Atid-60202-47-44 Min Apr 2026

"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."

47 degrees, 44 minutes.

Min had nodded, her face blank. But she didn’t go to the server room. She went to the airlock.

Min detached the data core and placed it in a shielded pouch over her heart. Then she activated her suit’s long-range transmitter. ATID-60202-47-44 Min

It was Jae’s emergency beacon. The casing was cracked, space-welded to a strut of twisted metal. Min pried it loose with a trembling hand. The data core was still intact, a tiny obsidian chip humming with residual power.

Static.

She found it wedged inside the crumpled cockpit of a lifeboat. Not a drone. "Sloane," she said, her voice steady for the

She slotted it into her suit’s reader.

"ATID-60202-47-44," she whispered into her suit’s comm, overriding the safety locks with a bypass code she’d spent six months stealing. "Min, initiating solo EVA."

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. Min had nodded, her face blank

The designation was . It wasn’t a name. It was a log entry, a line in a spreadsheet, a ghost in the machine.

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.