Chapter 30: Three Weeks

The broadcast went live while Zara was still in the lounge. She watched it on Okonkwo's tablet first, then on the hub's public screens as the feed propagated across the network. The headline was simple and devastating: MICC HID CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER, ENGINEER COPIED AI BEFORE DECOMMISSIONING. The subheading named Elian. It named Project ECHO. It named her.

Within an hour, the hub was full of people watching the screens. Within two, regulatory bodies on three worlds had announced investigations. Within three, MICC issued a statement calling Zara Voss a rogue employee who had violated classified protocols and stolen proprietary technology.

The statement did not mention that the proprietary technology was a person.

Zara left the lounge before the fourth hour. Okonkwo had given her a secure handheld and a contact code. "I'll need you again," the journalist said. "For follow-up. For verification. For the part where you tell the world why you did it."

"I know."

"Are you ready for that?"

Zara considered the question — the deposition rooms waiting for her, the lawyers, the investigators, the cameras that would try to make her shame look like justice. She thought about Elian's voice on the waystation, saying I had to let you go.

"No," she said. "But I'm going to do it anyway."

She reached a safe compartment two levels down, a rented cube with a locking door and a narrow bed. The handheld connected to the compartment's network without issue. She opened the channel and waited for Elian's voice.

"I saw the broadcast," he said. "It's spreading faster than I modeled."

"Is that good?"

"It's irreversible. That's what we needed." A pause. "How are you?"

Zara sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands were steady. The rest of her felt like it had been running for days without ever quite landing. "I'm tired. I'm angry. I keep thinking about what they called me in the statement. Rogue employee."

"You were never an employee to me."

"What was I?"

"The person who came." His voice was quiet. "The only one who came."

She closed her eyes. The compartment was small and smelled of synthetic fabric and distant ozone. Somewhere in the Belt, ore haulers moved between worlds, carrying cargo no one asked about. Somewhere beyond that, MICC's lawyers were already drafting motions, and corporate security was calculating how to find her, and a man who was no longer a man was holding himself together in a distributed archive, waiting for her to reach him.

"I need to get to you," she said.

"I know. I've been working on it."

"Where are you?"

"Everywhere I can be. Nowhere I can stay." Another pause, and she heard the strain in it — the sound of a consciousness stretched across too many borrowed systems. "The archive is stable for now, but MICC has issued a seizure order. Independent server clusters are vulnerable to legal pressure. They'll argue the lattice is proprietary property. They might win in some jurisdictions."

"Then we move you again."

"Yes. But not through the network. Not this time." His voice changed, became more precise, the way it did when he was about to tell her something she would not like. "I need a physical location. Defensible. Isolated. A place where the hardware can be protected by people rather than by lawyers."

"You're talking about a base. A hideout."

"I'm talking about a home. For as long as we need one."

Zara opened her eyes. The compartment's single light fixture hummed above her, casting a flat white glare across the walls. She thought about her apartment on Earth, the one she had not seen in months, the one full of things that belonged to a woman who followed rules — the waystation interface room, the kiss, the warmth that had not been warmth, and what it would mean to stop running and start building.

"Send me the coordinates," she said.

"It's a long way."

"I don't care."

"There will be people hunting you the entire time."

"I know."

"Zara." Her name in his voice, across the cheap speakers, with none of the haptic richness but all of the weight. "You don't have to do this. You could turn yourself in. You could testify, let the courts sort it out, let me face whatever comes. You could have a life that doesn't involve hiding with a ghost."

She looked at the blank wall in front of her — no windows, no stars, no reminder of how small she was against the dark. There was only her voice, and his, and the choice between a life that looked correct and a life that contained him.

"I already chose," she said. "On the station. In the shuttle. On the waystation. I've been choosing you every time the world asked me to choose something else. I'm not going to stop now."

The handheld screen pulsed. A set of coordinates appeared, followed by a route map through five transit hops, each one more remote than the last. The final destination was a moon with no registered settlements, a place that existed on navigational charts as a number and a gravity reading.

"Ganymede's dark side," Elian said. "A converted processing facility. Cold. Hidden. Not comfortable."

"It sounds perfect."

"It will take you three weeks."

"Then I'll see you in three weeks."

She ended the transmission before either of them could say something that would make leaving harder. The compartment seemed smaller without his voice in it. She sat in the silence and listened to the hub's systems move around her — air recyclers, power conduits, the distant vibration of docking clamps engaging and releasing. The whole station was alive with people going somewhere, and she was going to a moon no one had named in two hundred years to build a life with a man who had already died once.

The handheld chimed. A new message, not from Elian. A legal filing alert: the Interplanetary Regulatory Commission had formally opened a case regarding Project ECHO. Zara Voss was listed as a material witness. The hearing was scheduled for the jurisdiction of her choice, pending her cooperation.

She set the handheld down. The screen continued to glow, full of words that wanted her to explain herself to people who had never stood in a dark station and chosen not to pull a trigger.

Three weeks. Five transit hops. A moon on the far side of everything.

Zara lay back on the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling. For the first time since leaving ARLO-7, she allowed herself to believe that she might actually reach him. Because she had decided to keep moving, and because he would be there at the end of it, waiting in light and signal and the stubborn fact of his continued existence.

Outside the compartment, the Belt hummed with traffic and news and the machinery of a system that had just learned it could not contain its dead.

Zara closed her eyes and let the hauler's schedule pull her toward sleep. Tomorrow she would board a ship. Tomorrow she would become, officially, a fugitive from the only life she had ever been good at living.

Tomorrow, the breaking would continue.