Forcing his eyes open, Jase saw that Pahl’s face was creased with concern. “I’ll be okay.”

Pahl looked doubtful. “You don’t look very good.”

“I’ll be okay,” Jase repeated, as if saying it again made it true. “Help me sit up.”

Hooking his right arm under Jase’s left, Pahl eased his friend upright. Jase winced as the muscles along his spine complained. Pahl steadied Jase as Jase slumped forward, waiting for something bad to happen. When he didn’t vomit or pass out, he gave Pahl a weak smile.

“So far so good,” he said. “Let’s see if I can stand.”

The first time he tried to push to his feet, Jase nearly fell. Pahl took most of his weight, and Jase clung to Pahl for support. After a few minutes, Jase felt steady enough to let go. He braced himself against the large boulder he’d collided with and watched as Pahl sidestepped down a short distance to retrieve Jase’s flashlight. Jase’s head still hurt, and he was reasonably sure he’d had a tremendous bruise on his right shoulder. But he didn’t think he’d broken anything, and he wasn’t feeling as sick.

“We should go back,” he said as Pahl trudged back up the hill, flashlight in hand. Jase had plenty of air but enough adventure for one day.

Pahl nodded then frowned. Pivoting on his heel, he looked down the mountain. Jase saw his friend’s gaze flitting across the rock field below. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Something here, though. Like,” Pahl’s head cocked to one side, as if listening to something very faint, “old voices. You know? Like when there’s a big room and it echoes for a long time.” Pahl’s ice-blue eyes zeroed in on Jase. “You know what I’m talking about.”

For a brief instant, Jase had the impulse to lie, to deny the ghosts he sensed hovering in the shadows of this dead planet. Then he thought again about what had happened between them on the shuttle and, instead, he nodded. “I don’t really hear them all the time either. They come and go like waves.”

Jase wondered why his dad had never mentioned these voices. Then he had an odd thought. Maybe his dad couldn’t hear them. Yes, but then why could he?He was only half-Betazoid. He wasn’t a telepath.

“Can you hear what they’re saying? I don’t understand them.”

“No.” Pahl’s eyebrows crinkled to a point above the bridge of his nose, and his frills shivered with consternation. “It’s like being in a big room with a lot of people all talking at once. But it’s stronger here. Actually,” Pahl pointed to a mound of boulders forty meters down the mountain and to the right, “right there. I’m going to take a look. You want to come?”

All his common sense told him to stay put, to backtrack his way up the mountain and then down the ruined pass and back to the biosphere. Instead, Jase said, “Sure.”

They didn’t speak as they made their way down. Jase’s head felt mushy, and he had to work hard at the simple act of walking. But he felt that the thought-claws were stronger, too. Ten minutes later, they stood alongside the tumble of nonspecific brown and rust-colored boulders. Jase studied them then looked back up the mountain.

“Up there.” Jase pointed at a ragged fringe of overhanging rock. “Landslide.” Then he squinted. “Hey, you see that? Two meters up, to the left. That gap.”

“It’s a hole, like an opening. Cave, maybe.” Pahl glanced at Jase. “Let’s go.”

The boys clambered up the hill, Pahl leading the way. As soon as they were level with the gap, Jase immediately realized that what they’d seen was not a depression, or a hollow caused by rocks falling together, or a true cave. The opening was arched, like a passage in the side of the mountain. Jase edged closer. The opening couldn’t be natural.

As if reading his thoughts, Pahl ran his gloved fingers over the rock. “Machine cut. I feel ridges. You wouldn’t get that with a phaser.”

“But what’s weird is that the door is here.Usually, a door is something you see from the outside. I mean, if this part of the mountain hadn’t sheared away, how would you know it was here?”

“Maybe it was blocked off and you had to know what to look for. Or there might have been an outer door, only it got knocked away.”

Jase couldn’t see beyond the opening. Then he remembered his flashlight and flicked it on. The blue-white beam speared the inky hollow, and Jase swept the light over the interior of the cave. He could see now that a tunnel led down into the mountain.

“Can you see the end?” asked Pahl.

“No.” Taking a few cautious steps forward, Jase angled his light along the walls. He saw then hadthe sense that after three or four meters, the tunnel angled down and curved right. “It feels deep. You know what this reminds me of? Earth. Ancient Egypt. The tombs they used to build for the pharaohs. My dad took me to see them once, about a year ago. A place called the Valley of the Kings.”

“Valley of the Kings?”

“Yeah. The Valley of the Kings is a wadi,a valley surrounded by high mountains. The mountains have a lot of limestone in them, and that’s good because limestone makes for good walls and you can draw on it. The tombs had all these religious pictures and texts on the walls. The entrances,” Jase angled his flashlight back to the opening, “they looked just like this one, except they were rectangles, not arches. There was the opening, the entryway into the tomb and then this long shaft.”

Jase turned again, watching as the beam from his flashlight was swallowed by darkness, like water disappearing down a pipe. “Sometimes the shafts were ramps, and sometimes there were stairs. The older tombs were really steep and then by the later dynasties, the tunnels got more level. This one looks like it goes down.”

“How far?”

“No way of knowing without a tricorder. I mean, if this were Earth, it could be anywhere from fifteen to thirty meters long, and that would just be the first corridor. There’s usually more than one, and lots of rooms. I remember that a couple of them had gates and pits and booby traps. They were worried about grave robbers and stuff.”

“Then we have to come back,” said Pahl. “We have to get tricorders and lights and some extra air packs for our suits so we can come back.”

“We don’t even know what this is. Maybe it’s a big nothing. Or maybe it’s an old mineshaft,” Jase said, not believing himself for one second.

“We won’t know until we explore it.” Pahl looked past Jase into the darkness ahead. “It’s not a mine. You know that. We were led here. We’re supposedto be here. Can’t you feel it?”

“No,” Jase lied. “I just came over the pass. I didn’t know there was anything here. It’s a coincidence.”

Pahl’s eyes clouded, and Jase thought that his friend might argue. But Pahl just shrugged. “If that makes you feel better. But I’m coming back.”

Jase knew that he would come back, too. But he said only, “Come on. We need to get back to the biosphere before my dad does.”

Pahl didn’t protest. Jase led the way home, retracing his steps up the steep sides of the mountain and then down into the valley. They didn’t speak along the way. From a ridge that ran along the top of the mountains, Jase swept his eyes over the valley floor until he picked out the silver dome of the biosphere. His gaze drifted right, past the ship that squatted on its triangular pad, to the space where his dad usually left their smaller landskimmer. The space was empty. Checking his chronometer, Jase heaved an internal sigh of relief. If his dad and the others stuck to their routine, Jase and Pahl had three hours to spare.

An hour later when they were about a kilometer away and Jase could pick out the triangle of yellow entry lights around the airlock (Jase having discovered that Cardassians liked triangles and rhomboids and diamonds) Pahl said, “We shouldn’t tell them.”

“No,” said Jase.

“And you need to be careful what you think around your father.”