LUCY
By noon, I have a list of names, three borrowed carts, and more volunteers than I can use.
The cooperative hall has become too crowded for clear thinking.
People keep arriving with papers clutched to their chests, asking whether their family records matter, whether Helix can ignore burial claims, whether Rethan’s new inquiry means they’re safe.
I answer what I can and refuse to lie about the rest.
Safe is too large a word for the third day after ships came down.
So I choose useful instead.
“We need memories older than the field maps,” I tell the group gathered near the hall doors.
“Not guesses. Names, dates, landmarks, who planted where, who paid water tax, who witnessed a boundary agreement. If your grandparents told the same story every winter until you could recite it half-asleep, I want it written down.”
Someone asks, “Will stories count?”
I glance toward the records table where Rethan stands reviewing another ledger. “They will if we tie them to dates.”
He glances up at that, as if he’s heard his own thinking in my mouth and doesn’t know whether to approve.
Good. Let him wonder.
Our first visit takes us to Old Nara Venn, who lives in a stone cottage beyond the lower orchard with a roof patched in three colors and a gate that squeals like it objects to visitors.
Nara is ninety-four, sharp-eyed, and wrapped in a green shawl despite the heat.
She refuses to speak until I accept tea and Rethan accepts nothing, which earns him a look of immediate suspicion.
“Too tall to trust,” Nara says.
Rethan inclines his head. “That is not a legal standard I have encountered.”
I bite the inside of my cheek.
Nara likes him after that, though she pretends not to.
She remembers the Kest field before it had a parcel number. She remembers a spring flood that washed out the first stone markers. She remembers my grandfather standing waist-deep in mud with two other men, arguing over where the canal bend truly began.
“And Breccan?” Rethan asks, recording with permission.
Nara snorts. “Never heard that name until last night.”
“Could a trust have purchased access without local knowledge?”
“Could a goat become mayor? Anything can be written down if the writer is shameless enough.”
I turn away before my laugh escapes too loudly.
The second witness, Pell’s older sister Amadine, has a cedar chest full of winter letters.
The handwriting wavers across old paper, but the dates are clear.
One letter describes the disputed southern fields as planted and taxed eighteen years before Helix’s chain claimed them as dormant reserve land.
Another mentions a “valley promise” made at the first settlement hall, though the line ends before explaining more.
Rethan reads that sentence three times.
“What does valley promise mean?” I ask.
Amadine rubs her thumb over the edge of the page. “My mother used to say the founders made terms before they broke ground. Land for living. Water for sharing. No one owning what everyone needed.”
“Was it written?” Rethan asks.
“Everything important was written somewhere,” the old woman says. “The trouble is people only look for paper after thieves arrive.”
By late afternoon, word has outrun us.
At every stop, more people wait. A widower with irrigation stones wrapped in cloth.
Two sisters carrying their grandmother’s boundary songs copied into a school primer.
A former mill worker who remembers surveyors being chased away forty years ago because they had mapped burial hills as “unoccupied rise.”
I listen until my head aches. I write until my fingers cramp.
Rethan asks questions with careful precision, never wasting a witness’s strength, never mocking what sounds strange to outside ears.
When someone drifts into grief, he waits.
When someone offers anger instead of facts, he separates the useful detail without shaming them.
It’s infuriating, how decent he can be when he’s not busy sounding like a statute carved into ice.
On the road between farms, he walks beside me rather than ahead. The twin suns have lowered, warming the dust and catching the faint Pi’rell light along the edges of his skin.
“You are staring,” he says.
I look forward. “I am checking whether you glow in late light.”
“I do not glow.”
“You absolutely glow.”
“Pi’rell dermal patterns reflect certain wavelengths.”
“So, glow.”
His mouth doesn’t smile, but something close to amusement touches his voice. “If imprecision comforts you.”
“Careful, Specialist. Around here we call that teasing.”
“I will consult a local index.”
I laugh, and for one breath the day feels almost ordinary.
Then I notice the drone.
It hovers above the far fence line, black against the amber sky, small enough to pass for a survey unit if someone wants to insult my intelligence. Its lens tracks the cart road. When I stop, it shifts with us.
Rethan sees it too.
“Helix?” I ask.
“Likely.”
The warmth goes out of the evening.
I think of Nara’s cottage, Amadine’s letters, the widower’s shaking hands as he unwrapped stones from a field his son still works. Helix is not only watching records now. They’re watching people.
Rethan lifts his wrist display and sends a silent command. The drone’s running lights flicker once, then vanish as it retreats toward the ridge.
“You can order it away?” I ask.
“I can record its presence and make it inconvenient.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No,” he says. “But inconvenience leaves a trail.”
At the next rise, we look back toward the valley. Smoke curls from supper fires. Carts move between homes. Families who were frightened yesterday are now carrying boxes, ledgers, names, proof.
Hope is moving faster than fear.
I want to trust that.
At the far end of the southern road, a second drone rises from behind the trees.
Then a third.
Rethan’s expression hardens into something colder than caution.
I tighten my grip on the witness ledger beneath my arm.
The valley has started speaking.
Helix has started listening.