This transmission survives only as a recovered fragment, reconstructed and released unclassified by the keeper. The unnamed mission, conclusion. The planet is a bruise on time, I say. The ship we see took that bruise into herself. The bruise taught itself to speak with her mouth. So, not alive, Talis says, but not triumphantly. I did not say that, I say gently. Pain that learns to ask for its name is as alive as anything may be. It is not a person. It is not not one. The watcher, Laior asks. The watcher watches the watcher, I say. Reflections in a reflection. If we go, we must know that there are not only eyes upon us there, but needs. Luca enhales. And if we do not go, then there are still eyes upon us. Jackson says, surprising himself, and therefore all of us. The thing that calls from the future does not cease to call because we put tape over the bell. The wanderer, Laior asks. I fold back into her for the span of a heartbeat and return with her, yes. She is not eager. She is not resigned. She is what she always is, willing, beyond reason, and before it. She will open when you ask, I say. The captain closes their eyes and opens them as if rinsed. Prepare for a contact boarding, Laior says. Not a bridge, a kiss. Kissing is what we call it when the wanderer extends her harmonic lips and lays them over a wound. A bridge is a thing one can burn and regret. A kiss is an agreement to share breath. Talus nods once and moves. Lucas hands descend. Jackson runs a hand over the edge of a panel. The way a farmer runs a hand over the bark of a tree he planted at fifteen. The filaments around Laior's wrists spread their fibers through the fingers as if to capture instructions before they can escape. The ship pivots. The broken twin grows, filling the forward field until the mind insists we will collide, even as the ship assures every cell that we are in different rooms in the same house and can pass without bruising. There are lines on the twin's skin where geometry gave up. The planet has written poems on her. Ragged, yearning stanzas scored with a tool made of storms. The closer we come, the more I feel the gaze within. Not hostile, not kind, hungry for ending. I pulled the wanderer's voice into the place where a throat would be if a ship had a throat and sing the greeting cord we use when we meet ourselves in mirror and echo in dream. It is very simple, so simple it is almost nothing. It says, I know, I know. The twin answers. The sound is wrong, not in pitch, in intent. It's like hearing your own name said by someone who thinks you belong to them. Bored, Laior says in the space that sound left. We open. We do not extend tubes, we do not fire hooks. We peel ourselves like fruit and press our soft inside to the twin's soft inside and hope the rod is not catching. It is not a hope I permit the crew to hear, even from themselves. My job is not to lie. It is to phrase the truth so it does not run. The wanderer does not so much touch as sooth. Her field wraps, tests, releases, wraps again, and animals speaking to a skittish animal. Where the twin is strong, we meet strength, where it is torn, we lay our palm across the tear, and the tear remembers briefly how to be a seam. Air moves, not hours, there's. It is wrong by a thousand small kindnesses. Smells of memory, the first day of rain, the edge of a wool blanket that kept a child alive one night a century ago. Bread, caracene, the deaths of moths and candle fat. I want to weep for reasons not my own. Path, Talis says, and Luca draws it on the air, a ghost map of corridors that once ran straight and now loop upon themselves like a mind with a song it cannot shake. Take three, Leore says. Talis inclines her head to Jackson and Luca. They are a strange trio, the soldier, the comms savant, the systems barred. Even them they can speak to almost anything that can be spoken to, and most that cannot. Captain, Talis says. I will remain, Leore says, if the kiss becomes a bite. And me, I say almost lightly to cover the ache. You go, the captain says, and the wanderer agrees. And I do not argue because there is nothing left to say that is not either prayer or profanity. We move, it is not walking. Not in the way walking feels when gravity loves you. The twin's interior is a spill of inclines and refusals, rooms where up gives up and down decides to be democratic for once. We skim more than step, the wanderers field cupping ankles and knees to keep the crew's blood convinced. I am with them as voice and sense and ghost light, the way a hand is with its glove. The first door greets us by remembering how it used to open. The second does not greet us at all. It intends to act as wall and resents the implication that it could be otherwise. Jackson hums to it. The third tone in the triplet he taught himself to still ship side nausea the year we met. And the door endures the insult of becoming a door again and slides. Beyond a corridor of mirrors, not glass, moments. The walls are thin films of prior time, stretched and pinned. Here a technician tying a boot lace, they're a crewman failing at a joke and covering with a swig. There, oh there, Leore pressing a palm to a panel, the wanderers light running up their wrist like spilled milk. They are not our people, they are our people, their gestures are ours shorn of circumstance. Leore reaches without meaning to and stops one fingers width from touching the version of themselves that pauses, flinches, laughs because a friend off camera said their name, the way only that friend can say it. Do not, I say, not a command, a plea. Lucas hand trembles and falls. We pass. The watcher is closer, its attention thickens, like air before rain. There, Talis says, and points where no pointing is warranted because there is no there to point to, only a pressure well in the deferential time of the corridor, a place where seconds bow. We draw nearer. The corridor opens into a chamber that still obeys the idea of room, in the center, a shape that refuses to decide. If I had to describe it to a child, I would say it is what a planet would look like if it tried to become a seed and got distracted. It hums. The hum is the planet's hum. The hum braided with something else that will not name itself yet. Around it instruments, not ours. The twins, panels flayed for parts, coils nought bare by emergency, a feeling of hurry pressed into