Anka Gajewska, a seventeen-year-old apprentice, fishes for space debris on the Collector-7 ship, orbiting the Earth eight times a day. Through portholes, she sees patches of clouds and dark ocean wounds, full of dead satellites. Her favourite tool, the Hook drone, can hook loops on spinning panels like a spider. Today, however, they're not catching ordinary junk, but something that transmits a pulse in archaic modulation. For the past year, she has been learning to read trajectories like melodies, recognising danger by the colour of the signal. The signal skips like a heart after a run, AM on a frequency no one here has used for a long time. Anka switches the scanner to voice mode, and a deaf, stripped whisper comes out of the speaker. It's her own voice, suddenly older, maliciously calm: "Don't open hatch twelve, whatever happens." Commander Grajewski merely furrows his brow, and Hak registers a glare from the whirring, scratched box. The box makes its way to cargo bay two, where the air smells of grease and cold metal. It has the logo of a long-closed flight programme, redrawn with an arrow leading towards hatch twelve. The procedures say: report, seal, wait for instructions, but the procedures don't sound like yourself. Anka plugs the box into an isolated port, firing up an emulator that translates old telemetry into readable numbers. Coordinates from outside the orbital wormholes appear on the screen, oddly close to the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon. On top of this, the counter counts down silent microbursts, as if someone is tapping the hull to the rhythm of prime numbers. The voice returns, distorted with noise: "If you can hear that, I already know I made a mistake." Hatch twelve lights up on the panel with a red circle that hasn't been lit for months. The commander calls out a controlled alarm, ordering everyone to stay at their posts without going near the cargo bay. Anka coughs into her helmet as ice grows in her throat, exactly like the day her dad crashed. If the voice is hers, somewhere further down the line there is someone who knows how the story began. She kneels at the console, unplugs the safety from Hook's socket and sends the drone under hatch twelve. The camera image shows frost on the mount, and the field meter goes crazy like a rocking compass. The tapping returns, longer, then shorter, stacking into 2, 3, 5, 7, 11. The panel hisses, displaying her name, and the hatch lock jumps of its own accord, as if someone has entered a code. At the same moment, Hook moves away violently, and a cold, impossible light flashes behind the steel.