Alyssa Redd had been staring at the same star chart for six hours when the readout finally blinked green. She sat up straight in her workshop chair, red hair falling over the black heart tattooed under her eye. The screen showed a signal returning from a coordinate the Shrumella government swore was empty space. Empty space did not bounce signals back. Earth did. She pulled the printout free and smoothed it flat on the bench. Her grandmother Beverly used to tell her Earth stories in the kitchen — oceans, cities, birds — until the day Alyssa was old enough for someone else to correct her. Earth blew apart, they said. A million pieces. Beverly had smiled and kept telling the stories anyway. Beverly had been dead three weeks. Alyssa had been in the workshop for most of them. The planet survey wall behind her glowed with a dozen borrowed feeds. Habitat charts. Gravity readings. A blue-and-green marble the state archive labeled DEBRIS FIELD. Alyssa had spent a month cross-referencing the archive against the raw telescope pulls she wasn't supposed to have. The numbers did not match. Tonight the signal proved which set was lying. She knew how systems failed just by standing near them. It was the one thing she was good at and the one thing no grocery store on this mushroom-choked rock wanted her doing near the registers. Right now the skill was pointed at a government story, and the story had holes she could put her whole arm through. She needed someone who could move a printout without leaving a trail. She locked the workshop and walked to the payphone Tomas Leclair used on the west side of the market. He answered on the second ring, the way he did for people who paid late but paid. "It's Redd," she said. "I need a courier who doesn't ask questions. And I need to know if anyone's been asking about my feeds." A pause. Paper shuffled. Tomas Leclair skimmed a cut from every deal in this city and paid the desperate ones first, which was the only reason Alyssa trusted him at all. His rumpled voice came back flat. "Two people asked this week. One badge. One not. I told the badge nothing. The other one I owe a favor to, so I gave him your workshop street. Not the door." "How long ago." "Tuesday. You've got maybe a day. What did you find." Alyssa looked at the printout in her hand. The signal was steady. The coordinate was alive. "Earth," she said. "It's still there." She hung up before he could answer. Then she walked out past the edge of the settlement to the small stone under the red-capped mushrooms and knelt where Beverly was buried. She laid the printout flat on the dirt so her grandmother could see it too. "You were right," she said. "Now they know I know."

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.

Alyssa cut panels until her hands shook. The suit lay half-assembled on the bench. The ship sat in the yard, ribs open, hull plates stacked beside it. She had built for months and still needed weeks. She had hours. Marla came through the workshop door without knocking. Green hair wet from the rain. She set a bag on the bench and looked at the ship through the open bay. "Zarr is asking at the port," Marla said. "Two people pointed him here. You have maybe an hour." Alyssa's hand stopped over the wiring. "I can't finish in an hour." "Go to the crystal lady." Marla did not blink. "Noel. She cuts navigation stones. She has parts. She owes me a favor." "I don't know her." "You will. Move." They ran three blocks in the rain. Noel opened the door before they knocked. Short black hair, goggles pushed up, lab coat stained at the cuffs. Behind her, a tall cabinet hummed, growing something bright inside a sealed chamber. A finished crystal sat on a cloth on the counter. "Marla," Noel said. She looked at Alyssa. "You're the one they're hunting." "Yes." "Show me the ship in your head." Alyssa closed her eyes. She saw the hull, the seams, the gaps. She named every weak point in order. Noel listened, arms crossed. When Alyssa stopped, Noel walked to a shelf and pulled down a case. "Nav crystal. Two years old. It holds." She set it in Alyssa's palm. "Your seals leak at the third rib. I have plates. Suit visor needs a gasket I can print in twenty minutes. Bring the suit here." Marla went for the suit. Alyssa stayed and worked beside Noel at the bench. Noel did not speak while she worked. When she finished the gasket, she pressed it into the helmet ring and handed it back. "One test flight worth of calibration," Noel said. "After that, you're on your own." "Understood." They ran the parts back to the workshop. Marla sealed the last hull plate while Alyssa fitted the crystal into the nav slot. The ship's panels lit green in sequence. Alyssa pulled on the suit. The chest display woke: air ninety-eight percent, radiation low, AQI good. A siren rose two streets over. "Now," Marla said. Alyssa climbed into the cockpit. Marla climbed in behind her and pulled the hatch. The ship lifted before the yard lights finished blinking. It cleared the roofs, then the clouds, then the last thin skin of sky. Space opened around them. Black, and full of things Alyssa had only seen in stolen feeds. She had planned every step of this and forgot all of them looking out the glass. She turned to Marla. Her helmet monitors glowed between them. "When we get to Earth," Alyssa said, "will you marry me?" Marla looked at the stars. Then at her. "Yes." Behind them, the planet shrank. Ahead, the coordinates waited.

