The specimen is breathing.
Kinsey is the first to see it.
Most of the people on her team are looking at the horizon, where a dust-brown stripe has been growing thicker over the course of the past hour. A sandstorm is on the way. Kinsey’s been peering at it intermittently through her binoculars, trying to figure out how fast it’s moving. How much time they have to study the creature they found buried in the sand before it gets buried again beneath a layer of windblown dust.
She’s the one who makes the call: the storm is moving too quickly to risk staying out here to study the creature. Even without returning to the research station so Domino can consult Weatherman, she can tell. It’s time to bring the specimen inside. That brown belt between the ground and the sky is growing fast, gaining height as it draws closer with every passing second, and it’s making her nervous. She’s nervous and her team can tell that she’s nervous and her being nervous makes all of them nervous, because it takes a lot to make Kinsey nervous. And it doesn’t pay to be nervous in the desert. So she’s got to get them inside.
The team stumbles as they move across the sand toward the research station, trying to keep their eyes on the hell that’s coming for them. And because their eyes are on the horizon, Kinsey is the only one watching when the specimen draws breath.
She doesn’t tell anyone on the team at first. If she tells them, shock will loosen at least one pair of hands, and then they’ll all drop the shitty tarp they’re using to haul the specimen inside. They’re already struggling to keep a grip on the weathered plastic, their sweat-slick hands slipping, their knuckles white, their thick-soled, dust-caked boots sliding across the sand. She doesn’t want them distracted, so she doesn’t offer explanations; when they get to the base, she just slams her elbow against the big red button next to the exterior intercom.
“Mads, come let us in. I need an exam table. Now.”
The answer is immediate. “Did you forget your keycard again? Why aren’t you calling on your walkie?”
“Hands are full. We need help. Make it quick, there’s a storm coming.”
“On my way.”
Domino reacts first, which isn’t unusual. Domino is always the first to notice things, quick to speak up. They were the first to bring up the possibility of the storm today, when they spotted the incoming data on Weatherman. When Kinsey mentions the storm, Domino’s eyes meet hers, and the space between their brows slams shut.
Domino is gripping two fistfuls of tarp at the far end of the specimen. They’re wearing a faded pink crop top with the words Baby Slut emblazoned across the chest. It’s threadbare, damp with sweat, riddled with holes that will leave cheetah-spots of deep tan across Domino’s shoulders. Kinsey has tried to forbid this shirt at least twenty times, a dress code edict that Domino always insists “doesn’t count.” Now, as they contort their neck to wipe their dripping forehead on the cutoff sleeve, their expression is one of naked confusion. “Boss? We should have another hour or so before the storm really—”
Kinsey shakes her head. “We’ll talk about it when we’re full-in,” she snaps, meaning don’t ask me any more questions until we’re past the airlock.
She doesn’t like brushing off Domino’s confusion, especially in a way that she knows will raise more questions. Normally, when the team finds something that needs to come inside for further study, they carry whatever they’ve found into the airlock and stop there. That’s where they decide their next steps, assign tasks and catalog observations, comb through all the little tangles of detail that feel impossible when they’re standing outside under the relentless eye of the desert sun.
That order of operations is less feasible with a sandstorm on the way. The airlock is too exposed to the freight-train howl of the wind and the lashes of driving sand that will hit the base. And even if there wasn’t a storm coming, procedure stopped mattering once Kinsey saw the specimen’s lips part. Once she saw the sand fall onto its tongue. Once she saw it choke on a tiny, silent cough.
Seeing that should have made her tell her team to drop the tarp. Living things don’t get brought inside—that’s the rule she’s ignoring, and soon, her team will know she ignored it. They’ll want to know why.
She doesn’t know how to explain it to them. She can’t explain it to herself, either.
There’s the beep of a card reader near Kinsey’s left shoulder and then the door behind her swings open. The doorframe immediately fills with the towering rectangle that is Mads. “Exam table, huh? We got an injury? Jacques, I told you to drink water today.”
“It’s not for me,” Jacques objects.
“Who, then? Ah, shit, you weren’t kidding about the storm coming in. I should have been checking Weatherman.”
