No one answered her for a minute, not that she had expected them to.

  She found herself walking towards the arch. As she did, some small part of her was saying, “This is a bad idea, don’t walk towards this, the situation is already extremely crazy, do not walk towards this foreboding arch, you still seem to be walking towards it, you should turn around and stop walking towards it, just stop moving your feet,” and so on, but she apparently wasn’t going to stop.

  It wouldn’t have worked, if she didn’t keep investigating. Right now, it seemed like everything had changed. But if they turned around now, they wouldn’t be halfway back before they started to doubt what they’d seen. By the time they saw anyone, they’d be doubting themselves, and Ray and everyone would hear the doubt, and it would become one of those things where, maybe it was something maybe it wasn’t. So she was going to walk towards the ominous arch and see what it was.

  After all, it couldn’t be a portal to another world because she was already in another world.

  She realized that didn’t make sense after a minute, but by then she was nearly there.

  And, fortunately, it didn’t suddenly crackle with energy, or warp space around it, or have different weather on the other side or anything like that. It was, as far as she could tell, just a bunch of rocks stacked carefully to support each other, and that was it.

  Which meant it was only the most ominous thing that anyone had seen through the Triangle.

  Or, at least, the most ominous thing that anyone had seen through the Triangle and then lived to come back to tell people about.

  Or, actually, it would only become the most ominous thing that anyone had seen through the Triangle and then lived to come back to tell people about if she herself lived to come back to tell people about it.

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  It was probably for the best that Alessio interrupted that chain of thought by asking her, “Do you see anything? Any explanation?”

  She turned and saw he was still filming. “It looks like it was constructed in the normal way, just putting one stone on top of the next.”

  Jim was now approaching, but even he seemed to be too afraid to actually touch it.

  “Do you actually think it was constructed?” Alessio asked. “Isn’t that impossible? No one could have been here before us, right?”

  Jim turned back at him. “We don’t know that. There’s always the possibility that people go back to old Seas. It’s not something we could rule out experimentally, so it’s always possible.”

  The scientist in Adelaide had some concerns about that reasoning, but this wasn’t the time. “Even if that were possible, this looks old. And I don’t see how someone would get here, build this, and not leave a sign.”

  Jim nodded, but stayed quiet.

  She felt she owed it to the universe to try to give some of the sane solutions a chance. “I guess it could be some sort of animal that puts these down. Birds make elaborate nests all the time — there could be some weird animal that builds these.”

  As she said it, she realized it was actually a very credible explanation, and probably the explanation anyone back home would use to disregard this. Hell, it was what she would have done if she’d heard the news without being here. And maybe it was what she was supposed to believe, if she was being rational. The Triangle was always full of odd animals doing odd things — why shouldn’t there be some sort of shrew that built these things as a mating display?

  Alessio must have been thinking along the same lines, because he asked, “You don’t actually believe that though, do you?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Standing here, no, I don’t. I mean, we haven’t seen any animals at all, and although that isn’t definitive proof of anything, it seems to suggest there isn’t a particularly complex ecosystem in play. And the way the plants are split by color, that feels like an aesthetic choice. It feels cultivated.”

  They sat with that idea for another few minutes. She’d be processing it for the foreseeable future.

  But they couldn’t wait for that. Jim helped by asking her, “So what do you want to do?”

  She looked at the arch again. “We’re going to take two hours, starting now, to look around and see if we can find anything else that is interesting at all. Alessio, record as much of it as you can, not that you wouldn’t otherwise. And then, unless we see something that means we need to stay here, we go back to camp and see what everyone else thinks about what we’ve walked into.”