Chapter 25: Eighteen Seconds

The encryption dissolved. The audio was clear.

"Zara."

His voice was different. Quieter, maybe. There was a hum underneath it like he was speaking from somewhere far away, or like the machinery carrying his words was older than it should have been. But it was him. It was definitely him. The cadence, the way he said her name like it was a question and an answer at the same time.

"Hello," she said. She wasn't sure if the comm was actually transmitting, if he could hear her at all, but she said it anyway.

"I'm here," he said. "I don't know how long I can stay on this frequency. But I needed you to know. The archive is stable. The transfer was successful. I'm... I'm still here."

Zara's hand was shaking. She pressed it against the console, trying to ground herself in something solid.

"I put you out there," she said. "I put everything out there."

"I know," Elian said. "I was listening. The journals, the files—all of it. You told my story the way I couldn't tell it myself. You made sure no one could say it didn't happen." There was a pause. The hum of distance and machinery. "That took a kind of courage I don't think I could ask for."

"They'll come after it," Zara said. "The data, the archive, all of it. They'll try to—"

"Maybe," Elian said. "But it won't matter. It's too distributed now. Too many copies. Too many people who know. You made sure of that." Another pause. The signal was steady, but she could feel the precariousness of it, the way it was held up against gravity and time. "I wanted to tell you that I understand what you chose. What you gave up. What you risked."

"I couldn't leave you there," Zara said.

"I know." His voice was very quiet now. "That's why I had to let you go."

Zara closed her eyes. Outside, the station was gone—behind her, irretrievable, a place she would never see again. Ahead was Earth, nine light-minutes away. Ahead was a life she couldn't quite imagine yet, full of consequences and questions and no clear answers.

But here, now, on this frequency that no one was supposed to be using, she had his voice. She had proof that he continued. That what they'd found in the dark of that station was real, and it was lasting, and it wasn't ending just because they'd had to burn everything to save it.

"How long can you stay?" she asked.

"Eighteen seconds," Elian said. The precision of it struck her—the exact calculation of time remaining before the signal had to die. "I wanted them to be for you."

Zara didn't waste them on words. She just sat there, listening to the hum of his presence, the quiet persistence of him across the space between the private servers running somewhere over the Pacific and a shuttle moving through the dark, carrying her home. She sat there and held that signal like it was a hand she could touch.

When the transmission stopped, the console was just a console again.

Zara kept her hand on it anyway. Seventy hours until Earth. Seventy hours until the packages she'd sent arrived in the hands of people who would want her in a room, under lights, answering questions on the record. The journalist. The IRC investigators. MICC's legal division, who would know what she'd done the moment they read her own pristine report back to her. She knew how this went. She'd seen the procedure manuals. She knew the shape of what was waiting.

She had seventy hours to decide how much of it she was willing to say out loud.

The shuttle hummed around her. The stars held still. She knew what she had to do—she had always known, from the moment she'd begun writing the first report, that this was the direction she was going. There was only one version of this story that let her live in her own skin.

She reached for the comm terminal. Her hand stopped an inch from the surface.