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1. Twelve Years of Blueprints, and a New Anchor
The Silver Anchor's living quarters — cut off from the noise of Subaru Station, quiet in the way only a familiar ship can be.
After docking their respective vessels, the three of them had drifted here without quite deciding to, drawn by something wordless.
"Kanoa..."
Ledea sat beside her on the narrow sofa and took her small hands in both of hers.
Kanoa's gaze had fixed on a point on the floor and stayed there. She was trembling — faintly, but without stopping. The lips that usually had something dry and precise to say were pressed shut. Whatever had been behind her eyes was gone.
Ledea drew a quiet breath, about to say something — anything — but Shutia's voice from near the kitchen counter stopped her first.
"Sis, stay with Kanoa."
She was already walking toward the door as she said it. Her expression, in profile, was serious in a way Ledea recognized.
Ledea nodded once. Thirteen years ago, Shutia had lost her sister in the same sudden way — she would know something about this that Ledea didn't. She watched her sister go, then turned back and held Kanoa's hands a little tighter, and stayed.
Some minutes later, the living room door opened again, and Shutia returned.
In her hands was a data terminal — old, solid, the kind built to last — one that Ledea knew was ordinarily kept locked away in the ship's concealed storage.
While Shutia had been gone, Ledea had put a kettle on, and now she set two cups of herbal tea on the table, steam rising from both. Shutia placed the terminal beside them.
"This is... the record of how I found sis. I kept it close. Just in case."
She tapped the screen. The living room filled with soft blue light as a hologram expanded into the space around them — vast and layered, a three-dimensional display that seemed to go on forever.
A star map. Countless systems, rendered in fine detail. Between them, a thin thread of light traced a complex, shifting path — coordinates visited, signals followed, courses corrected and corrected again. Every surface of the projected space was packed with observation data and equations, each one the result of a specific calculation made at a specific moment over twelve years.
Ledea stared. Beside her, Kanoa — whose eyes had been hollow since the passage — was staring too.
"This is..."
"While I was looking for sis," Shutia said, quietly, "I spent twelve years collecting data on the Liminal Flux. Every appearance coordinate I could find. Every eyewitness account. Every residual energy signature recorded anywhere in the galaxy." She paused. "This is old data. But it's what I had."
It was not research. It was not a project. It was the shape of an obsession — twelve years of it, compressed into light and numbers hanging in the air of a small living room.
"The Liminal Flux has a pattern. I believe that. It doesn't repeat exactly, but there's something underneath it — a logic. Finding sis when I did was still close to a miracle." She looked at the data. "But if we use this as a foundation, and look for the pattern again with what we know now —"
Kanoa finished the sentence for her. Her voice was unsteady. But something had come back into her eyes.
"We can save Asphi sis...?"
"Yes."
Shutia nodded — firmly, completely.
A visible change moved across Kanoa's face. Not quite relief, not quite hope, but something edging toward both — a direction, where there hadn't been one.
Ledea said nothing.
She was looking at the equations still drifting in the air. At what they represented. Shutia had pushed her mind and her will to their absolute limit to produce this — twelve years of it, the kind of searching that left marks on a person. And now the question forming in Ledea's chest, quietly, was this: if they started again from here, would twelve years even be enough? In the time it took — however long it took — would Asphi, somewhere in the far dark of space, be all right?
Shutia noticed the silence and tilted her head.
"Sis?"
Ledea took a small breath. She looked up, and her silver hair shifted with the movement. Whatever was in her eyes was not resignation.
"Let's ask for help."
This galaxy was too large for the three of them alone. But they had people they could call on — people who would answer.