Chapter 13: The Long Way Home

The return took eleven weeks.

Eleven weeks of clean transits and long silences and the particular quality of coexistence that develops between people who have learned the exact shape of what has been taken from them and have not yet decided what to do with the knowing. The Thread moved through the intergalactic hubs in reverse — each one familiar from the outward journey, each one diminished, the flagship gates shrinking from a hundred kilometers to fifty to thirty, the Throat Engines stepping down from stellar to planetary to merely colossal. The gravitational wave torrent thinned at each hub, the encoded data stream receding from roar to murmur to the faint structured whisper Yuki had first detected at 97 AU, a lifetime and sixty-two years ago. Retracing the gradient. Walking the river back from the sea.

The ship was quiet in a way it had never been quiet before.

Not the silence of concentration or of sleep or of five professionals absorbed in their work. This was an absence — a specific, architectural absence, the way a house is different after someone has moved out and taken nothing but their presence. Yuki’s humming was gone. The three-note lullaby from Sapporo — the ambient frequency the crew had stopped hearing consciously months ago because it had become part of the ship’s metabolism, part of the background hum of being alive aboard the Thread — had ceased in the observation bay when the number appeared on the display, and it had not returned. The silence it left was not empty. It was shaped. It had edges. The crew moved through corridors that felt wrong the way a room with a missing wall feels wrong: structurally intact, functionally altered, the draft coming from a direction that used to be solid.

Yuki worked. She ran transit calculations with the same precision she had always brought to the ship’s systems, fed Gardener-derived parameters into each wormhole approach, confirmed zero resonance coupling at every threshold. She spoke to Herrera in clipped, professional exchanges — headings, timing windows, hull status. She spoke to the Thread in her usual way, hand on a bulkhead, voice low, the running monologue of encouragement that had carried them both across twelve intergalactic crossings and would carry them across ten more. But the melody was gone. Her lips moved without music. The machine heard her; the air did not.

At each hub, Herrera suited up and went out.

The beacon retrievals took twenty minutes apiece — short tether, the physical act of detaching a small automated relay from its anchor near a wormhole mouth and bringing it back aboard. He did not delegate. He did not explain. The crew understood. Every beacon was a signpost pointing toward Earth, and the derelicts had taught them what followed signposts through the dark. So Herrera pulled them — methodically, unhurried, the way a man breaks camp in country where something large has been moving through the trees. Node by node. Hub by hub. The trail home erased behind them, each blinking relay stowed in the cargo bay beside the last, the path that connected a small blue world to the center of the universe dismantled one link at a time.

He returned from each EVA, removed the suit, crossed to the command chair, and opened the journal. Wrote. Closed it. Palm flat on the cover. The soft click of the drawer. The ritual held, as it always held, as it would hold across the remaining weeks because that was what rituals were for — not to make the unbearable bearable but to give the body something to do while the mind processed damage too large for a single sitting.

He wrote to his sons every night. His sons who were in their seventies now. Old men, older than their father, with families and careers and grandchildren — entire architectures of life erected in the decades he had spent crossing the space between stars. The leather journal had been his half of a conversation with two boys, and the boys no longer existed, and the conversation continued anyway, because a man who stops writing to his children because his children have grown old has conceded something Herrera was not prepared to concede.

Nolan remained in his quarters.

Not confined — Herrera had lifted the formal restriction after the visions, when the ship’s damaged state made the distinction between prisoner and passenger academic. The Thread had one destination now and no mechanism capable of altering it. The override was irrelevant. The man who had built it was irrelevant. He was cargo.

He ate alone. He moved through the corridors during the hours when the common spaces were empty — a ghost in a vessel he had designed, tracing the architecture of a ship that carried his fingerprints in every bulkhead and his betrayal in every silence. The crew did not discuss him. They stepped around his absence the way they stepped around the dead engine bay: with the practiced economy of people who had absorbed a catastrophic loss and were now simply living with the wreckage.

In the first weeks, guilt was all there was.

