The inspector was three bunks away when Juno Vex heard the scanner click. She sat very still on the edge of her cot, feet not quite touching the floor, the cracked solar panel on her back pressing cold against the wall. Under the mattress, wrapped in foil, her notes waited: 14:32, forty degrees southwest, the moment her shadow stayed put while she moved left. She had two problems now. The inspector, and the other child she had not yet found — the only person in the colony whose shadow might also refuse to follow. The inspector wore a gray coat and carried a light rig on a strap. He pointed a lamp at each student and watched the wall. The rule was simple. Move. Shadow moves. Pass. A girl two bunks down raised her arm and waved. Her shadow waved back. The inspector grunted and moved on. Juno pressed her palms into her knees. The dorm windows faced the wrong way for her to fail cleanly. If he shone the lamp from the door, her shadow would freeze. She would be logged. Taken. She did not know where. That was the part that scared her most. A scuff at the far end of the room. Her cousin Fenn Hollis leaned in the doorway in his old flight jacket, a Copperstripe Armadillo curled on his shoulder. He was not supposed to be in the school. He grinned at the inspector like they were old friends. "Left my broom in here yesterday," Fenn said. He held up a sleek broom with a lit panel on the handle. "Cleaning contract. You want to see the paperwork, or you want to finish your rounds before the west light goes flat?" The inspector frowned. "West light?" "Forty minutes," Fenn said. He tapped the broom's panel. It chirped. "Angle drops. Shadows go long and soft. Your rig won't read clean. I'd hurry." The inspector checked his watch. He looked at the four bunks left, including Juno's. He waved the lamp at the boy across from her, saw the shadow twitch, and moved to the door. "Finish tomorrow," he muttered, and left. Juno breathed out. Fenn crossed to her bunk and set the broom against the frame. The armadillo blinked at her with one calm eye. "You knew," Juno whispered. "I know a lot of things, cousin." He crouched so their eyes met. "Get your notes. Whatever's under that mattress. You can't stay here." "There's another kid," she said. "Like me. I haven't found them." Fenn's grin thinned. "Then we look together. But not from this bunk. He'll be back with a stronger lamp." Juno pulled the foil packet from the hollow under her mattress and pushed it into her pocket. She stood. The solar panel on her back scraped the wall. She did not look at her shadow. She followed Fenn out the dorm door, into a colony that had just started hunting her.

Fenn Hollis pulled Juno into the service corridor behind the dorm and shut the hatch. His Copperstripe Armadillo shifted on his shoulder, sand-colored plates ticking against his collar. A speaker in the ceiling coughed. Then the inspector's voice came through, calm and clear. Missing student. Juno Vex. Report any sighting. Hold in place. Every corridor camera would be watching now. Every adult would look twice at a small girl with a cracked panel bolted to her back. Juno pressed the foil packet against her ribs. "He knows my name." "He knows the name on the bunk," Fenn said. "Not the girl." He crouched. "Take the panel off." "I can't. It's bolted." He turned her by the shoulders and looked at the cracked panel. He clicked his tongue once, the way he did when a thing annoyed him. From an inner pocket he pulled a short driver. Four turns on each bolt. The panel came loose in his hands. Cold air hit her back where it had been. He wrapped the panel in his jacket lining and slid it into his satchel. "They flagged the panel," he said. "Not your face. Kids all wear the same coat." She touched her back. It felt wrong to be lighter. "Where do we go?" "Off the school grid." He nudged her toward a side stair. "I know a house past the water lines. Thatched roof. A friend owes me a room. We wait there until the alert cycles off the boards." They moved. Fenn walked in front, slow and bored, like a man on an errand. Juno kept her hands in her pockets and her eyes on his boots. At the first junction a worker glanced at her. Juno smiled the way she smiled at teachers. The worker looked away. At the second junction a clay water cache sat against the wall, its painted sun symbols faded, one skull-sun still bright pink. Fenn stopped and pretended to check the tap. Above them, a speaker repeated her name. He filled a tin cup, handed it to her, and watched the corridor behind them in the cache's copper fitting. "Drink slow," he said. "Girls who run get noticed. Girls who drink don't." She drank slow. Two colony guards passed the far end of the hall. Neither turned. When their steps faded, Fenn tapped her elbow and they walked on. They cleared the school gate at the shift change, folded into a group of maintenance workers, and stepped into the open lane. The alert kept playing behind them, but no one stopped a small girl with no panel on her back and an old pilot at her side. The house sat at the end of a dust track, its palm-thatched roof low over a shaded porch. Fenn unlatched the gate. "Inside," he said. "Now we look for the other one." Juno stepped onto the porch. Her shadow stayed on the step behind her, one beat too long, and then followed.

