Atid-60202-47-44 Min -

"Sloane," she said, her voice steady for the first time in years. "I’m not coming back to the Rake . I’m taking the long way home."

Behind her, the dead star pulsed a silent, red warning. Ahead, a single figure in a worn-out suit drifted toward the truth, carrying a twelve-second ghost and a coordinate that was no longer just a code.

The recording was only twelve seconds long. Grainy, flickering. But it was her sister. Jae’s face, younger, wild-eyed, her lip split and bleeding. ATID-60202-47-44 Min

The silence of space was not silent. It was a pressure, a weight, a cold that chewed through her suit’s heating coils. Behind her, the Rake was a dull grey needle against the bruised purple of the nebula. Ahead, the graveyard.

"Min… don’t come. They told me it was a salvage run. It’s not. The company… ATID… they’re using us to map the gravitational anomalies. They knew the star was going to collapse. Don't let them wipe the logs. Tell everyone. 47-44 is the proof. I love—" "Sloane," she said, her voice steady for the

Min closed her eyes. For three years, she had needed to know if Jae had suffered. Now she knew. She had been afraid. She had been brave. And she had been murdered by the very corporation that signed her paychecks.

The outer door cycled with a sound like a held breath. Ahead, a single figure in a worn-out suit

Tonight, Min was done staring.

She cut the channel and set a new course. Not toward the salvage vessel. Not toward the nearest spaceport. Toward the relay station on Titan, where a journalist was waiting for proof of the ATID cover-up.

Min had stared at the code for three years. It was stamped on the inner hull of the deep-space salvage vessel Rake , just above the emergency oxygen scrubbers. To the crew, it was just a serial number for a missing maintenance drone. To Min, it was the last known coordinates of her older sister, Jae.