Oh, sorry, Ami is the person I've been looking into this with. Her older brother was on the Orfeo. 

...well now he's having as many as several emotions about the fact that Magini apparently thinks he belongs in the same category as someone who—lost their brother—

(—he doesn't even know if that's what Shiro was to him, but they were something, and nobody else seems to get that—)

He doesn't text back. 

...oh no, should she not have said that? 

Ugh, she so bad at this.

Kani returns to the waterfall again the next day, feeling curious (and... maybe a bit excited? (is she allowed to be excited?)) to explore the caves during the daytime and without company! It's weird, but... she feels like there's something in them that feels like it's calling out to her, maybe? (Maybe she's just losing it. But if so, it's a pleasant sort of losing it, so she's not going to think about it too hard...) 

But as she approaches the plunge basin, she sees a hoverbike, bright red in the daytime sun, and her mood plummets like the water falling off the cliff. He's here again...

Well. He didn't look that much older than her, and she has the advantage of being too broken to be in school. (After the 2nd month of refusing to leave the house, her fathers had pleaded with her until she agreed to do a self-study program, which - hasn't been horrible, if she's being fully honest?)

Tomorrow is Monday. He won't be here then! She'll come back.

The Red Rider (as she's taken to calling him) is apparently a fellow delinquent, because his bike is there all of Monday - she leaves and comes back several times, hoping for some daylight hours to explore on her own. No luck - he's there till past sundown. And presumably he'll be there tomorrow, too. (She gets so frustrated that she cries, the 4th time that she rounds the bend and sees that bright red bike. Why can't the universe just let her have this? Has she not suffered enough?)

That night, she waits until everyone else is asleep, sneaks into the garage, and digs through the camping supplies until she finds an old set of high-powered floatlamps that her fathers use when doing Ranger Activities past sunset. These ones stopped working and had since been replaced, but she remembers Magini saying that she was 90% sure that the controller had burnt out its battery unit but would work fine if it were plugged into power...

Back in her room, she tests it, and - success! The controller beeps happily at her, and lets her set, adjust, and recall the floating orbs as she needs. Magini was right! (She should message her and let her know! (...maybe later...))

Bippy 2 has a power output port, so she doesn't even need to bring a spare battery. 

The next day, Kani wakes up before noon for the first time in a while, rushes through her schoolwork (...as well as Monday's), and then eats a big dinner before leaving for the caves, floatlamps tucked into Bippy 2's storage compartment. This time, she takes the long way around she traced out on a map, and arrives at the top the waterfall, so she can wait for the Red Rider to leave without being spotted.

She times it well, and gets to eat her packed dinner while she watches the sun set, and it's not long before Red leaves and she can finally head back into the caves, a floatlamp hovering behind her head, the other 4 trailing behind her at 5-meter intervals.

The string of bobbing lamps casts flickering shadows on the cave walls, lending the illusion of movement to the carved and painted figures that adorn them. Humans and animals—some recognisable, some not—run and fight and cavort around Kani on all sides. 

One figure repeats over and over: a lioness, sitting or roaring or leaping, sometimes towering huge over the tiny people around her. Wherever traces of pigment remain, she's always some shade of blue. 

It's incredible.

She looses track of how much time she spends there, staring at the paintings, fingers reaching out but never quite touching... 

She doesn't take any pictures. For some reason, it just feels like it'd be... wrong, somehow.

When she finally heads home and sleeps, late that night, she has fewer of her usual nightmares. Instead, she sees that strange blue lioness - impossibly tall, towering above her, keeping her safe.

The next evening, when Keith leaves the caves, sitting conspicuously on his hoverbike's seat, there's a snack bar and an envelope with "To: The Red Rider" written on the front. Inside it, there's a handwritten note:

Hey Red,
This place is calling out to you too, isn't it? I can't think of any other reason why you'd be here now, every day, when 4 days ago it seemed clear that nobody had been here for years and years...
At first I didn't really understand why I kept coming back. I thought I was going crazy, but there's something, here, isn't there? I think it's... friendly? Comforting? Kind? 
I've been going in at night to avoid running into you, but - I wanted you to know it's not just you, or just in your head. See you around, maybe?
Sincerely,
Blue

...what.

He checks the snack bar for tampering, but it looks unopened, and nobody seems to have messed with his bike either. He...puts the note and snack bar in his bag? And heads home?

Why is his life so weird these days. 

Magini hasn't quite been herself since the day they found out about the aliens, the poor girl. Ami sympathizes; she'd probably be stressed or scared about all of this too, but mostly what she's feeling these days is angry at the Garrison, and impatient. She tries her best to be calm and comforting around her partner in crime, but it doesn't seem to help.

Despite her impatience, right now would be exactly the wrong time to try and sneak (or break) into Garrison archives and get the unedited records - security and tensions are high, but it's business as usual, otherwise. They need to wait until things either die down, or get so distracting that record security isn't a pressing concern anymore.

Until then, the pair quietly tries to find out more about the aliens. With their very limited expertise and data access, they don't make any progress on decoding what's being transmitted, but Magini can track where the signals are coming from, tracing a path from Jupiter's moons, to the asteroid belt, to Mars...