The ship coasted. Alyssa watched the nav crystal pulse green and matched the numbers on the panel to the numbers in her head. The coordinates were close. Marla slept in the seat behind her, helmet cradled in her lap. The comm chirped. Not the ship's channel. A back channel, thin and scraped, riding a frequency Alyssa did not recognize. "Hello. Hello. Do you hear me." Alyssa froze. A woman's voice. Steady. Tired. "I was with the Bureau," the voice said. "I found something. I turned my back on them. Please answer." Alyssa keyed the mic. "Who is this." "An agent. I still have the badge. That's why the signal reaches you." A pause. "Have you found Earth." Alyssa checked the panel. Marla stirred. "No," Alyssa said. "I'm almost at the coordinates. If it's empty, the government wasn't lying to us. If it isn't, they were." "Find proof," the voice said. "Anything. A visual. A reading. Send it back on this channel and I will push it to the civic screen. Every resident will see it at once." "Why you." "I watched my supervisor sign a false report six weeks ago. I sat in a garage for forty minutes after. I'm done sitting." Alyssa believed her. She did not know why. "Sasha," the voice added, quieter. "If you need a name." Marla was awake now, hand on Alyssa's shoulder. The nav crystal pulsed faster. The panel counted down the last thousand kilometers. Alyssa closed her eyes. She saw the ship in her head, every seam, every weak point. The crystal held. The seals held. The gasket the crystal grower had pressed into her helmet held. She opened her eyes. Through the glass, a curve rose out of the black. Blue. White cloud in bands. A brown edge of land under the cloud. Water. Real water. "Marla," Alyssa said. Her voice cracked. "Do you see it." Marla leaned forward against the harness. Her lips parted. "It's Earth," Alyssa said into the comm. "It's really there." She swung the forward camera and locked it on the planet. The screen filled with blue. She hit transmit. The signal climbed back the way they had come, a thin line reaching for the world they had left. "Received," Sasha said. "Pushing it now." Alyssa pictured the civic screen waking in the square, the image of Earth crossing it, ten thousand residents in the layered domes looking up. She pictured the Bureau building with its clean stone face and the people inside who had signed the lie. She pictured her grandmother's grave. The comm cut. Not static. A hard cut. Someone on the other end had reached the channel. Marla's hand tightened on her shoulder. "Alyssa." The panel flashed a new warning. Atmosphere entry in six minutes. Below them, Earth turned. Behind them, on a world that now knew the truth, something had already started moving.

