TREES IN THE DARK

“What is that?” I asked, my eye pressed to the telescope.

Adam gently pushed me aside. “I don’t know what that is.” His tone was tight, almost scolding, as if the universe had broken a rule.

“That can’t be real…right?” My voice cracked.

Adam pulled back, staring through the ships window at the asteroid.

“A…a forest shouldn’t exist. Not here. Not anywhere out here.

I nodded.

“You’re right,” I said, swallowing hard. “If that’s even what we’re seeing. Nothing biological could thrive in a void.” I pressed my eye against the telescope again.

“If a forest isn’t supposed to exist, then what are we actually looking at?”

Adam leaned back in his chair. The low thrum of the ship’s engine pulsed through the floor. The cabin smelled of metal and recycled air.

“We’re supposed to be on a mission to collect data from asteroids…” He trailed off, fingers tapping the armrest in an uneven rhythm.

“But what if—” He stopped, straightening abruptly.

I pulled away from the telescope.

“What if, what?”

Adam’s mouth tightened. “Well… what if it’s aliens? A hidden forest no human was ever meant to see.”

He let out a small laugh as though wrapping the words in humor could make them less absurd.

I huffed a laugh, sharp and too quick. “Yeah… alien life. Sure.”

I sat in my chair and leaned back. The quiet between us lingered as thoughts swirled in my mind.

Adam dropped his elbows to his knees.

“Okay, but seriously. We know Asteroids aren’t just rubble. Some carry water, even organics.

I nodded, eyes still on the viewport. “Right. Clues to where life could begin. But not life itself.”

Adam brushed fingers over the console, checking the readouts.

“Our mission isn’t just dust and rock. It’s prospecting, cataloguing resources. Metals, ice. Anything with value.

I let out a slow breath. “Yes. Maybe ice if we were lucky. Nothing alive. Nothing with bark, leaves and roots.”

His hand hovered over the controls. “Still… If water and organics can exist out here…”

I swallowed, eyes flicking back to the impossible canopy of green outside the window. “Then maybe…something else could exist too. A different system.”

“I guess my alien joke’s not so much a joke anymore, huh?” he teased, a crooked smile tugging at his mouth.

“Ha, yeah.” I huffed, though it came out more brittle than amused. “Maybe.”

“I say we go check it out,” Adam said, straighter now, more confidence threading his tone.

I turned to stare at him. “Just us two? In this big black void?” My words clipped sharper than I meant.

“Not to mention, that forest could kill us. If it’s real, it’s thriving in conditions no life-form should survive.

The silence between us deepened.

“You’ve got valid points,” Adam admitted. He paused, then swiveled his chair toward the monitor.

“But come on, Sarah. We may be the only two people in all of history to discover this. It’s what we signed up for. Why we gave our lives to space, knowing we’d face risks no one else would take. Are you really going to let the possibility of death stop us from uncovering a veiled space forest? That could break the science books, the history books… hell, every book out there.”

His words hit me like a pressurized wave, and for a beat I just stood there, unable to answer. My mouth parted, then closed again.

I turned from him and began to pace, slow at first, back and forth. Each step gave me room to think, though the thoughts tangled themselves into knots. There had to be a reason the forest was concealed. Every risk was real, every fact stacked against survival, but so was the forest. It loomed behind my eyelids every time I blinked, green where there should be black.

The quiet stretched long enough that I lost count of my own passes across the cabin.

Finally, Adam huffed. “At this rate we’ll die of old age before you even come to a conclusion.”

A short laugh escaped me. I stopped pacing and pressed a hand against the cold metal wall, staring at the monitor. “You’re right,” I said at last, my voice low. “It’s worth it. We can’t turn away from this.”

Adam grinned, the tension in his shoulders loosening as though my words had snapped a tether holding him back. He spun toward the storage lockers, fingers already dancing across the seals.

I stood still for one more heartbeat, staring out at the impossible forest. My chest felt heavy, like I’d just signed an unspoken contract. Then I turned and followed him.

The whirr of hydraulics filled the cabin as Adam swung open the lockers. Inside, our EVA suits waited: bulky white shells lined with carbon fiber, their helmets cradled in docking braces. He pulled one free and set it on the bench with a hollow thud.

“You know,” he said lightly, “they trained us for micrometeorite strikes, radiation bursts, suit punctures—” He glanced at me with a crooked smile. “But not for strolling through interstellar woodlands.”

I smirked despite myself and ran my hands over my own suit, checking every seam, every clasp. A single leak could turn my lungs to ice in seconds. The ship hummed beneath me, balanced on steel thinner than my palm.

“Pressure seals?” Adam asked, his voice snapping back to routine.

“Check,” I said, fastening my gloves.

“Comm link?”

“Check.”

Our helmets locked into place with a pressurized hiss.

My breath fogged across the visor and cleared, revealing the forest framed perfectly in the viewport.

Adam’s voice crackled in my earpiece, steady now. “Ready to make history?”

