"You're joking," I told Michael. I could have sworn he was about to start crying.

  "I'm afraid not," he said, his voice growing unsteady. "It would be a miracle if we successfully got there on time. Maybe if our masks worked for a couple of months, there would be a slim chance of making it, but no, our stupid masks only last for a week."

  I put on my brave face. There was no way I was just going to give up that easily. There had to be a way. I looked something up with the search engine on my flesh-watch.

  "Michael," I said. "Titan is twenty-three and a half times smaller than Earth. We have to be able to make it!"

  "Sure it is," Michael said, but then I saw something begin to dawn in his eyes. "Wait a second. How exactly do you know that?"

  I told him about the search engine on my flesh-watch. I saw his eyes widen as I saw him trying it for himself.

  "This is huge!" he said. "Now I can do research about all this before I go onto the surface."

  I patted him on the back and he set right to work doing whatever he was doing. He kept working for ten minutes, and I hated bending over in this stupid shell to keep my head from hitting the ceiling, so I asked him,

  "How long is this going to take you?"

  "About one to three hours," he said. I didn't bother to mention the discrepancy between one and three. Clearly he was locked in.

  Michael ended up being way too into his research because I ended up sitting in my little chair for about an hour before Harper woke up.

  "How long have I been out?" she said with a yawn. I could have sworn Michael jumped.

  "Only about an hour since I woke up," I told her. Her eyes went wide.

  "An hour!" she said. "Shouldn't we be out of here by now?"

  "Nah," I said. "Michael's doing research so I've just been hanging around waiting until he's done. Then we'll take off."

  "Oookaaay," Harper said, dragging out the word. You could tell she was confused. "Shouldn't we be out of here in, like, five minutes before the pod takes off and returns to the main ship? Remember the 'no life support on the return journey' thing?"

  I shook my head and turned to Michael.

  "Did you hear that?"

  "Yeah," he said. "I just finished up my research, and for your information, the show said that you're fine until you press the red button that lets you out onto the surface."

  "Right," Harper said. "I remember that."

  "Sure you did," Michael and I said at the same time, grinning at each other.

  "Anyway, Michael, what all did you find out about the moon?" I asked him.

  "I guess I'll give you the rundown about Titan's history and how this place came to be," Michael said, just getting warmed up. "About 30,000 years ago this place was very cold, about -290 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, if someone were to even step foot on the planet without some type of life support, they would die instantly."

  "Please don't tell me it's still that way," Harper said with a wide look in her eyes.

  "It's not," Michael reassured her. "Please let me finish my story, though. I'll never be able to finish if you guys are interrupting me constantly. Anyway, the moon was really cold until something happened that would change the course of this place forever. A man by the name of Walter Ozwald figured out that if you mix water with Dark Matter, the combination of the two makes a hot compound that somehow generates heat and stays about a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and as far as we know, the compound doesn't stop generating heat while still retaining all the properties of water."

  "When some scientists got wind of this discovery," Michael continued, "they had the bright idea of drilling a hole through the thin layer of crust separating the Dark Matter from the water on Titan."

  "Hold up," I said. "Titan has layers?"

  "Yeah," Michael said as he drew a quick sketch of how the layers on Titan were positioned. "That's pretty much how it goes. Anyway, when the hole was drilled, the reaction took place and Titan has slowly been heating up ever since. Now the average surface temperature is only 35 degrees Fahrenheit."

  "Only 35 degrees Fahrenheit," Harper muttered under her breath.

  "Anyway," Michael said with emphasis on anyway, "this change made it possible for complex life to thrive on Titan that can breathe nitrogen. The creatures were designed by humans and released by humans in hope of creating an ecosystem. Apparently it has worked too, though plants still haven't been able to take hold. Instead of plants, the food chain works this way: small creatures are somehow powered by the Dark Matter in the center of Titan, and other fish eat them, and eventually this power makes it to the surface, and that is how the land animals are fed."

  "The last thing that you should take note of," Michael began to finish off, "is that there are a couple very large life forms on this moon. I will only mention three for the sake of time. First we have the Behemoths. They are gigantic beasts the size of mountains that eat Floadons. Floadons are very large birds that fly through the atmosphere of Titan and really just eat whatever they can get their hands on. The last thing I should mention is the Kryposar, a large creature that is about the size of a house and also eats whatever it can get its hands on."

  "Finally," Michael finished, "the last thing that you need to be aware of: on Titan there are lots and lots of creatures per mile because of the lack of plants. Think about it like this: a bunch of smaller creatures are animals but act like plants and hardly move. Not all of them are dangerous, but there are a lot of them."

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  "Thanks for the speech," Harper said sarcastically. "Did you discover anything about how to kill the dangerous beasts that could come after us?"

  Michael shook his head. I don't even think the sarcasm entered his system.

  "The only thing I learned that we are going to need to know is that there is an old mining base about three miles away from here that might have a faster form of transportation than just walking to the academy. This is our only shot, unless we want to die trying to walk to the academy."

  "Okay, I guess," I said. "That means we have to get to that base then, huh?"

  "No duh," Harper said. I think she was ticked off from Michael's lecture. "Let's just get out of here."

  She opened the compartment for the mask and pulled it out. I watched as she pressed it to her face and she started to choke, pointing frantically at her throat.

  "She won't be able to breathe unless she gets out of here!" Michael shouted as he pulled out his mask and pressed it to his face. I did the same and ran over to push the button. The door opened and I gasped at what was in front of me.

  It was a leg about the size of our pod, and I gasped as it moved. I clambered out of the pod and saw a large creature on four big, stocky legs that had a neck that reached into the heavens. A tail dragged behind the behemoth that was even bigger than the legs.

  "Whoa," Michael said as he stepped out of the pod. Harper was right behind him.

