We're not going to make it anywhere today in the remaining daylight and twilight hours, which is just as well. I lie on my bed with my pillow over my face, and for the longest time just let my thoughts take me wherever they please. The hundreds of times I said yes to things like the interns' request in the Philippines still haunt me. Hundreds of times something could have gone wrong, until the one time it finally did.

In rare cases, the risks we took paid off, and luck would grant us water or shelter or a trail, or whatever else we were looking for. In the best cases, nothing happened but no harm was done. Everyone returned alive and well, no equipment was damaged, no time was lost. Yahvi and I would use the opportunity to teach younger members of our team how to screen a river or slope for safety, how to identify a rip current at a beach, or any number of other nuggets of wisdom we had accumulated over the years and could pass along.

I pull the pillow down harder and roll over. Was any of that actually worth it? We had so many close calls: with alligators, snakes, hypothermia, dehydration, currents, rockfalls, insect swarms, falling through ice; even snapping turtles and quicksand. Everything your average Aventurero learned to live with over the years. We watched young people under us go on to take charge of their own teams. Ours had the highest production rate of new leaders of any team in the organization. "You train them well," people at the top would say, echoing the trainees themselves.

Am I giving that up? Liu is still finding her footing in the field, but nothing accelerates that faster than carefully controlled experience. And Krüger has been through this before. Of all the people in the Pod, he's had the closest to my level of field time: dozens of planets with hostile environments, thousands of hours of fieldwork. At his age, I'd already been leading teams with Yahvi for more than a decade.

If this were the Aventureros, Krüger would be in leadership training. I can't trust him with that. Not yet. Not here. Not when Liu's safety might rest on it; this moon is already so hostile, I don't know if I'd have time to fix a different leader's mistakes before they turned lethal, and I'm not willing to take that risk. But Krüger could be a valuable asset if trained.

I roll over. "Yahvi, what would you do?"

The ceiling doesn't reply. I sit up and lean over to pull open the small, topmost drawer of the many making up the half-dresser, half-bed beneath my mattress. I set aside the folded-up jungle poster and pull out a simple, stainless steel box. Watertight, even airtight, it served a long life as a survival kit before I quit and took it with me.

I pop the latches. The lid opens with a suction sound, almost releasing the packed wad of paper stored inside. Each is a news headline. They're all printed out on lined or dotted paper: sheets torn from some field notebook or other, the only paper I could get my hands on in the digital halls of moving spacecraft or high-tech planetary cities. I separate the first one. Letters and words crawl like ants on the paper, but I've read these all enough times to have memorized their contents.

Yahvi Sanghera gives exclusive interview on The Nebula, talks exploration, planetary consciousness.

It dates back to just over a year ago. I might have listened in just to hear her voice, but I missed the broadcast by two weeks. You can't get any information streams on a moving F-300.

Another groundbreaking paper from the Neelambar Research Group.

Science or Science Fiction? Sanghera says science. Now others are starting to agree.

Yahvi Sanghera and Erez Abramovich debate live on Interstellar.

I page back through time, carefully building an upside-down stack of papers on my bed. Yahvi always had a knack for the media: she was the outward face of our team, giving interviews when we couldn't avoid them, while I heckled off other reporters and kept people out of her way. I almost smile. I was notoriously hard to get on television. Yahvi would intercept the cameras and talk them around so eloquently, they left in a daze. We'd be gone by the time they remembered there was another half to the all-star team.

Look out, Dara: Neelambar Research Group joins the race to the cutting edge of science.

The scientist behind the newest addition to the Özdemir list.

That one has her picture on it, and it sends a knife through my heart like it always does. She looks directly at the camera, her calm smile giving the picture of a composed, competent scientist even as her dark eyes sparkle with the wit and drive of an insatiable adventurer. Even now, she still wears her hair in a braid, just long enough to touch between her narrow shoulderblades. She always claimed it was easier to manage on long trips when mine required maintenance to stay cropped. I shot back that mine served me better in the heat, and didn't get tangled or caught on things.

It was an argument that ran for so many years, it became more of a comfort than anything: our own little signature of how long we'd known one another. Each time we left a base for the wilderness, we would see how many people we could convert by the end of the trip. She gained on me in colder climates, but for the most part, I wore my winning streak with more fondness than pride.

Life IN other planets? Neelambar Research Group releases papers on planetary consciousness, throws scientific world into controversy.

She would have enjoyed that. Right at the heart of the debate, where all the action was.

Breakthrough, or just cracked?

This scientist claims we killed Earth. No, she's not talking about biodiversity.

What if I told you your planet was alive?

