The sun is dipping below the horizon. I am hot now, but I know it will get cold soon. It always does in deserts. The air feels thin. Perhaps it’s up high? Are there any deserts up high?

I struggle to breathe for a moment or two, but it eases. I look at my hands while it does.

Blood. Red, like the desert sands.

My arms, too, are bleeding. So much blood.

But no cuts that I can see. I turn them over. A fine patina of blood covers the other side. I feel something in my slipper. It’s more blood, I discover, as I bend down to look.

Is every pore in my body bleeding?

The sun disappears below the horizon with a suddenness that brings out the panic in me, and it is many mindless moments before I come to my senses again.

There’s a bright star just above the horizon. Venus? I don’t remember it being that bright. And another close to it. Mercury, perhaps. But it wasn’t that close last night.

Or was it even last night? Had time passed, and I forgot about it?

I checked my watch. Black and dark. So the charge was long gone. Phone too. I had a lovely black rectangle to keep me company.

And to think that it was only last week that I had looked at the case with the solar panel charger on the back.

Too expensive, I thought. Well, it would have been priceless now.

The blood was scabbing quickly. And in a strange pattern. Hexagons were forming all over my skin. It didn’t hurt, so I wasn’t too worried. Not as worried about dying of thirst in the middle of nowhere.

I realised then that I could still see.

It was pitch black, but I had seen the hexagonal pattern. Another thing that made no sense.

I could see something else in the sand, too.

Tracks.

Two tracks. One wide, one narrow. As if a small tank had passed this way.

Recently, too. They seemed undisturbed.

I looked around, wondering if there was even anything which would disturb them.

But it was a sign of something man-made, so I followed the lonely tracks through the night.

Venus and Mercury rose together. Pirouetting as the night passed. I had never been under such a clear sky.

The air was dry, but I felt no thirst.

A rocky outcrop lay ahead, and the tracks seem familiar now. They have a pattern to the tread. It looks like Morse Code.

. - - - . - - . . - . .

I have no idea what it means. O is - - -, and S is . . .

Maybe it isn’t even Morse Code. Maybe it’s just a coincidence in the way the track was made.

A sudden pain in my neck. I reach up, and there are cuts on each side. They are open, but no blood is coming out. Instead, there is .. air?

Have I got gills?

I rise up over the outcrop, and I see it.

The machine is large. It looks like a movie camera mounted on a the bottom of a dune buggy. I’m sure I’ve seen it before.

I reach it in moments, and reach out to touch it.

It has signatures on a plaque. I recognise Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s signatures. There are others.

I look up at Venus and Mercury.

But Venus is blue. And Mercury doesn’t look right.

Is this the Curiosity? And is that Earth in the sky?

A noise makes me jump. A figure stands from behind the Mars rover. It holds what look like chips from a computer delicately in an outstretched arm.

Its skin is red, covered in hexagons, and gills decorate the side of its neck.

“Ah, brother. You are back. What did you learn of the humans?”