Hana Greaves's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

Hana Greaves had died three times this morning, and she still could not remember how the fire started. Each time the world snapped back, she woke in the same rusted bunk, layered metal panels ticking as they cooled, her silver jumpsuit scorched black across the left shoulder. The handheld in her fist flashed a wrong year, then another. She pressed her palm to the burn. It was warm, always warm, as if the fire had just touched her. But the fire was the one thing the loop refused to show her. "Start where it hurts," she muttered. "Start where—" She never finished. She already knew the sentence didn't help. She had built a tool for exactly this. A compact scanner sat on the bunk's fold-down shelf, its viewing screen dark, its dials waiting. If her memory was gone, the burn itself might still hold the answer. Heat leaves a signature. She peeled off the jumpsuit and clamped the scorched fabric under the lens. The screen woke. Numbers climbed. The reading spiked into a range she had never logged before, hot and strange, not chemical, not electrical. "That's frost," said a voice behind her. Hana turned. The old woman stood in the bunk's hatch, faded denim, frost still glinting in her white hair. Three days out of a cryo-pod and she blinked at every light like it burned. Vera Doss. The one person who kept appearing in the loop, always at the edge, always watching. "You've seen this," Hana said. It wasn't a question. "You were there." Vera nodded slow. "Every time. You don't remember, but I do. The pods don't reset me clean." She stepped closer and tapped the screen. "That vine. The crystal one, with the spores. You reached for it. It flared white. Burned you before you touched it." Hana's stomach dropped. A crystalline vine, translucent, threaded with luminous spore clusters. She had walked past it a hundred loops. She had never once suspected it. "The reading matches," Hana said. She turned the dial. The signature on her jumpsuit and the frost in Vera's hair were the same cold wavelength. "It's not fire. It's the vine discharging. It scorched me and threw us both back." Vera's mouth tightened. "So it's the plant doing this. To both of us." "To both of us," Hana repeated. The words settled wrong. She had thought the loop was hers alone. It wasn't. She grabbed the scanner and the ruined jumpsuit. The moment she couldn't remember finally had a shape: a vine, a flare, two people caught in the snap-back. She knew where to start now. But knowing the cause changed the problem. The vine was still out there, still charged. To break the loop, she would have to walk straight back to the thing that killed her—and this time drag a half-frozen stranger with her.