The cut comm hissed once and went dead. Alyssa stared at the flat panel where Sasha's voice had been. Six minutes to entry. Earth filled the glass, blue and close enough to see weather move across it. Someone on Shrumella had reached into the channel and killed it. She did not know who. She did not know what they had done to Sasha after. Marla unclipped her harness partway and leaned forward. "Was that the Bureau?" "Or worse," Alyssa said. She keyed the back channel again. Nothing. She tried the ship's open band. Nothing. She looked at her hands on the yoke and made them stop shaking. A second light blinked on the console. Not the comm. The nav crystal cradle. The crystal Noel had grown for her was pulsing out of rhythm, faster than the descent clock. Alyssa pulled it from the cradle. It was warm. Inside the lattice, faint lines of color moved that had not been there before, thin threads of pink and green sliding through the diamond. "Noel said this could fail at the end," Alyssa said. "She said the lattice can collapse." "It's not collapsing," Marla said. "It's doing something." Alyssa held it under the panel light. The threads inside settled into shapes. Not shapes. Characters. Rows of them, stacked, small enough that she had to squint. A language she did not know. Under the characters, a shape she did know: a coastline. The coastline scrolled. Another coastline replaced it. Then a third, thinner, with the sea eating into the land. Her stomach dropped. "Marla. This isn't just a nav crystal." "What is it." "It's a record." She turned it. More text. More coasts. "Noel didn't tell me. Maybe she didn't know. Someone put something inside it before she grew it, or the growing pulled it in." The entry alarm chimed. Four minutes. Alyssa clipped the crystal back into the cradle. The ship shuddered as the first thin air kissed the hull. "We can't read it now," Marla said. "Suit up." Alyssa reached for her helmet. The biosuit's chest panel woke green: air good, radiation low. Her hands stopped shaking. She sealed Marla's gasket, then her own. "Listen," she said through the helmet mic. "Whoever cut the signal knows we made it. Sasha may be gone. When we land, we're on our own. No one on Shrumella can help us and we don't know what's down there." "We know it's not empty," Marla said. "No. It's not." The hull began to glow. The panel counted down. Alyssa put one gloved hand on the crystal cradle and one on the yoke. The ship tipped, caught the atmosphere, and started to fall. Whatever Earth was now, it was about to be under her feet.

The ship hit the beach hard and skidded. Alyssa's helmet cracked against the yoke. When she opened her eyes, the panel was dark and Marla was already unbuckling. Outside the glass, a gray shore stretched toward flat water. The sky was the wrong color for anything Alyssa had ever seen. She popped the hatch. Air rushed in. Her suit chest-panel flashed green. She pulled her helmet off. It smelled like salt and rain. Marla climbed out behind her and stopped. "Alyssa." Ten paces from the ship, someone had built a small pile of stones. On top of the pile sat a metal box, dry, clean, no rust. Beside it, pressed into the wet sand, was a boot print. Fresh. Smaller than Alyssa's. Alyssa knelt and opened the box. Inside were three things. A folded page of Shrumella civic paper. A nav crystal shard, cloudy and old. And a photograph, creased, of a woman with dark brown hair and a black heart drawn under one eye in ink. Marla looked over her shoulder. "That's you." "It's not me." Alyssa turned the photo. On the back, in careful handwriting: For the girl who comes back. She read it twice. Her hands were steady now in a way she didn't like. "Someone knew I was coming. Before I knew." She unfolded the civic paper. It was a shift roster from the civic hall archive, dated forty years before her birth. One name was circled. Redd. Marla crouched beside her. "Your family worked in the archive." "My grandmother said her mother cleaned floors." Alyssa touched the circled name. "She lied. Or she was lied to." She looked up at the empty beach. The boot print led away from the stones, up toward a line of low dunes, and stopped where the sand turned to grass. Whoever left the box was gone. But not long gone. Marla stood. "They're watching us." "Probably." Alyssa closed the box and held it against her chest. The nav crystal in her pocket had gone quiet. The one in the box had not been grown by Noel. It was older. Someone had been seeding this shore with pieces of her story before she was born. Earth had not been waiting for a stranger. It had been waiting for her. She stood up. The tide was coming in and would take the boot print soon. She let it. She had what she needed. Her ancestors had not been from nowhere. They had been from here, and someone here had been keeping their place. "We move," Alyssa said. She started up the dune. Marla followed. The box was heavy against her ribs. Behind them, water reached the stones and knocked the top one down. Alyssa did not look back. Whoever had left the photograph was ahead of her now, and she meant to find them before they found her again.

