The red lights were not coming from the service shaft.
Mara pressed her palm against the cool pipe beside her and counted their pulses. One. Two. Three. Each light woke in the same deliberate rhythm, moving through the wall from forward to aft like a message traveling along a nerve.
Unit 7-Kite's limbs shifted beneath her. The damaged one dragged against the deck. Its voice came from the speaker in the service shaft, thin with interference.
“Do not touch the red line.”
Mara looked down. A red cable ran along the base of the coolant bundle, no thicker than a pencil. It had been hidden beneath a strip of black insulation. She had walked over it during her fall.
“Sensor?” she asked.
“Power return.”
“Power return to what?”
The drone did not answer.
Mara lifted the black core away from her chest. Its surface had warmed in the last few minutes. A thin line of amber light moved beneath the glass, carrying symbols too small to read at that distance. The core was not merely storing a memory. It was transmitting one.
Or trying to.
“The red line goes to the core,” she said.
“It goes through the core.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only answer this shell can safely hold.”
The amber light moved again. A pulse of heat crossed Mara’s fingers. For an instant she heard a woman laughing—not Lio, but someone close enough to wear Lio’s voice. The sound vanished before she could identify it.
She slipped the core into her belt pouch.
The service hatch above her remained shut. Beyond it, boots moved across the deck. More than one set. The security team had reached the upper level. Mara checked the shaft markings. The lower arrow pointed aft, toward the old life-support spine. The other arrow had been scratched away.
Kite made a low clicking sound.
“Which way?” Mara asked.
“Forward.”
“That's not a direction.”
“It is the only one that does not end at a locked door.”
She trusted the machine more than the locked door. The distinction had become important.
They moved aft, the drone's good legs clicking against the ladder rungs while Mara climbed beside it. The shaft narrowed after twenty meters. She had to turn sideways, one shoulder scraping the wall. The ship groaned around them, a low vibration that traveled through the deck and into her teeth. Somewhere above, a warning bell began to sound.
Mara kept climbing.
They emerged behind a bank of inactive environmental controls. The room beyond was dark except for a narrow strip of emergency light along the floor. It smelled of dust, disinfectant, and the metallic sweetness of overheated insulation.
A memorial terminal stood at the center.
Mara recognized it. Every maintenance worker had passed it on the way to a shift. The terminal displayed a portrait of the Peregrine with a gold line crossing the empty starfield beyond Sol. Beneath the portrait were the names of the dead.
Three names.
ELIAN ROOK — MEDICAL
JUNO PARK — CIVIC RECORDS
MARA VENN — TECHNICAL SERVICES
Mara stopped.
Her own name looked back at her from the terminal, crisp and permanent. She had never seen it there. She had never looked closely enough to know what the other two names were.
Beside the display, a smaller panel held a list of crew transfers. Mara touched the screen.
The system rejected her credentials.
She tried the manual query. The terminal woke with a soft chime, and the public archive opened. A warning appeared: MEMORY PERMISSION LEVEL 2 REQUIRED.
Mara entered the disaster year.
The public account loaded.
PEREGRINE INCIDENT REPORT — YEAR 72
CASUALTY COUNT: THREE
CAUSE: REACTOR CASCADE AND STRUCTURAL FIRE
STATUS: CONTAINED
Below the report was a list of the damaged sections. A dozen names appeared under EVACUATED AND REASSIGNED. The text moved too quickly for Mara to read. She caught fragments: nursery, hydroponics, memorial choir. Then the list ended.
There should have been more.
A hand touched the terminal behind her.
Mara spun, wrench raised.
Tavi Sen flinched backward.
“Unit Seven-Kite,” they whispered. “You got it out.”
Mara lowered the wrench by one inch. “You knew it was alive.”
“I knew the speaker circuit was live.”
“That is not the same as knowing it could speak.”
Tavi looked toward the drone. Their face was pale in the emergency light, but their hands were steady. They carried a small maintenance bag across one shoulder. A music clip trembled from the speaker clipped to their belt, repeating a half-remembered melody.
“Why are you here?” Mara asked.
“Orin sent me to find you.”
