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“If it’s on the farm much longer, Drev’s going to name it, and then we’ll never get rid of it.”

“So he’s doing better?”

“Drev or the goat?”

I smiled. Rauf might have vehemently denied that he was the leader out on that farm, but everything I saw told me that he cared deeply about everything and everyone out there.

Even the damned goat.

“I’m driving us out to where we found the dead goats. I figured you can take a look around, see if there’s anything there that looks like it might be sickening the animals. Then I’ll bring you home.”

He said it to the road.

“What if I want to check on your goat before I go home?”

“It’s not my goat,” he gritted out.

I smiled. One day he’d admit the truth.

We drove past the turn for the farm and continued into rougher country. The road narrowed between low fields and long cuts of exposed earth. In the distance, whole sections of hillside had been carved into level shelves. Water channels ran between the terraces.

Young trees stood in rows on one slope, their trunks almost evenly spaced. Beyond them, native scrub crowded against the planted ground in a ragged border.

Could terraforming have changed something the glow-goats needed? Everyone I’d met in town seemed healthy, human and minotaur alike. Whatever was happening seemed far more specific.

Rauf turned off the road and stopped beside a clearing surrounded by knee-high brush. He shut off the engine and finally looked at me.

“Nakhil found the first one here about a week ago,” he said as we climbed out. “He was checking the boundary. The goat was already dead.”

“And no one thought it was strange?”

Rauf shrugged. “Things die.”

The clearing offered nothing obvious. Pale grass grew through hard soil, and a few flat stones broke the surface. Whatever the men had done with the body, it wasn’t here now, and the weather had washed away any obvious stain. I walked the edge, checking the brush for caught fur, dead leaves, or bare patches, but it looked like any other piece of open ground we’d passed.

I took a clean sample jar from my bag and scraped dirt into it with a small metal scoop. I sealed the jar and marked it as the first site.

We left the truck and followed the road for another half mile. Rauf carried the sample bag without asking. The land dipped on one side, and the brush grew thicker where water had once cut a shallow path through the soil.

“The second was here,” he said. “Five days ago.”

This site looked as ordinary as the first. I searched anyway, stepping around stones and pushing the brush aside while Rauf watched the road.

“Did you report any of this to the mayor?” I asked.

Rauf seemed confused. “Why? What’s to report?”

Fair point. It wasn’t like I’d been calling in roadkill I saw on my daily commute back home.

No, back on Earth.

Ceres-9 was my home now.

I tripped on something hard on the ground and would have fallen to my knees if Rauf hadn’t caught my arm. He held me there for a frozen moment before he let me go, satisfied I was steady.

I could feel the imprint of his palm and it wasn’t fading.

The toe of my boot had caught on a strip of metal jutting from the soil. I bent and brushed dirt away from it. More metal appeared, the edge of a device buried deep enough that only part of its casing showed.