The scanner's display flickered three times before Vera Kole understood what she was seeing.
She sat cross-legged on the floor of her grandmother's workroom, the portable sensor unit balanced on her knees, its screen casting a sickly green wash across the antique furniture surrounding her. Dust motes drifted through the light. Outside, the colony's humidity recyclers hummed their constant, sleep-denying drone, but here, in this corner of the family quarters that smelled of old lacquer and something sharper, beneath, the air held a different texture. Cold. Old.
The hand-mirror sat on a velvet pillow six centimeters from her outstretched fingertips.
Grandmother Imara had refused to let her touch it during the standard scans. "The glass is old, malenchik," she'd said, her voice carrying the particular weight of someone who had outlived three colony governors and two crop failures. "Old things remember being handled roughly. We ask first."
Vera had asked. The mirror had, apparently, granted permission in whatever language old things spoke, because her grandmother had stepped aside with a single nod and returned to her herb garden without another word.
Now the mirror's surface lay still, silvered glass catching the green sensor glow, its tarnished bronze frame carved with patterns Vera had spent six years trying to translate. Her translation software claimed they were Old Earth decorative motifs. Her grandmother claimed otherwise. Both, Vera suspected, were wrong.
The flicker came again. A single, arrhythmic pulse in the upper register of her frequency sweep, so brief that the sensor almost didn't catch it. Almost.
Vera leaned closer. The screen updated: 3.7 seconds since last emission, 4.1, 4.0, 3.9. Not random. Not noise. The interval was shortening.
Her stomach performed a small, complicated movement that had nothing to do with the recycled lunch ration she'd eaten an hour ago.
She adjusted the sensitivity. The pulse sharpened, separated itself from the ambient electromagnetic chatter of Agrisynth's underground colony: the power grid's sixty-hertz heartbeat, the hydroponics bays' variable draw, the distant thrum of the mining crews boring through the basalt layer three kilometers overhead. All of it she knew. All of it her sensor had catalogued since she'd first learned to read waveforms at eleven, sitting beside her grandmother while the old woman catalogued her own, stranger spectra.
The pulse from the mirror belonged to none of it.
Her fingers hovered over the interface. She should log it. Standard procedure. Anything anomalous in colony airspace required notification to the environmental monitoring division, which in turn forwarded to the Council's Resources Office, which in turn buried the notification in a queue that, statistically, would never be read.
Vera did not log it.
Instead, she widened the band. The pulse elongated, unfurling across her screen in a waveform that her pattern-recognition algorithms rejected three times before she overrode the rejection manually. The wave was not random. The wave was not noise. The wave was, according to every classification her sensor possessed, an undefined emission source.
That category did not exist in the Agrisynth database.
She had grown up believing it did not exist anywhere. Her instructors at the youth technical corps had been emphatic on the point: the electromagnetic spectrum had been mapped for two centuries. New sources appeared only in deep space, and deep space did not leak into an antique hand-mirror sitting on a velvet pillow in a colony workroom.
The pulse counted down. 3.4 seconds. 3.3.
Vera reached for her grandmother's old reference binder, the one bound in cracked leather that smelled faintly of pressed herbs and contained forty years of handwritten spectrum notes. She found the tab her grandmother had marked in faded ink: UNCATALOGUED.
Inside, twelve pages of careful notations. Each one a frequency that had appeared in Imara Kole's workroom and refused to identify itself to any sensor the colony possessed.
Vera scanned the entries. The numbers were hand-drawn, precise, beautiful in their inconsistency. None of them matched her own reading.
She looked at the mirror. The mirror did not return her gaze. Its surface showed the ceiling beams, the sensor's green light, the corner of her own bent knee, but something in the angle felt wrong. As though the silvered glass had chosen which of her features to display, and had chosen poorly.
The pulse hit 2.9 seconds.
Her comm unit buzzed. She flinched, almost dropped the sensor.
