The shatter of glassware jerks my attention up from my laptop faster than Iraj's accompanying shriek. He's somewhere in the lab section of the camp; last I checked, he was messing with microscope slides, but this sounded like a beaker. I slide my overheating laptop onto the nearest side table. A stream of what I can only imagine are unflattering descriptors in at least three languages leads me to the room with our soon-to-be plant tanks. I find Iraj gripping a coil of tubing like a weapon and facing down a dusty-orange moth the size of my hand.

I squint to make out its finer details. "Is that a real one, or a demighost?"

"Hit it and find out," says Iraj dryly. "Whatever it is, it's drunk."

"It won't hurt you."

"It came for my head."

I fight down a laugh. For someone both Earth-born and Earth-raised, who spent both his graduate degrees studying drought-resistant fungi in Panama, Iraj is still hilariously easily startled by the rock moths out here. I needled him about it once. His indignation hinted that it's far from a new joke on his own team.

"I can't tell if it's real," I say. "Pass me that container—no, the clear one."

"I need that one."

"Iraj, I swear to god, do you want to me to deal with this or not?"

He moans and empties a variety of pens, pencils, and rolls of differently-coloured labeling tape from the plastic box. I take it, step carefully over the broken glass on the floor, and begin to stalk the moth. Iraj moves to the opposite end of the room. That doesn't put much more distance between him and the offending insect, but he's probably hoping to dive out the door if it comes for him again.

The moth fans its wings, drawing my attention back. It's perched on the rim of one of the empty fish tanks. I'm going to need to get it onto a flatter surface to trap it beneath my makeshift bug catcher.

"Don't," says Iraj as I lower the container and reach for the cardboard lid of the microscope slide box. "Lingmei, I swear, if you make that thing fly again—"

Too late. I take a deft swipe at the moth. Rather than take flight, though, it explodes into a cloud of dust, making Iraj and I both leap back.

I fan the orange fog away with the lid. "Demighost."

"And now it's shat dust all over my tank," grumbles Iraj. "Do you have any idea how long I spent cleaning that one?"

"Longer than someone spent cleaning the entryway, clearly. There's enough dust in here somewhere for it to have assembled itself inside."

"That—" Iraj breaks off mid-sentence, a guilty look replacing his flare of protest. When I raise an eyebrow at him, he reaches under the nearest table and drags out a bucket of rocks. A bucket of very dusty rocks. Without a lid.

I point the plastic container at him. "Next time I hear you complaining that anyone else doesn't do as thorough a job of the entryway as you do..."

"Okay, fine. I deserved that." He caps the bucket. "Thank you for disposing of the intruder."

"You'll want to wipe that up before it regathers."

He accepts the plastic container back and heads to the kitchen to grab water. I keep a close eye on the dusty patch as Iraj bemoans our less than expeditious water-recycling system. The container fills slowly; I can hear it from here. Iraj has just turned off the tap when the dust on the side of the tank shifts visibly.

"Iraj, hurry!" I call, grabbing the microscope slide-box lid again. I take another swipe at the dust. It scatters, and I notice too late that the real culprit wasn't anywhere near the top of the tank. A nearly-formed moth wing flaps about behind a box on the table. I whack it, but it just tumbles off the table's edge and flares back to full form in a shower of dust. The demighost rock moth makes a break for the ceiling.

"Shoot." Iraj arrives with the water, drops the basin on a table, and twists a wet cloth into a rat-tail that I don't doubt he knows how to use. He takes a lightning-fast whip at the moth as it nears him, exploding one of its wings. It regathers before it hits the ground. Iraj shrieks as it whizzes for his face. I double over laughing at the panic in his eyes as he trips backwards over the rock-bucket and goes sprawling.

"Quick, quick, it's headed for the kitchen!" I give him a hand up, grab another container, and take off in hot pursuit. The moth jinks furiously back and forth like it's trying to shake me. It's persistent, even for this species. The host puppeting it from outside is either looking for food or shelter, or it's just drunk like Iraj suspected. I manage to get ahead of it just before it reaches the kitchen. The moth swoops wildly and zigzags back into the middle of the common room. Iraj strikes again. Orange dust peppers a side table.

"Don't make a mess!" I say.

The moth makes tracks for me. I ready my container, but the bug shoots sideways, its mangled wing throwing its flight awry. If it won't stop on its own, we can wear it down like this until it can't fly anymore, but that requires scattering its dust over half the camp. Zuri—my boss—will kill us.

My eyes fall on a broom leaning against the wall in the entryway. Scattering dust everywhere isn't an option, but if we can bring the moth down in a single blow, the resulting splatter will be easy enough to clean. I snatch the broom and run back to the lab. Iraj is now leaping about the couch-bedecked side of the common room like a possessed lemur. His container of water is still perched on the lab table. The broom handle knocks the lid of one tank askew as I swing it around in the close quarters to dunk its head in the water. Wielding it like a poleaxe, I dash back out. The moth is flying dangerously close to the rubbery, blow-up wall of the camp, and I can't let it get away.

Iraj catches onto my plan immediately. We close in from opposite sides, cornering the moth against the wall. Iraj waves his arms high, cloth rat-tail smacking his wrist on each swing. Confused or alarmed by the feed it's getting from its dusty puppet, whatever live moth is messing with us from outside lands its double on the camp wall. I bring my wet broom down in a mighty swing.

