Chapter One: The Unknown
The recall breaks her climb. Three sharp pulses at her wrist halt her mid-step.
"Bearer," a voice says, crisp and urgent. "Priority return: unmarked at Solanna's edge. Holding position."
The margin is where Solanna's pull thins and the outer nets stop speaking.
Unmarked. The archive returns a blank glyph across the band's inner field. Blank signals refusal, a warning: When there is refusal, a witness is required.
Her chest tightens, then steadies. She lets the sola narrow to one directive: return.
Isaryn reaches for the rail at the overlook.
Stone meets her palm, worn smooth by other hands that have stood here before her. She presses into it once, letting the contact anchor her.
"Returning now."
She pushes off from the rail and begins to descend.
Ahead, the route curves through the terraces, each level marked by railings that have weathered countless seasons.
She knows this path, bone memory in every step. She has walked it often: between runs, to feel the planet under her boots, or to look down toward the grey beach where she first met Trilixx. This sola, she doesn't stop.
Below, swell strikes the undercut, the sound rising in a low roll along the cliff.
Far out, the horizon blurs into a wall of cloud, stacked higher than it should be, still building when the last storms should already be gone.
She keeps moving, the image clinging to the edge of the sky.
Here, the terraces open onto a wide platform with a viewing rail facing the upper sky. She has stood here with kin, shoulder to shoulder, watching the big ships maneuver above, their hulls carving paths through the light. Grazez among them, its hull a darker spine in the light.
This sola, only a few figures fill the platform. Techs and couriers, eyes on the enlarged transit feed, voices low. A single contact glyph sits pinned on the feed. Too clean, too still. No drift line trails it.
Recall marks her.
Space opens, but the silence is not empty.
It carries the weight of unspoken journeys.
The wind shifts.
Sea-salt gives way to the sharper scent of the station: ozone from the fields, the dry bite of systems on standby.
By the time she reaches the last turn, she can see the transport pad through the arch.
Rylan waits on the ramp, a narrow device glinting in his palm, and when she steps forward, her shoulders unbrace in spite of herself. His gaze meets hers, concern softened beneath an even exterior.
The recall sits in his shoulders, in the careful way he holds the device.
"Bearer."
His voice stays level.
"Any change?"
Isaryn asks.
"Contact still holds its place."
He glances back, gaze firm over the edge. Objects drift through the margin; they do not stop there.
"No match in the archives. Nav-X is driving the primary vector array, cutting us a corridor to the margin. Council Bearers want us on it the moment alignment locks."
She nods once and steps onto the ramp; its field ripples as she passes through.
"How long?"
Rylan follows, seals the hatch, and moves to the pilot cradle. She takes the forward seat and connects the harness.
"Corridor alignment in less than two vek," he says.
"Two vek is a long time to leave an unknown on the margin."
Frustration edges her voice as her shoulders settle into the straps.
"Long enough for the edge to answer first."
Rylan adjusts thrust. The deck presses gently against her spine as they lift, and the screen warms from dark to a softened light, showing the transport pad as the outside field begins to shift. On the screen, the pad lights cycle, then fall away below as ground and sea fade quickly into haze.
The last of the blue lifts out of the sky until stars sharpen above them, and the planet's rings rise into view, a pale band of ice catching the star in a thin scatter. Below, the world curves away, lights scattering as shadow spreads across the surface.
In the corner of the display, the contact marker does not shift. Even as stars slide and vectors update.
Beyond the rings, the twin moons clear the arc of the world: one compact, its face crowded with ancient scars; the other still in formation, surface shifting in slow tidal rise.
Their paths cross and part.
Isaryn watches them for a moment, then looks ahead.
As they climb, Grazez resolves from silhouette into mass: a single armored spine from bow to stern, flanked by twin carrier blocks, with a central trench cutting through the ship's length like an open channel for craft and cargo. Engine collars burn softly near the aft quarter, each a ring of contained light that pulses in steady rhythm with the ship's core.
The command tower rises at the crown, set back as a watchpoint carved from dark alloy.
She knows the hull by its marks. A plate scorched by a dock fire. A line from a glancing strike. Another from a near-pass that scrapes too close along the flank. No one logs that strike. She remembers it.
As they close, the shuttle's motion eases, caught by external guidance.
Maintenance spines and antenna sensors trim to meet them, and gates along the trench slide open in sequence, rhythm precise.
The shuttle glides forward.
Starlight falls away as walls rise around them into the bay.
The screen switches to internal feed, showing guide lights along the cradle floor and alignment glyphs flaring on the bulkheads in patterns she recognizes from countless landings.
Touchdown comes as a soft, double tap through the hull. More felt than heard.
The hatch cycles. Cool recycled air moves in, carrying the familiar scent of the ship.
Isaryn unseals her harness, stands, and follows Rylan down onto the deck.
She recognizes the scuffed plating and the worn patches where cargo has dragged.
Ahead, the inner doors open. Light spills across the deck.
He moves past her, already returning to duty. His hand brushes her shoulder in passing.
She pauses. Just enough to feel the faint vibration that runs beneath the ribs of Grazez.
Behind her, the bay seal engages. A brief flare. A soft pressure drop.
The corridor lights adjust to her presence.
Out on Solanna's margin, the unknown still holds its place.
She goes to meet it. Before it moves, before choice unravels. The logs chart the last cycles in fine detail: Solanna's pull shifts, the outer field flexes, yet the contact stays pinned to the same point, adjusting by fractions with no recorded force.
In the record, it is a clean glyph and a string of numbers. Beneath her ribs, it settles with a new weight, and the thought rises. Reflexive, impossible to shake: some things do not arrive. They return.
The question is not what it is, but what it remembers.
And if it returns for them, they are already late.