The screen showed Dax Kole's icon. Her younger brother. Seventeen years old, four months a member of the colony's junior geological survey corps, and possessed of an unwavering conviction that Vera spent too much time with dead objects and not enough time with living people.
She answered. "I am busy."
"You are always busy." His voice carried the faint distortion of being routed through three relay nodes, but she could hear the smile in it. "Grandmother sent me. She says you have been in the workroom for four hours and have not eaten."
Vera glanced at the chronometer in the corner of her sensor display. Four hours and twelve minutes. She had not noticed.
"Tell her I am cataloguing."
"She says cataloguing does not prevent soup."
"She is correct." Vera's gaze drifted back to the mirror. "I will be there in twenty minutes."
"Ten. She made the soup with the peppers from the south bay. She does that when she wants you to come immediately."
The call ended. Dax's icon faded. The workroom settled back into its quiet, dusty stillness.
The pulse hit 2.6 seconds.
Vera stood. The mirror remained where it was, velvet pillow undisturbed, its surface continuing to show the ceiling beams and the green sensor glow and the empty air where she had been sitting. She did not touch it. Some part of her understood, with a certainty older than language, that touching it would change the reading, and she wanted the reading preserved exactly as it was.
She powered down the sensor. The green light died. The workroom dimmed to the amber of the single glowstrip her grandmother kept burning at all hours, a habit from the old country that no power rationing had yet managed to break.
The mirror caught the amber light and held it differently than glass should.
Vera stood in the doorway and looked at it for ten more seconds, counting the intervals in her head. 2.5. 2.4. 2.3.
She closed the door behind her.
In the corridor, the colony's air recyclers roared their constant, indifferent roar. Somewhere above her, the basalt groaned under the weight of three kilometers of rock and the small, persistent pressure of human habitation. Somewhere below, the aquifer pumped its measured, mineral-dark water toward the filtration plants.
Vera walked toward the family kitchen, where her grandmother would be waiting with pepper soup and questions she had decided not to ask, and she tried very hard not to think about the waveform she had just measured, and the way it had felt, in her chest, like something that had been waiting a very long time to be noticed.
The mirror pulsed on, uncounted and uncatalogued, in the quiet dark of the workroom she had left behind.
The kitchen smelled of pepper and the mineral bite of recycled water that had been boiled twice. Grandmother Imara Kole stood at the counter with her back to the door, and she did not turn around when Vera's boots found the threshold.
"You smell like the lab."
It was not a question. Imara spoke in statements, mostly. She had grown up in a place where questions were luxuries one could not afford, and she had carried the habit down through three levels of rock and forty years.
"The sensor overheated."
"Overheated." Imara stirred the pot. "You leave the door open again?"
"I closed it."
"Good." A pause. The spoon tapped the rim twice. "Eat. You are too thin."
Vera sat. The chair was salvaged polymer, molded decades ago to fit a frame that had since been replaced twice. She did not ask how her grandmother knew she had been in the lab. The old woman kept her own counsel, and her observations.
They ate in the way of the Kole household, which was to say in near silence, with the occasional offering of bread or the small, formal courtesies Imara insisted upon. The soup was good. The pepper came from the hydroponics tier and was never enough, so Imara rationed it the way she rationed everything, with an exactness that made Vera feel both safe and a little suffocated.
"You are thinking," Imara said, near the end of the meal.
"I am tired."
"You are thinking about something. Your face does that thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you are deciding whether to tell me something."
Vera set her spoon down. "Grandmother. There is a mirror in the workroom."
"I know there is a mirror in the workroom. I put it there."
"You never told me where you got it."
Imara's hands stilled on the bowl she had been drying. The kitchen, which had been humming with the small sounds of supper cleanup, went very quiet.
"No," Imara said. "I did not."
She resumed drying. The cloth moved in slow circles against the ceramic.
Vera waited. The roast coil under the counter ticked as it cooled. Somewhere in the corridor outside, a child laughed, and the laugh bounced off the basalt and came back strange.
"I have questions," Vera said.
