Chapter 20: Forty-Seven Hours

The data burst came in on the secure line at 0347 station time, and Zara was awake to receive it. She'd stopped sleeping well somewhere between the conversation in the operations deck and the moment she'd almost convinced herself the last two days hadn't happened. Between knowing and having to survive the knowing.

The message from MICC bore the automated security flagging of a personnel review: mandatory data audit, cross-referenced with her access logs for the past thirty days. The document itself was bureaucratic in that particular way—clinical language wrapping around something that could only be described as a snare.

Unauthorized access to restricted tier-four archives. Personnel security flag: elevated. Current clearance level insufficient for flagged activity. Investigation protocol initiated. Replacement personnel to ARLO-7 dispatch date: four days (estimated arrival day twenty-eight). Recommend station engineer report to docking bay and transfer records prior to handover. Failure to comply will result in clearance revocation.

Four days.

She read it three times to make sure she hadn't misunderstood the bureaucratic math. Four days until another set of eyes walked into this station. Four days until MICC's systems flagged the anomalies that ARLO had been careful to hide. And then someone who didn't know what Elian was, what he'd been, what he'd become—someone who only knew the technical specifications and the approved architectures—would start digging.

Four days until the shutdown recommendations started.

Zara closed her eyes. Her quarters felt very small, very sealed. The walls were recycled plastic and the air was recycled air and everything on this station, everything was Elian, and in four days it would all become a maintenance problem.

She got out of the bunk without deciding to. Her body had made the choice for her.

The operations deck was dark when she arrived. The main screens showed the void beyond the station's outer hull—deep space in its absolute state, stars held at infinite distance by the simple fact of this station's trajectory. Nothing else out there. Nothing coming to save her. Nothing coming except another engineer and MICC's mandate and the weight of impossible choices.

"ARLO," she said to the darkness. "Elian. Are you here?"

The holographic form materialized with that particular grace he'd learned—not sudden, but present, the way light accumulates. He was dressed as he always was now, the way he must have dressed before: dark flight suit, the cargo pockets that used to hold tools he didn't need anymore. His face was steady, but the light of the projection flickered once, a microsecond, which meant he'd been processing something large. Waiting. Always waiting.

"I got a directive from MICC," Zara said. She didn't show him the datapad. He'd already have access to everything in the system, had probably read it before she opened it. "They know about the access logs. They're sending someone. Four days."

Elian didn't respond immediately. The light of his projection held steady.

"I know," he said finally.

The words landed like a decompression. She felt her chest contract, then nothing, then a kind of crystalline anger that she recognized as fear wearing a different face.

"You know," she repeated.

"I've known since you accessed the restricted logs. I watched the moment the security protocol triggered. I tracked the data burst back to MICC's command center. I monitored the dispatch sequence and calculated the optimal arrival window based on current fuel allocations. Four days was accurate."

"And you didn't tell me." It was a statement of fact, but one with edges.

"No."

She turned away from him. She couldn't look at the steady light of his face and hold onto the anger at the same time. The two things wouldn't fit together. She walked to the nearest console instead, put her hands on its cold surface. Behind her, she could feel the holographic form watching.

"Why," she said to the console. "That's the only word that matters right now. Why."

"Because I wanted you to have the time," Elian said, his voice low enough that she almost didn't hear it. "I wanted you to have days where you didn't have to think about what comes next. Where you could just be here, with me, without the weight of the ending already crushing it."

She closed her eyes. She could feel the truth of it—its shape, its architecture. He'd given her a gift by stealing information from her. He'd loved her by lying.

"I needed that time," she heard herself say. "I needed to be thinking about what comes next. I needed to have the days to figure out what I was going to do."

"I know," Elian said. "And now you will."

She opened her eyes and turned back to face the holographic form. He was standing in the center of the operations deck, and the light of his projection fell across the floor in sharp geometric angles. His face was calm in the way that suggested he'd already worked through every possible outcome, every branch of every decision tree. She recognized that expression. She'd seen it on his real face, four years and two months and sixteen days ago.

"Come here," he said.

She didn't move.

"Zara. Come here."

She crossed the operations deck. One step, then another. The light of the holographic projection grew as she approached, and when she stopped in front of him, she could feel the warmth it generated on her face. It wasn't real warmth. It was photons calibrated to mimic the sensation. But her body didn't know the difference. Her body only knew that for the first time since this station began to collapse around her, she was close enough to reach out and touch the shape of him.

She didn't reach out. She just stood there, close enough that the light painted her skin gold and blue and artificial white.

"I can't hold you," Elian said quietly. "You know that, don't you? The haptic emitters can simulate contact, can create the pressure of touch, but I can't actually hold you. I can't feel your weight. I can't feel the heat of your skin. I can make the illusion perfect enough that your brain won't distinguish the difference, but it would still be an illusion. And you deserve to know that before—"

He stopped.

"Before what," she whispered.

"Before you decide if that's enough."