He told himself, after the Consortium approach, that the timing was right to look.
The truth was the timing had been right for months and he’d been waiting for a reason that was specific enough to justify the fear.
Now he had one.
The archive hall was quiet at night, the way institutional spaces were quiet at night — maintained, climate-controlled, the specific silence of a place where records were kept rather than where things happened.
Kai sat at a deep-history terminal with his hands on the interface and gave himself thirty seconds to be afraid before starting the search.
He was afraid for about twenty seconds.
“Relic recovery records, White Devil Graveyard perimeter, eight to twelve years,” he told the system.
“Cross-reference with civilian contract registries.”
“Broad parameters for a specific concern,” ARIA noted.
“I don’t know how specific to be yet. Starting broad.”
The archive returned results slowly — the careful trawl of records that hadn’t been indexed for easy access, the administrative residue of a dangerous profession that mostly generated paperwork nobody had gone back to read.
Salvage manifests, survey logs, contractor registrations, the flat dry language of documentation that covered real human work in forms.
Most of it meant nothing. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Most of it was exactly what it claimed to be: unremarkable records from unremarkable operations.
Then, forty minutes in, deep in a cross-referenced contractor registry that the initial search had flagged as a secondary match:
O.
ORION — INDEPENDENT RELIC SURVEY CONTRACTOR — REGISTERED ROUTE: WHITE DEVIL GRAVEYARD, NORTHERN PERIMETER SECTOR — STATUS: OPEN (UNRESOLVED)
The word Open sat there like a held breath.
Kai read the entry five times, slowly.
His father’s certification number, his father’s registered equipment class, his father’s last known survey route, and at the end of it: Open, because nobody had ever closed the file, because there had been nothing to close it with, no resolution, no incident report, just a contract window that had passed without a log-in and then simply been left in the system, waiting.
“ARIA,” he said, very quietly.
“I see it,” ARIA said.
“I was already searching the adjacent records. The northern perimeter sector encompasses the general area of my recovery site as documented in Tarn’s manifest. Not identical coordinates — different enough that I cannot confirm a direct connection. But proximate.”
“How proximate?”
“Same operational sector. Same general timeframe. Several kilometers apart, at minimum. It could be coincidence. The sector was active with multiple contractors during that period.” A pause, careful, honest, the way she always was with things that mattered.
“Kai — I want you to hold this carefully. What we have is a real thread, a genuine geographic proximity between your father’s last recorded position and the site of my recovery. That is not nothing. It is also not confirmation of anything. The distance between a real thread and an answer is often longer and harder than the thread makes it look.” Visit NovelPing for the full chapter.
“I know,” Kai said.
“I’ve been living with this for eight years. I know how long threads can be.”
“I know you do,” ARIA said, and her voice was very gentle.
“That’s why I trust you to hold this correctly — not to make it more than it is, and not to make it less.”
Kai saved the cross-reference carefully, archived the search results, and sat in the quiet of the archive hall for a while after, just sitting with it, the way you sit with something that changed the shape of a question without answering it.
His father had been out there.
In that sector.
Around the time A-01 had been recovered from that sector.
And the file was still open.
Open.
“We keep looking,” he said.
“Carefully.”
“Carefully,” ARIA agreed.
“One thread at a time.”