Alyssa followed the boot print up the dune until the grass turned to gravel. At the top, a low concrete hatch sat open in the ground. A hand-drawn arrow pointed down. Marla put her hand on Alyssa's arm. Alyssa nodded and went first. The stairs ended in a narrow room lit by one bulb. A man stood against the far wall in a long gray coat. His face was a smear of static, like a screen that had never resolved. He did not offer his hand. "You're late," he said. "Close the hatch." Marla closed it. Alyssa set the metal box on the table between them. "You left this." "Someone did." He tapped the box once. "I found it here forty years ago. I put it back. Your grandmother asked me to." Alyssa's jaw locked. "Who are you." "No one. That's the point." He slid a tablet across the table. "Your friend on Shrumella is still breathing. For now." The screen showed a live feed from a cracked civic panel — red switches under labels for Communications Shutdown, Broadcast Terminate, Data Purge. Two of the switches were already thrown. A stamp across the top read BLACKOUT PROTOCOL LEVEL OMEGA. "They cut every channel off the planet," the Hollow Man said. "Ten thousand people saw your face. The Bureau is pretending it was a hoax. It isn't working." He swiped. A new window opened. Six young people crowded around a table inside a mushroom dome, replaying a fourteen-second clip of Alyssa on a loop. One of them, a green-skinned kid with glasses, leaned into the camera. "We have the fourteen seconds," the kid said. Flat. Fast. "Three copies. Two hidden. We need the rest." "That's them," the Hollow Man said. "They call themselves what you'd expect. They've been trying to punch a hole through the blackout for nine days." Alyssa looked at Marla. Marla nodded once. "Can you get me a line back?" Alyssa said. "I can't. He can." The Hollow Man tapped the screen. A second feed opened — inside the Bureau building, an agent at a terminal, badge clipped to his collar. He was pulling small insect-shaped devices from a drawer and slotting them into a case. Recorders. Bugs. The kind the Bureau planted, not the kind it swept. "Agent Chen," the Hollow Man said. "He watched your broadcast. He's walking out the front door in six hours with a relay in that case. If he makes it, your friend Sasha gets a working channel. If he doesn't, she doesn't." Alyssa touched the screen where Chen's hand moved. "Tell him I'm alive. Tell him where to point it." The Hollow Man was already typing. "Told him." On the feed, Chen closed the case and stood. He walked past two officers without looking up, and out through the front doors into the light. The channel was not open yet. But someone was carrying it toward her.

The tablet went dark. The Hollow Man slid it into his coat and turned to the wall behind him. He pressed his palm against the concrete. A seam Alyssa hadn't seen split open, and cold air pushed out. "There's more under us," he said. "Your grandmother didn't just hide a box. She hid a room." Alyssa followed him through the seam. Marla stayed close behind her. The passage sloped down. The bulb above them died and another woke further on, then another, tracking their steps like something had been waiting. The room at the bottom was small and clean. A pedestal stood at the center. On the pedestal sat a squat brass cylinder with glass portholes and a diamond-shaped crystal locked behind the front pane. Beside it lay a star-shaped piece of metal, rusted at the tips, its channels glowing faint pink and green. "Forty years asleep," the Hollow Man said. "It only opens for certain hands. She said one of those hands would be yours." Alyssa picked up the star. It was warm. The channels along its arms brightened where her fingers touched. She looked at the pedestal and saw, without thinking, exactly how it worked: three locks, one key, one current, one voice. "It's built to fail if the wrong person tries," she said. "The whole room burns." "Then don't be wrong," the Hollow Man said. Marla took her free hand. Alyssa slid the star into the slot at the base of the cylinder and turned it. The locks clicked. The crystal behind the glass lit from inside, and a thin voice came out of the brass — a woman's voice, older, tired, unmistakably her grandmother's. "Alyssa. If you're hearing this, you came back. Good girl." Alyssa's throat closed. Marla squeezed her hand. "We're not from Shrumella," the voice said. "We were brought there. Your family worked the shift I circled on that roster. When the records were rewritten, they kept us as proof, in case anyone came looking. You're the one they were afraid of. You always were." The voice cut. The crystal dimmed but did not go out. Light moved inside it like slow water. Alyssa set the star down. Her hand shook once and then stopped. "So I'm not visiting," she said. "I'm from here." "You're from here," the Hollow Man said. A soft chime came from his coat. He pulled the tablet out. On the screen, Agent Chen stood in an alley in a coat too thin for the wind, the case open at his feet. Inside the case, a bright pink core pulsed steady as a heartbeat. "Relay's live," Chen said. Flat. Fast. "Point me." Alyssa looked at the crystal, then at Marla, then at the pink light on the screen. "Point him at me," she said. The channel opened. Somewhere on Shrumella, a woman under blackout was about to hear her name.