Kinsey can feel the solidity of Mads’s body coming close to hers. They get that way when there’s an emergency, losing their typical strict regard for personal space in the interest of attacking whatever problem has presented itself. Their chest presses flush against her back, their omnipresent stethoscope digging into her shoulder blade. Their chin brushes the crest of her ear as they try to peer around her at the horizon.
She feels their breath catch as they spot the specimen. “What in the—”
“Exam table,” Kinsey repeats, barreling past Mads since they decided to be in her way. “Right now. Help or don’t.”
“What is that thing?” Mads yells as they jog to get ahead of her, their holey white sneakers crunching across the sandy linoleum. They pass the pegboard wall where the keys to the largely disused Jeep hang, then swing around the low IKEA shelves that hold everything the team discards on their way in and out of the station—jackets, flashlights, sunglasses, spare keycards, walkie-talkies in their charging stations.
The interior card reader beeps as Mads scans in, and then comes a soft sucking sound as they tug the interior door open. A gentle rush of air from within pushes Kinsey’s hair into her face and sends ripples across the sand on the airlock floor.
Jacques, who never wears sunscreen and is hungover one hundred percent of the time, is the first to answer Mads’s question. “Domino found it,” he says, one corner of his mouth lifting with wry affection. It’s impossible to see his eyes behind his mirror shades, but guaranteed he’s casting an adoring glance at Domino. Those two have been fucking for about four months as far as Kinsey knows. Jacques is definitely in love. Domino is definitely not.
“Should have been helping me map the grid for tomorrow’s samples. Not that there’s much point since it’ll be buried by the end of the day anyway,” Nkrumah snaps, her tongue ring clicking against her front teeth on the ths. She’s pissed about Domino and Jacques fucking. Kinsey isn’t sure which of them is the target of Nkrumah’s possessive jealousy. Could be both. “What were you doing digging, anyway?”
Domino replies without meeting Nkrumah’s bid for conflict. “I had to piss.”
“Who digs a hole just to piss?”
“Fine. I had to take a shit. I just didn’t want to say so. You happy?”
“Go left,” Kinsey says.
The team knows where they’re going. Of course they do. But she doesn’t want to have to listen to Nkrumah and Domino bickering. Especially knowing that they’ll both come vent to her about it later—Domino frustrated, Nkrumah heartbroken, both of them tired and dehydrated and pissed off.
She knows they’ll vent about it to her because she’s the person everyone vents to. That’s the consequence of not participating in the lacelike web of hookups and breakups and romances and letdowns that develop in a situation like this one—she’s treated as a neutral party. For months at a stretch, Kinsey’s isolated six-person research team curls in on itself, touching itself and talking to itself and mutilating itself and eating itself, and—when it comes to the members of the team who aren’t Kinsey—fucking itself. And complaining to her about all of it. Kinsey loves her team, but she sometimes thinks that managing them is like having a lab partner who won’t stop talking about how they cry after jerking off.
Maybe it’s just because she’s hot and tired from cataloging lichens in the sun all day, and maybe it’s because the storm is coming and coming fast—but right now, Kinsey doesn’t want to deal with the seepage of their entanglements. Not when there’s about to be something that looks like a six-legged multi-segmented coyote on a rat-gnawed tarp in the exam room.
She needs time to look at it more closely. To count the joints on those six legs. To figure out if there’s a tapered wasplike waist or just a rotted belly sinking into the barrel of the ribcage. She can’t memorize the feel of that patchy, coarse fur, not if she’s dealing with her team and their endless, recursive drama. She needs space. She needs to be alone with the thing they’ve found.
She needs it.
“Boss,” Domino says again. “Why are we taking this thing full-in? There’s still time left before the storm hits us, we could just tag it and head back out.”
“Load it,” Kinsey says brusquely. It’s the kind of nonanswer the team hates from her, the kind that supplies no information. Too bad.
She bumps into Mads, her shoulder against their elbow, her heel landing on their toes. They don’t complain. They never complain. The door to the exam room is wedged open, a thick paperback crushed between door and doorframe. It’s Tropic of Cancer—Mads swears it’s unreadable, useful only as a doorstop, but every time Kinsey looks at it she notices more dog-ears among the pages. It flops to the floor as Mads uses a foot to push the door open wide enough to admit the team.