I swallowed hard. “Ready.”

The airlock doors sealed behind us with a deep, metallic thud that reverberated through my bones. A low hiss bled the cabin air away, and then came the silence, total, suffocating, the kind that only space could hold.

The outer hatch slid open, and blackness stretched before us, vast and endless. The forest glowed faintly in the asteroid’s hollow, its canopy rippling as though stirred by a phantom wind. My chest tightened. Even with the suit’s recycled air filling my lungs, I felt as though I were holding my breath.

“Step careful,” Adam said over comms, though his voice carried a note of awe he couldn’t mask.

We clipped our tethers to the guide rail and pushed off the threshold. My boots met the asteroid’s surface with a muted crunch, dust scattering like powdered glass.

The forest loomed larger with every step, its trunks rising from fissures in the rock. Up close, they didn’t look like any trees I had known: their bark shimmered faintly, as if shot through with veins of silver light, and the leaves pulsed with color that shifted like breath.

We moved cautiously. Every motion was heavy and deliberate in the suits. Our boots pressed into the loose dust, sending pale clouds spiraling upward before drifting back in slow motion, as though time itself lagged behind us.

The tether clipped to my waist tugged faintly with each stride, a thin lifeline to the ship glimmering in the distance.

Adam stayed just behind me, his visor catching the faint silver glow. The forest seemed to sense us, the way the light along the bark brightened when we passed, the way the leaves trembled in perfect unison, as though following our pace.

We stood in the impossible world around us: roots glowing faintly where they split the rock, branches bending toward us in slow, graceful arcs.

It was beautiful. And it was terrifying. The trees seemed alive. Their trunks rose and fell in slow rhythm, as if inhaling and exhaling together. Bark flexed with each movement, the silver veins rippling like liquid light beneath skin.

I froze mid-step, my breath catching in my helmet. Adam stopped too, his visor tilted upward, body rigid.

“You see it?” I whispered into comms.

“I see it.” His voice was thin, reverent. “They’re… breathing.”

“You have the kit for collecting samples?” I asked, driven by the need to do something, anything, in the face of the impossible.

“Yeah,” Adam replied, his hand drifting to the pouch at his hip. He unclipped the sample canister, a cylindrical container designed for dust and rock, not living matter. The metal gleamed faintly in his glove, fragile-looking against the backdrop of silver-veined trunks.

“Get a sample of this,” I said. My pulse thudded in my ears. “We need to take it back to base. Study it.”

Adam hesitated, his visor turning toward me.

Then he crouched, awkward in the stiff joints of his suit, dust billowing around his boots. Slowly, deliberately, he reached toward one of the glowing roots that split the asteroid’s surface.

The closer his glove came, the brighter the silver veins flared beneath the bark. They pulsed like arteries, alive with light, as though the forest were aware of him.

“Easy,” I breathed, though he couldn’t possibly move any slower.

Then, carefully, he clipped it back to his pouch.

We moved forward, letting our steps carry us deeper into the forest. Our movements were cautious, each stride slowed by the asteroid’s weak gravity and the stiffness of our suits.

That was when we saw them.

Orbs of light, dozens of them, floating in the gloom between the trunks. They darted quick, unpredictable, weaving trails of bioluminescence that lingered for seconds before fading. For a moment I thought they were insects, winged things, but no, they had no wings at all, no visible structure, only a halo of light. They circled us in wide arcs, moving so fast they blurred, and yet every time I turned, I found them hovering just beyond reach, watching. Studying. As though we were the aliens here.

The deeper we went, the more the forest revealed. Strange flowers clung to the roots, if they could be called flowers at all. Their petals were translucent membranes that flexed open and shut. They looked less like blooms and more like the feeding sacs of deep-sea creatures, unfurling to taste the airless dark.

Something skittered across the ground at my feet, quick as a dart of shadow. I caught only a glimpse, jointed limbs, slick and glistening, eyes that glowed like molten glass before it vanished beneath the soil again. it reminded me of the Mariana Trench, things that lived without light, under crushing pressure, utterly alien to the human world.

This place was the same. It didn’t need sunlight, or warmth, or air. It had built its own rules for survival, rules that bent every law we knew.

“We don’t belong here.”

I whispered, my throat dry.

And then, I froze, my pulse thrumming in my ears.

“Adam… do you see that?”

He looked up, gaze following mine.

“I see it,” he whispered. “God help me, I see it.”

Between the trunks, the bioluminescent orbs had begun to change. No longer drifting at random, they gathered into deliberate shapes, lines, arcs, a slow spiraling pattern that tightened around us. The light seared against the darkness, moving with eerie coordination, too exact to be chance.

I could feel it now, not just see it. A vibration humming through the soles of my boots, crawling up my legs.

Something was coming closer.

Adam shifted at my side, his gloved hand twitching toward me as though to steady both of us.

Dread filled us with a fear unlike anything I had ever known. It stole the breath from my lungs.

