Day 3. The sun is a red orb in the sky. The fog hangs heavy. She sifts through dry, dessicated dirt. The fine grains of it embed themselves into the crawl space between her fingers so now her hands make faint grinding sounds of sand crunching in between.

Day 4. No one is here. The planet is red, red, red. Red soil and red sky and red sun. Her body is red in the light.

Day 5. No new orders. She sifts through the sand. Nothing. The sun is redder today.

Day 6. Something pearlescent and white between her fingers. A colour other than blood. White and glowing in her hands she sees the true colour of her exoskeleton for the first time, black white and orange stripes.

Day 7. The storm is worse. It is windy now and she cannot keep upright. She crawls. Faint crunching in all her joints now, legs and limbs and arms. The eye of the storm is orange not red. The pearl is tucked between her teeth and she runs her tongue over it as the eye seethes.

Day 8. A rover with a visor perched atop its head, akin to a giant pair of binoculars, peers at her. Tentatively, she reaches out a hand.

The rover chirps. Her hand lands on its head. A metallic clang and it blinks, then an arm reaches out from its boxy torso and sifts through sand. It roots around a little, and the arm retracts back into its body with the sample of silt in its arm.

“ Hello,” she says, then feels silly. She takes her hand off its head.

Day 9. The rover follows her. Over the dunes and hills and valleys they search. It is so empty. She shows it the pearl that stained her teeth with a faint glowing sheen and in response it produces a brilliant orange rock, the colour of the storm. Her eyes hurt from looking at it.

Day 10. Earth is a dream. It pulls up images from its database and links them to hers. Images sent from people far far away, photos taken by somebody else’s hand.

She remembers. It is difficult. She remembers impressions, smears of colour. She remembers red. She remembers blood. She remembers so much of it that it makes her sick so she tries something else; green and blue and yellow. Sunlight. Leaves. Water spanning over the horizon.

It blinks. A light flashes red on its torso. Then it moves. She gets to her feet and she follows.

They scramble over rock and chalky sand. Before the sand was so fine it was like water. Now it is big, inseparable chunks, crumbling and powdery.

Slowly glimmers of light appear in spongy rock. White spheres half buried glinting in desaturated sun, the colour of bone and teeth among porous blood.

The spheres smooth out into long shelves of white, wavy and rippling. They keep walking.

Before them a cavern yawns. Rocks drip from above. She sees only by the faint light of white rock shelves; she sees deeper reds among the walls, different from the destitute red that submerges the rest of the planet.

“Where are we?”

The rover chirps. They keep going. Deeper and deeper. Deeper.

She should turn back. It's a thought she has too late. If she runs out of power here she will never leave and the darkness will encroach upon her and devour the stripped metal of rusted limbs.

The rover turns around. A robotic hand unfolds out of its stomach and reaches towards her.

There is no one for miles and miles. If she runs out of power she will die anyway.

She takes its hand.