He sat in the dark of his quarters and the guilt was tidal — it came in waves that left him unable to breathe, cresting at unpredictable intervals, triggered by sounds through the intercom he could not stop monitoring. Herrera’s voice, level and steady, giving course corrections. Ren’s dry murmur confirming a navigation solution. Maren’s footsteps in the corridor at three in the morning, passing his door without slowing, the absence of a pause more devastating than any confrontation. The silence where Yuki’s humming should have been. And beneath all of it, beneath every ambient sound the ship produced, the thing he could not unhear: five words delivered through the intercom in Adaeze’s voice, in the observation bay, in the amber light, on the day the number appeared on the display. You stole my daughter’s life.

He did not eat well. He did not sleep well. He lost weight he could not afford to lose on a ship rationing its final stores. His reflection in the darkened viewport of his quarters looked back at him with the hollowed precision of a man being consumed from the interior — the same face, the same architecture, the soft tissue receding to reveal the bones of whatever was underneath the performance.

Then, gradually, in the third week or the fourth — he could not have identified the moment it began, any more than a man standing in a river can identify the moment the current shifts — the rationalization arrived.

It did not arrive as a decision. It arrived as a thought that surfaced during a stretch of insomnia and did not fully subside. A small, quiet thought, barely a sentence: But the knowledge exists.

He pushed it away. It returned. It returned the way water returns to a depression in sand — not because it has direction, but because the shape of the ground requires it.

The physics is real. Zero resonance coupling, clean crossings, twenty-two transits and counting. The framework Yuki had received from the gravitational wave memory was not interpretation, not subjective experience, not unverified data flagged by Adaeze’s careful taxonomy. It was mathematics. It was testable. It was the single most important engineering breakthrough in human history, and it existed because he had refused to turn back.

The topology is confirmed. Twelve intergalactic data points. Maren’s propagation model, verified at arbitrary precision. The seed signals, the Throat Engines, the architecture of a network spanning the observable universe — all of it real, all of it documented, all of it carried in the data banks of a ship that would never have reached the place where these truths were stored if a man in the secondary console had not done what the crew had voted not to do.

Someone would have had to pay this price.

That was the thought that held. The one that found its depression in the sand and filled it and would not drain. Someone, someday, would have followed the thread inward. Some crew, some ship, some captain overruled or persuaded or simply outlasted by the gradient’s pull. The knowledge at the center was too important to remain unknown. The Gardeners had built the network to be found, had seeded the universe with minds capable of finding it, had placed the thread and made it glow. Someone was always going to follow it to the end. Someone was always going to pay.

I bear the guilt, Nolan told himself in the dark, so the truth can be free.

It was self-serving. He half-knew it was self-serving. The half that knew it watched the other half construct the shelter with the weary recognition of a man who has seen himself do this before — shape the narrative, find the angle where the light falls just right, make the terrible thing look like sacrifice. He had done it with Vasik. He had done it with the investors. He had done it with the firmware specification, sitting in a quiet room at the Ceres shipyard, writing an override into the bones of a ship and telling himself it was insurance.

But the shelter held. It held because the alternative was to sit in the dark with five words and no defense against them, and a man cannot sit with that forever, not without building something to sit behind.

By the sixth week, the guilt had not diminished — it lived in him the way the ache had always lived in him, chronic, structural, part of the architecture — but it had been joined by a companion. A narrative. A story he told himself about himself: that he was the one who had paid, that the cost was his to carry, that the sixty-two years were a burden he bore so that the species could have what it needed. It was the same pattern. The same conflation of destination and righteousness, the same inability to distinguish between the worthiness of a goal and the acceptability of its cost. He would have recognized it if he could have seen it from outside. But no one can see their own load-bearing walls. You only know they’re structural when you try to remove them and the ceiling comes down.

He did not attempt to speak to the crew. There were corridor encounters — brief, unavoidable on a ship this size — and in each one he saw the same thing: not hatred, not fury, but something worse. The flat, settled gaze of people who had finished processing him. Maren passed without acknowledgment, her eyes on her tablet, her footsteps unchanged, as though the corridor were empty. She had reclassified him — he could feel it, the way you feel a door lock from the other side — and the reclassification was permanent. The woman who had walked these corridors at three in the morning and called him the most brilliant person she had ever met was gone. In her place was someone who regarded him with the detached precision of a scientist examining a dataset that had once seemed promising and had turned out to be contaminated.

