Stale air pressed against Jira Thorne's face as she jerked upright on cold metal. Her spine met the edge of a stair, and the impact sent a white flare through her shoulder. Somewhere below, conduit pipes ticked with residual heat. Above, nothing. No lights, no ventilation hum, no distant announcements. Sector 7's blackout stairwell had become a tomb of silence.
She drew breath through her teeth. The air tasted of burnt polymer and something metallic underneath, a residue from whatever Compliance had thrown at her mother's workshop. The smell had soaked into her jacket during the scramble down nine flights, through service corridors slick with emergency sealant, into a maintenance alcove where she had wedged herself behind a coolant manifold. Now, hours later, the odor remained. It clung to the fabric like a second skin.
Jira pressed her palm flat against the step beside her and felt the faint vibration of the station's core, still cycling, still alive beneath the blackout protocols. Her pupils adjusted. Shapes emerged from the dark: the pale geometry of railings, the yellow stripe of a safety marker, the emergency call box three meters up with its dead indicator light.
She had run. That fact sat in her chest like a stone she could not cough up. Forty-one minutes since the raid alarm had split the air in her mother's workshop. Forty-one minutes of choices made without thought, of muscle memory and survival instinct overriding everything the Compliance Academy had drilled into her. She had been trained to assess, to document, to report. She had been trained to be the system. And when the first officer had raised his baton over her mother's hands at the workbench, Jira had put her shoulder into his chest and kept moving.
Ilse would have done the same. The thought arrived uninvited, and Jira let it stay.
Her sister's name still carried weight, even after three years of silence. Even after the official notice, stamped and delivered by a Compliance courier who would not meet her eyes. Even after the unmarked file in the archives that listed Ilse Thorne among the unconfirmed casualties of protocol sweep 7-Alpha. Jira kept a folded copy of that notice in her inner pocket. She had read it enough times to memorize every bureaucratic phrase.
A door groaned somewhere below. Jira's hand found the cold grip of the torch she had taken from her mother's bench. She held it low, thumb on the activation stud, and waited. Footsteps approached, uneven, weighted to the left as if the walker favored one leg.
"Jira?" The voice arrived before the face did, warm and slightly out of breath, with the lilting drawl of the southern stations. "Jira, honey, if you're planning to brain me with that torch, please aim for the shoulder. I'm told my face is my best feature."
Mirelle.
The torch lowered. Jira did not relax, but the tension in her wrist eased a fraction. "I should let you stumble. Save myself the trouble of explaining your corpse to the network."
"That's cold, even for you." Mirelle rounded the last turn, her silhouette resolving into a narrow frame wrapped in a maintenance coat three sizes too large. She carried a bundle under one arm and moved with the careful economy of someone who had learned to navigate dark corridors by memory. "Also inaccurate. I would haunt you, and you know how I get when I'm dead. Worse than when I'm alive."
"What do you have?"
Mirelle crouched beside her and set the bundle on the step. A medkit, a water flask, and a thin data slate wrapped in foil to defeat passive scans. "Cauterizing patches, two liters of recycled, and a ghost drive with everything I could pull from the secondary relays before Compliance sealed the sector." She paused, her head tilting. "There's also a sandwich. Don't ask where I got it."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good. Because I'd lie, and then we'd both feel bad."
Jira took the flask, unscrewed the cap, and drank. The water tasted of copper pipes and minimal filtration, but it was wet and it was clean enough. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and passed it back. "The workshop."
Mirelle's expression shifted. The easy humor drained away, leaving something harder underneath. "Burned. They used thermal containment, not accelerant. Whatever they wanted, they wanted the structure intact." She glanced toward the stairwell above. "Your mother?"
"In the back room when I left. There was a panel behind the lathe. She showed me once." Jira's voice stayed level, each word measured and flat. "I don't know if she made it."
"You think she did?"
"I think she survived the sweeps that took Ilse. I think she built that workshop to outlast three Compliance audits. I think she planned for this." The torch in Jira's hand clicked softly as her grip tightened. "I think she is the most stubborn woman on this station, and I refuse to insult her by assuming otherwise."
Mirelle reached out and squeezed her wrist, brief and firm, then withdrew. "The network is moving. Daoud has the east passage cleared to the recycler junction. From there we can loop through maintenance and reach the Kettle in under an hour."