The pink light on Chen's screen brightened, then split into a second window. A woman's face filled it. Sasha B. Bureau agent, still wearing the badge, black hair pulled tight, one earring catching the alley light behind Chen. Nine days of blackout showed in the shadow under her eyes. "Alyssa," Sasha said. Flat. "You're alive." "I'm on Earth," Alyssa said. "I'm standing where my family stood." Sasha didn't blink. "Say that again. Slow." Alyssa said it slow. Marla kept hold of her hand. The brass cylinder on the pedestal still glowed faint behind them, the recording spent but warm. "I have proof," Alyssa said. "Transport records. Family unit. Earth to Shrumella. Sealed forty years. My grandmother's voice on top of it." Sasha's jaw moved once. "Send it. Now. While the relay holds." Chen crouched by the case in the alley. He tapped the panel. Indicator lights ran red, yellow, green. "Channel's clean for maybe six minutes," he said. "After that they trace it to me." Alyssa fed the crystal reader into the relay port the Hollow Man opened for her. The classified transfer log lifted onto the shared screen — CLASSIFIED, SEALED, NO CONSENT stamped across her family name. Under it, the old survivor's testimony began to play in a thin, steady voice: an elderly woman describing the night the ships came, the count of families taken, the doors sealed behind them on Shrumella. Sasha listened without moving. When it ended she said, "That's enough to bury them." Then her eyes cut sideways, off camera. Her hand went to her hip. Not to the badge. "Chen," she said. "Someone's on your relay." Chen looked down. A sixth light had come on that Alyssa hadn't seen him touch. Blue. Steady. "That's not mine," he said. A new voice came through — not Sasha, not Chen. Young. Clipped. Behind it, other people breathing in a small room. "We have you," the voice said. "We're the ones who saved your fourteen seconds. There are twelve of us. We made three copies. We've been looking for the rest." Alyssa saw the room in her head before she asked. "Where are you broadcasting from?" "Civic screen substation," the voice said. "We can push what you just sent to every screen still lit on Shrumella. Tonight." Sasha's face went hard. "Alyssa. Listen." "I'm listening." "The blackout wasn't the Bureau covering the leak," Sasha said. "It was cover for a launch. They moved a ship four days ago. Coordinates match yours." Marla's hand tightened. "They're coming to Earth," Sasha said. "For you. They'll be there inside a day." The relay lights held steady. Chen stared up into the camera. The Truth Movement waited on the open line. The brass cylinder pulsed once behind Alyssa like it had heard. Alyssa let go of Marla's hand. She looked at the transfer log frozen on the screen — her family's name, sealed, stamped, true. "Push it," she said. "Tonight. All of it."

The relay held for another minute after Alyssa gave the word. Then the blue light on Chen's panel doubled. A new voice cut in over the Truth Movement's line — older, tired, female. "Alyssa. Don't move. I'm patching in from a safehouse. My name is Selene Aris. I built the ships that took your family." Alyssa's hand went flat on the pedestal. Marla stepped closer. On the shared screen a second window opened. A woman in a lab coat, gray hair pulled back, glasses catching a lamp behind her. She looked straight into the lens like she had rehearsed this for months. "I designed the transit for travel," Aris said. "Someone rewrote the specs. They used it to move people. Your grandmother. Your mother. You were supposed to be next." "Why me," Alyssa said. "Because of what's in you." Aris looked off camera, then back. "The colony was seeded from a narrow pool. Your bloodline wasn't in it. You carry Earth markers they can't fake or grow. As long as you're breathing, their story that Earth is empty falls apart. That's why the ship is coming." A third window opened without asking. A younger woman, dark ponytail, thinner coat. "Elara Voss," she said. "I helped build Shrumella. I found the memo. Repopulation was crossed out. Preservation stock was written in. The colony was never meant to replace Earth. It was meant to hold what they took from it." "Hold," Alyssa said. "Like a vault," Voss said. "There is a real one. Stone walls. Under the civic district. That's where the defectors went. That's where your mother is." Marla made a small sound. Alyssa did not look at her. A fourth window. White hair, black uniform, blue seams. He did not introduce himself. He did not need to. Marla whispered the name anyway. Director Caelum Orr. "I signed the order," Orr said. "Forty years ago. The people who used the ships are dead. I am not. I am giving you the list." A file dropped into the relay. Names. Dates. Signatures next to Alyssa's family name. "Why now," Alyssa said. "Because you're still alive," Orr said. "And they sent a ship. I did not authorize it." The Truth Movement's clipped voice came back on. "We have the file. We have the scientists. We have you on camera. We push all of it in ten minutes." Alyssa looked at the pedestal. At Marla. At the frozen transfer log with her family's name still stamped sealed. "Push it," she said. Chen's voice broke through, tight. "Alyssa. The Bureau ship just entered atmosphere. Six minutes out. Commander Rhyne on the hail. He's not answering Orr." Orr's face did not move. "Then he isn't mine anymore." Alyssa stepped back from the pedestal. The bunker felt smaller. "Marla," she said. "Run."