Adaeze did not look at him at all. Not with anger, not with the controlled fury of the observation bay — simply without. He had been removed from her field of vision the way a variable is removed from an equation: cleanly, completely, the remaining terms rebalancing around the absence. She carried Ife’s letter in her pocket and touched it sometimes in the corridors, and the gesture was not for him, but he saw it, and it was worse than anything she could have said.

Ren, once, in the seventh week, met his eyes. Just that — a moment of direct contact in the dim corridor outside the sensor bay, neither man stopping, neither man speaking. What was in Ren’s gaze was not forgiveness and not condemnation but something rarer and more honest: the look of a man who had weighed the data and found it unambiguous and was not going to pretend otherwise. Ren had called it a crime, not a miscalculation, and his eyes still said the same thing, and then the moment passed, and they walked on, and the corridor returned to its silence.

On the seventy-ninth day, the Thread transited the last intergalactic wormhole and emerged at the Milky Way’s central hub.

Eleven Trunk Line mouths in their precise geometric arrangement. The three extragalactic gates — the two five-kilometer lateral connections and the fifteen-kilometer flagship, through which Nolan had forced them in another lifetime. Ren confirmed their position from pulsar timing: two kiloparsecs from Sagittarius A*. Home galaxy.

Nobody said home. The word was too heavy to spend on anything less than arrival, and arrival was still ten hops and several weeks away, and the word itself had become complicated in ways none of them had language for. Home was a place that had aged sixty-two years. Home was where their families had grown old. Home was a world that had declared them dead and moved on and filed the paperwork and closed the folders, and the people waiting at the end of the word — if they were still waiting, if waiting was even the right verb for what you do when someone has been dead for half a century — were not the people they had left.

The intragalactic return was fast. Ren had been right, months and a lifetime ago, when he estimated weeks instead of months for the inner journey. They knew the route. They skipped the surveys. The biological gradients and Throat Engine analyses that had occupied them on the outward leg were irrelevant now — each system was a waypoint, not a destination, and the Thread moved through the Lacework with the grim efficiency of a vessel that had spent everything it had on the outward journey and was running on the fumes of physics and will.

Ten intragalactic hops. No surveys. Waypoints, not destinations. The crew moved through the ship in a silence that had become structural, load-bearing, part of the vessel’s architecture as surely as the bulkheads and the hull plating and the makeshift thrusters firing their last reserves into the dark. They did not discuss the future. They did not discuss the past. They existed in the narrow present tense of transit — the countdown to each wormhole approach, the clean crossing, the emergence, the next set of coordinates, the next beacon pulled, the next day closer to a world that would not recognize them and that they were no longer certain they would recognize.

Somewhere in the final days, approaching the last intragalactic nodes, the silence shifted. Not broke — shifted. The quality of it changed the way the quality of light changes before dawn, when the darkness is technically still darkness but something in it has turned, and the body knows before the eyes confirm that the night is ending. They were close. Close enough that the word home began to press against the inside of their teeth, unsaid but present, heavy with sixty-two years of meaning and the specific, irreducible weight of everything they had lost and everything that might — impossibly, implausibly, against all actuarial expectation — still be waiting.

The Thread emerged at Viridis.

The wormhole mouth — five kilometers of engineered spacetime, the Regional Bridge they had transited on the outward journey fourteen months ago by the ship’s reckoning — released them into a system they had last seen as a waypoint: a young star, a green world, the place where Adaeze Obi had confirmed directed panspermia aboard the Meridian and changed the trajectory of human science before most of the crew had met one another.

What they found was not what they had left.