Saskia stops in the doorway, halting the team’s progress just a few steps from the exam table. Desert sand rains down from the tarp as it pulls taut. Saskia is staring down at the specimen, her pale eyes enormous, her jaw slack. Kinsey wants to scream at her to move—they’re so close to getting to put this thing down.
“What?” Kinsey snaps.
“It moved,” Saskia whispers. The Eastern Orthodox cross around her neck has slipped loose of her mostly unbuttoned shirt. It’s stuck fast to the sweat-tacky expanse of her décolletage, the angled crossbar drawing a cockeyed line between the swell of each of her breasts. “I swear to god it just—”
She doesn’t get to finish her thought, because Jacques’s grip on the tarp falters. The plastic slides out of his fists. The specimen rolls toward him. He lunges, hangover-clumsy, for the edge of the tarp—but he catches a fistful of the specimen instead. His hand finds one of the legs that emerge from the center of the specimen’s abdomen, his fingers sinking into the surprisingly lush fur that covers the limb.
He lets go with a yell, and the specimen comes awake.
The barrel of its chest heaves as it chokes on sand and thick saliva. Its jaw slackens, three long tongues unbraiding, a stream of gritty mucus falling from the corners of its mouth. It lets out a sound like it’s breathing through gravel.
Kinsey lets out a wordless cry. She tries to drag the team and the tarp backward with her, hauling them deeper into the exam room, aiming the many-legged mass of researchers toward the table.
Nkrumah, Jacques, and Saskia don’t follow her. They bolt out of the exam room, slamming the door shut behind them. It’s the right thing to do and they all should have done it. There’s no protocol for a wild animal getting into the research station but if there was one, it would include the words run away fast. They’re all smart enough to know that.
Still, not everyone runs. Mads grabs hold of the tarp. Along with Kinsey and Domino, they clench the plastic into a loose bundle around the thing as it writhes, swinging it toward the exam table hard enough that they’re practically throwing it.
By some miracle it lands in the right place. It drops onto the exam table with all the heft of a waterlogged mattress. Mads and Domino each take an immediate step backward. The tarp is still folded loosely over the specimen, the plastic rising and falling fast as the creature pants beneath it.
It’s scared, Kinsey thinks. She’s breathing fast too.
The crinkling movement of the tarp is matched by a rhythmic sound that Kinsey only belatedly recognizes as the sound of Nkrumah tapping a finger against the thick glass of the exam room window. Nkrumah, bossy and brisk, always safety-minded. She’ll want to call some kind of meeting about how Mads and Kinsey and Domino didn’t leave the room. She’ll want to agree on new rules, then print them out and laminate them and tape them to the exam room door.
1. When the monster we find beneath the desert sand turns out to be alive, we all get away from it.
A thick wet sound comes from beneath the tarp. Another choking cough. Nkrumah keeps tapping her finger on the glass, but Kinsey doesn’t give a shit about Nkrumah right now. The entire research station falls away. It’s just her and the specimen.
Kinsey steps toward it.
“Hey,” Mads pants, their voice a million miles away. “Hey, maybe don’t.”
They’re too late. Even if they weren’t, Kinsey would act like they were. She reaches out one trembling hand and lifts the folded-over tarp off the specimen.
It twists its head. The long snout angles toward her. The damp dimpled nostrils flex as it searches for the smell of her. Kinsey doesn’t move. She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for until the moment the specimen’s eyelids snap open. There are no eyes in the sockets—only densely packed sand. Still, when it turns toward Kinsey she feels something impossible, something she never gets to feel anywhere else.
She feels noticed.
“Hi,” she breathes.
The specimen lets out a low gurgle. A single red-and-black harvester ant wriggles free of the sand in the left eye socket, crawls down over the specimen’s cheek, makes its way down one leg of the exam table.
“Boss,” Domino says. At the sound of their voice, Kinsey feels the research station slam back into place around her. “Hey. Boss. We need to walk out of this room now, okay?”
Kinsey nods. “Yeah. Okay.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the specimen.
“Kinsey,” Mads adds. “Now.”
She doesn’t make them drag her out of the room. She turns away on her own steam. As she opens the exam room door, she can feel the weight of the specimen’s eyeless gaze on her back.