The aliens, tracked by the Garrison and therefore also by Ami and Magini, finish whatever they're doing around Jupiter and move on to Mars, chattering over the radios as they go. Towards the end of the second week in November, after considerably less time than they took for Jupiter, they finish with Mars—and start heading for Earth. 

The Garrison higher-ups, very quietly, panic.

They're keeping it need-to-know, and cadets apparently don't need to know, but Ami and Magini know what to look for and can see the outlines. Most of the senior officers are stressed and distracted, twice as busy as normal with classified projects.

Good, Ami thinks vindictively, when she notices. (Matty - trusted them, looked up to them, and -)

She goes to meet up with Magini, who points out that if the aliens come to Earth next, the Garrison is probably not going to be able to keep things secret much longer.

Ami asks if she can estimate how long it'll be until it becomes completely intractable. Magini gets nerdsniped by feeding all the data she has into linear algebra models for about 15 minutes before Ami says "well, they can't censor the sky, right? So at some point, anyone with a good telescope..."

Ohhhh. Yeah, that makes sense! stupid, stupi

Wait, actually, that gives her an idea... (She doesn't exactly like the idea, but that's okay. She wants to help.)

"...I'm scheduled to do some repairs Monday afternoon. The supply sheds are basically always empty - I could sneak out one of the high-end tripod telescopes in its carrying case and hide it, and we could go out later in the night and see if we can spot anything."

Ami is excited enough about the idea that Magini lets herself smile, a little bit. She is helping! 

About an hour later, Keith gets another Weird Message!

Ami and I are going to 'borrow' a garrison telescope Monday night to try and get a glimpse of the aliens.

If you're around, do you want to come check it out? Ami said she has something she wants to ask you about.

...oh no, social interaction. 

Eh, he can always bail if it's terrible. And it's not like he had anything else planned for...wait, when is Monday? He may or may not have lost track of the days and weeks just a little. 

He checks the date.

It's November. His 18th birthday was a couple of weeks ago. 

He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that it had probably come and gone, but if he didn't check, if he didn't look at it—

Since his dad died, he hadn't really had anyone he wanted to celebrate his birthday with. And then there was Shiro. Shiro who actually apologised that he couldn't be there for Keith's 17th birthday, even though that was because he would be in space further away than any human has ever been from Earth, which was so much cooler and more important. (He gave Keith a wrapped present before he left Earth, with strict instructions not to open it until October, and then managed to send him a recorded video on the day itself even though they were less than three weeks out from Kerberos at that point and it had to go through half a dozen relay satellites.) 

And he promised he'd be there for the next one. The big one, because other kids might look forward to the day when they can buy a drink, but foster kids are always counting down to the moment they age out of the system. 

And if he didn't check the date—if he didn't know it was his birthday, even though he couldn't hide from the way the nights were getting longer and the days colder—then he didn't have to face the fact that he was back to celebrating alone. 

...oh no, he still needs to reply to Magini.

After having left her on read for at least an hour, he sends: 

where and what time

!!!

Monday at 2130, on the dirt path that passes by the southern edge of campus.

(there's a latitude/longitude infopoint attached to the message.)

That's actually really helpful of her and he appreciates it. 

ok

Magini spends the weekend fretting. She meets up with Ami, once or twice, but neither of them can really focus on their homework, their plan doesn't actually require much talking through, and the conversation between them doesn't really flow, anymore. 

She tries messaging Kani, but can't think of anything meaningful to say. She settles for non-commital life updates, and gets some delayed emojis but no actual conversation.

By Sunday night, she gives up on doing anything interesting or useful , and ends up taking apart her phone, laptop, and omnicalc all at once, which she's never done before, and puts them back together swapping around as many identical parts as she can.(Turns out the phone and omnicalc used the same power modules, so now her phone has much better battery life!) 

She finishes up at about 1 am, brain successfully fried enough that she can pass out immediately.

Ami, full of suppressed doubts and slowly churning anger, somehow makes it through her classes on Monday with her mask intact. She fills her hiking backpack with her important belongings and a few portable rations, and encourages Magini to do the same. (It's probably unnecessary, she explains, but they might need to be out late, and there's really no telling what could happen at the Garrison, once word gets out. Magini nods seriously.)

After forcing herself to eat dinner, she sneaks out early, and is at the meetup spot an hour before she needs to be. While she waits for the others, she drafts a message to Kes explaining everything, and sets it to send 2 days from now, just in case.

She finishes it with just enough time to start really fretting about Magini getting caught sneaking out before her friend arrives, borrowed telescope kit cradled in both hands.

Keith gets there about 5 minutes late, having parked his bike on the far side of a rocky outcrop and walked the last little bit. 

"Hey." 

Magini has started assembling the telescope, but turns around to wave excitedly at him. "Hi Keith! Glad you could make it. I'm still setting up, sorry, it's been a while since I last took astronomy..."

The other girl (tall, skinny, a warm smile over tired eyes) introduces herself.

"Hi, I'm Ami. Thanks for coming out - I know this is a lot. Hopefully, we'll finally get some actual answers."