A station hung in high orbit around Viridis. Modest by the standards of things built in the inner solar system — a wheel-and-spoke design, solar collection arrays fanning from its central axis like the petals of a mechanical flower — but unmistakably human. Running lights traced its circumference. Docking arms extended from its lower ring. A communications array larger than the Thread’s entire sensor suite rotated in a slow survey of the system, and beneath it, on the surface of the world below, the infrared signatures of a permanent settlement glowed against the night side like embers in green ash.

Humanity had followed the Lacework outward. Not far — not into the Trunk Lines, not past the galactic center, not into the spaces where the gradient deepened and the questions became unbearable. But far enough. Viridis Station was proof that in the sixty-two years since the Thread had carried six people into the dark, the species had not been idle. It had colonized the nearest garden. It had built a foothold among the stars it could reach without losing itself.

Ren confirmed the station’s identity from its transponder — UNEA Viridis Research Station, commissioned 2194, forty years after the Thread’s departure. A research outpost. Thirty-two permanent crew. Biological survey platforms on the surface. Lacework monitoring instruments trained on the nearby wormhole mouths. Small. Established. Alive.

“Hail them,” Herrera said.

Yuki opened the channel. Standard frequencies, standard protocol — the same hailing sequence the Thread had been designed to transmit, using call signs and authentication codes that were sixty-two years out of date.

The response took a long time.

Not light-lag — Viridis Station was mere light minutes away. The delay was human. Somewhere on that station, a communications officer was staring at a console displaying a transponder code that belonged to a ship declared lost with all hands before she was born. Somewhere a supervisor was being called. Somewhere verification protocols were being pulled from an archive no one had opened in decades.

When the response came, it was a woman’s voice, careful and steady and audibly working to remain both: “Vessel transmitting on UNEA legacy frequencies, this is Viridis Station Control. We are reading your transponder as DSV Thread, registration Alpha-Seven-Seven-Niner. That registration is classified as lost. Please confirm identity and transmit current crew manifest.”

Herrera leaned forward. His voice carried the same quality it had carried for eleven weeks and twenty-two transits and the entire weight of the return — level, measured, the voice of a man who had held the line because that was what lines were for.

“Viridis Station, this is Captain Tomás Herrera, DSV Thread. Crew of six, all alive. We have been in transit for —” He paused. The number still tasted like a wound. ”— sixty-two years, Earth-frame. Requesting docking clearance. Hull integrity below forty percent. Consumables critical. We need a dock.”

Silence. Longer this time. The silence of someone whose training had not prepared them for the dead coming home.

Then: controlled chaos. Multiple voices on the channel — station commander, medical officer, operations chief — overlapping, interrupting, the disciplined architecture of a small research outpost suddenly rearranging itself around an event that no protocol manual had anticipated. Verification requests. Biometric challenges. Cross-references against mission files that had been sealed and archived and half-forgotten. Herrera answered each one with the patience of a man who understood that being believed was a process, not a moment, and that the people on the other end of the channel were trying to reconcile the impossible with the procedural, which was, in Herrera’s experience, the only way human institutions knew how to greet a miracle.

Docking clearance came seventeen minutes later, issued by a station commander whose voice had gone hoarse.

The Thread limped into dock at Viridis Station the way a wounded animal walks the last hundred meters to water — slowly, listing, the maneuvering thrusters firing in stuttering corrections that Yuki coaxed from fuel reserves she had been rationing for weeks. The docking arm extended. The magnetic clamps engaged. The ship shuddered once, settling into the cradle with a sound like a long exhalation, and the vibration that had been constant for eleven weeks — the low-frequency hum of a vessel in transit, the heartbeat of a machine in motion — ceased.

The station crew stared through the docking bay viewports at the hull.

They had seen photographs of the Thread in its original configuration — the sleek, purpose-built geometry that had left Ceres orbit in 2157. What they saw now bore the same relationship to those photographs that a face after a war bears to a face in a wedding portrait. The hull patches were everywhere — welded metal in a dozen different alloys, each one a different color, a different texture, the geological strata of damage and repair spanning dozens of wormhole transits. The micro-fracture networks were visible to the naked eye, hairline veins running through the plating like the crazing on old porcelain. The sensor arrays were jury-rigged, the primary antenna replaced by something Yuki had fabricated from hull plating and salvaged conduit. The port maneuvering thruster housing had been rebuilt twice. The entire forward section bore the faint, warped discoloration of a hull that had been exposed to gravitational stresses no human engineering had ever predicted — the tidal signature of a supermassive black hole, written in the metal like a scar.