"I know you do."
"Will you answer them?"
Imara set the bowl down in its place. She turned, finally, and looked at Vera. Her face was the color of oiled wood, and her eyes were the color of something darker, and the lines around her mouth had been earned, every one.
"Not tonight," she said. "Tonight, you sleep. Tomorrow, you work. The questions will keep."
"But they won't, Grandmother. They aren't the kind that keep."
Imara studied her for a long moment. Then she did something she almost never did. She reached out and put her hand against Vera's cheek, and the hand smelled of pepper and the faint, persistent dryness of an old woman's skin.
"You are like your father," she said, and her voice changed on the last word, dropping into a register Vera had not heard since she was a small child and her father had still been alive. "He could not let a thing alone either."
Vera felt the weight of the hand on her cheek, and the weight of what her grandmother had not said, and the weight of the mirror in the workroom that was, even now, pulsing on in the dark.
She went to bed.
---
The colony of Thornwick was sixty-three years old, and it was tired. This was the thing no one said at Council meetings, and no one said at the communal tables, and no one said in the long, quiet hours between recycling shifts when the basalt groaned and the lights flickered and the aquifer pumps made their small, faithful complaints. Thornwick was tired. The scrubbers that kept the air breathable were running at eleven percent above their design capacity. The water recyclers had begun to taste of copper and regret. The hydroponics tier had lost two cultivars in the last year, and the replacements had not yet arrived from the surface, because the surface did not, in fact, send things on schedule anymore.
Vera knew all of this in the way that one knows the weather of one's childhood, by feel rather than by measurement. She knew which lights would fail and when. She knew which corridor would flood and which valve would stick. She knew that the atmosphere scrubbers were calibrated every midnight cycle, because she had been the one calibrating them for the last nine months, ever since Councilor Bex Ardent had reassigned her from general maintenance to environmental monitoring, a promotion that had surprised everyone, including Vera, and that Imara had received with a flat look that said she had not yet decided what to make of it.
She thought about these things as she lay in her narrow bunk and listened to the colony breathe.
The mirror pulsed, uncounted, in the workroom down the hall.
She did not sleep.
---
At twenty-two hundred hours, the calibration sequence began. This was the part of the day Vera had come to love, though she would never have said so aloud. The colony dimmed. The communal spaces lowered their glowstrips. The corridors emptied. Even the children, who had the gift of noise like a native language, went quiet. For two hours, Thornwick became a thing of whispers and pumps, and Vera walked its veins alone.
She started in Sector Twelve, the eastern reach, where the scrubbers were oldest and crankiest. The air here tasted faintly of rust. The sensor, held in her left hand, hummed against her palm. She moved it through the prescribed arc, smooth and steady, the way she had been taught, and the numbers came back green.
Green was good. Green was the range.
She moved to Sector Eleven. Green. To Ten. Green. To Nine, where the sensor hesitated, as it always did, at the junction of the old haul and the new construction.
She moved it again. The numbers came back green, but only just.
She made a note on her tablet. She would have to recommend a cycling of the backup unit. She would have to write the report in a way that did not alarm Councilor Ardent, who was not a woman given to alarm but who was a woman given to decisions, and whose decisions were not always the ones Vera would have made.
She moved on.
By the time she reached the workroom, it was nearly midnight, and her arms ached from holding the sensor at the precise angles the manual required. She opened the door. The green glow of the sensor met the amber of Imara's glowstrip, and the two colors braided together and fell across the mirror.
The mirror did something it had not done before.
It answered.
Not in the soft, ambiguous way of before. Not with the gentle variation of light. It answered with a tone, a single, sustained note that came from inside the glass and was not quite sound and not quite vibration but something between, something that lived in the teeth and the wristbones and the soft tissue behind the eyes.
Vera's hand tightened on the sensor.
The tone held for three seconds. It held for five. It held for ten.
Then it stopped, and the mirror was just a mirror again, and Vera was just a woman in a workroom, holding a sensor that was screaming green, green, green, as if nothing had happened.
