The archive was not a room of books, but a single terminal set in a wall of seamless white. Administrator Elara Vance, the diplomat from The Dome, gestured toward it with a quiet, proprietary air. The airlock had sealed them in this place of perfect temperature and sterile light, a world away from the grit and rust of the one they were trying to save. Irina Pavlenko’s objective was simple: secure repairs for the Perun’s damaged anchor and refuel their dwindling reactor. The price of crossing the Vitreous Reach had been a week of their future, a cost they could not afford to pay twice. Vance had granted Irina access, a lure presented as a gift.
Irina approached the terminal, which she called a Lexicon, a device that hummed with a silent, internal power. Its surface was a sheet of dark, flawless glass. As her fingers neared it, the glass came to life, displaying schematics not etched on steel plates but drawn in pure, steady light. Fusion reactors. Atmospheric processors. The theoretical physics behind mnemonic shielding. Irina’s breath caught in her throat. Her hands, calloused from a lifetime of wrestling with failing machines, trembled as she scrolled through technologies she had only known as myths, as prayers whispered over dying engines. The temptation to stay, to learn, to finally understand the perfect forms of which her own work was just a broken echo, was a physical ache.
Vance watched Irina’s captivation with a clinical satisfaction, then turned her attention to the others. She led Pavel Orlov and the rest of the Union 9 crew to another transparent wall. Beyond it lay the Veridian Terraces, vast hydroponic farms that stretched for kilometers under the soft glow of the artificial sun. Water, clean and clear, flowed in perfect, recycled rivers between rows of lush, green plants. It was a vision of impossible abundance.
Pavel, a man who had measured his life in kilograms of scavenged grain and liters of filtered water, pressed his hand against the wall. His hardened face, accustomed to the grim realities of the wastes, showed cracks of pure, desperate longing. The promise of safety, of a life where his people would never go hungry again, was a lure more powerful than any weapon. The alliance, forged in the heat of battle, was beginning to cool and fracture in this place of perfect, effortless plenty.
Sineus did not follow them. He stood apart, observing the citizens of The Dome as they moved through their pristine city. They drifted through the corridors with an eerie lack of urgency, their faces unlined by hardship, their hands impossibly clean. He watched one of them ‘work’ at a maintenance panel, his movements precise and graceful, following a diagram of light projected onto the surface. The man was a curator, not a mechanic. He was maintaining a system he had never built, whose failures he had never known.
Sineus’s hand went to his own belt, his fingers tracing the worn leather of a pouch where he kept the multi-tool Morozov had given him. He could feel the faint, raised impression of the tool’s maker’s mark through the leather, a simple, three-spoked gear. A symbol of honest work, of steel shaped by knowing hands. These people had no such marks. Their world was seamless, perfect, and without history. They had forgotten the feeling of grit under their fingernails, the satisfying ache of a day’s hard labor. They had forgotten hardship. And in that forgetting, he realized, they had lost the very thing that made them strong.
He found Irina still at the Lexicon, lost in the ghost of a perfect past. The light from the screen reflected in her wide, mesmerized eyes. He stood beside her, his dusty greatcoat a stark intrusion in the sterile white room.
— They have forgotten how to build, — he said, his voice quiet but rough, like stone on steel. — They only maintain.
The words were a counter-argument to everything she was seeing. Irina looked from the perfect, glowing schematics on the screen to Sineus’s face, smudged with grime and etched with the memory of the wastes. Her hand drifted to the heavy leather satchel at her hip, her fingers brushing against the cold, solid form of a wrench stamped with the same three-spoked gear he had just been thinking of. It was a choice between the flawless memory of a dead world and the difficult, uncertain future of a living one. Her resolve, once as solid as Union steel, was wavering. The alliance, their shared purpose, felt a thousand kilometers away.
She was torn. The silence in the archive stretched, thin and fragile.
Then it shattered.
A shockwave hit Sineus, not of sound or force, but of pure, absolute cold. It was a psychic impact of such finality that it felt physical, a star going out in the space behind his eyes. He cried out, a raw, involuntary sound of agony, and staggered back, his hands flying to his head. The world dissolved into a roaring static of pure loss. He knew this feeling. He had felt it once before, when the wall at Monolit had died. But this was not a wall. This was a man.