They ran out of the bunker into thin gray light. Marla carried the brass cylinder. Alyssa carried the drive. The Bureau ship's engines pushed a low pressure into the air behind them, still miles off but closing. Alyssa's plan ended at the door. She had proof, a fiancée, and a planet she did not know how to stand on. She needed a person. Someone here. Someone who would open a door for a stranger before the ship landed. Marla stopped at a fork in the path. "Which way." "Up," Alyssa said. "Higher ground. The old man said people used to live on the ridges." They climbed until the trees closed over the sky. Alyssa's crocs slipped on wet leaves. Her workshop eye kept running, uninvited. She saw how the slope would fail in heavy rain. She saw where a snare would sit. It was the first time the skill had told her anything she could use. Half a mile up they found a shelter built into the hillside. Layered slate slabs. Dark seams. A low tunnel mouth cut into the rock. Smoke came out of a vent thin as a finger. Someone lived here. A woman stepped out from behind the shelter with a knife held low. Brown braids. A jacket worn soft at the elbows. She looked at Alyssa's red hair, the tattoo, the crocs, and did not lower the knife. "You're not from here," the woman said. "No." "I heard the engines." She tilted her head at the sky. "They yours?" "They're after me." The woman waited. Marla stepped up beside Alyssa and did not speak. "My grandmother was born on this planet," Alyssa said. "I don't know where. I need a roof for one night. I can trade for it." "What's the trade." "I can look at anything you use and tell you how it will break." The woman's mouth moved, almost a smile. "Prove it." Alyssa pointed at the vent. "Your flue's pitched wrong. One hard wind from the north and it back-drafts. You've been sleeping with a headache." The woman lowered the knife an inch. "Two weeks." "I'm Alyssa. This is Marla." "Alanna Moss." She looked past them, down the slope, at the sound of the ship. "You bring that here, you cost me the ridge." "I know." Alanna weighed it. She looked at Marla's hand on the cylinder, at Alyssa's face, at the tattoo under her eye. "One night. You fix the flue. You leave at first light and you don't tell anyone my name." "Yes." Alanna stepped aside from the tunnel mouth. Alyssa ducked under the slate. The air inside was warm and smelled like roots. She had a foothold. She also had a stranger who could hear the ship as clearly as she could, and a deadline of dawn. Marla set the cylinder down on the packed floor. Outside, the engines got louder.

