First Contact - Part 6

The system had been quiet for a long time. We'd gotten Harko on his feet and retraced our steps with Nev or me supporting him. First the creek with the bluff rising on the eastern bank, then the pathway winding back to the northwest and then the bamboo forest. Now that we had reached the edge of the potato field, Harko needed to rest again. The sky was turning from deep indigo to the thin wash of gray-blue that signaled dawn approaching. Nev stood facing back the way we'd come. She wasn't speaking. She wasn't checking her overlay. She was just watching the dark where the rift was, beyond the bamboo line and the bluff and a forest of trees we couldn't see from here, her body still and her arms loose at her sides. Her magenta outline was gone. So was Harko's yellow aura. The imagery had faded as we moved from the region of the rift. Both of them glowed. Harko sitting at the field's edge, a teal-to-cyan luminescence at his edges, faint enough that I almost missed it. Nev standing, the same residue brighter on her, the way she always seemed to take more of whatever was...