The sun was setting by the time Mia made it back to her shelter, built into the cliffs.

  The air had shifted. There was a quiet to the desert that came in the evenings, like even the dust had settled in to rest. No more heat shimmered off the sand. Just the st stretch of golden light, softening the edges of everything. The wind stirred gently.

  She stood at the edge of what used to be the irrigation line, boots sinking slightly in the brittle crust of dirt. The silence out here wasn't peaceful—it was abandoned. No wind through tall stalks. No insects. No soft rustle of leaves. Just dust, settling over everything that used to live.

  Above her, Veltryn loomed, dominating the evening sky, rger than any pnet had a right to be. It wasn't just a bright dot or a soft glow—it was a full presence overhead. From this angle, she could make out the subtle movement of its cloud systems, swirling across the surface in wide, slow arcs. Its color was a deep rust-red near the poles, but lighter toward the equator—pale golds and soft violets where the sun hit just right.

  She could still spot the light bands ringing the pnet—satellites, probably, or orbital nes packed with traffic. Even from this distance, you could tell it was crowded. Efficient. Alive. The sprawl of cities down there was invisible to the naked eye, but the soft, artificial glint of habitation hung in the atmosphere like dust in water.

  When she was younger, the size of Veltryn used to scare her. Hanging that close in the sky, it looked like it could fall on them at any second. But her parents had expined it—sat her down, showed her the science. Terraforming protocols had built orbital stabilizers into Kaveth's crust, guided by autonomous systems designed to self-regute and adjust over time. It didn't need oversight. It didn't need maintenance. It just worked. The same way a heart keeps beating, even after the world moves on.

  Still, she made a note to check on it eventually. Just to be sure. She hadn't worried about falling into the pnet when she was a kid. She didn't want to start now.

  She still remembered what this nd on Kaveth had looked like before it all fell apart. The fields, wide and green, stretched as far as her child's eyes could see. Sprayers hissed, irrigation lines pulsed, and the soil was so rich you could smell it before you touched it. Even from acres away, the ranches were alive—hooves pounding, gates creaking, the night filled with the low calls of animals.

  Now it was dry. Now it was poisoned.

  SVC had stripped the life from this pce one contaminated drop at a time, siphoning funds meant for repairs, writing off families like hers as acceptable losses in a spreadsheet. The water was fixed, they said. But only just—just enough to drink. Not enough to grow. Not enough to bring life back to what was already dying.

  Veltryn might've been her dream once—but Kaveth was her fight. Avenridge was still her home. Her parents' sweat and blood had fed this nd, coaxed it into bloom, and she'd be damned if she let corporate rot write their story's ending. She would fix the water. She would fix the nd. And she would make sure no one ever forgot who tried to kill it in the first pce.

  Her eyes drifted from the distant outline of her family's fields to the dark curve of the canyon wall beside her—where her shelter was hidden, tucked so seamlessly into the rock that even knowing it was there felt strange sometimes. The nd around her had been stripped bare, but here, there was still something—something her parents had built, something that had survived.

  It had no business having windows.

  Originally, it didn't. It had been designed as a fallout shelter—sealed tight, no seams, no gaps. Safe. Invisible.

  But her parents were engineers. And paranoid ones at that. They'd installed adaptive tech—optical camoufge screens embedded in the structure. From the outside, it looked like solid stone. From the inside, the windows and skylight adjusted to the light and ndscape, dispying either seamless camoufge or false projections depending on the setting. Even from a passing drone, it would register as just another rise in the terrain. The tech was old, but still working. Quietly, stubbornly. Like everything else her parents had touched.

  She stepped closer, letting her fingers brush the edge of one window. It shimmered at her presence, the gss adapting in subtle shifts to reflect nothing at all. Just rock. Just sky. Just the illusion of a world that hadn't failed.

  Inside, it was a mess.