"What the fuck is going on out here?" says a voice behind us. Iraj and I step back from the wet, streaked, rust-red splatter, panting and triumphant.

Tiana pokes her head from our shared tent. "Jesus," she says, upon seeing the gore on the wall. She flicks her dark braids over her shoulder and settles right back down with her book, already closing the zipper behind her. "Have fun. Make sure you clean up."

"Thanks for helping!" shouts Iraj.

"You're welcome!" comes an answering call, muffled through the thick rubber of the tent door.

"In fairness," I say, leveling my dust-bloodied broom at Iraj, "this was technically your fault."

"I know, I know."

He mopes back to the lab to retrieve his water-basin. I hold a hand under the broom to catch drips as I carry it gingerly to the kitchen and the safety of the sink. Water runs rust-orange the moment it picks up the slightest bit of Jenu's dust, and a week here has been more than enough to teach us all how badly this stuff stains.

"Can you fix the tank?" says Iraj, emerging from the lab room again.

I finish rinsing the broom and give him a nod. My nose wrinkles involuntarily as I step back into the lab. Something reeks like pond bottom. I sidle up to the largest aquarium and push its dislodged lid back a little further to peek inside. I wrench back. I'm not sure what a fish tank set up to grow aquatic plants harvested from a sentient planet is supposed to smell like, but I'm pretty sure it's not this.

The stench is too potent to not merit an investigation, so I slide the cover back a bit further and flick on my phone flashlight. The tank is black-wrapped in an attempt to keep out ambient light. There's nothing in it yet except water and a handful of rocks, but the rocks look suspiciously fuzzy.

I backtrack and poke my head out the door. "Iraj? Are your tanks supposed to be growing algae?"

There's a moan from across the common room. "Don't say that."

I've barely had a hand in preparing these tanks, but seeing them off to a bad start doesn't bode well. This was supposed to be the easy part of his team's experiments. "Are they still cycling? The water quality might not have settled yet, so it might not be an issue."

"Could also be the species from down in the tunnels." Iraj returns with water and a rag, and recoils as the smell hits him. He presses one elbow over his nose and mouth in a futile attempt to block it. "Oh gross, that's from the tunnels alright. How? Those rocks were from the middle of the desert—and sanitized."

"Is that going to mess up your experiment?"

He shrugs helplessly.

"Did Yahvi warn about this?"

She's the head scientist on Iraj's team. If anyone has the answer to this, it's her.

"Kind of? It was a potential variable." Iraj wipes down most of the dust and leaves a sticky note on the moth-hit tank. He and the rest of our plant team hope to control the amount of outside material that gets into these, and a dust-burst like that means this tank is going to need a more thorough cleaning before it gets used. Iraj now looks resigned to it. I return to the big tank and shine my light around it long to confirm that every carefully weighed and placed rock at its bottom is covered in a coat of red-brown scum. I step aside to let Iraj see.

He grimaces, then gingerly lifts the cover and settles it back on top. "I'm going to let Bersa handle this one."

"Good call."

All the astrobiologists from both our teams are in the van that's on its way to camp right now. We'll have plenty of people here soon enough who'll be happy to apply their expertise to the puzzle of moldy rocks. And our meteorological instruments. And the quirks of our camp airlock—the dust-locker—which has taken to vacuum-packing its occupants rather than cleaning them on random occasions for reasons we do not yet understand. I'm ready to pass that level of responsibility to someone more qualified and go back to being the unrivaled expert at catching rock moths.

As if on cue, my phone buzzes.

"Is that them?" says Iraj hopefully. He's been the only member of his team here for almost a week, and he's getting golden-retriever-level lonely.

I check. It's Tobias.

'Please save me from this vehicle,' his text reads.

'Where are you guys?' I text back.

'Good question.'

There's a pause.

'They wish to inform you that we are two minutes out from the turd-shaped rock, and coming up on the one that looks like a bread loaf someone tried to poke before it was done baking.'

I can't repeat that with a straight face, so I show the text to Iraj. It rips a laugh out of him unbidden.

"Sounds like Yahvi's in a good mood," he says. "Darn it, they're almost making me miss that car ride."

My phone buzzes again.

'Alex says we're about an hour out.'

"Bless Alex," says Iraj when I show him the update. "I stand reassured that at least someone is keeping that circus moving in the right direction this time around."

There's subtext there, and I already know it's going to be funny. "That sounds like a story."

"Oh, believe me." He caps the newly wiped tank, too. "If anyone worked under Yahvi and didn't have stories, I'd question their sanity. Not that the rest of us are particularly sane, either, but you get my point."

"I still want to hear the story," I say, on my way out the door. "I'll be right back."

The camp is about to go from one leader to four, and that one will probably appreciate knowing how long she has before her second-in-command and two rivals show up. I check the window for any sign of the vehicle's approaching dust cloud, but it's a futile hope. I resign myself to finding my boss. She's on her computer at the table in our working room.

"Van's arriving in an hour," I say, and get a thumbs up in return. I want to tell her about the demighost and our new tank experiment setback, but she doesn't take well to being interrupted, and Yahvi is the biological expert. If we want this complicated study and situation to go as smoothly as a study can, I won't be the one crossing the two teams' wires.