There was a clearing in the bush, and it was full of low wooden buildings. The . . . camp, she realised, was longer than it was wide. She could see that only five or six of the low buildings were dotted across, while she could not see the end of the shelters to her left or right.

The dirt under her feet was a ruddy red-brown, and the few parked vehicles were that same khaki colour that the men who took Deimos had worn. Her orange suit stood out against the neutral landscape.

The odd village seemed to merge with the bush. If she had walked fifty metres either side of it, Romy couldn’t be sure she would have spotted it.

A shiver ran up her spine as she scouted the area for life.

Romy took a few steps forwards and scanned once again. There would be a guard of some description watching them if Atlas meant to harm the knot, though no one had come running when she’d flung open the panel.

Nothing disturbed the still morning.

A few hundred metres to her right was a cluster of buildings. They were the tallest Romy could see in the camp.

She took off at a fast clip towards them. Was this an old township? It didn’t look hundreds of years old. And she knew that wooden buildings were rare in the twenty-first century. Romy glanced back and saw a clear trail of her footsteps extending from the building she’d left.

“The doors were unlocked,” she reminded herself before abandoning any attempt to sneak her way through the village.

The red dirt clung to her ventilation suit as her steps disturbed the smooth surface, adding to her general grime.

As she walked through the camp, the houses remained quiet. Empty, for all she knew. But the window coverings were lowered against the rays of the morning sun.

And the homes looked too . . . pristine to be empty. But if the low houses were full. . . .

What were the odds that every single battler that had ever crashed on Earth ended up in this exact place?

The dead weight in her stomach grew heavier.

Romy scouted ahead, creeping towards the taller buildings. There were three of them, arranged in a semi-circle with the tallest in the middle. All were much larger than any of the homes she’d passed thus far.

A flickering caught her eye. To her right was some kind of pixelated black and white hologram. It rose up from a small black box bolted into the ground. The pictures on it were rotating, like a slide-show; pictures of families laughing, of the young helping the elderly, and of children holding hands. Romy blinked in alarm as a message flashed across in large letters, ‘Take Less Than You Need’. The images the projection showed were happy, but for some reason it felt sinister. What was the projection for? And what did the message mean?