Once the exam room door is shut behind them, Mads lets out a shaky breath. “Holy shit.”
“That thing’s alive,” Domino breathes. “How the hell is it alive?”
“Where did you find it again?”
“Like a hundred meters from the survey grid,” Domino answers. “Under, I don’t know, two feet of sand? I started digging and the ground just kind of collapsed under me, and—Boss? Are you okay?” They might as well be on the other side of the world, talking to Kinsey through a tin can. “She doesn’t look okay.”
Kinsey doesn’t answer. She brushes at a tickle on her neck and feels something small and damp roll beneath the weight of her touch. She catches it between her fingers and when she brings her hand in front of her face, she realizes that she’s holding the half-mangled body of a harvester ant. Maybe the same one that came out of the specimen’s eye socket, maybe not—there are always ants around the station. Its antennae wave slowly, tasting her breath on the air.
Kinsey licks her lips, then tucks the ant into the pocket of her jeans.
“Team meeting,” she says at last. “Now.”
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Kinsey opens the passenger door of the Jeep for Nkrumah, but doesn’t offer to help with either of the large duffel bags at her feet. In the four hours it took to drive from the airstrip to the research base, Kinsey came to understand one thing quite clearly: Nkrumah prefers to haul her own load.
“Glad to be here,” Nkrumah replies. She scuffs her boots in the sand, getting the toecaps dusty. “That’s better. Hate the look of a new boot.”
Kinsey grins and pulls out two keycards. “Don’t worry. It won’t last long. This is for you,” she adds, flashing one of the keycards before tucking it into the side pocket of one of the duffels. “You’ll need it to get in and out of the airlock.”
Nkrumah’s chin tilts upward, her brows dropping. This is something Kinsey noticed during the interview process: Nkrumah tends to ask questions with an air of authority. “Airlock?”
“Come see.” She scans her own keycard against the pad on the outside of the exterior door, waiting for it to let out a beep before turning the handle. “This place was originally supposed to house astronauts-in-training. They were still building it when that budget massacre hit NASA. You remember the—?”
“Yes.” The answer carries the weight of what it felt like to be a research scientist during that particular presidential administration. What it’s felt like ever since.
They walk into the dim airlock. It’s a narrow hallway, wider at the far end. It does a so-so job of keeping the outside out and the inside in. The floor is permanently blanketed with desert sand, the walls ornamented with the tiny pissed-off lizards that always manage to find their way in. Still, it’s better than nothing, and it’s good to have two locking doors between the lab and the intense indifference of the desert.
“Yeah, so. The base was originally supposed to be a circle. Kind of bicycle-wheel shaped, with a recreation area in the middle where that cement pad out front is now. This airlock system was put in place for the baby astronauts to practice secure entry and egress from each spoke of the wheel. But then funding got vaporized, and they had to abandon construction partway in.”
“Ah.” Nkrumah looks around, taking in the near-triangular dimensions of the airlock. “They just connected the spokes? So we have a … pie slice?”
“Got it in one. Twenty-five hundred square feet, tons of dead space between hallways,” Kinsey adds, crossing the airlock to scan her keycard at the interior door. “It’s not a lot of breathing room for six people, but we’ll make it work.”
“I’ve lived in smaller apartments with more roommates.”
Kinsey hesitates at the door. “I’d wager those apartments had reliable cell service and Wi-Fi. Ours gets knocked out by dust storms half the time. Hell, in the bad sandstorms even the emergency landline goes down, and repairs on that can take months. Phone company’s not exactly prioritizing line repairs in the middle of nowhere.”
The only sound for a moment is the creak of Nkrumah’s new boots as she shifts her weight from foot to foot. “Are you trying to get me to turn around? Head back to the airstrip? Miss out on the opportunity to put Kangas Station on my resume?”
“No. No, sorry. I just—I want you to know what you’re getting into here. That’s all. Hope you’re ready to get cozy with some strangers.”
She looks back to see a wicked sparkle in Nkrumah’s eyes. “Oh, I don’t think that will be a problem.” Her mouth slowly spreads into a Cheshire-cat grin. “The real question is—are they ready to get cozy with me?”
The keycard scanner beeps. Kinsey opens the door. “Let’s find out.”
Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Gailey
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