"Li, honey, you can't go off by yourself like this," Randi scolded. "You have to stay with us."

An Li didn't seem to hear, but she was certainly aware that the older woman was there. She turned, looked up at Randi Queson, and smiled a vacant, little child's smile, and held out whatever she had to show the team geologist what she'd found. "Pretty," she said.

Randi squatted down and took an object from An Li's hand and looked at it. It wasn't very large, but it was definitely no volcanic oddity. It was a bright, shiny, golden color, so polished that it reflected a distorted vision of whatever image it captured. It was certainly not heavy enough to be pure gold-a hundred and fifty grams, no more. It had a pentagonal base no more than fifty or sixty millimeters long with a series of pentagonal brackets, a half dozen or so, running down its length. Why it wasn't sandblasted or bent and twisted was as much a mystery as what it was or whose it might be. The only thing she was sure of was that it couldn't have been dropped very long ago from the looks of it, and whoever lost it just might come back looking for it.

They were in strange territory now, and needed to tread softly and carefully. She wasn't sure whether to take it or leave it, but An Li made up her mind for her by grabbing it out of her hands and clutching it to her. "Mine!" she said. "Pretty!"

Randi sighed. "All right, you can keep it, but we have to go and find the others. It's going to rain. Get very wet. Can you hear it?"

As if on cue, loud rumblings of thunder sounded far too close to ignore.

An Li got up and took Randi's hand, clutching the strange artifact in the other, and kept pace as much as she could with the larger woman striding off towards where the other two had vanished.