"The Kettle is a target. Compliance will have it flagged."
"The Kettle is a target," Mirelle agreed, "which is why half of Sector 12 will be there tonight pretending to drink something that isn't made from nutrient paste. Hark's people can't sweep a crowd that size without optics, and optics mean records, and records mean questions from the Oversight Committee." She unwrapped the foil from the data slate and held it up so the faint glow of its standby indicator caught Jira's eyes. "Unless Hark has finally figured out how to file paperwork without a compliance officer's soul leaving his body."
The name landed like a slap. Jira set her jaw. "Hark doesn't need questions. Hark needs bodies."
"Hark needs convictions, sweetheart. Without convictions, he's just a man with a badge and a grudge against unauthorized breathing." Mirelle tucked the slate back under her arm. "Come on. Daoud's people are watching the corridor feeds. We have a window of maybe twelve minutes before the next patrol cycle."
Jira stood. Her legs protested, stiff from the cold step and the hours of stillness. She rolled her shoulders, felt the bruise along her left blade pulse once, and picked up the medkit. The weight of it was familiar. She had carried medkits on inspection rounds, back when she had worn the Compliance grays and believed the system could be corrected from within.
That had been before the Caelum Protocol files. Before she had found the sealed annex in the Central Archive, the one with the red classification markers and the redaction stamps that bled through every page. Before she had understood what the Protocol actually meant: not population control, not resource management, but something quieter and more permanent. A culling dressed in administrative language.
She had reported it through channels. The channels had reported her to Hark.
Now she stood in a dark stairwell with a stolen torch and a friend's too-large coat, and the channels were a closed door she would never open again.
Mirelle led the way down. The stairs descended in tight switchbacks, each landing marked with faded numerals that glowed faintly under the torchlight. Jira followed, counting steps out of habit, mapping the route in her head the way she used to map inspection routes. Third landing, service corridor. Fourth landing, junction with the heating trunk. Fifth landing, the door with the faulty seal that whistled when the station rotated to night cycle.
The whistle came. Thin and reedy, a sound like breath through cracked lips.
"Daoud's mark," Mirelle whispered. She pressed her palm to the door, and it opened onto a corridor lit only by the amber glow of emergency strips along the floor.
Jira stepped through, and the temperature changed. The stairwell had been cold, but the service corridor carried residual heat from the reactor feeds. Warmth pressed against her face and the backs of her hands, and the air smelled of machine oil and recycled atmosphere. Somewhere ahead, pipes carried the dull thrum of the station's circulatory system.
They moved in silence for seven corridors. Mirelle knew the route, and Jira matched her pace, stepping over cable runs and ducking beneath low-hanging conduit. Twice they passed closed hatches with the Compliance seal affixed, red tape over silver clasps. Jira noted each one. Old habit.
Then Mirelle stopped.
The corridor ahead widened into a junction where four passages met beneath a vaulted ceiling stained with moisture. In the center of the junction, a figure stood with their back to them, facing the far wall. The figure wore a maintenance uniform, but the way they held their shoulders was wrong. Too straight. Too still.
Mirelle held up a hand. Jira halted.
"Daoud?" Mirelle's voice carried forward, cautious but not yet alarmed.
The figure turned.
He was not Daoud. He was older, grey at the temples, with the lean build of someone who had spent decades moving through narrow spaces. His uniform bore no name patch. His eyes, when they caught the torchlight, were the flat color of old steel.
"Thorne." His voice was measured, each word given equal weight. "You are expected."
Jira's grip on the torch tightened. "By whom?"
"By people who understand what you found in the Archive. And what it will cost if it remains buried." He did not move toward her. He did not move at all. "Your mother sent word before the raid. She asked us to bring you in."
"Brought," Jira corrected. "Past tense. I'm already here."
A faint expression crossed his face. It might have been approval. "Yes. You are."
Mirelle's hand found Jira's wrist, a brief pressure that said everything. Hold. Watch. The stranger had not raised his hands, had not reached for a comm unit, had not done any of the dozen things a compromised operative would do in the first three seconds of contact. He had simply stood and spoken.
"Your mother," Jira repeated. The word tasted strange in her mouth, metallic and far away. "My mother is dead."
"She was not dead when she spoke to us." The stranger's tone held neither sympathy nor impatience. He spoke as though reciting a maintenance log. "She was alive, and frightened, and very precise. She gave us coordinates. She gave us a phrase to say to you when we met. Do you want to hear it?"
