“Everyone in this room signed a confidentiality directive before they walked through that door. I expect all of you to honor it.”Captain Voss stood at the head of a small, windowless conference room, five officers and senior staff seated around the table, and Alex, watching from a maintenance corridor two decks below, having no idea this meeting was even happening, would not learn of it until much later, pieced together secondhand from fragments Priya eventually gathered.“Captain, with respect,” one of the officers said, a woman Voss had pulled from navigation, sharp-eyed and clearly unsettled, “the crew is already talking. If this stays secret much longer, the secrecy itself becomes the story.”“I’m aware,” Voss said. “That’s precisely why I’ve called this meeting. I am not asking any of you to hide the disappearances from the crew indefinitely. I am asking you to help me understand what’s actually happening before we tell five thousand people something we cannot yet explain, conta

“I have ten minutes before someone notices I’m not in my office.”Dr. Reyes slipped into the utility room without knocking, closing the door quickly behind her, and Priya rose halfway out of her chair in surprise, hand instinctively moving to angle her screen away from the door.“How did you know we’d be here?” Alex asked.“I didn’t. I’ve been walking this deck for twenty minutes hoping to find you, actually.” Reyes’s voice was low, urgent, her eyes darting once toward the door before settling on the three of them, cataloguing the room the way she might catalogue symptoms, quickly, professionally, unable to fully switch that habit off even now. “I don’t have long, so I need you to listen carefully.”“What’s happened?” Kai asked.“I found something in your file, Alex. Something that was never supposed to surface again.” Reyes pulled out her tablet, hands trembling slightly as she navigated to the entry. “Remember the neural scan I told you should have happened your first week, and neve

“Attention, crew of Eden-1. This is your midday systems update.”The plaza filled the way it always did at noon, crowds drifting toward the central screens out of habit more than urgency, and Alex felt his pulse hammering as he, Kai, and Priya moved into position near the base of the announcement terminal, exactly where Priya’s research said the public feed originated.“Ninety seconds,” Kai murmured, barely moving his lips. “Once we’re in, that’s what we’ve got.”“I know.” Alex’s hands were steady despite everything in him screaming that they shouldn’t be. “You both remember the order?”“Data first,” Priya said. “Then the accusation. Then get out however we can before security processes what’s happening.”The routine announcement droned on overhead, ordinary and forgettable, and Priya moved first, connecting a small override device to the terminal’s access port with practiced, careful hands, her fingers steady despite the tremor Alex could see running through the rest of her.“Now,” s

Priya’s cell was smaller than the one she imagined Alex had been given, she’d heard, secondhand, that his came with an actual cot rather than a fold-down bench, that his door sealed with the heavier mechanism reserved for “elevated risk” designations. She didn’t resent it. If anything, it steadied her, knowing exactly how much worse it could be. She spent the first three days simply sitting, replaying the plaza in her mind, the moment the crowd’s confusion had sharpened into recognition, the sound of Kai’s voice cracking on Dev’s name. She didn’t regret it. She was surprised by how completely she didn’t regret it, given everything it had cost. On the fourth day, alone with nothing but the hum of the ventilation and her own thoughts, she let herself think about Naomi properly for the first time in years. They’d trained together, back when Priya was still new to facilities work, assigned to the same senior technician for onboarding. Naomi had been sharper than anyone else on the crew

The terminal in Alex’s cell chimed once, an automated tone he’d learned to dread, meal notifications, wellness check reminders, the occasional maintenance alert about ventilation cycling. This chime was different, unfamiliar, and he sat up on the narrow cot before he’d consciously registered why. REVIEW REQUEST STATUS: DENIED. NEXT ELIGIBLE REVIEW: 90 DAYS. He’d filed the request six weeks ago, the earliest the system allowed. He stared at the words until they stopped looking like language, the way words did sometimes now, after enough days spent with nothing but a blank wall and his own thoughts for company. Ninety more days. On top of the six weeks already gone. He lay back down, staring at the ceiling, and tried to remember, as he did most days now, some detail of his life before all this, not the fragmented, dream-logic memories of Project Exodus and Elias Kane that had haunted him those first weeks aboard Eden-1, but something smaller, more human. The specific sound of Kai’s