A ship that looked like it had been through the center of the universe. Which it had.

Medical teams were first through the airlock. Six physicians, four support staff, carrying diagnostic equipment designed for standard deep-space crew assessment — bone density, muscle atrophy, radiation exposure, the routine degradations of extended spaceflight. They were not prepared for what they found: six crew members in adequate physical condition, biologically unchanged from their departure profiles, showing none of the expected markers of a sixty-two-year voyage because, for their bodies, the voyage had lasted fourteen months. The paradox of it — youth preserved by the same time dilation that had stolen their lives — silenced the medical team for the duration of the initial assessment. The physicians exchanged glances over their instruments. The numbers were impossible, and the numbers were correct, and the six people sitting on the examination cots looked exactly like their mission photographs, and outside in the docking bay the hull of the ship that had carried them told a different story entirely.

Debrief officers followed. Two senior UNEA representatives stationed at Viridis — a mission analyst and a xenocontact specialist, titles that had not existed when the Thread launched. They sat in the station’s small conference room across from five crew members and listened to a compressed version of a story that took four hours to tell and would take decades to fully process. The Lacework. The Trunk Lines. The intergalactic hubs. The Throat Engines. The biological gradient. The derelicts — the weapons fire spanning fifty million years, the shattered hulls tumbling through the dark. The override. The living galaxy. The visions. The physics. The sixty-two years.

Herrera told most of it. Adaeze corrected twice on technical points — precise, controlled, the same insistence on accuracy that had shaped her classification of the visions, applied now to the historical record, because if the story was going to be told, it was going to be told with the fidelity it deserved and not a gram of embellishment more. Ren provided the topology. Maren supplied the mathematics, her stylus tracing the familiar propagation diagrams on her tablet for an audience of two people who did not yet understand that they were looking at the architecture of the observable universe drawn from memory. Yuki described the engineering — hull resonance, transit profiles, the zero-resonance framework — in language stripped of everything but the technical, which was the only language she had been willing to speak for eleven weeks.

No one mentioned Nolan. The sixth crew member remained aboard the Thread in his quarters, and the debrief officers did not ask about him until the second hour, and when they did, Herrera’s answer was brief and factual and delivered in the flat tone of a captain filing an incident report on equipment that had malfunctioned. The officers did not press.

The data was transmitted to Earth within the hour — the complete archive, everything the Thread carried, routed through the station’s high-bandwidth relay. Not electromagnetic propagation across 42,000 light-years, which would have taken 42,000 years — the signal traveled through the Lacework itself, the inner wormhole nodes now carrying human communication infrastructure, and reached Earth-Luna Station in under a day. The news began to move through the institutions and the networks and the consciousness of a species that was about to learn that the dead could come home, and that what they had found at the center of everything was stranger and more frightening and more beautiful than anyone had imagined.

The debrief officers filled in the gaps — the shape of the sixty-two years the crew had missed, told in the careful language of professionals briefing people on the life they had lost.

No deep-network missions since the Thread. None. The UNEA had declared the mission lost at Year Ten and treated it afterward as a cautionary tale — the inevitable result of private funding, unchecked ambition, and a mission architect who had embedded a hidden override in his own ship. The institutional response had not been to reach further but to pull back. The Lacework was too dangerous. The unknown too vast. The Thread’s silence too total, too final, too useful as a lesson for the next generation of administrators who would be asked to authorize a journey into the dark. Risk assessment committees had cited the mission by name for decades. The Thread precedent. The phrase had entered the bureaucratic lexicon the way a disaster enters the engineering lexicon — as a warning, stripped of wonder, reduced to a set of failure modes and their institutional remedies.

