2 — Amr

The rover’s video feed tilted. For the first time, it looked back the way it came. The tunnel it had drilled was gone. Where there had been a clear borehole, there was now seamless, rippling ice— healed . The amber dot on the map was no longer forty-seven klicks down. It was sixty. Then seventy-five. The cavern was descending .

"It wants to know if we are a pattern," the rover said, "or a mistake." The rover’s video feed tilted

Soren stared at the empty screen. Then she reached for the comms panel and dialed a frequency she never thought she'd use. Where there had been a clear borehole, there

Soren leaned closer to the feed. The rover’s scientific data stream was still live—temperature, pressure, salinity—but the telemetry was drunk. Then, a single frame of video came through, pixelated and raw. Then seventy-five

The rover’s audio crackled to life. A low, resonant hum filled the bridge. It wasnt mechanical. It was a note, held impossibly long, then answered by a second tone from deeper in the cavern. A conversation.