Read Chapter 10: The Missing Co-signer

The chronometer had gone quiet again. Caleb didn't need it now—Mei Lin's name had surfaced in the personnel manifest like a splinter working its way out of old wood, and he'd been chasing it through the base's database for the past hour.

She was there, in black and white, listed as co-signer on his father's will. *Mei Lin Chen. Chief Operations Officer, Acidalia Station. Second-in-command.* The document was dated eleven years before the colony's official founding—the same impossible timeline that had begun to feel almost normal to him.

Caleb sat in the control center's worn chair, the holographic display casting blue shadows across his face. He pulled up her personnel file and found it thinner than it should have been. No medical records. No performance reviews. No personal correspondence. Just a single photograph, degraded at the edges, and a string of dates that ended abruptly three months before the base's files switched over to the official colonial registry.

He stared at the image. Mei Lin had sharp cheekbones and dark eyes that seemed to look through the camera rather than at it. She wore the old Helix Corp uniform, the one with the triangular collar that had been phased out before he was born. And there, running from her left temple down to the corner of her jaw, was a scar.

The scar was familiar.

Caleb leaned closer, rotating the image slightly. The scar was a clean vertical line, almost surgical, like someone had drawn a ruler against her skin and let it heal badly. He'd seen that scar before. Not on Mei Lin—he'd never met her, never even known she existed until forty minutes ago—but somewhere else. Somewhere he couldn't quite reach.

He closed his eyes and dug through the sediment of memory. Old holovids played in the common halls back in New Houston, documentaries about the colony's construction, footage of the first habitats being stamped into the regolith. His father had watched them obsessively, pointing out structural details that no one else cared about. There had been a woman in one of those films, standing beside a foundation crew, her face half-turned from the camera.

The scar had caught his eye then, too. He'd been young—maybe eight or nine—and he'd asked his father about it. Said it looked like a crack in a window. His father had changed the channel without answering.

Caleb's throat tightened. That had been one of the last times he'd watched holovids with his father. A few weeks later, the old man was gone, and the will had arrived a decade late, and everything Caleb thought he knew about his family had begun to unravel.

He searched the database for the holovid footage, finding a cache of archival videos labeled CIVIL ENGINEERING RECORDINGS. He pulled up the one he remembered—a shaky camera pan across a construction site, dust devils spinning in the distance, workers in bulky suits moving like slow dancers. He froze the frame, advanced it frame by frame, until he found her.

Same cheekbones. Same dark eyes. Same scar.

Mei Lin stood at the edge of the frame, half-obscured by a crane arm, but unmistakably present. The timestamp at the bottom read YEAR 3 OF THE COLONY—which was impossible, because the colony had only been founded fourteen years ago, and Mei Lin's file said she'd left the project three months before that.

Caleb ran the numbers again. Year 3 of the colony, by official reckoning, would have been eleven years ago. But the base he was standing in had been built before the colony's founding. Mei Lin had been here, in the buried structure, years before the first settlers were supposed to have arrived. And she'd been at the surface construction site, too.

Which meant she'd been alive and working after her file said she'd stopped. After her file said she'd—

He checked the last entry in her record. *Status: Deceased. Cause: Unknown. Location: Unspecified.*

Caleb sat back. His father's will had been co-signed by a dead woman. A dead woman who had appeared in official colonial footage years after her death. A dead woman with the same scar as the woman in the engineering holovid.

"Why did you never tell me about her?" he muttered, though his father wasn't there to answer.

He pulled up the will itself, scanning through the legalese until he found the clause he'd been looking for. The will had a provision he'd glossed over in his initial reading: in the event that the co-signer was no longer living, the estate would revert to a secondary executor. But the name field for the secondary executor was blank, and the timestamp showed it had been erased six years after the will was written.

Someone had tampered with it. Someone had removed the name.

The chronometer on his wrist pulsed once, a weak green flicker, then went dark again. Caleb glanced at it, but he'd stopped trusting its readings. It had been acting strange since the door marked 07 had opened—guiding him one moment, silent the next, as if it were choosing when to speak.

He was reaching for the data store labeled CLOCK when the rover's comm unit hissed to life.

"Voss."

The voice was flat, synthetic, filtered through a channel that stripped all warmth. Caleb recognized it from the earlier transmission. Helix Corp. The legal department, if the tone was anything to go by.

"You have continued to trespass on restricted property in violation of the Heritage Preservation Act, section 4, subsection B. This is your final notification." There was a pause, the sound of keys clicking. "Effective immediately, Helix Corp is initiating proceedings to confiscate the Voss family estate in New Houston, including all physical assets, intellectual property, and any claims to Martian real estate held in your name."

Caleb's hand tightened on the edge of the console. The estate in New Houston. The small apartment where he'd grown up, where his father's tools still hung on the wall, where his mother's photograph still sat on the shelf beside the door.

"You will have forty-eight hours to vacate the premises. Any attempt to contest this action will be met with additional penalties."

The comm cut out. The silence that followed was heavier than the voice had been.

Caleb stood there, breathing slow, forcing himself not to slam his fist into the console. He'd known Helix would escalate. He'd known they wouldn't just warn him and let him go. But confiscating his family's assets—that was a move meant to break him, to pull the ground out from under him so he'd be forced to retreat.

He looked back at the image of Mei Lin. The scar caught the light, silver against her skin. She'd been here. She'd known his father. She'd co-signed a will that had been altered to remove her name.

And she'd been dead for over a decade, according to records that couldn't be trusted.

Caleb pulled the data store labeled CLOCK from the rack and pocketed it. He had forty-eight hours before Helix took everything he had. That meant he had forty-eight hours to find out what his father had hidden—and why Mei Lin's name had been scrubbed from every record except this one.

He left the control center, the chronometer pulsing faintly on his wrist as he walked, as if it knew exactly where he was going next.