They were veterans of the Viagens Interplanetarias Authority—men and women who’d sweated through the sulfur jungles of Venus and coughed the dust of half a dozen dead worlds. They’d charted seas of methane, traded with silicon minds, and brought back relics from civilizations older than Earth’s memory. But nothing in their dossiers, nor in the Authority’s endless safety directives, had prepared them for Maluva— the Black Garden of Altair’s rim, where thought itself took root in the soil.

It was a paradise, sure. A topsy-turvy Garden of Eden — with green moonlight, golden grass — and the astonishing girl, Tainá.

But there was horror behind the beauty.  There was non-human intelligence at work— And then there was the sudden, shrieking, agonizing death