Closer exploration had continued. Viridis, three neighboring systems, a handful of Lacework nodes within a few hops of Earth. Throat Engine studies. Wormhole engineering. Trade routes through the nearest connections — practical exploitation of the infrastructure the Gardeners had built, the cosmic highway used for commuter traffic. Colony infrastructure at Viridis and two other habitable worlds. Humanity had learned to use the network the way a child uses a river: for the stretch it can see, careful not to wade past its depth.

But no one had followed the convergence deeper. The Trunk Lines inward remained untraveled. The question of the Gardeners — who built the network, and why, and what waited at the center — had faded from urgent mystery to background philosophical debate, the kind of question discussed in graduate seminars and late-night conversations and nowhere that mattered. The wormhole at 97 AU still turned in the dark, patient and ancient, and no one had passed through it with the intention of reaching the center since six people and one hidden override had done so sixty-two years ago.

The Thread’s return changed everything. Even before the crew arrived at Earth, the data preceding them was rewriting the landscape — the physics, the topology, the biological evidence, the surveillance data, the proof that something ancient and vast was watching and had been watching since before the species learned to walk upright. The debate that had fallen asleep was waking up, and it was waking up afraid, and it was waking up with the specific, galvanizing energy of a civilization that has just learned the sky has eyes.

They stayed at Viridis Station for nine days.

The Thread would not carry them the rest of the way. Yuki had delivered the assessment on the second day — hull integrity at thirty-one percent, the jury-rigged drive assembly fracturing along every weld, resonance dampeners operating on margins she could no longer certify for transit. The ship that had carried them to the center of the universe and back had nothing left to give, and the woman who knew its body better than anyone alive would not ask it for what it did not have. A UNEA transport docked at the station would take them the remaining hops to Earth — fast, clean, designed for the Lacework crossings the Thread had once been built to make. The Thread itself would stay at Viridis, too broken to fly and too important to scrap, awaiting the institutional disassembly that would reduce it from a vessel to a collection of samples in a hundred laboratories.

Nine days of hull assessments and resupply and resupply and medical assessment and the particular, disorienting quality of being treated as both heroes and ghosts — people who had done something extraordinary and who were also, by any institutional reckoning, dead, their files sealed, their pensions disbursed, their names on a memorial plaque in the UNEA headquarters lobby in Geneva that the debrief officers mentioned once and then, seeing the crew’s faces, did not mention again.

On the sixth day, Nolan made his announcement.

He made it to Herrera, in the Thread’s corridor, during one of the brief passages between his quarters and the galley that had been his only form of movement for eleven weeks. He had not attended the debriefing. He had not spoken to the station crew. He had not left the ship. He stood in the corridor in the amber light of emergency systems that had become the ship’s only illumination months ago, and he told the captain he would not continue to Earth.

“I’m requesting permission to remain at Viridis,” he said. His voice was quiet — not the careful quiet of a man choosing his words, but the reduced volume of a man who had been speaking to no one for so long he had lost the habit of projection. “On the surface. The research station has berthing. I’ve already contacted their commander.”

Herrera looked at him. The look lasted longer than any exchange they had shared since the observation bay, since the number on the display, since Adaeze’s five words and the silence that followed. Herrera’s face showed the same thing it always showed — the controlled, level architecture of a man who processed everything and revealed only what was necessary — but something moved behind it, briefly, the way a current moves beneath ice.

“Why.”

The stated reason came first, as stated reasons do: the network could be studied from the nearest node. Viridis was the closest seeded world to an active Lacework junction. The research station had instrumentation. There was work to be done.

The real reason sat behind the stated reason the way a body sits behind a shadow, and Herrera saw it, and Nolan knew he saw it, and neither of them named it. Nolan could not face Earth. Could not ride a transport into the Sol system and walk through an airlock into a world that knew what he had done. Could not sit in a debriefing room and answer questions under the gaze of people who would look at him with the flat, settled knowledge of what he was. Could not walk through any corridor, any city, any room where the families of the crew might be — the old men who had once been Herrera’s boys, the aging wife who had waited, the colleagues and children and grandchildren of people whose decades he had stolen. Could not stand in the same gravity well as a seventy-six-year-old woman named Ife and meet her eyes.