She took a reading. The numbers were unchanged. The air in the workroom was exactly as it had been at twenty-one hundred hours, when she had been here before, and exactly as it had been at twenty-three hundred hours, when she would come back, if it was, if she could make herself.
She powered down the sensor. She stood in the doorway for ten seconds. She closed the door.
In the corridor, the colony breathed. Somewhere above her, the basalt groaned. Somewhere below, the aquifer pumped.
The corridor lights flickered.
Vera looked up. The flicker lasted half a second, then steadied. She made another note on her tablet. She had been making these notes for months, small irregularities that no one else seemed to notice and that no one else seemed to want to notice, and she kept them in a file she had labeled MAINTENANCE LOG, because the truth of what she was logging was a truth she did not yet know how to say.
She walked.
She had gone perhaps twenty meters when she heard it. The sound of the cargo bay cycling, the great metal yawn of the outer seal. She stopped. The bay cycled only on supply days, and the next supply day was not for nine days. She could feel the air shift as the seal opened, a faint pressure change against her eardrums, a smell of something that was not recycled air and not basalt and not the mineral tang of Thornwick's interior.
Ozone. Cold. The outside.
She moved toward the bay, faster now, the sensor still in her hand because she had not thought to set it down. The corridor turned. The bay's inner seal stood open, and the lights along its frame were amber instead of the usual green, which meant arrival instead of departure, which meant someone was coming in instead of going out.
A figure came through the inner seal.
Tall. Broad. A face Vera had not seen in fourteen months.
"Dax."
He stopped. He stood in the amber light with a duffel over one shoulder and a helmet in his other hand, and he looked at her, and the look was complicated in the way only family looks can be complicated.
"Vera." His voice was rough. Prospector rough, the sound of someone who had been breathing recycled air in a helmet for too long. "You're up late."
"You're early."
"Got bumped. The route opened." He shifted the duffel. "Is Grandmother still keeping the light on?"
"She keeps every light on."
He smiled at that, a small, tired thing. Then his head turned, the way a person's head turns when they have heard something they did not expect to hear, and his eyes went past Vera and down the corridor toward the workroom.
"What is that?" he asked.
Vera looked. The workroom door was closed, as she had left it. The amber light inside was visible through the small window in the door. The mirror was not visible. But Dax was not looking at the window.
He was looking at the air around the door.
"It's the workroom," Vera said.
"Something in it is making a noise."
Vera's hand tightened on the sensor again. She had not heard any noise. She had been in the corridor, and she had heard nothing.
"What kind of noise?"
Dax set the duffel down. He took a step closer, his head tilted, the way he had tilted it since he was a boy listening for the aquifer hum. "Low. Steady. Like a tuning fork that won't quit."
He looked at her.
"I hear it," he said. "You don't?"
Vera listened. She heard the colony. She heard the basalt. She heard the pumps. She did not hear the mirror, but she knew, with a certainty that was older than language, that if she walked back to the workroom and opened the door and put her hand against the glass, she would feel it, and that Dax had felt it too, and that this was, in some way she could not yet name, the reason he had come home early.
"No," she said. "I don't hear it."
She lied, and the lie tasted of copper and regret.
Dax studied her for a moment. Then he picked up the duffel and slung it over his shoulder.
"Let's go see Grandmother," he said. "She'll want to know I'm back."
They walked together, and the corridor lights flickered once more, and neither of them mentioned it.
---
In the duffel, wrapped in a thermal blanket that had not been designed for this purpose, wrapped again in a piece of cloth that Dax had taken from his own bunk, wrapped a third time in his own hands, a fragment of black glass hummed in answer to the mirror, and it had been humming, he would tell her later, for the entire nine days of his return journey, and he had not slept, and he had not known why, and now, standing in his family's corridor, listening to a sound only he could hear, he thought, for the first time in fourteen months, that he might be about to understand.
