Alyssa Redd's Arc

Chapter 2 of 15

Alyssa walked back from the grave with dirt on her knees and a countdown in her head. The signal proved Earth was there. It did not tell her how to breathe when she landed. Air mix. Gravity. Water she could drink without dying in a week. She had a coordinate and no survival file. Arriving blind would kill her before the badge people ever caught up. She locked the workshop door and pulled up the wall of borrowed feeds. Habitat charts. Gravity readings. Sample panels stamped DEBRIS FIELD in the corner. All of it was the sanitized public layer. The real environmental data lived in one place, and that place was the civic hall downtown with columns out front and a shield over the door. The Bureau kept the sealed files on any coordinate the government wanted forgotten. She did not need to walk in. She needed to reach the console on the third floor that held the classified relay. She had mapped its weak point months ago, out of habit. A maintenance port on the alley side fed straight into the archive stack. Give it forty minutes and the right handshake and it would cough up whatever the state had buried about Earth. She went at the shift change. Rain made the alley empty. She jacked her reader into the port and watched the panels wake up under her fingers. Pink light bled through the seams. Files scrolled. Atmosphere: breathable, thin. Gravity: lower than home. Water: drinkable in three of the mapped basins, poison in two. She dumped it all to a drive. Then she reached for the folder marked TRAVELER ISSUE and pulled the schematics for a sealed environmental suit — helmet, monitors, filters, the whole rig her workshop could build in a night. A boot scraped grit behind her. "Unplug it." She turned slowly. He stood at the alley mouth with rain on his jacket and a scar running down one cheek. Dark hair. Empty hands, which was worse than a drawn weapon. She had never seen him before. She knew what he was the second he spoke. "You're the one without the badge," she said. "Zarr." He said it like it cost nothing. "Unplug the reader. Walk away. You get tonight." "And the drive?" "Stays." She looked at the port. The transfer bar showed ninety-four percent. Six seconds. She held his eyes and counted them down. The reader chimed. She yanked it free and ran. He did not chase. He did not need to. He had seen her face and the drive in her hand, and now he knew exactly what she meant to do with them. She made it back to the workshop with the files intact. She spread the suit schematics on the bench beside Beverly's printout. She had what she needed to survive the landing. She had lost the last night anyone did not know her name. She started cutting the first panel before the rain stopped.