Read Chapter 33: The Fragments of a Ghost

The sheets were rough against Kaelen’s back, the cot too short for his legs. He had woken in this infirmary three times now, each time with a different name on his lips. Maris. Lyra. Elena. None of them meant anything beyond a hollow echo.

A shadow moved at the edge of his vision. Maris sat in a chair by the bulkhead, a glass vial in her gloved hand, turning it over beneath a strip of cold light. The plague sample. She had explained it to him twice—once in technical terms, once in layman’s phrasing—and both times he had nodded as though he understood. He did not.

“This could kill you,” she said without looking up. “The neural pathways were already destabilized during the merge. Reversing it now is like trying to stitch a wound while it’s still bleeding.”

Kaelen touched his temple. There was a scar there his fingers did not remember earning. “But you think it will work.”

“I think it has a chance. The engineered pathogen was designed to erode short-term memory. If I can invert the protein folding, it may promote regeneration instead.” She finally met his gaze. “It may also give you back things you’re better off not remembering.”

“Like what?”

Maris set the vial down. “You were close to someone. I won’t tell you who. I want you to remember her on your own.”

His chest ached at the word *her*, though he could not say why. “My sister,” he whispered. “Lyra.”

Maris said nothing.

The hours blurred. He lay still while she worked, the infirmary lights dimming as the ship’s cycle shifted toward rest. Nurses came and went—new faces, rebel uniforms, a few officers he did not recognize. Each one looked at him with something between reverence and pity. One woman, her arm in a sling, knelt beside his cot and pressed her forehead to his hand. “Thank you,” she whispered. “For the engine bay. Two years ago.” She left before he could tell her he did not remember.

Maris administered the antidote in three stages. The first tasted of copper and burned going down. The second left a cold numbness spreading from his fingertips to his sternum. The third brought only exhaustion, and he slept.

He dreamed of a name carved into metal. Of a maintenance shaft filled with voices. Of hands pulling him up through water, through fire, through something thicker than both.

When he woke, the pain was worse. His skull felt too small for what was inside it. Maris was asleep in the chair, her head tilted back, one hand still wrapped around an empty syringe.

And on the screen above his cot, a message was waiting.

He did not know how he knew it was from Lyra. He did not know why his breath caught in his throat before he read the first word. He only knew that the face on the screen was his, softer and younger and already gone.

“Kael.” Her voice crackled through ancient speakers, warped by transmission lag. “I hope this reaches you. I hope you’re still alive. I hope you haven’t forgotten me—though if you have, I hope you remember this.”

She smiled, and the ache in his chest turned sharp.

“Do you remember the time we hid in the upper maintenance crawlspace and watched the stars through the observation slit? You told me they were holes in the ship’s hull, and the light was coming through from outside. I believed you for a week. Mother was furious.” She laughed, but the sound was thin, stretched. “You used to say that if you ever got lost, you would follow the noise of the engines back home. You claimed you could tell which turbine was failing by the pitch of the hum. You were wrong every time, but you always sounded so sure.”

Kaelen’s hand shook. He did not remember the crawlspace. He did not remember the stars.

But something beneath his skin was stirring.

“I’m sending this on a low-frequency loop. The colony’s defense grid should bounce it back to the ship if there’s any traffic at all.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter. “I found something, Kael. About the founders. About our family. I tried to tell the Council, but they— ” She stopped. Swallowed. “They put me on a maintenance rotation far from the core. I think they meant to bury me down there. I think they meant for me to disappear.”

His knuckles whitened on the cot’s railing.

“But I found a way out. I found a way *down*. To the planet. There’s a shuttle bay on the lower decks that hasn’t been logged in a century. I’m going to take one and fly it through the storm window. I don’t know if I’ll survive. The colony sees anything coming from the ship as hostile—they have cannon batteries aimed at the sky. But I have to try. There’s something down there that the founders didn’t want us to know. Something that changes everything.”

The screen flickered. Her face wavered like heat over a vent.

“If I don’t make it, I need you to finish what Elena started. Find the Heartstone. Touch it again. It keeps the memory of everyone who ever merged with it, and I think—I think it might have a piece of me too.”

Kaelen did not realize he was crying until a drop landed on his hand.

“They told me you were dead,” Lyra said. “After the accident in the conduit tunnel. I didn’t believe them. I never believed them.” Her smile turned brittle. “Because you’re my brother, and I would know if you were gone. The same way you would know about me.”

She held up a hand, pressing it flat to the unseen surface of her recorder, a gesture that from her end looked like reaching through the glass.

“Find me. If not in the ship, then down there. In the green. In the storm. I’ll be waiting.”

The message ended.

Kaelen sat in the silence, the ghost of her handprint burning behind his eyes. His mind was a wreck of half-formed images—a crawlspace, a mother’s voice, a turbine’s pitch—all of them surfacing like debris from deep water.

He did not know what Elena had started. He did not know what the Heartstone was, or why his fingers itched at the word. But he knew, with the same certainty that had told him his sister’s name, that she was alive.

He threw off the sheets.

Maris stirred, her eyes snapping open. “Kaelen—you shouldn’t be standing. The neural regeneration is incomplete. You need rest.”

“I need the Heartstone.” He turned to face her, swaying on his feet. “I need to see where it is.”

Maris studied him for a long moment. She did not ask how he knew about the Heartstone. She only nodded, slowly, and rose from the chair.

“It’s in the core chamber, where you left it.” She reached for his arm, steadying him. “But Kaelen—there’s an irregular transmission coming through the colony’s defensive array. It’s been repeating for the last two hours.”

His throat tightened. “What does it say?”

Maris’s expression was carefully blank. “It’s asking for you. Calling you by name. It’s addressed from outside the ship.” She paused. “From the planet.”