Grandmother Imara Kole did not rise from her chair when they entered. She turned her head, which was all she could manage without pain, and the look she gave Dax was not surprise. It was confirmation.
"Sit," she said. Her voice was a thread, but it carried. "Both of you."
The kitchen smelled of boiled grain and antiseptic. A single cup of tea sat on the table, untouched. Grandmother Imara had not been able to lift it for hours. Her hands, when Vera looked at them, were swollen at the knuckles, the skin stretched and shiny, and her ankles, beneath the hem of her dress, were the same. The pressure sickness was advancing. The colonists called it the bends, though there were no oceans here to dive into. It was simply what happened when the colony aged, when seals failed and joints ached and the body remembered, in its slow cellular way, that it had been made for open sky.
Dax crossed the room in three strides. He knelt beside her chair and took her hand. The gesture was clumsy, unpracticed. He had not been raised to kneel. He had been raised to stand, to work, to leave. Vera watched his fingers close over the swollen knuckles, and she saw the mirror's reflection in his eyes, brief and blue and impossible.
"Grandmother," he said.
"I know," she said. "I felt you come in."
"You felt me."
"I felt the air change. The way it moves around you now. The way it doesn't move around me."
Vera pulled out a chair and sat. The wood was cold through her coveralls. Across the table, the untouched tea had formed a skin, a thin membrane that caught the light. She thought of the aquifer, of the pumps, of the seals that kept the air in and the void out, and she thought, with a start, that her grandmother was one of those seals, and that she was failing.
"The mirror," Grandmother Imara said. "Bring it."
"It's in the workroom," Vera said. "Dax has a piece of it. We found it at the rim. We were going to tell you."
"You were going to tell me when you understood. You don't understand. Bring the mirror."
Vera hesitated. She looked at Dax. He looked at her. Neither of them moved.
"Bring it, Vera."
She stood. The chair scraped against the floor, and the sound was too loud in the small kitchen. She walked out into the corridor, and the lights did not flicker this time, but they seemed, to her tired eyes, to pulse, a slow heartbeat that had nothing to do with the colony's failing circulation. She reached the workroom. She opened the door. The mirror stood where she had left it, leaning against the wall, and when she put her hand on its frame, she felt the hum climb her arm, settle in her teeth, in the bones of her wrist.
She did not pick it up. She pulled the thermal blanket from around it, folded it into a tight square, and tucked it under her arm. She would not carry the mirror itself. She did not think she could, and she did not think it would let her.
When she returned, Grandmother Imara had not moved. Dax was still kneeling, still holding her hand. The teacup sat between them like an accusation.
"Set it down," Grandmother Imara said. "On the table. Face down."
Vera laid the folded blanket on the table and pressed the flat of her palm against it. The hum was muffled, but it was there, a vibration that traveled through the wood and into the legs of the table and into the floor. She could hear it now. Or she could feel it as sound. She was no longer sure of the difference.
"There is a man coming," Grandmother Imara said. "His name is Bex Ardent. He is a councilor. He will arrive tomorrow. He will tell us that this house is no longer safe. He will tell us that we must move to the lower ring."
Vera opened her mouth to protest, and her grandmother raised one swollen hand.
"He is not lying," she said. "The house is not safe. The seals in the upper ring are failing. They have been failing for years. The council has known. The council has waited, because moving a family costs credits, and credits are what keep the pumps running, and the pumps are what keep everyone alive. They have waited until now. They will not wait longer."
Dax stood. His knees cracked. He had been kneeling for a long time.
"Then we move," he said.
"We move," Grandmother Imara agreed. "We do not take the mirror."
The words fell into the room like a dropped tool. Vera heard them hit, heard them ring.
"I didn't say destroy it," her grandmother said. "I said we do not take it. It will stay here, in this house, in this ring, because the lower ring cannot hold it. The lower ring is built for people, not for what this is. And if we take it, and they find it, they will take it from us, and they will study it, and they will break it, and the thing that is inside it will go elsewhere. It will find someone else. It will find a way."
