Blake felt the doors open but saw nothing. He began to squirm a little inside. The dark was total, and astronauts, training or not, could get as squeamish as anyone when trapped in a foreign place in the pitch black. Throwing in the fact the place was approximately a hundred kilometers beneath the surface of the moon didn’t help with the heebie-jeebies. Not a bit.

Norris stepped out of the elevator and overhead lights barked on, illuminating a long steel-floored hallway about the length of a football field. The walls were chiseled moon rock.

A rush job, Blake thought, and stepped out of the box.

“After you, commander,” Norris said, and smiled. Showed teeth.

Blake declined taking the lead.

2

THE LAST OF SECURITY DOORS sealed behind them. It had seemed like an eternity of hallways and metallic stairwells, all it of jutting deeper and deeper, like a tangle of man-made arteries, into the belly of the moon.

Blake was about to make a gibe about his hourly rate when he heard voices. Lots of voices.

“Last door,” Norris said, never slowing his quick pace the entire way. Blake felt a pang of embarrassment at how heavily he was breathing to keep up and promised himself a new exercise regimen once he returned to Earth. He was in his forties now and it was important….

“Jesus,” Barbara said.

With a flick of the same ID card he’d used to open the last dozen or so doorways, Norris triggered a large slab of metal the size of a garage door to slide silently away. “Well, almost the last door,” he added, his face slapped with a fool’s grin, his eyes fucking twinkling.

But Blake had no time for Norris, because he was following Barbara through that door, into a city.

“What is this?” Blake asked, almost inaudibly.

Norris wouldn’t stop smiling, a new trait that would drive Blake mad had he the capacity to concern himself with the trivial little man. “We call it The Site,” he said. Blake was waiting for him to rub his hands together maniacally, but he quickly thrust all thoughts of their chaperone aside, took in the wonder of what laid before him.

A cavern, brilliantly lit by light sources the size of houses stuck fast into the carved ceiling and walls. A cavern the size of a small town, easily a mile in length, half that in girth. Men and women in uniform, navy-blue jumpsuits walked and crawled over the surface of the cavern, some wearing goggles, all wearing gloves. They had tools, and—Blake realized with a sudden shock of reality gone sideways—what they were doing.

Barbara looked at him and he met her eyes, his own astonishment reflected on her face, her smile almost beautiful enough to be distracting.

“They’re excavating,” she said.

3

SOMETIME LATER, AFTER MORE STAIRS and another long elevator ride (this time open-air) leading ever downward, the scientists were led to a large canvas tent the size of a barracks. A short, plump woman with frizzled black hair and a maddening habit of touching her fingertips to her lips said each of their names in a loud, garish tone. Blake and Barbara shared an amused glance as they seated themselves in a couple white plastic folding chairs, their names spoken by the woman as if off a call-sheet, in the manner a teacher might list the name of each student prior to class. Blake had to make an effort not to raise his hand.

After the affirmation of identities, the scientist, who revealed herself to be none other than the world-famous archeologist Madeline Cooney—or “Mad C” as the vast scientific community had nicknamed her—had the lights dimmed. A large glowing square appeared on the wall behind her. A slideshow had begun.

Blake’s amusement withered as the brilliant shrew began lecturing about what exactly was happening and why there was a hidden city inside the moon.

By the time she arrived at the part about the giraffe, she had their undivided attention.

“It was thirteen years ago, almost to the day,” Mad C said, her voice scratchy and deep with a slight warble, as if she were teetering near a precipice. “It was a mistake. Three astronauts of the revived Apollo 23 program found her.”

“They were the first base inhabitants, is that right?” Barbara asked hesitantly, a bit out of her field. Mad C nodded enthusiastically.

“Yes. Part of the first hundred of Base One. These three were mineralogists, vacuuming literally tons of moon soil through a roving atmosphere chugger, made to extract mineral and the miniscule amounts of moisture from the dead soil here.”

The slide showed the chugger mounting a grey sandy crest, the background a black curtain. The slide flipped, and it showed a patch of soil, dotted with white.

“This is what they uncovered. Due west of the Grimaldi crater. On the dark side, that is.”

“The side we can’t see,” Blake said without humor.

Mad C nodded shakily, and a new slide appeared.

Barbara couldn’t help herself and rose from her chair. Mad C said nothing as Barbara approached the screen, her fingers reaching for the image. Mad C, her tic momentarily unchecked, was all but swallowing her own fingers with excitement.

“What the hell is it?” Blake said, feeling like the dumbest guy in the room. “Looks like, Jesus, it looks like an animal.”

Barbara turned, tears in her eyes. She looked at Mad C. “A giraffe.”

Mad C nodded. “That’s what we came up with as well.” Here she paused, looked down, shuffled her feet. She mumbled the next part under her breath, as if ashamed, or afraid. “At first.”

Norris piped up from the back of the tent. Blake’s eyes darted to his shadow. He’d nearly forgotten about the little man, made a point not to lose track of him again.

“It’s too big,” Norris said. “Slide!”

Behind the projector, someone clicked to the next slide, and they all turned to stare.

It was the giraffe bones, all laid out now on a tarp, orderly as could be. The puzzle assembled. Next to the giraffe were measuring sticks. A few of them. Barbara counted quicker than Blake.

“My god,” she said, more amazed than afraid. “It’s nearly thirty feet tall.”

“And the bones are too thick,” Mad C added. “Thick and strong. Fossilized, yes, but even extracted we could tell that the bones were denser, stronger. This animal would have been thirty feet high, nearly five feet wide, and strong as ten bulls.”

Blake looked at the bones, at the two women. He shook his head. “This makes no sense. You’re telling me there are giant giraffe roaming the moon? What the hell is this?”

Mad C raised a hand and the lights popped on in the tent, the slide image swallowed by the light. “The giraffe, we think, was an anomaly,” she said, then started to follow up her thought, but paused, re-thinking her approach. “It was too close to the surface. The rest were much, much deeper.”

Barbara looked at Blake, then sat down in a chair, a dazed look in her eyes. It was too much for her. Blake stepped behind her, put a hand on her shoulder, not fully knowing if he was supporting her, or himself. He looked to Norris, still smiling, then turned back to Mad C.

“The rest?”