I wondered too if Yahvi had lost it when she first floated the Neuron Theory of Planetary Consciousness, an idea so outrageous at the time, she couldn't even get funding to look into it. She started on earth, paying out of her own pocket, proving first that large, intact tracts of organisms like trees communicated through chemical and electrical signals in a broad-scale and coordinated fashion. Then she proved the same in smaller systems, like herbaceous plants and fungi. That those different systems could "talk" to each other came next. She argued that if scaled up, an uninterrupted ecosystem the size of a small planet could theoretically develop consciousness as an emergent property—a side effect of its network complexity.

Earth, she said, could have been a conscious planet once, back when the continents were conjoined and most of the world was tropical. She hypothesized that it might even have retained a rudimentary consciousness after Pangea split, before humans disrupted the planet's ecosystems so disastrously, any chance of that was wiped out. It's a fascinating prospect. And sad, and faintly unnerving. But at least not dangerous. Yahvi and others made it clear that consciousness is just consciousness without a body to control. As the theory gained traction, Sci-Fi lovers were quick to paint planets where jungles came alive and strangled invaders of their own accord, but there's no scientific basis to back that.

I don't need to see the rest of these.

I dig down through the pile, to the one at the bottom. Sanghera and Gallegos named team of the year after fourth ex-trainee in twelve months attains leadership position.

It's a print-off of the Aventureros website this time, from back before they changed their name and logo and everything else. I don't even know what they call themselves now. Yahvi and I look so young in the picture.

Beneath the clipping is a series of letters in battered white envelopes. Physical mail rose again with the rise of interstellar travel. People felt so uprooted that sending a digital message like they would a paper one—on an F-300 for weeks to months at a time—was one too many steps removed from a physical reality.

The letters are from ex-trainees of Yahvi and I's team. Over a dozen of them reached out when my name hit the news last year; some claimed to have been trying to find me for years. They spoke about missing the old Aventureros organization, reminisced about their days with us, and told me how much it meant to them. I open the letters and read them one by one. All different flavours of the same.

The last letter stays in the box. Yahvi's elegant cursive handwriting graces the envelope. The date on the shipping stamp falls two months after her research group published their landmark suite of papers on planetary consciousness, throwing the interstellar scientific community into pandemonium. Her new career was taking off, and she wanted me along in the midst of the chaos and adventure, just like the old times.

I never replied.

What we had is gone now, even if it tears me apart inside. Everything changed in the Philippines. Even if Yahvi doesn't blame me, I do, and she deserves better than someone who spirals so hard and can't even keep a team alive. She was always the better half of whatever we called ourselves. It just took this long for something to strike wide the gap and prove that I never deserved her in the first place.

Even if she kept reaching out at first, she must have given up now that it's been nine years without so much as a word in return. I'll probably hate myself for it for the rest of my life. If she hates me, too, that will make it easier.

I hope.

I drop the letters back in the box, then flip the stack of papers I've made on the bed and nestle them on top. What would Yahvi do here?

The answer springs to my mind as easily as anything else about her. She would do what we did best: gather the troops and organize an investigation. We relied on our teammates in the field. Nobody was the expert on everything, and the greatest diversity of knowledge and experience meant the strongest team. And the most effective one. Krüger is right about the safety risk posed by whatever destroyed the Isoptera. And he and I might be experienced from a staying-alive-on-Mahaha perspective, but neither of us is a meteorologist. There's no escaping taking Liu along.

I'll have to be there, of course. Not let her out of my sight for a moment, whether Krüger is there or not. But I've got leverage. She's been pushing for this, and fieldwork is a privilege I have every right to revoke. I can set the rules. If she wants to be the trainee of an ex-Aventureros team leader, she's going to have to act like one.

Krüger, too.

I shut the box and stow it back in the drawer with the jungle poster and other small items I keep stashed away. My hand runs through my hair as I stand. God, already falling back into old habits. I also still need a haircut. I'm not about to become a tick mark on Yahvi's scoreboard.

The team has migrated to the living room. They all look up when I stroll in.

"We're going first thing tomorrow morning," I say. "We've only got tomorrow left before the dark cycle hits, and I want us in and out by sundown; whatever you don't retrieve by then, Mahaha is keeping. I expect to see all gear packed and ready to go by sunrise, and both of you up by the fifth beat. Krüger, you're responsible for the digging equipment; Kwon, see what we have. Liu, I expect you to review your suit and mask safety training modules before lights' out tonight, and no more all-nighters. Nobody is coming if they can't pass an alertness test tomorrow morning, end of story. Understood?"

There's a crisp and unanimous "Yes, Chief!" from Liu and "Aye aye, Boss," from Krüger. Kwon just nods.

"You've got three beats til sundown," I say. "Get moving."

They scatter like ants. Liu goes straight to Krüger, who takes her under his wing just like Yahvi would have. They leave for the gear room together. Kwon disappears into her workshop. If we don't have something to melt ice with already, I'm willing to bet she'll have that something by the end of the day.

I drop onto the lowest couch and lean back with a long breath. With this opportunity hanging over their heads, those two will think twice about fighting me from now on. Finally, this place feels back under control.