Jira's pulse beat in her throat. Beside her, Mirelle had gone very still, the kind of stillness that meant she was calculating distances and exits.
"Speak it," Jira said.
The stranger drew a breath. "The luthier remembers the first string."
Something behind Jira's ribs cracked, hairline fracture, no blood yet but the pain already registering. Her mother's voice had said those words to her once, a long time ago, in a bedroom that smelled of solder and machine oil. A phrase from before the sweeps. Before Ilse. Before Jira had learned what her mother really did in the quiet hours.
"Keep talking," she managed.
"I am called Saen Korr. I work with a network of archivists, technicians, dissenters. We have been collecting what the Compliance regime erases." Saen Korr's gaze did not waver. "Three days ago, your mother contacted us through a dead-drop channel we thought had been burned. She was in the Meridian district. She had evidence. She wanted it preserved. She also wanted you found."
"Where is she now?"
"We do not know. The channel closed before we could respond. The district went dark shortly after." Saen Korr paused, and for the first time something like grief moved behind his expression, quickly suppressed. "We have to assume the worst."
Jira's free hand curled into a fist at her side. She forced the fingers open again, one by one. Panic was a luxury. Panic was a door she could not afford to open in a corridor that smelled of rust and old water.
"Evidence of what?" Mirelle asked. Her voice had steadied, southern warmth replaced by something cooler, more businesslike. "You said she found something in the Archive."
"The Archive did not hold what she expected." Saen Korr's gaze shifted to Jira, held there. "It held what she had placed there herself, years ago. A copy. Insurance, she called it. She told us the original was kept elsewhere, and that the copy referenced something called the Caelum Protocol."
The name landed in the corridor like a dropped weight. Jira felt Mirelle's grip tighten on her wrist.
"You know what that is," Saen Korr said. It was not a question.
"I know what it is supposed to be." Jira kept her voice flat. "A decommissioned atmospheric program. Filter failures. Acceptable losses."
"Your mother disagreed. She believed it was something else." Saen Korr reached into the inner pocket of his uniform and withdrew a small wrapped object, rectangular, no larger than two fingers pressed together. He held it out, balanced on his palm. "She asked us to give you this when we met. She said you would understand what to do with it."
Jira did not reach for it. "Why didn't she bring it herself?"
"Because she was being watched. Because the raids had begun." Saen Korr's voice softened a fraction, though the measured cadence remained. "Because she trusted us more than she trusted the distance between herself and you."
The corridor dripped somewhere out of sight, a slow irregular percussion. Jira's torch threw their shadows long against the damp walls, her silhouette sharp and angular, Mirelle's smaller and tense beside her.
"Take it or don't," Saen Korr said. "But decide quickly. We are not alone down here."
A sound reached them from the junction behind, the groan of a hatch being tested, the muffled bark of a voice giving orders. Saen Korr did not turn. His attention remained fixed on Jira as though he had heard nothing at all.
Mirelle moved first. She stepped forward and plucked the wrapped object from Saen Korr's palm in a single fluid motion, her fingers brushing his for no longer than necessary. She stepped back and pressed it into Jira's hand without looking at her.
"We move," Mirelle said. "Now."
Saen Korr inclined his head, a small gesture of agreement. He turned toward the far passage and began walking without waiting to see if they would follow. His stride was unhurried, the stride of a man who had walked these corridors many times and knew exactly which floor panels would creak.
Jira followed. The wrapped object sat in her palm like a coal, warm and full of heat that had nowhere to go. She did not unwrap it. Not here. Not yet.
Behind them, the hatch at the junction opened fully. A voice called out, clipped, authoritative, the vowels flattened into Compliance station-standard. "Sweep pattern seven. Check the lateral conduits."
Mirelle's breath caught. She kept walking.
The passage narrowed, ceiling dropping until Saen Korr had to duck beneath a pipe junction wrapped in failing insulation. The air grew warmer, damper, thick with the mineral smell of groundwater pushing through concrete. Somewhere ahead, Jira heard a low hum, mechanical, rhythmic, the sound of pumps working somewhere deeper in the station's forgotten infrastructure.
Saen Korr stopped at a hatch set flush with the floor. He knelt, pressed his palm to a panel beside it, and waited. A faint green light pulsed once beneath his hand. The hatch released with a soft exhale of pressure.