Herrera did not object. He did not approve. He said, “I’ll note it in the log,” and turned and walked away, and the corridor swallowed the sound of his boots, and Nolan stood in the amber light of his own ship and understood that the captain’s indifference was the final verdict — not punishment, not absolution, but the withdrawal of attention from something that no longer required it. He had been weighed. He had been found. And the man who had weighed him had moved on to the work of bringing the remaining crew home, which was the only work that had ever mattered, and which did not include him.

The others learned in the way things are learned aboard a small ship: through absence, through glances exchanged over recycled coffee. Nolan was not coming home. Whether this was penance or cowardice or the last self-serving calculation of a man who had always been better at choosing destinations than facing consequences was a question no one asked aloud, because the crew had finished with Nolan Cade the way a body finishes with a fever — not by defeating it but by surviving it.

Adaeze did not look at him — had not looked at him since the observation bay. Her hand moved to the letter in her pocket; then she returned to the station’s biological archives and did not comment. Maren walked past his quarters without slowing, tablet under her arm, topology sketches in the margins; the door she had closed was closed. Yuki noted his absence from the transport manifest the way she would note a component removed from a schematic — clinically, adjusting the system to account for the change.

Only Ren paused.

On the morning of departure, the five crew members were boarding the transport. Nolan stood at the junction where the station corridor met the docking arm, as if he had come to watch them go or had simply run out of places to stand that were not a farewell. The others passed him the way you pass a landmark you have decided not to visit. Ren stopped and looked at him — not forgiveness, not hatred, but the recognition that the man in the corridor had chosen the loneliest death in the history of the species. Not the death of the body. The death of proximity. The slow, permanent exile from every person who had ever understood you, carried out by the man himself, because the alternative was to face a seventy-six-year-old woman and say, I am the reason your mother grew old without hers. The look lasted three seconds. Then Ren turned and walked on, and the docking corridor received him, and behind him Nolan watched five people leave him for the last time and did not lift a hand, because nothing about this was temporary, and the distance he had chosen was the kind that did not close.

The transport’s engines fired. The docking clamps released. Viridis Station fell away — the wheel-and-spoke silhouette diminishing against the green world below, the planet where life had been seeded by an intelligence older than the sun, the first garden, the place where the story had begun to become the story it became.

Below, on the surface, somewhere near the research station’s landing pads, a man was beginning the rest of his life 42,000 light-years from home. The man who had spent his entire existence trying to close the distance between himself and the unreachable had finally reached the unreachable, and the cost was that the reachable — the human, the near, the people who had once sat beside him and trusted him and called him brilliant — had become the thing he could not close the distance to. The symmetry was perfect. The symmetry was cruel. The universe, or the Gardeners, or the simple mechanics of consequence, had arranged it with the precision of a parable, and whether Nolan appreciated the geometry of his own exile was a question the green world did not answer.

Above, in the transport’s forward cabin, five people sat in a quiet that was different from the silence of the Thread — lighter, thinner, missing a specific weight that had been part of the architecture for so long that its removal changed the way the remaining structure balanced. They did not discuss Nolan. They had finished discussing Nolan weeks ago, or months ago, or in the observation bay when the number appeared on the display — the exact moment varied by crew member, but the finishing was unanimous and complete. What remained was the journey. One transit. One wormhole. The 97 AU mouth and the Sol system on the other side, and beyond it a planet that had aged a lifetime around them and was, even now, receiving their data and their names and the news that the dead were coming home.

Herrera opened his journal. He uncapped the pen he had carried from Ceres. He wrote a single line — the crew manifest for the final leg, five names where there had been six — and closed the cover. Palm flat. The soft click.

The transport aligned with the wormhole mouth. The stars of Viridis wheeled past the viewport — alien constellations, a sky that belonged to no one’s childhood, a sky that one man had chosen over the sky he was born under because the sky he was born under contained the faces of the people he had hurt.

Zero resonance coupling. Clean crossing.

They went home.