I run the engram again, this time with Joaquin beside me, his hand on my shoulder in the way that means he is worried but he is not going to say so. I let the kitchen come back. The yellow curtains. The cardamom. Selin’s hands on the dough. And then I go further than I have gone before, past the comfortable domestic surface of it, into the deeper architecture of the memory. Because engrams don’t just store images. They store knowledge. They store the whole shape of a person’s understanding.
And Selin Arslan understood something extraordinary.
I surface forty minutes later. My nose is bleeding, which happens sometimes with deep access. Joaquin hands me a cloth without being asked.
“She knew,” I say. “Before the Castor Event. She knew the Ashfall wouldn’t be permanent. She had the atmospheric modeling data. She calculated a recovery window.” I stop. My hands are shaking. “Joaquin. The window is now. It’s been opening for the last eight months and it peaks in nineteen days.”
The generator hums. Somewhere deeper in the bunker, Anders drops something metal and swears in Swedish.
“If we seed the upper atmosphere during the peak,” I say, “using the aerosol dispersal system she designed, which is apparently in a depot forty kilometers east of here—”
“We can accelerate the clearing,” Joaquin finishes. His voice is very quiet.
“By decades,” I say. “She calculated decades.”
THREAD TWO — JOAQUIN
The argument that follows is the worst one yet.
Zaid does not believe the engram. Or rather, he believes the memory is real but does not believe we can trust it. “It’s one woman’s calculations from before the Event,” he says. “The atmosphere has been evolving for four years. Her models are four years out of date.”
Anders agrees with Zaid, which surprises no one. Anders Bjornstad has the careful, angular face of a man who was once an engineer himself, before the Event, and he approaches every problem the way he approaches a damaged structural beam: with suspicion and a preference for doing nothing until you are certain. He is not wrong to be cautious. He is also not right to be paralyzed.
Mateo is quiet through most of it. Mateo Villanueva is the youngest of us, twenty-six, with a stillness about him that people sometimes mistake for passivity. It is not passivity. It is the particular patience of someone who grew up in the settlements, who learned early that the world would not hurry for you, and that the best thing you could do was watch carefully and wait for the moment when your action would actually matter.
He speaks when the argument begins to loop back on itself for the third time.
“Runa,” he says. “When you’re inside the memory. Does it feel like a guess? Or does it feel like certainty?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. That is an answer in itself.
“It feels like the most certain thing I’ve ever known,” she says. “And it’s not my certainty. That’s the part that’s hard to explain. Selin spent thirty years on this. I can feel the weight of those thirty years. It doesn’t feel like someone’s opinion. It feels like… bedrock.”
Zaid turns away. He stands with his back to us, looking at the dead monitors, and I watch his shoulders and I know he is doing the calculation that we are all doing: the cost of being wrong in one direction against the cost of being wrong in the other.
Finally, without turning around, he says: “Forty kilometers in Ashfall conditions. We’ll need the full respirator suits. We’ll need the sled.”
He doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t have to.
THREAD ONE — RUNA
The depot is real. The dispersal system is real. Selin’s calculations, cross-referenced against the four years of atmospheric data on our own instruments, are accurate within a margin that makes Anders go very quiet and then say, softly, “She was good.”
The seeding takes eleven hours. We work in shifts, two on the equipment and two resting in the depot’s sealed interior, which smells of lubricant and old plastic and something faintly sweet that none of us can identify. The Ashfall outside is a grey curtain, thick and directionless, the sky a uniform nothing. You stop looking up after a while. There is nothing to see.
On the ninth hour, Zaid’s respirator seal fails.
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