Min closed her eyes. For three years, she had needed to know if Jae had suffered. Now she knew. She had been afraid. She had been brave. And she had been murdered by the very corporation that signed her paychecks.
She found it wedged inside the crumpled cockpit of a lifeboat. Not a drone.
It was Jae’s emergency beacon. The casing was cracked, space-welded to a strut of twisted metal. Min pried it loose with a trembling hand. The data core was still intact, a tiny obsidian chip humming with residual power. ATID-60202-47-44 Min
The designation was . It wasn’t a name. It was a log entry, a line in a spreadsheet, a ghost in the machine.
Forty-seven degrees, forty-four minutes. The angle of the distress beacon’s final vector before it was swallowed by the accretion disk of a dead star. Min closed her eyes
The recording was only twelve seconds long. Grainy, flickering. But it was her sister. Jae’s face, younger, wild-eyed, her lip split and bleeding.
She pulled the heavy insulated gloves over her hands, the worn fabric smelling of recycled air and old coffee. The Rake ’s captain, a woman named Sloane with a face like cracked leather, had given the order two hours ago: "Purge the old logs. We need storage for the new navigation maps." She had been afraid
Min had nodded, her face blank. But she didn’t go to the server room. She went to the airlock.