  "That's huge," Harper said with her mouth wide open.

  "Just like you," Michael said, smirking. Harper hit him with the back of her hand, making me laugh.

  "Stop the goofing around," I told the two, trying to hold back my laughter. "We are in a new, possibly hostile environment. Any mistakes could be dire."

  Harper and Michael nodded seriously at me, but I could tell they were holding back their laughter.

  "Those big creatures sure are moving slowly, aren't they?" Michael said as he pulled a robot out of his pocket and sent it into the air. "That'll provide us some reconnaissance."

  Michael pulled a controller out of his backpack with a monitor on it so we could see everything the drone was seeing.

  I watched in awe as the drone rose above the big creatures that we were seeing to the point that they looked like trees. I pulled up the search engine on my flesh-watch and asked it what those creatures were.

  "They are called skimbas," the search engine said. "They are large terrestrial creatures that feed on infant floadons."

  I relayed the information to my friends and kept watching the screen.

  "What's that on the horizon?" I asked my friends, pointing to a cloud that seemed to be rapidly approaching us. The cloud gained on us quickly and soon I was able to make out hundreds of strange flying creatures. They looked kind of like the extinct manta ray, but they could fly, and they had talons sticking out from under them.

  "That there is the baby floadons," the search engine kept narrating into my head. "They have a wingspan of about ten feet long and eat gimlongs, a humanoid creature that lives on Titan."

  The word humanoid was about to make sense in a second. I looked up and saw the floadons fly above us. I nudged Harper as the skimbas lifted their elegant necks into the air and started eating the baby floadons by the mouthful, almost like the extinct baleen whale would eat krill and shrimp.

  "Whoa," she said as a floadon swooped down from the mess of necks and grabbed Harper by her sweater, lifting her into the sky.

  I yelled out as Harper was suddenly falling back toward us because her sweater ripped. She hit the ground with a crunch and moaned, clutching her ankle.

  I ran over to her, pulling her under a skimba. Michael was right behind us.

  "Are you okay?" I held Harper's head as her face started to turn white. Her eyelids fluttered and started to shut. I pulled up the leg of her pants and saw bone sticking out of her leg at a nasty angle.

  Thud. I looked next to us and saw one of the floadons looking around, feeling everything with the rim of its "wings."

  "What is it doing?" I whispered to myself, looking desperately from the floadon to Harper and back again.

  "The floadon that you are observing is feeling the ground right now looking for something," the search engine said. "Floadons are blind so they rely on touch to guide them, and their seamless, round wing guides them. Chances are this floadon is hunting, based on its stance."

  GREAT, I thought to myself right as four more floadons landed around us and started to feel the ground. We were surrounded. I looked over at Harper's dying face and almost felt resigned. It looked like I was going to die.

  "Harper," I started to say. "I was just going to say..."

  I was cut off by a strange voice in my head. It was powerful and overwhelming, and just its presence made my life have a new meaning. I felt strong once again, bolstered with confidence.

  WYATT, I heard a voice say in my head, and something told me this wasn't my flesh-watch. YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO USE MATTER WHEN YOU AREN'T GIVEN MORE OF IT. FIND THE POWER INSIDE YOU. SEARCH YOURSELF.

  Bam. It was over and the voice was gone. My confidence disappeared, but I still remembered what the voice had said.

  "Find the power inside you," I mumbled as I felt deep inside my soul. It was there that I found a blazing white power, like the dots I had seen on the floor. I reached toward the power with my consciousness and pulled it out and pushed it through my hands.

  It wasn't that impressive in the real world. All I saw was a little white speck in my hand, but I could still feel power radiating from it. I was mesmerized.

  "Wyatt!" a voice broke through my haze. "You have to do something!"

  I looked around and saw Harper breathing her final breath. With all my strength, I pushed my little white speck into her body and her eyelids closed.

  Then the beasts finally closed in and touched the skimba's legs. The skimba wasn't happy about this and stamped its feet, making the ground shake, crushing the floadons underfoot. They went still.

  "Is it over?" I said, running over to Harper. Michael stood up.

  "My drone is out of commission," he said. "It's best we wait here for a couple more minutes before moving on."

  I was hardly listening to him as I knelt down and put my head against Harper's chest. I could feel her heart beating steadily.

  "She's alive!" I said, rising into the air, giving Michael a hug that probably pushed the wind out of him. He didn't seem to care, though. He was just as happy as I was.

  "How?" Michael said as tears started to stream down his eyes. I started to cry too. "I felt her heart stop beating. I thought she was gone."

  "Well, I'm here now," Harper said. We both spun around to see her standing up. With each second that went by she seemed to get better and better. "Whatever you did to me felt great. I felt happier than I ever have when that speck entered my body."

  "Harper?" I asked her. "Why are you glowing?"

  Harper looked down at herself. Her skin was glowing brightly, and with each second that passed she seemed to get brighter and brighter until I had to shield my eyes to even look at her.

  "Whoa," Harper said, smiling like crazy. "That feels weird. I feel like I could touch the sky. The joy and happiness—it all feels so overwhelming."

  Michael looked at me like I was crazy, but I knew that feeling. What she described is what I had felt a couple of times after consuming a white dot.

  "We should keep moving," Michael said as he started to walk out from under the skimba. He looked up to the sky.

  "It's all clear," he said, giving us a thumbs up. We scurried out from under the giant and followed Michael.

  We walked through the legs of skimbas for maybe ten minutes when we came to the edge of a cliff. We all gasped.

  There was a vast canyon filled with what looked like extinct trees from a distance. On the other end was a tower protruding out from the adjacent cliff. The whole thing was super awe-inspiring.

  "That's where we're trying to get," Michael said, pointing at the tower in the distance. "That's the old mine."

  This was going to be a very long walk.