"Beneath us," he said, "is a market. Unlicensed. Off the grid. They do not ask names and they do not remember faces. We can rest there until the sweep passes."
Jira crouched at the hatch's edge and looked down into darkness. A rusted ladder descended into shadow. At the bottom, barely visible, a string of dim bulbs flickered, each one guttering in turn as though fighting some long battle against the damp.
"After you," Mirelle murmured.
Saen Saen Korr went first. Then Mirelle. Then Jira, pulling the hatch closed above her, sealing them into the warm wet dark.
The ladder rungs were slick under her gloves. She counted them out of habit. Twenty-three. The sound of the sweep above faded with each rung, replaced by the rising murmur of voices, the clatter of commerce, the thin reedy music of a stringed instrument played by someone who had long since stopped caring whether they played well.
Her feet found the floor. Mirelle was already at her shoulder, hand at the small of her back, guiding her forward. Saen Korr had vanished into the crowd ahead.
The market opened around her like a held breath released. Stalls leaned against curved walls, draped in tarps and salvaged fabric, laden with goods that smelled of spice and machine oil and human presence. Bodies moved between them, hooded, unhooded, faces lit by lantern glow and the pale blue shimmer of repaired displays. A child ran past clutching something wrapped in cloth. An old woman argued with a vendor about the weight of a coil of copper wire.
"Mirelle." Jira's voice came out hoarse. "Mirelle, I need a minute."
"You've got thirty seconds." Mirelle steered her toward a stall at the edge of the market, draped in indigo, where a heavyset woman with silver-streaked hair sorted through a crate of salvaged components. "This is Hesper. Hesper, this is her."
Hesper looked up. Her eyes were sharp, amused, taking in Jira's dust-streaked uniform and Mirelle's protective stance with a single glance.
"The compliance girl," Hesper said. Her voice was low, rough-edged, amused. "The one who walked off the grid."
"I'm not compliance anymore."
"No," Hesper agreed. "You're not." She turned back to her crate, sorted a moment longer, then lifted something and pressed it into Jira's free hand. A small flask, warm. "Drink. You look like death's rehearsals."
Jira drank. The liquid was bitter, sweet beneath, something herbal she did not recognize. It burned a path down her throat and settled somewhere in her chest like a small fire lit against the cold.
Mirelle took the flask when she was done, took a pull herself, and handed it back to Hesper with a nod of thanks.
"The sweep will pass overhead in twenty minutes," Hesper said, not looking at either of them. "Maybe thirty. Then you can go up. Until then, you sit, you breathe, and you don't draw attention."
"Understood." Mirelle guided Jira toward a low bench against the far wall, half-hidden behind a hanging tarp. They sat. The bench was damp, the wall cold through the fabric of her jacket. Jira still held the wrapped object in her hand, fingers closed tight around it.
She unwrapped it slowly, beneath the tarp, hidden from the market's wandering eyes. Inside was a shard. Data crystal, standard format, the kind that could be read by any of a dozen devices scattered through the station's surviving infrastructure. A small strip of paper had been folded around it, and on the paper, in handwriting Jira recognized down to the slant of every letter, was a single word.
Luthier.
The sound of the stringed instrument drifted through the market, thin and persistent, the same phrase repeated over and over as though the player could not remember what came next. Or could not bear to leave the only part of the song they had left.
Mirelle leaned close, her breath warm against Jira's ear. "Do you know what it means?"
Jira stared at the word. Her mother's handwriting. Her mother's hand, alive three days ago, reaching across the dark to leave her a trail.
"It means," Jira said, "that I have to find someone. And it means she thought I could."
Above them, somewhere in the station's upper corridors, the sweep continued its patient rounds. Beneath them, the market breathed and murmured and went about the small business of staying alive. And in Jira's palm, the shard waited, heavy with everything her mother had not been able to say out loud.
The tarp fell closed behind them, and Jira's world shrank to the size of a wrapped shard and a single word written in her mother's hand.
The terminal they chose sat at the back of a dead kiosk, half-buried behind stacked ration crates that smelled of salt and old polymer. Mirelle had brought her here once before, during the early days when they were still learning which corners of the station the sweeps forgot. The kiosk had been a charging station for field equipment, back when anyone had equipment worth charging. Now it was a husk, its display dark, its housing cracked along one seam where something heavy had been dropped on it during the last resource riot.