Inside the thatched house, Fenn Hollis set his satchel on a low table and listened. A copper wind vane on the roof ticked in the dry breeze, bone tassels tapping against the metal. The Copperstripe Armadillo on his shoulder went still, plates lifted a hair. Fenn's hand went to the window slat. "Patrol," he said. "Two of them. Coming up the track." Juno crossed to the slat. Two figures in inspector gray walked the outskirts, sweeping handheld scanners along the fence line. If they reached the porch, they would scan her, panel or no panel, and drag her back before she found the other child with the wrong shadow. "Cellar," Fenn said. He lifted a woven mat. A hatch sat under it. "Down. Now." She went down the ladder. The cellar was cool and smelled of clay. A brass sundial sat on a crate against the wall, tilted, its mirror dusty. A woman stood beside it in a pressed black coat and a dark dress with pale stitching at the hem. Another Copperstripe Armadillo sat on the crate at her elbow, tail curled around the tripod. Juno froze on the last rung. "She's the judge," Fenn said from above, quiet. "Cora. She owes the room. Do what she says." Juno had heard of the judge. The one who sentenced people for what they hadn't done yet. The one who was never wrong. Cora Lind did not smile. She looked at Juno the way a person looks at a page. "Stand on the mark," Cora said. She pointed to a chalk circle on the floor under the sundial's mirror. "Don't speak." Juno stepped onto the circle. Above them, boots crossed the porch. A scanner chirped near the door. Cora tilted the mirror. A thin bar of sunlight slid down through a roof slot and struck the dial, then bent onto Juno. Her shadow appeared on the clay floor. Cora watched it. Juno held her breath and did not move. The shadow moved. A small shift left, then back. Juno had not moved at all. Cora's mouth tightened. She covered the mirror with her palm. The shadow died. "They'll open the hatch in thirty seconds," Cora said. "The vane above the roof is copper. It scatters their scan for about that long. Not longer." "Can you hide her?" Fenn whispered down. "No." Cora looked at Juno. "But I can sign her." She pulled a folded slip from her coat and pressed her thumb to it. A containment order, already written, already dated. "On paper you are mine now," Cora said. "Sentenced. In custody. They can't take what the court already holds." The hatch lifted. Fenn's voice went bright and bored above. "Down here, gentlemen. Judge Lind is working." A gray sleeve appeared at the rim. Cora held up the slip without looking at them. "Signed subject," she said. "Move on." The sleeve withdrew. The hatch closed. Juno stood on the chalk mark. Her shadow lay still at her feet, the wrong shape, and now it belonged, on paper, to the judge who was never wrong.

The hatch stayed shut for an hour after the inspectors left. Then Fenn tapped twice on the wood and lifted it. Juno climbed up. The judge was gone. The containment slip lay folded on the table with her thumbprint drying on the wax. "They're back on the ridge," Fenn said. He watched the copper vane on the roof turn. His armadillo, Kita, pressed flat against his collar. "Recalibrating. Better lenses this time. If they catch you in open sun, the paper won't hold." Juno set her notes on the table. Underlined twice. A time. A light angle. And a note at the bottom she had written in the cellar: another child, same shadow. She still had to find that child. But she could not walk the lanes in daylight while inspectors tuned their scanners a hundred meters off. "I need help," Juno said. "Someone who watches people and knows the school rolls. Not you." Fenn thought about it. "Petra," he said. "Linguist at the courtyard house. She likes you. She keeps lists." He would not take her himself. Two figures on the track drew eyes. He drew a map on the back of a receipt and pushed it across. Juno went out the back way, along a drainage ditch, keeping the copper vane between her back and the ridge. The Palmtech Courtyard House sat under a wide thatched roof with sliding glass panels open to the shade. Petra was on the porch in her sand-yellow jumpsuit, headset over one ear, writing on a slate. A big man in a rumpled linen suit stood behind her. Speaker rods lined his jaw. He watched Juno the way a guard watches a door. "Tomas," Petra said, without looking up. "She's fine. She's the cousin I told you about." Tomas did not move. "Inspectors on the ridge." "I know," Juno said. "That's why I came inside." Petra set the slate down. Juno pushed her notes across. "I need every child logged with a lighting exemption in the last year. Sunburn waivers. Indoor PE. Anyone who skips the shadow drills." Petra's face did not change. She pulled up a school roster on the slate and filtered it. Twenty-three names. She filtered again. Nine. Again. Two. One was Juno. The other was a boy from the east dorm. Exempted from outdoor assembly for eleven months. Reason: photosensitivity. No medical file attached. "That's him," Juno said. Tomas leaned in and read the name. He tapped one of the rods on his jaw and it did not light. "He was at the delegation house last week," he said. "With an inspector escort. They weren't testing him. They were showing him to the aliens." Juno stared at the slate. She had a name now. She also had a much bigger problem than a shadow that would not move.