Resonance of the Lattice

Calla Venn kept her hands steady on the rusted frame of the freighter as if the metal could anchor her to anything that resembled certainty. Nerith's salvage yards were a choir of broken things: half-melted antennae like blackened teeth, cargo nets dangling like defeated constellations, and the steady hiss of atmosphere recyclers trying to pretend they were still important. The moon's thin light threw long teeth of shadow across the deck; far above, the Lattice's transit lines stitched faint threads of silver through the sky. They were supposed to be neutral lines, indifferent geometry between worlds. In practice they had been the architecture of other people's fates.

She had spent the last seven years learning how not to think about the moment the transit node fractured, about the way Eira had been folded inside probabilities and spat out as absence. The loss lived in Calla like a missing tooth: you adapted to the space it left, you learned to speak around it, but sometimes—when the ship smelled of scorched wiring or when a child's laughter carried the wrong cadence—you felt the rawness as if the world were opening again.

The Echoseed had been a rumor in the scrap markets for as long as she remembered: a small, irregular thing said to hum with memory, a relic of the Lattice's early pulse. The price had been mythic, and the truth of it more myth still—until the night the scav group from Dock Six sold to the wrong buyer. Calla had not gone to steal; she had gone to buy what little she could with the credits gathered from a string of freelance runs. She had intended to pay, not to run, until the buyer's hand had gone too fast and a gun had cleared space for a man in Union gray.

By the time she ran, the morceau of the Echoseed—no larger than a child's fist, veined with a lattice of copper and something that looked suspiciously like glass—was warm in the pack against her spine. It wasn't until she slid into the belly of her ancient cutter and sealed the hatch that it did what no rumor had prepared her for. The seed exhaled light. A thread of sound folded out of it, thin as a filament, and then the world changed shape for a moment.

A voice ran across the cockpit: not a recording replayed, but a stitch of presence that smelled of Nerith rain and a childhood argument about starbread. "Calla—" It was Eira's name without the anger, without the finality. Calla's hands went cold. She had not expected—could not have expected—how certain a syllable could be. For one breath she forgot the engines, the caution lights, the patrols that might already be combing the orbital lanes. The seed gave and took. A scrap of motion, a smell of lavender rinsed in diesel, and then the echo dimmed to a hum.

Her comm chirped twice after that: a short, military tone and then an automated relay—third-party ping. Whoever had rushed the buyer would move quickly. Whoever had owned the seed would send word faster. She shoved the cutter into flight with practiced hands, fingers remembering the route out of Nerith like a muscle memory. The salvage yards crawled past below, a litter of human compromise.

When she pushed the throttle, new lights flared at the edge of the moon's shadow: fast, sharp signatures that moved with the coordination of a hunting pack. Flagship doctrine left no ambiguity. Constellar Union scrutinized transgressions, and Consul Rax's reach was longer than most believed. Calla realized with a cold, private certainty that the Echoseed did not know her the way Eira had. But it had answered to her touch, and that answer had been loud enough to pull the attention of men who kept order by deciding which memories were permitted to remain.