Inside the shelter, Alanna crouched by the stove and pointed at a low shelf. "Storm coming overnight. North wind. You leave at dawn like you said, you'll be wet through in an hour." Alyssa looked at her crocs. At Marla's thin sweater. She had built a ship. She had not built a coat. "Do you have anything to spare," Marla said. "No." Alanna did not look up. "I have what I use. You knew the trade." Alyssa fixed the flue by lamplight. She wedged a slate wedge under the pipe and re-seated the collar. The draft pulled clean. Alanna watched, nodded once, and turned in. Rain started before dawn. Alyssa woke Marla. They stepped out under a sky the color of wet stone. Alanna stood at the tunnel mouth with her arms crossed and did not wave. They walked downhill. The rain went sideways. Alyssa's tank top stuck to her ribs. Marla carried the cylinder inside her sweater. By midday Alyssa could not feel her fingers. They found a hollow log and slept curled under it. Day two, Marla found nuts under a split husk and berries on a low bush. They ate what fit in two hands. Day three, nothing. Day four, Alyssa saw her grandmother walking ahead on the path, then blinked and saw only trees. "Marla," she said. Her tongue felt thick. "I see her too," Marla said. "The bright one." A figure stood between two pines. Pale robes. A crown of light. It did not move the way a person moves. "You are hungry for a name," the figure said. "I am looking for hands that will hold one." Alyssa did not know if the voice was in the trees or in her head. A goat stepped out from behind the figure. Brown and white, with a clean cross patterned into its side. It looked at Alyssa with a steady yellow eye and turned down a path she had not seen. "Follow," the figure said. They followed. Alyssa did not remember choosing. The goat walked ahead, patient, stopping when they fell behind. Marla held Alyssa's wrist so they would not lose each other. The rain thinned. The trees opened. Alyssa's knees gave out on wet moss. Marla dropped beside her. The last thing Alyssa saw was the goat standing at a low stone step, waiting. She woke on a wooden floor. Dry. Warm air. Colored light through a broken window. Marla was breathing next to her. The cylinder lay between them. Above them arched a stone ceiling with a bell rope hanging still. An old chapel. Ivy through the cracks. No road in sight through the doorway. No goat. Alyssa sat up slowly. Her clothes were dry. She did not remember them drying. "We're inside," Marla said. "Yes." "Someone carried us." "Maybe." Alyssa looked at the empty aisle. The storm was behind them. The Bureau did not know this place. Neither did she.

Alyssa stood up from the wooden floor and looked around the chapel. Dust drifted in the colored light. Marla sat with the brass cylinder in her lap. Neither of them had put it there. Neither of them remembered how the door had closed behind them. "Someone lives here," Marla said. "Or comes here." Alyssa walked the aisle. Her crocs stuck to the boards. The pews were pushed against the wall to make room for two cots joined at the foot. A cloth was folded on one pillow. The other pillow had a dent in it, like a head had been there that morning. Alyssa's skill kicked in without asking. She saw how the roof would fail in a hard wind. She saw the weak beam over the door. Then she saw what did not fit. A wooden crate stood behind the altar, hinged, painted to look like part of the wall. She opened it. Inside sat a shelf of dented cans with faded labels, a jug of water, and a book. The sign above read church donations in half-peeled letters. The cans were old but sealed. Someone had stocked this for people. Marla lifted the book. The cover read the truth of shrumella and its origin. Her hands shook. "Alyssa." Gravel crunched outside. Slow steps. Not running. Not hiding. Alyssa reached for the cylinder. Marla reached for her hand. The door pushed open. A man stood in the frame. Brown robe. Bare feet in worn sandals. A bruise along his jaw that had faded to yellow. He carried nothing. He looked at them like he had been expecting them for a long time. "You found your way," he said. "Welcome." Alyssa put herself between him and Marla. "This is your land." "It is nobody's land." He stepped inside and closed the door. "I stocked the shelf. I set the cots. I have been walking a long time to reach the ones who were forgotten." "How did we get here," Marla said. "You were carried." He did not explain. He walked past Alyssa and touched the book in Marla's hand. "No one will find you here. Not the ship. Not the Bureau. Here you can learn the truth of Shrumella. Why they took your family. Why they took the memory." Alyssa's chest went tight. "Who are you." "I am here to help you wake up." He looked at her with plain brown eyes. "Wake up." He snapped his fingers. "Wake up." Another snap. Alyssa's knees loosened. The colored light bent. "Wake up." The third snap took the room. Black poured in from the corners of Alyssa's vision and closed over the middle. She felt Marla's hand still in hers. Then she did not feel anything. The chapel was quiet. The cylinder rolled once on the boards and stopped. The book lay open on the cot, waiting to be read.