Through the web of luminescence, eyes began to peek through. Vast and unblinking, each one larger than my helmet visor. They gleamed with liquid depth, reflecting the silver glow of the forest as though they contained a thousand stars. Eyes that felt capable of crushing bone with a single glance, of unraveling the self that dared meet them.

Then the figure stepped forward, tall and spindly, its movements impossibly slow in the weak gravity. Black-scaled skin drank in every thread of light, so dark it seemed to bleed into the shadows around it. It had no mouth, no face beyond those eyes,

eyes that followed, measured, judged.

I was frozen in equal parts fear and awe, every thought stripped away except for the terrible pull of those eyes. The next thing I felt was Adam’s hand slamming against my shoulder, harder than he meant.

“Sarah! We need to get the hell out of here!”

His voice cracked across the comm, sharp and ragged.

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. My body moved before my mind caught up.

We ran. As fast as the suits allowed, as fast as the thin grip of gravity would let us. Each stride became a leap, our boots pushing off the dusty surface before crashing down again.

My breath thundered in my helmet, loud and uneven.

Still, I risked a glance back.

The figure hadn’t moved. It stood tall and unyielding, eyes gleaming like cold suns, the bioluminescent orbs swirling around it in hypnotic patterns. It made no chase, no sound. It didn’t have to.

Because it knew.

It knew it had done enough. The message was clear in every motionless line of its form: You do not belong here. Leave.

And God help me, I believed it.

The ship’s beacon glimmered ahead, a single, steady light against the abyss.

“Almost there,” Adam gasped through the comm.

The airlock loomed closer. I slammed the release on my tether and hurled myself forward, my boots hitting the outer rung with a jarring clang that rattled through my marrow. Adam landed beside me a heartbeat later, both of us fumbling for the latches with shaking hands.

The hatch sealed behind us with a bone-deep thud. The pressurization cycle kicked in, a hiss of oxygen flooding the chamber, too loud, too bright. My breaths came ragged, fogging the visor until I could barely see. I yanked the helmet free the instant the indicator light turned green.

Air rushed over my face, stale but blessed, and I bent forward, hands braced against my knees.

Adam ripped off his helmet and staggered back against the wall, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead. His chest rose and fell in harsh, shuddering bursts. For a moment neither of us spoke. The only sound was the air recycler whining back into balance, and the frantic beating of my own pulse.

“What…” My voice cracked. “What the hell was that?”

Adam pressed the back of his head against the wall, eyes still wild. “I… I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to.”

We had no answers. Only the image of those eyes, unblinking, etched into the dark behind mine.

Adam dragged a hand down his face, still pale. “We… we have to report this.”

My throat was raw, but I nodded. “Inter-NASA. Now.”

He fumbled with the comm panel, fingers clumsy from the adrenaline still flooding us. The channel crackled open.

“Control, this is Shuttle Eos,” Adam said, his voice trembling despite his effort. “We’ve encountered…God, I don’t even know how to say this, we’ve encountered life.

On asteroid four-two-nine. A forest. Bioluminescent organisms. We have a sample.”

Static sputtered, the signal fraying.

A clipped voice broke through in pieces: “—repeat—copy—what’s… wrong… why—panicked?”

Adam slammed the console with his palm. “Dammit, they can’t hear us.”

But neither of us tried again. Our pulses still thundered in our ears, drowning out everything else.

Together, we turned. Step by step, we walked toward the ship’s window, our breaths slowing as though bracing ourselves to see it again. The impossible forest. The glowing orbs. The eyes.

We leaned close, side by side.

And froze.

The asteroid,

gone.

The forest,

gone.

“Where did it go?” I asked, my breath shallow, cracking in my throat.

We scrambled back to the monitor, fingers flying across the controls, adjusting feeds, sensors, lenses. Still nothing.

“The sample,” I whispered.

Adam lurched toward his suit, tearing it from the locker. He pawed through the pouches, breath ragged, until finally, he found the tube. He yanked it free, holding it up to the cabin light like proof, like salvation.

But it was empty.

Clean.

Polished smooth, as though it had never been touched, never brushed against that glowing root.

He stared at it, his face draining of color.

My stomach hollowed.

It had all vanished.

Not just the forest. Not just the asteroid.

Every trace of it,

erased.

And as the hum of the ship filled my ears, something caught my eye, a faint glint at the neckline of Adam’s under-suit.

I squinted, leaning closer.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice still raw, edged with exhaustion.

But I didn’t answer. My stomach had already turned cold.

There, etched into the fabric just beneath his collar, was a mark. Not a stain, not a tear, an imprint.

A symbol burned into the fibers, sharp and alien, as though pressed there by unseen hands.

I staggered back, my pulse hammering.

It was then I realized the most terrifying truth of all:

It didn’t matter if anyone believed us.

It only mattered that it had seen us.

Was it a promise or a threat?

I couldn’t tell.

Only that the silence itself now had eyes.

I knew now the forest had been hidden for a reason.

And IT was still watching.