“Orin sent security?”
“Orin sent me before security arrived.” Tavi’s eyes dropped to the core pouch at Mara’s hip. “He said you would run toward the old systems. He said you would choose a machine over a person.”
“Was he right?”
“Usually.”
“That is not an answer either.”
Tavi flinched at the echo of her own words, then glanced toward the closed door. “The old environmental controls are connected to the memorial network. If Seven-Kite is transmitting, the security team will triangulate it through this room.”
“Can you stop the transmission?”
“No. But I can make the room look empty.”
They set down the maintenance bag and removed a narrow black strip. It was no larger than a fingernail. Tavi pressed it against the terminal's access port. The screen flickered. Mara felt the pull in the black core again, stronger this time, a hook behind her sternum.
The memorial names blurred.
One line appeared beneath the three official dead: TRANSFERRED — I. SOL.
The line vanished before Mara could read the rest.
“What was that?” she asked.
Tavi's hand stopped over the black strip.
“Who is I. Sol?”
“I don't know.”
“You have a maintenance file for every crew member on this ship.”
“Not every crew member. Not the ones who were removed from the active registry.”
Mara looked at the blank space beneath the official list. “You knew about this.”
“I knew the list was wrong. I didn't know how.”
The drone clicked.
“Imen Sol,” it said.
Mara turned. “Who?”
“Imen Sol. Technical services. Seven-Kite custodian. Missing.”
Tavi's face changed.
The name was familiar to Mara only because it was absent. She knew the missing person's workbench. She knew the empty seat in the drone inspection bay. She knew the small repair knot Tavi used on the straps of their tool bag, the same knot Mara had taught them six years earlier.
She did not know the missing person's face.
“Where are they?” Mara asked.
Kite's speaker produced a burst of static. “Memorial access incomplete.”
Tavi stepped toward the drone. “Seven-Kite, where did Imen go?”
“Blue hatch.”
Mara's hand closed around the core pouch.
The terminal behind them chimed. A new line appeared beneath the official casualty report.
I. SOL — STATUS UNRESOLVED
For three seconds, the room was silent.
Then the door at the far end unlocked.
Tavi grabbed Mara's arm. “That was not supposed to happen.”
Mara pulled free. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. The terminal responded to the core.”
The wall lights turned white.
A voice came through the intercom, calm and familiar.
“Mara Venn, remain where you are. This is a civic safety request.”
Orin.
Mara looked at the sealed door. She had spent six years obeying that voice when it came through a speaker. It told her which systems to repair, which failures to report, and which questions would be answered later.
Later had never arrived.
“Orin,” she said.
“Unit Seven-Kite is damaged equipment,” his voice continued. “Do not remove its memory core.”
Tavi's hand moved to the drone. “He knows.”
“He knows the core is out.”
“He knows because I told him.”
Mara stared at them.
Tavi's mouth twisted. “He asked me to bring you in quietly. I said I would. I did not say I would bring you the truth.”
“Which part was true?”
“All of it. That is the problem.”
The door began to open.
Mara grabbed the core and ran for the far maintenance panel. Kite moved with her, its damaged leg leaving a bright scrape across the floor. Tavi hesitated, then thrust the black strip into Mara's hand.
“Take this. It will blind the nearest access reader for thirty seconds.”
“Where do I go?”
Tavi pointed to a low opening beneath the environmental controls. “The archive lift. It is the only route that does not pass through the memorial network.”
“Will you come?”
“I have to make Orin believe I brought you in.”
Mara looked at the young technician. Tavi's fingers were still curled around the broken melody on their belt. Their face held the expression of someone preparing to lie badly.
“Thirty seconds,” Mara said.
“I know.”
She pulled the panel open and dropped into the darkness beyond.
Kite followed, folding itself into the narrow space. The core pulsed against Mara's palm. On the other side of the panel, the door opened fully.
Orin said, “Tavi, where is she?”
Mara moved deeper into the archive lift shaft.
The hidden terminal above them displayed Imen Sol's name for one last time before the screen went dark.
Below, far beneath the living decks, something mechanical turned over and began to wake.