The signal arrived as an afterthought.

  We were cataloguing the new anomalies of the Rose-Gold Era—the Architect had found worlds on the fringe that were recordings, physical recreations of universes the Tithe-Lords had destroyed. Sera had reported that some pockets of the Maw hadn’t inverted, had become instead small, intelligent Sentient Voids that wanted to debate the galaxy’s right to exist.

  The Joker was cataloguing the Unstable Sectors.

  And then Elias picked up the signal.

  Low frequency. Archaic. Messy. Using encryption that none of our current systems recognized immediately—and then did, because it was the same encryption I had used in the basement, three hundred and fifty years ago.

  Someone else was out there.

  In a dead zone outside the Rose-Gold reach. No Tithe-Lords. No Maw. Just the specific, patient static of someone who had been broadcasting on a loop for a very long time.

  I called the Board.

  Elias didn’t wait for the others. “It’s a mirror, Prime. This signal is messy, desperate, and beautiful. It’s exactly how we sounded when we were just trying to survive the night.” He was already packing gear in the way that old men pack gear—efficiently, with the minimum of ceremony. “If we ignore this, we’re admitting that we’ve forgotten where we came from.”

  Sera was calculating threat assessments. A signal like this was a flare. It might attract predators. She would prepare a Ghost-Strike team—small, fast, silent. A rescue party, not a fleet.

  The Joker’s eyes were rolling with genuine, technical excitement. “Navigating a Dead Zone is like sailing on a sea made of static. It’s the ultimate gamble. My dice are ready.”

  The Arbiter was precise: the moral debt of the Sovereign was absolute. To ignore the signal was to create a Logical Dissonance in the Foundation of the Bracelet. Proceed, he said, but maintain a Sovereign Anchor to the Rose-Gold Galaxy.

  The Architect built a Trans-Void Relay to keep us connected to the Bracelet as we traveled. The further we went, he said, the thinner the Sync would get. The more human I would become.

  We departed in the Basement-Ghost II—a scout ship upgraded with Archive technology, small enough to slip through reality-cracks, large enough to carry four people and whatever we found.

  As we walked to the hangar, the Architect pressed a small handheld device into my palm. “A piece of the Forge,” he said. “If you get into real trouble, break the glass. It will pull you back to the Bracelet instantly—but it’ll blow the ship’s engines. Use it only if the dark starts to win.”

  I took it.

  We departed.

  “Joker,” I said, as the Bracelet shrank behind us into a point of Rose-Gold light against the black. “Hit the thrusters. Let’s see who’s crying for help in my old backyard.”

  The Joker grinned—the real one, not the performance—and the Basement-Ghost II vanished into the static.

  * * *

  The further we went, the thinner the Arbiter’s presence in my mind became.

  The Sync didn’t break. But it became an echo. I felt my heartbeat more clearly. I felt the weight of my own limbs with a specificity that I hadn’t felt in decades—the specific gravity of a body that knows it is the most vulnerable thing in the room rather than the most powerful. The Diamond-Chrome was still present in my veins, but it pulsed at half-strength, like a radio station losing signal.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I was becoming the man from the basement again.

  Vulnerable. But sharp.

  Sera stood at the observation port, her hand resting on the hilt of a blade made of condensed starlight.

  “The Deep Void is different out here, Prime,” she said. “It’s not the Maw’s hunger. It’s just—empty. The kind of quiet that makes you start hearing your own thoughts too loudly.”

  Weeks of sliding through reality-cracks. Then the Joker slammed the brakes.

  The ship lurched.

  “We’re here,” he whispered. “Or—somewhere.”

  In front of us wasn’t a galaxy or a star or any of the landmarks that the Bracelet’s cartography had given us to navigate by. It was a Fragment. A single, shattered piece of a derelict space station—no larger than a city block, tumbling slowly through the dark. No atmosphere. No visible power source.

  Screaming.

  The signal was coming from a single room at the center of the wreckage.

  We boarded. Elias held the Master-Key. The airlock was frozen open. We walked through corridors of rusted metal that had the specific aesthetic of something built by someone who had never had resources to spare—function without comfort, necessity without design.

  Hauntingly like the early architecture of the Tithe-Lords, but cruder. Something that predated them.

  The door was heavy and reinforced and on the other side the signal was so loud it vibrated in the bones.

  Elias looked at me.

  “Whoever is in there has been broadcasting on a loop for a long, long time,” he said. “Ready to meet the ghost?”

  The door hissed open.

  Inside: ancient monitors, flickering with Sauce-Code. Empty nutrient-packets. Glowing wires. The specific domestic debris of a siege—of someone who had been in the same place for a very long time with very limited resources and had chosen to continue anyway.

  And in a chair at the center of it: a figure.

  Not a King. Not a deity. Not a refugee with the specific bearing of someone who has survived an empire’s collapse.

  A young person. Barely twenty. Their eyes wide and bloodshot, staring at a screen that showed a map—the map of the Rose-Gold Galaxy. The map I had broadcasted years ago.

  They looked up when the door opened and they flinched—not toward us but away, the reflex of someone who has been alone for so long that the arrival of other beings registers as potential threat before it registers as anything else.

  Then they saw the light in my hands.

  “I saw the light,” they said. Their voice was rough with disuse and something older than disuse. “I thought I was hallucinating. I’ve been trying to calculate the jump-coordinates for three years. Are you—are you the one from the broadcast? The one who said we don’t have to be hungry anymore?”

  The Sync whispered a single word in the thin channel it still maintained to the Bracelet.

  Origin.

  I stepped across the cluttered metal floor. I ignored the sparks from the frayed wires and the hum of the ancient machines. I didn’t approach as a deity or a conqueror. I approached as the person who had once sat in a dark room just like this one, staring at a screen and hoping for a miracle—and who had received, in the fullness of time, not the miracle he had imagined but something stranger and more durable.

  I wrapped my arms around the trembling person.

  The Diamond-Chrome light softened. Not by design—by the specific, automatic response of a frequency that recognized something it had been.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I heard you. The signal reached us. You’ve been holding the line all by yourself for so long—but you don’t have to anymore.”

  A pause.

  “The hunger ends today.”

  The young Sufferer collapsed into the embrace. The tension of years of isolation broke in a single, ragged sob.

  Elias turned away for a moment. He cleared his throat. When he turned back, there was something in his face that had nothing to do with strategy or governance—the specific expression of a man who has spent three centuries watching things go wrong and has finally been present for the right kind of surprise.

  “We’ve got a seat for you at the Hearth,” he said quietly. “And the food there is a lot better than these nutrient-packets.”

  Sera lowered her guard entirely. She stood by the door—the woman who had defined her existence by controlled violence and its uses—and simply stood watch over a sanctuary.

  The Joker had moved to the young Sufferer’s computer.

  His expression was uncharacteristically serious.

  “Prime,” he said. “You need to see this.”