Three years had turned the wreckage into a tomb. The valley's mist clung thicker now, as if the earth itself sought to bury what remained of the alien ship. But the seven returned, always—scars deeper, eyes harder, their laughter a rarer sound. They called the place *Mòzhé*, "the Grinder." It gnawed at them, this graveyard of secrets.
The first year, they'd only dared skirt the edges. The blast had seared the crash site into a glassy crater, but the ship's heart endured—a tumorous mass of organic metal, still breathing. They'd found the predator's corpse on day thirty-seven, half-consumed by the same phosphorescent mold that now veined the wreck. Its skull had been cleaved open, not by force, but *precision*. A betrayal.
"They weren't supposed to be here," Aisha muttered, crouching to trace the glyphs etched into a bulkhead. Her fingers glowed faintly, borrowed DNA humming beneath her skin—something sleek and sightless from the caves, all echo-location and needle-teeth. The ship's walls reacted to her touch, bioluminescent patterns flaring like startled veins.
"*We* weren't supposed to be here," Ravi corrected. He leaned against a spire of twisted alloy, his form flickering—a half-second blur of scales, then flesh. Mastery had cost him. They all bore their vials like nooses now, the power within both weapon and weight.
Liu Jian knelt beside the predator's remains. Three winters of digging through the ship's carcass had taught him its language: the way certain corridors sealed at the smell of human blood, the hieroglyphs that shimmered only under moonlight. This glyph was new. A circle split by a jagged line, repeated in the predator's own dried blood.
"A quarantine mark," Meili said quietly. She'd deciphered it months ago, cross-referencing symbols with the predator's holographic star maps. Her vial had fused her to something winged and sharp—a creature of storms, she claimed—but her hands still shook when she touched the eggs.
*The eggs.*
Most had burned in the blast. But the ones that survived… They'd watched them. Studied them. Leathery husks now, dormant but *alive*, buried where the ship's underbelly had fused with bedrock. Hiroto swore they pulsed in time with the lunar tides.
"Show me again," Yumi said. At fifteen, she was the only one whose vial remained unbroken, her power still latent. The predator's final gift—or curse—hung untouched around her neck.
Liu Jian nodded. They gathered in the chamber they'd dubbed the *Garden*: a cavern where the ship's biomechanics had gone rogue, sprouting fungal towers and sinewy vines that spat spores. Here, the holograms were clearest.
Aisha pressed her palm to a nodal growth. Light bled upward, coalescing into the star map from three years prior—Earth dotted with crimson. But now, the image shifted. A playback, they'd realized. A record of the ship's last days.
The predator crew materialized—eight of them, armored and silent, tending to rows of suspended pods. Not eggs. *Capsules.* Humanoid shapes floated inside, faces blurred.
"Hostages?" Ravi frowned.
"No," Liu Jian said. "Look."
The hologram jumped. Predators in combat, their claws raking through corridors choked with *those* creatures—the serpentine nightmares from the first vision. But something was wrong. The predators fought… defensively. Guarding the pods.
A new figure appeared. Taller, its crest ringed with glowing sigils. It slaughtered the crew methodically, each kill marked by a guttural chant. When only the ship's captain remained, the executioner ripped open a pod. A humanoid form spilled out—not human. Alien, but *different*. Delicate, almost crystalline. Dead.
The executioner turned its blade on the captain. The last hologram froze: the captain's gauntleted hand slashing the quarantine glyph into the floor as it died.
Silence.
"They were transporting refugees," Meili whispered. "The pods—they were protecting them. And *that* thing…" She gestured to the executioner. "…was wiping out witnesses."
Hiroto's staff tapped the ground. "Why? What's in those pods that someone would slaughter their own to hide?"
Yumi stepped closer to the hologram. "Maybe not *what*. *Who.*" She pointed to the dead crystalline alien. "They're not invaders. They're… prey. Like us."
Aisha's glow dimmed. "The predator said *invasion*. But what if the war isn't coming? What if it's already *here*? These refugees—they knew something. And someone wants them erased."
Liu Jian approached the wall of pods, long emptied. "We've been asking why the ship came. Wrong question." He pressed his vial to the glass. "We should ask *who else* knows it's here."
The ground trembled. Not the ship—something deeper. Distant, rhythmic, like the heartbeat of the valley itself.
But valleys don't have hearts.
Yumi went pale. "They're digging."
——
That night, they found the tunnels.
Not theirs. Not human.
Smooth, ribbed shafts plunging straight down, reeking of enzymes and scorched stone. Ravi transformed to scout—his serpent DNA shedding heat signatures—but returned minutes later, shaking.
"Five miles down," he rasped. "There's… a hive. And it's not theirs."
He'd seen eggs. Thousands. Clusters pulsing amber. And carapaces—discarded, adult-sized—that matched none of the ship's horrors.
*New players.*
Meili hovered at the shaft's edge, her wings fretting the air. "The executioner. It didn't just kill the crew. It seeded the ground. This hive—it's a trap. For whoever came looking."
Liu Jian stared into the dark. Three years of thinking they were hunters. Now, the chill of being *prey* crawled back.
"We need to go deeper," he said.
Yumi touched her unbroken vial. "And do what?"
"Finish their mission."
The vial's liquid swirled—no longer black, they'd realized, but a color the eye refused to name.
Aisha laughed bitterly. "What mission? They're *dead*."
"No." Liu Jian pointed to the quarantine glyph, still glowing faintly. "They marked this place. Not to contain a threat. To *preserve* it." His voice hardened. "The pods were a message. And we're going to read it."
Ravi's grin was all teeth. "Even if it kills us?"
*Especially then.*
The thought went unspoken. Above them, the stars blinked out one by one, swallowed by clouds thick and hungry.
The Grinder had sharpened them.
Now, it demanded an edge.