pressing into the back of my skull whenever I stood still for too long.
When my shift ended, I walked over to Ethan's tent and nudged it with my boot.
"Your turn," I murmured, his groggy grunt the only reply I got before he rolled out, bleary-eyed and muttering to himself.
I stepped into my own tent, peeled off the outer layers of my undersuit, and lay down.
For a moment, I just watched the monolith through the open flap, its surface smooth and featureless, yet impossible to ignore. The darkness around it seemed to bend, as if even light were reluctant to linger too long in its presence.
Still, I forced my eyes shut and tried to sleep.
It was easier said than done.
That constant feeling of being watched hadn't left me. It clung to me there in the dark, quiet and patient, like something deep beyond the surface of that impenetrable black had stirred from an ancient sleep and turned its gaze toward us.
Though at some point, sleep must have taken me.
One moment I was lying in my tent, and the next I was weightless.
I hung suspended in an endless void where shadows moved like dancers in a fluid, hypnotic rhythm. They spiraled and twisted around me in shifting patterns I couldn't begin to understand, flowing without gravity, without direction, without any law I knew.
Then came the sound.
It arrived all at once, a thunderous wave like a thousand war horns erupting in the same instant. It was less a sound than a force, a crushing pressure that rattled through my bones, tore across my chest, and left only silence in its wake.
And then it was there.
The monolith.
It did not rise from the darkness or descend from above. It simply existed before me, sudden and immovable, as if it had always been there and only now had I caught up to it. My breath caught as it loomed over me, vast beyond reason, its scale so impossible that my mind couldn't fully hold it.
Then the world twisted.
The space around me folded inward. The ground blurred, though I couldn't have said whether there had ever been ground at all, before I was pulled forward, weightless once more, until I stood inches from its surface.
I should have stepped back.
I should have run.
Instead, my arm lifted on its own, as though some part of me had already made the choice. I reached out and pressed my hand against the monolith, expecting it to be deathly cold.
Instead, it was warm.
The kind of warmth you only notice in contrast, like standing near a fire after being cold for too long. It spread across my palm, climbed my arm, and sank deep into my chest, filling me with something almost unbearable in its gentleness. It did not burn. It soothed. It settled into me with a strange, impossible familiarity, easing parts of me I had not realized were wounded.
Then everything snapped to darkness, only to return a second later in a violent rush.
I jolted upright, my heart pounding so hard it felt like my ribs might give out, and for one wild instant I thought I was still dreaming. But as my thoughts cleared, the truth hit me all at once.
I wasn't in my tent.
I wasn't even lying down.
I was standing outside, directly in front of the monolith.
And my hand…
My hand was inside it.
The surface of the monolith had swallowed my palm whole, yet there was no seam, no break, no sign that anything had been pierced at all. It was as if my hand and the thing itself had simply fused, as though neither of us knew anymore where one ended, and the other began.
"What in the world…" I breathed, panic rising the moment I tried to pull back.
I yanked once.
Then harder but nothing happened.
Then, from somewhere deep within the monolith, a low hum began to rise. It reverberated through my arm, climbed into my chest, and finally settled in my skull until it felt like the sound was inside me.
Then came the heat.
Not the warmth of a fire in the dark, but the agony of being thrown straight into the flames. It came in pulses, each one hotter than the last, like molten metal crawling beneath my skin. I screamed, though I couldn't hear it. I couldn't think. The pain became everything. My vision blurred at the edges, black creeping inward like ink spilled through water.
And then it let go.
I stumbled back with a gasp and collapsed to my knees, clutching my arm and bracing myself for the inevitable blisters, the blood, and ruined flesh.
But when I finally looked, there was nothing. My hand was completely unmarked. Stranger still, many of my old scars were gone without a trace.
I barely had a second to process it before the ground shifted beneath me.
It wasn't just a tremor. It felt like the earth itself had fallen into some violent convulsion, twisting as though something deep below the surface had begun to wake. A moment later, the monolith's surface collapsed inward, turning fluid as it rippled like disturbed water.
And from that collapse, something poured out.
A thick black liquid, tar-like and endless, gushed from the heart of the monolith like the lifeblood of some long-forgotten creature, spilling across the ground in a thousand slithering rivulets.
I ran.
But the ground buckled beneath me, rising and falling like breathing lungs. Every step felt wrong, as if gravity had shifted and no one had thought to warn my body. The black tide surged after me, moving faster than anything that thick had any right to.
Then, before I could even draw another breath, it overtook me.