But the data port still worked. Mirelle had checked it that morning, before the market opened, before Jira had arrived with the shard in her pocket and the shape of her mother alive in her chest.
"Here," Mirelle said, kneeling beside the kiosk. She pulled a length of flexible cable from the inner pocket of her coat, the kind scavenged from medical monitors, its connector end stripped and re-soldered into something that could talk to a standard data crystal. "Standard read, no network handshake. Whatever's on it stays here."
Jira nodded. Her fingers had gone cold around the shard, and she made herself loosen them, made herself breathe. The market murmur pressed against the tarp like water against a hull. Somewhere a child laughed, high and sudden, and the sound made her flinch.
"Easy," Mirelle murmured, not looking up from the cable. "I'm almost there."
The connector seated with a click that felt too loud. Mirelle touched two contacts on the side of the kiosk, and the display flickered to life, its blue-white light cutting a small wound in the dimness. Lines of interface scrolled, most of them corrupted, the station's failing systems struggling to render anything coherent.
"Here," Mirelle said again, quieter now. "It's holding."
Jira leaned forward. The shard's contents were loading, file by file, onto the kiosk's local buffer. She watched the names scroll past, each one a small weight landing in her chest. Audio capture, sector 7-C. Audio capture, sector 9-A. Visual capture, residential block Delta. Visual capture, transport hub Echo-3. Her mother had been methodical even at the end. Even running.
Then a new file appeared, and the scrolling stopped.
MESSAGE. Priority. Recipient: J. Thorne.
Jira's mouth went dry.
"Play it," she said.
Mirelle touched the display. The blue-white light softened, warmed, resolved into something that was not a file anymore. It was a room.
The holo stabilized, and Jira's breath caught.
Her mother stood in a kitchen Jira had never seen, in a residential block that did not match any address Jira had memorized. The counters were clean, the lighting warm, a single window showing the curve of the station's upper hull. Behind her mother, on a hook by the door, hung a coat Jira did not recognize. The room smelled of nothing. The holo could not carry scent. But Jira's memory did, and she remembered suddenly, viciously, the smell of her mother's cooking on a morning when nothing had yet gone wrong.
Her mother's face was thinner than Jira remembered. Older in a way that had nothing to do with years. She was dressed plainly, hair pulled back, hands folded in front of her in a way that looked composed but that Jira knew meant she was gripping her own fingers hard enough to leave marks.
"Jira," her mother said, and the word landed in Jira's chest like a fist.
The audio was imperfect. There was a faint hiss beneath her mother's voice, the sound of the station's atmosphere pushing through whatever recorder had been used. But the voice itself was clear, was her mother's, was the voice that had sung her to sleep and scolded her for tracking ash across the threshold and laughed once, only once, when a stray cat had followed her home from the lower markets.
"If you're hearing this, then the message reached you. And if the message reached you, then I did not."
Jira's vision blurred. She did not wipe her eyes. She kept watching.
"I do not have much time. They are looking for me, and they are close, and I will not run from them a second time." Her mother's folded hands tightened. "But I want you to know, first, that I am sorry. I am sorry I did not tell you sooner. I am sorry I let you believe I had given up. I am sorry I let you carry the weight of thinking yourself alone."
The holo caught a flicker of movement beyond the kitchen doorway. Her mother's eyes went to it, came back. The composure held.
"Listen carefully. The Luthier is a man. He lives below the ash fields, in the parts of the station the surveys never finished. He has been watching the protocols longer than I have. Longer than anyone. He has proof, Jira. Real proof. Not fragments, not inferences. He has the original orders. The original signatures. The original list of names."
The hiss on the audio grew louder. Somewhere in the room beyond, a door opened.
"I cannot get to him. You can. You have to. And when you do, you have to make a choice I did not have the courage to make." Her mother's voice softened, and for a moment the composure cracked, and Jira saw her mother's eyes fill with something she had never seen in them before. Not fear. Grief. "You have to decide whether the truth is worth the cost. I have spent my life telling myself that I was protecting people by staying quiet. I have spent my life telling myself that the truth would only break what could not be repaired. But silence has a cost too, Jira. And I have paid it. And so have you."
The movement beyond the door grew louder. Footsteps. More than one set.