Alyssa woke on a stone floor. The chapel was gone. She lay in a round room cut into rock. Rope carvings ran up the walls to a huge anchor above a low arch. Marla was not there. The brass cylinder was not there. A stack of worn books sat by her hand. She sat up. Her head felt clean and light, like a room after someone had swept it. That scared her more than pain. A woman sat across from her on the step. Small. Gray tunic. A hospital band still on her wrist. She was looking at Alyssa the way a nurse looks at a chart. "You're awake," the woman said. "I'm Rebecca. I was the first one they put in that chair." Alyssa's hand went to her cheek. The tattoo was still there. The teardrop under the heart. Something, at least, was hers. "Where is Marla." "Safe. Above us. The robed man kept his word about that." Rebecca did not soften it. "He brought you here because I asked him to. You need to read those before you decide." Alyssa looked at the stack. The top book was thin, the spine cracked. She opened it. Her own handwriting. Firetruck red ink in the margins. A date twelve years old. They told me I hold it together. I ran. I am writing this so next time I know. She opened the next. Different pen. Same hand. Same first line, almost. I ran again. If you are reading this you ran too. Do not trust the ship. Do not trust Earth stories. You are the anchor. Six books. Six times. Her stomach turned. "What is an anchor," Alyssa said. "A person the system ties to." Rebecca's voice stayed flat. "Shrumella needs one alive and bonded or it comes apart. They took your family because your blood holds. Mine didn't. Yours does. Every time you wake up and learn it, you run. They wipe you and start again." "And you." "I stayed. Nothing happened to me. People near me stopped falling apart. That's all I know." Alyssa stood. The arch under the anchor led down. She could feel the pull of it in her teeth, the way she felt a bad wire in a wall. "If I walk through there I don't come back to Earth." "You come back to yourself. Every time. That's the trade." Alyssa thought of Marla above her, sleeping, not knowing. She thought of a grocery store on Earth that kept throwing her out. She thought of the girl in the first journal, twelve years ago, writing so a stranger with her face could find the thread. She picked up the journals. She tucked them under her arm. "Tell him I'll go in," she said. "But I keep these. And I keep her." Rebecca nodded once and stood to lead her down.

Rebecca led Alyssa down a narrow stair into the arch room. The anchor above the door was cut deep into the stone. Ropes carved into the walls twisted toward it. Alyssa held the journals tight against her ribs. Her own words in her own hand, six times over. She had read enough to know the pattern. Every past self had walked up to this arch and broken. "You've read what happens," Rebecca said. "The bond opens the memories all at once. Twelve years, four wipes, every face they took from you. Your mind is a small room. They pour a river into it." "How did you survive it." "I wasn't the anchor. I only sat near one." Alyssa set the journals on the step and knelt. She opened the thinnest one, then the next, then the next. Her old handwriting spread across the floor like a map. In the margin of the fourth book she found a diagram she had drawn to herself. A valve. A choke point. Slow the flow. She had always seen how systems failed. She had never thought of her own head as a system before. She went back through each book and pulled the marked pages. A word on one. A date on another. A name circled twice. She lined them on the stone in order. Each page was a step. Read one, breathe, close the eyes, wait. Then the next. A staircase down instead of a cliff. "You're building a gate," Rebecca said. "I'm building a drip." Alyssa stood and walked to the arch. She pressed her palm flat to the carved rope. The stone was warm. She felt the pull she had felt before, sharp behind her teeth. She did not let it take her. She read the first page aloud. A street she had lived on. She waited until the street sat still in her head. Then the next page. A brother's name. She waited again. The memories came, but slow. A kitchen. A hand on her shoulder. A room with a chair and a light. A woman signing a form. Her mother's face, then her father's. She swayed. Rebecca caught her elbow and let go. An hour passed, maybe two. When Alyssa lowered her hand from the stone, she was still herself. She knew what they had taken. She knew every name. She picked up the journals and closed them one by one. "It worked," Rebecca said. She sounded surprised. "It held." Alyssa's voice was rough. "But I'm bonded now. Shrumella can feel me. Whatever's up there hunting me can feel me too." Rebecca went pale. Above them, faint through the rock, a low tone began to sound. Not a bell. A signal. Something had locked on. "They know where you are," Rebecca said. Alyssa tucked the journals under her arm and started up the stair toward Marla.