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They've landed on Girisha, a sparsely inhabited Rim planet. It's not even really nominally under Alliance control - people left, decades ago, three ships crowded full of discontents, made a blind jump out of the Arusha System - itself connected only by a few frayed threads to the rest of the Kalidasa Cluster. It's pretty, River thinks, trying not to pay too much attention to how everyone else thinks about it as she peers out of their eyes. (They see a different world than her, so she's doing this more aggressively than normal - Girisha is a world rife with crumbles and lines and criss-crosses of mountains and canyons, tall or worn by the ages. This makes for dramatic - beautiful - bands of flora ringing the mountains, and probably an immense amount of biological diversity. Girisha wasn't terraformed, they don't think (River tries to shove away how this is Mal's thought), just found by the colonists this way. Perfect, in a way only the Core worlds were supposed to have been. It's covered with forests, rippling into fields in only a few places where the soil grows too poor, glaciers capping the mountains and inching through the northernmost valleys. There's only three proper settlements on the entire planet, all clustered within a day's walk of each other. The buildings are wooden, and the colonists haven't kept up a lot of their technology, but smugglers followed them eventually, settling a fourth port and a moon facility, and gossiped, eventually - the Alliance hopefully doesn't know anything's here, but Mal thinks it's a pretty good place to lie low while they heal up. The ship don't need repairs, but their bodies do - )
That's not the world River sees.
She sees -
Towers. Grand. Like nothing humanity ever built. Smooth and shining and perfect, twisting imitations of the mountains. Pyramids. Reverse pyramids, built by clever confident hands. A bustling world full of - full of minds, unlike hers - like hers -
It's one of the weirder hallucinatons she's ever had, though her hallucinations get pretty strange. It feels worn down, thin, echoed, but like nothing else has overwritten it.
Wash lands them outside of one of the settlements, the one the gossip says has some doctors who don't ask questions. He asks River to stay with the ship. He reminds her about her radio and her comm link. He asks - if you want to wander, keep the radio. (He's told her the comm link would let them track her, if she takes it. He never asks her to take it. She sometimes does anyways, if she's going somewhere with Simon. Her brother's a very smart idiot at times.)
They leave, and River sits outside the ship, looking at a world unlike what's in front of her - there's a courtyard, here, a fountain there, depicting strange animals -
She takes the radio, and sets out down a road only she can see.
It takes her up into the mountains, winding back and forth. She moves quickly, the steps falling behind her - she finds a staircase off the path, through an archway, emotions impressed into the stones that aren't under her feet as she climbs -
...Aren't they?
She stops, trying - to ask the path - what are you now - trying to focus -
There's the remnant shape of a stairway under her feet, maybe. An echo of old stone.
Bothered, curious, River keeps climbing.
At the top - a painted wooden arch, a stone building that her hands tell her doesn't exist though they can trace the impression of where it might be -
Inside (she opens the door, even though it isn't there) -
A large sphere made of metal, smudged with dirt (clean and new?) - there, even to her hands, even to her chest when she hugs it, even to her tongue when she licks it. It tastes bad. She doesn't lick it a second time.
There's echoes -
She wanders around, her footsteps falling into the paths of - someone scared, she thinks. Someone angry, and determined, but so so scared. Her hands trace where their hands go (went? will go?) and her lips form strange words she's never spoken, agitated, speaking to someone she can't hear the echo of -
There's a hum. She thinks her actual ears hear it. It's coming from the sphere.
She turns to it, resting her palm on its cold smooth metal -
It slides aside, and she steps in.
- She does not emerge in the someone's footsteps.
She emerges somewhere very, very strange, in fact.