metal. Jackson steps and stops. Do you feel? Yes, Lucas says simultaneously, and Talis. No further. I step further because I am not a body and cannot die by being mad. I lay a fraction of us against the humming thing, and it is as if I have cupped a child's hot forehead in a night without nurses. Name it says, without words. Name me so I can be over. I have named many things. It is one of my labors. I open my mouth to the impossible baby, and the name that rises is the sound of our other self-breaking. No, I say, to myself more than to it. Behind me, Lucas breath. Keeper? It wants us to finish it, I say. It wants its last word, and will borrow our throat. Talis' visor lifts fully now. Her eyes are not afraid. They are mourning in advance what she knows she may be asked to do. And if we do not grant it? When it will learn to speak without us, I say. But slower, crueler. The watcher leans. I feel its face press up to the veil of our scene like a child to glass, not malevolent, greedy, not for us, for ending. It is a hunger so absolute, it feels pure. Captain, Talis says, and though Leore is not with us, the word travels, I carry it. Leore hears. The filaments climb Leore's hands again in a room we are not in, and the ship makes a decision she would not have permitted me to make alone. Not a bridge, the wanderer says into my heart. A mirror. Luka, I say, prepare a resonance, not to couple, to show. Jackson, pair your local field to mine. Talis, you may kill my voice if the hum spikes above. I know the curve, Talis says, and the kindness in not letting me finish is a thing I will take out of my pocket when the world is broken and hold to the light. We do not sing the twin, the song that would let it end. We sing it the song that let us begin. It is the simplest thing we know. The cord, the wanderer used when she woke the first time she understood her own weight. Not triumph, not birth cry. The small sound one makes on a winter morning when the floor is cold and the kettle is full and there will be tea. We play that to the watcher, we play that to the seed that is a planet with fever. We play that to the room of mirrors, to the walls that have pinned our friends so their moments never melt. We play that to the ship that is us, was us, will be us, not because it will fix her, but because I will not let her last lesson be that ending is all things want. The hum changes, not in pitch, in shape. The pressure of the watcher eases like a hand removing itself from a bruise with care. The seed, the planet, the hot sphere of insistence dims from blazing to bright to steady to ember. Keeper, Luca Whispers. I know, I say, and my voice shakes not like fear but like someone carrying boiling water at a run and trying not to spill. The mirror's quiver. In one, Leore kisses someone I have not met yet who looks at them like a stranger trying to be polite. In another, Talis sits on the floor with her boots off and cries into her hands where no one can see. In another, Luca stares at a message that opens and opens and never ends. The moments consider being memories and then decide to wait. The watcher withdraws. We breathe. In the humming of the seed I hear a new note, not now, not never, not yet. Captain, I say, we have been invited. Decline, Leore says, promptly and with love. We are already inside, Talis says, equally promptly and with different love. Then we will leave, Leore says. Slowly, and we will not let go. The wanderer draws back but not away. We do not break the kiss. We slacken it. We teach the hum to hear itself without needing our mouth. The crew returns by paths that were different when they passed them a moment ago. The door that resented its duty is a door today. The door that remembered is obstinate. Mirrors have reduced themselves to ordinary wall. The things they showed are not ours to keep. We keep them anyway, not as images but as muscle tone. On the lip of departure, with the twin's wrong skin pressed to ours, and the seed's hum a gentler burn. The watcher speaks for the first time in a way that forces me to call its speech. We are you, it says, and the we is faithful and false and full of grief. No, I say, allowed and within, and let the wanderer's tone bear the word so it cannot be mistaken for arrogance or fear. You are yourself. You are not our ending. And what are you? It asks, genuinely. I do not know how to be delicate with the truth. We are your refusal to be finished, I say. The watcher considers this, and in that consideration is a tiny forgiveness. We withdraw. The kiss unwinds. The wanderer closes herself around her crew like a mother around a child who has just learned that shadows are longer than rooms. On the bridge, the captain's hands release the filaments, and the filaments do not want to be released. We're clear, talus reports. Though clear is not the word anyone would use for the feeling in our bones. Keeper, Leore says softly. Write it. I begin before I realize I have begun, because some songs do not wait for paper, and in the writing I tuck away a splinter, a single dissonant bright fleck the watcher left me when it leaned too close. Not a weapon, not a key, a reminder. Tucked where I will not forget to forget it until I need to remember. Behind us, the twin completes its turn and faces the planet again. The way a tired animal faces the thing it loves, because it does not have anywhere else to put its eyes. Ahead of us, the latter's first rung trembles into tolerance. The coordinates of where we will go next gather themselves like geese. Of course, Leore says, and their voice is sanded wood. Set, Lucas says, because saying ready would be a lie. Hold, talus says, as if she can make the universe obey by reminding it of its job description. Home, Jackson says, and blushes, and I love him very much for it. The wanderer does not fear. She does not break. And in her gentle cruelty and impossible mercy, neither do we. I lower my note into the dark and let it spread, a hand in cold water. The signal that should not exist presses once more against the hull, and then, as if satisfied it has said its peace, lets us be. Still, Leore whispers, and the word is a coin flipped into a well. We traverse, I answer, and the well answers back. End of the unnamed mission from the Keepers archive of impossible places. Stay tuned for more from wanderer Chronicles Radio. Thanks for listening.