"Find the Luthier. Find the proof. And then do what I could not. Choose."
The holo image shifted, jumped, and then a second feed loaded, and Jira's stomach dropped.
The second feed was not her mother's kitchen.
It was a corridor. A wide one, brightly lit, the lighting harsh and institutional. Compliance uniforms moved at the edges of the frame, their faces obscured, their movements precise. And in the center of the frame, being dragged forward by two officers whose grips had left bruises already forming on her upper arms, was a woman Jira had not seen in eleven years.
Ilse.
Her sister was thinner than the last time Jira had seen her, thinner than the stories had made her, but the face was unmistakable. The same jaw. The same eyes. The same stubborn set of her mouth that had earned her a dozen scoldings as a child and a place on the first list of names the protocols had ever drawn up.
Ilse was not dead.
Ilse was being dragged toward a Department of Civic Harmony transport, its side emblazoned with the compliance seal, its rear ramp lowered, its interior dark.
The timestamp burned in the corner of the holo. Three days old. The same age as the message in Jira's pocket.
Jira's hand found the kiosk's housing and gripped it hard enough to feel the cold metal bite into her palm.
In the holo, Ilse's eyes lifted. For a moment, impossibly, across three days and a thousand kilometers of station corridor, her sister looked directly at the camera. Directly at Jira. And her mouth moved, shaping a single word that the corrupted audio could not carry.
Jira did not need to hear it. She knew the shape of it. She had seen it on her sister's face enough times, in the years before the first sweep had come and taken her sister and left the rest of them to grieve.
The word was run .
Then the holo cut, and the kiosk display returned to its list of files, and the dimness of the dead kiosk settled back over them like a held breath.
Jira could not move.
Mirelle was beside her, saying something, her hand on Jira's shoulder, her voice coming from very far away. The market murmured beyond the tarp. The stringed instrument played its single phrase, over and over, patient and broken.
Jira's mother was alive three days ago. Now, probably, she was dead. Or worse. Or in the hands of the people who had already taken her sister.
Her sister. Alive. Three days ago. In a transport marked with the compliance seal. Being dragged toward a destination Jira did not know and could not guess.
The Luthier. Her mother had said. Find the Luthier. Find the proof. Choose.
And her sister, somewhere in the same station, in the same week, in the hands of the same people who had already taken everything else from her.
Mirelle's hand tightened on her shoulder. "Jira. Jira, look at me."
Jira looked.
"We have to go," Mirelle said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were wet. "We have to go right now, before someone comes looking for whoever plugged into this port. We have to go, and we have to make a plan, and we have to decide what we're going to do."
Jira nodded. She did not trust her voice yet.
She unplugged the shard. She wrapped it again, in the paper with her mother's handwriting, in the cloth she had carried it in. She tucked it back into her jacket, against her ribs, where she could feel its weight with every breath.
Behind the tarp, the market went on. Above them, the sweep went on. Somewhere in the station's depths, the Luthier waited, if he was still alive, if he had not been found, if the proof her mother had died to protect still existed.
Somewhere in a transport cell, her sister waited too.
Jira stood. She did not look back at the kiosk. She did not look back at the market. She looked at Mirelle, and Mirelle looked at her, and between them passed the understanding they had shared for years now: that the world was larger than survival, that silence had a cost, that the choices ahead were the kind that broke people who let them break them.
"We're going to find him," Jira said. Her voice came out flat, cold, certain. The voice of a compliance inspector who had learned the shape of the system from the inside. The voice of a daughter who had just learned her mother had spent eleven years trying to undo what she herself had once enforced.
Mirelle nodded. She did not argue. She did not ask what it would cost. She had already decided, long ago, that whatever Jira decided, she would stand beside.
They slipped out of the dead kiosk and into the market's flow, two more figures among the ash-gray crowd, indistinguishable, unremarkable, carrying a shard and a name and the knowledge that the people they loved were not where they had thought.
Behind them, the kiosk display faded to black.
Ahead of them, somewhere below the ash fields, the Luthier waited.
And in Jira's chest, beneath the wrapped shard, a new weight settled in beside the old one. The weight of her mother, alive three days ago, choosing to spend her last hours building a trail for her daughter to follow. The weight of her sister, alive three days ago, shaping a single word across a corrupted holo feed.
The word was run.
Jira Thorne had never been good at running. She was, at last, done trying.