"You know what it is," Vera said.
"I know what it does."
"Grandmother."
"I know that your grandfather heard it. I know that he sat where you are sitting and put his hand where your hand is now. I know that he went to the rim and he found something, and he brought it back, and he told no one, and he put it in the workroom, and he never touched it again. I know that when he died, the hum stopped. I know that when you touched it, the hum started again. I know that when Dax brought a piece of it home, the hum became a chord. I do not know what it is. I know what it does. It waits. It remembers. It calls things home."
Dax had not sat down. He stood behind his grandmother's chair, one hand on its back, and Vera could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw was set, the way his eyes had gone flat and bright, the way he looked when he was calculating a route through a fissure no one else could see.
"The piece in the duffel," he said.
"Is vibrating," Grandmother Imara said. "Yes. I can hear it."
Vera could not. Vera could feel it, through the table, through the blanket, a low and steady pulse that matched her own pulse and did not match her own pulse, that was her pulse and something else, something older, something that had been pulsing in basalt since before the colony was a sketch on an architect's screen.
"We hide it," Vera said.
"We hide both pieces," Dax said.
"Not from each other," Grandmother Imara said. "From the council. From Bex Ardent. From anyone who comes through that door and asks what we are carrying."
Vera looked at the blanket on the table. She looked at Dax's duffel, still slumped by the door where he had dropped it. She looked at her grandmother's hands, at the swollen knuckles, at the way the light fell across them and made them look like carved stone.
"My kit," she said. "The maintenance kit. The big one. There's a false bottom. I put it in last year, when the rats got into the seed lockers and started chewing through everything that wasn't bolted down."
"A false bottom," Dax said.
"For my tools. For the things I don't want the inventory auditors to count." She paused. "For the things that are mine."
Grandmother Imara closed her eyes. The effort of talking had cost her. The skin around her mouth had gone the color of old paper. But she opened her eyes again, and she looked at Vera, and the look was the same look she had given Dax, confirmation, not surprise, the look of a woman who had known, for longer than either of them, exactly how this would go.
"Do it now," she said. "Before you sleep. Before the lights change again."
The lights did not change. But the pump she and Dax had listened to in the corridor had been cycling faster, and she had heard it and not said so, and she thought, as she rose from the table, that the house had begun to exhale.
---
She worked by the light of the workroom lamp. Dax sat on the floor beside her, the duffel in his lap, and watched her hands. The maintenance kit was a heavy thing, polymer over metal, scarred by years of drops and bangs. The false bottom was a panel she had cut herself, fitted with a magnetic latch that required a specific sequence of presses to release. She had designed it for small things, for the cache of screws she kept when the supply officer shorted their inventory, for the half-bottle of spirits she had won in a card game and did not want to declare.
It would hold two pieces of glass. It would hold them if she wrapped them well.
She lifted the panel and set it aside. The cavity beneath was shallow, but it was deep enough. She took the mirror's blanket-wrapped bulk from the workroom, laid it in the cavity with both hands, and felt the hum settle against her palms like a cat that had been waiting to be picked up. She took the fragment from Dax, unwrapped it from the cloth and the thermal blanket and the layer that had been his own shirt, and laid it beside the mirror. The two pieces did not touch. The hum, when she lowered the panel and pressed the sequence to lock it, did not stop. It deepened. It became a sound she could only hear when she pressed her ear to the kit's polymer shell, and even then it was more felt than heard, more bone than air.
"It will hold," she said.
"It will hold," Dax agreed.
She closed the kit and latched it and stood, and her knees ached, and she thought of her grandmother's hands, and she thought of the lower ring, and she thought of Bex Ardent, whose name she had never heard before tonight, and whose name she would not forget.
They did not sleep. They sat in the kitchen with Grandmother Imara, who had finally allowed Dax to lift the teacup to her lips, and they watched the pressure gauge on the wall, and the needle drifted, and drifted, and in the small hours, when the colony's circulation was at its lowest, it dipped below the line that the council had marked red, and did not climb back.