  Years of neglect had yered the room in dust. Spiderwebs stretched in corners. Sand had drifted in under the door and settled like a second carpet. But her tools were still there. Her father's books. Her mother's odd knick-knacks. The bed frame she'd dragged in herself, made from scavenged shipping crates and old cables. Her desk, scorched at the edges from one of her early experiments.

  After the Sheriff had dropped her off, she was too tired, too emotionally drained to tackle anything. But now she rolled up her sleeves, and got to work.

  It took her most of an hour to get it halfway decent. The dust she swept into a pile, dumped out into the desert. She shook out the linens, found a few water-purifying tabs still sealed in the drawer, and set a small kettle to boil on the sor pte.

  Then came the boxes.

  Stacked in the corner, tucked behind a canvas tarp, the boxes were a mystery. She hadn't left them there. They were packed neatly, beled in her mother's snted handwriting or her father's clipped code-tags. The st time she'd seen them, her parents had been so sick. But they must have dragged what they could here—personal effects, family keepsakes, data chips full of records and encrypted files.

  She knelt beside them, pulling the fps open one by one.

  Sketches. Some hers. Some Tav's. Ideas they had drawn together in a simpler time—nky, awkward concepts for drones, for water-purifiers, for skyboards they never finished.

  There were recordings. Paperwork. Her mother's obsessive lists—emergency supplies, protocols, fallback shelters. None of it surprised her. Her mother had prepped for every worst-case scenario. And now, years ter, Mia could only feel gratitude for it.

  She found food, too. Sealed rations. Vitamins. Freeze-dried packs that wouldn't spoil. Stacked in orderly rows in old crates.

  In other boxes, she found vacuum-sealed, clothing and fabrics. Clean bedding, her old clothes, her mother's clothes. Her mother had saved it all.

  Her throat tightened. But she kept moving.

  By the time the sun dropped behind the distant ridge, the room glowed with a low, warm light from the camoufged skylight overhead. She lit a small ntern anyway and set it on the desk. The workshop smelled like old paper and warm dust, with just a hint of sage from the dried bundle she'd found in the cupboard.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Asrell was quiet. For once.

  But even in the silence, she felt him stir.

  "Don't start," she muttered.

  His voice slithered through her mind, robotic and dry. "You chose to clean instead of flee. Fascinating. Does that count as progress in your species?"

  "It's not weakness to want something to come back to."

  "Incorrect. It is sentimentality. And sentiment clouds efficiency."

  She didn't respond. Not allowed.

  She just let her eyes trace the curves of the ceiling. The cracks. The way the sand curled in the corners. Her old home. The only pce she ever felt real.

  But even as she rested, her thoughts kept circling.

  The doc had seemed genuine. Kind. And once Asrell had healed her from the worst of it, there were things he couldn't fix. The impnts were still in her. Hardened synthetic, buried in soft tissue. Breathing too deeply, twisting too far, and she felt them. Always.

  Not agony. But wrong. Always wrong.

  She'd rip them out herself if she could. But she'd run a full med-scan on the stolen ship, and the results were clear—trying to remove the impnts by hand would cause catastrophic internal damage. She wouldn't even finish the job before passing out from blood loss.

  "Your Terran medics always cim to help," Asrell muttered, tone metallic with disdain. "Until they slice first and expin ter."

  She had to give him his due, he wasn't wrong. But she had to believe in something, in the Doc and his offer to help. She was desperate enough to. She needed her energy and her focus on their pns, hers and Asrell's, and it was a distraction.

  She knew she had to go back. To the clinic, the sooner the better. Tonight would be best.

  Asrell stirred again, more pointedly. "You intend to return. Alone. At night. With limited recon. This is a terrible pn. I loathe inefficiency."

  "I know."

  She rubbed at her arm, where a scar curved like a question. "But I need them out. And I think he might actually help."

  And the dark still scared her. Always had. But prison had taught her a new kind of fear—the kind that lived in silence, in blind corners, in hands that grabbed when you couldn't see.

  But she would go anyway.