23. Althea
ALTHEA
The file is named for me.
Not a code. Not a manifest number. When Caelis cracks the last partition of the stolen core, the deepest layer opens on a personnel record, and the name at the top of it is mine, Althea, A.
— Armstrong labor registry, with a string of cold annotations beneath it that I make myself read all the way down.
Low survival probability. No dependents post-event. Suitable carrier — disposable.
There it is, in someone's clean clerical hand.
Daxira's, I'd bet my life. She didn't pick me because I was good.
She picked me because nobody would come looking when I vanished — because my brother was already dead and there was no one left to raise a noise over one more scavenger gone quiet in the Badlands.
I wasn't even a person to her plan. I was a courier chosen for being unmissed.
I sit with that. I let it do what it wants to do, which is hollow me out. And then, slowly, it does something else instead, something I didn't expect: it makes me furious, and this time the fury has somewhere to go.
"Caelis. The other layer. The destination data — what's actually at the end of the coordinates?"
He pulls it up. The ruins, yes — but tagged, in the Ishani glyphs Elsyn has been drilling into me, with a word I now know cold. Archive. And beneath it, half-corrupted, a phrase that stops my breath: record of the fall.
"It's not just technology Daxira wants buried out there," I say.
"It's proof. Whatever really happened to the Ishani — how it happened, who did it — it's sitting in that archive, and she'd rather it stay sitting forever than let it loose.
" I look at Caelis. "She used me to find the one thing that could clear your whole people's name, and she meant for me to die carrying it so it'd die too. "
The ship is limping. Half its systems are scar tissue. The gravity well is a patient mouth at our flank. By every measure of sense we should run for the nearest neutral port and never look back.
I put the decoded coordinates — the map I made him carry with me, the one we've both been circling for weeks — flat on the chart table
"They wanted this lost," I say. "So I want it found. Take us to the ruins."