In the morning, the alarm sounded.
It was not a loud alarm. It was a soft, insistent chime that came from the panel by the door, the one that monitored the seals in their section of the upper ring. Vera had heard it twice before, once when a coupling had failed in the unit, once when a child had wedged a toy into a vent. Both times, the council had come within the hour. Both times, they had brought the forms.
She opened the door now, before the chime had finished its first cycle, and stood in the corridor in her coveralls, the maintenance kit heavy on her back, and she looked at the gauge in the wall, and she saw the red line, and she saw the needle below it.
Dax stood behind her. Grandmother Imara remained in her chair, because she could not rise, and because she had known, and because knowing had long since ceased to be a comfort.
The chime sounded a second time. A third. The lights in the corridor, which had been flickering for days, went out, came back at half power, went out again. The pump that Vera and Dax had listened to the night before spun up, spun down, spun up again, a mechanical stutter that she could feel through the soles of her boots.
She looked at Dax. He looked at her. The kit was on her back, and inside it, wrapped and hidden, the mirror and the fragment waited, and the hum, she was certain now, had become a sound, a low and steady tone that matched the failing pulse of the colony and did not match it, that was the colony's pulse and something else, something that had been here long before the colony, something that would be here long after.
The door at the end of the corridor opened. A figure stepped through. He wore the council's gray, and he carried a tablet, and his face, when he saw them, was not unkind.
"Vera Kole," he said. "Dax Kole. I am Councilor Bex Ardent. I have come regarding the pressure loss in this section. May I come in?"
Vera stepped aside. She did not speak. The kit was heavy on her back, and the hum was steady, and the lights, at half power, made the corridor look like a photograph of itself.
Dax stepped aside as well. Grandmother Imara, in her chair, turned her head toward the door.
"Come in, councilor," she said. "We have been expecting you."
Bex Ardent entered the kitchen. He set the tablet on the table. He looked at the pressure gauge on the wall, and his expression did not change, because he had seen it before, and he would see it again, and the forms in his tablet had been prepared for this address, this family, this failure, long before he had walked through the door.
"The upper ring is no longer safe for habitation," he said. "By order of the council, your family is to be relocated to the lower ring. You have twenty-four hours to prepare. A transport will arrive tomorrow at this time. You may bring personal effects. You may not bring heavy equipment. You may not bring items that have not been declared."
His eyes moved to the maintenance kit on Vera's back. He did not ask about it. He did not need to. The forms would ask. The inventory would ask. The auditors, who would come before the transport, would open every kit and count every tool and note every item that did not match the manifest.
Vera set the kit on the floor. She did not take it off her back. She let it rest against her ankles, and she felt the hum through the soles of her boots, and she looked at Dax, and Dax looked at her, and Grandmother Imara closed her eyes.
"We will be ready," Vera said.
Bex Ardent nodded. He tapped the tablet. He left the way he had come. The door closed behind him. The lights came back to full power, then dropped to half again, then held.
Vera knelt and lifted the kit onto the chair across from her grandmother. She put her hand flat on its surface. The hum was there. It had always been there. It would be there tomorrow, and the day after, and in the lower ring, where the air was thicker and the seals were tighter and the pumps ran on a different schedule, and the mirror, if it could be hidden, would hum against the bones of a family that had carried it for a generation, and would go on carrying it, because there was no one else, and because the hum, once heard, could not be unheard, and because Vera Kole, maintenance technician, daughter, granddaughter, liar, keeper, had made her choice, and the choice was this: to carry what could not be carried, and to hide what could not be hidden, and to wait, as the mirror waited, as the fragment waited, as the basalt waited, for whatever was coming next.
She did not speak. Dax did not speak. Grandmother Imara slept.
The pressure gauge held steady below the red line, and the colony breathed, and the kit hummed, and the night passed, and the twenty-four hours began.