On Lucidum, a lunar colony on Caligo, Lira, Kian, and Essi uncover a message that should not exist and a reply that arrives before anyone sends one.
The dome of Lucidum trembled in the silver pull of six moons, a constant reminder that Earth lay more than a thousand light-days away. Beneath the artificial sky, the colony glowed with cold screens, humming vents, and the thin, restless patience of people who had learned to live under glass.
Lira sat alone in the control room after curfew, her reflection hovering ghostlike over a holovision packed with security code. Radiation shielding lined the walls. The air tasted faintly metallic. Across the room, Kian hunched over a second console, tracing system logs with the kind of focus that looked like stubbornness from far away and obsession up close.
They were only supposed to be testing the colony’s weak points, the way they always did when the adults were asleep and the station ran quieter. A harmless game. A way to prove they understood Lucidum better than the engineers who built it.
Then Lira found the file.
It had no sender, no destination, no authorisation stamp, no reason to exist at all. Its metadata dated back to before the colony’s founding, before the first habitats were sealed, before anyone had set foot on Caligo. Inside were symbols she couldn’t parse and fragments of audio sliced so thin they sounded more like breathing than speech.
Kian leaned over her shoulder. "That isn't in the archive."
"I know." Lira scrubbed the recording back to the beginning and played it again.
A distorted whisper leaked through the speakers, rough with static. For one impossible second, it seemed to shape itself around their names.
Lira went still. "No," she said, though she wasn't sure what she was refusing.
The room had gone so quiet she could hear the power relay buzzing under strain. Then the door hissed open and Essi burst in, breathless, a portable decoder clutched in one hand.
"I got an alert from the network," she said. "Unusual activity. Something answered our signal before we sent it."
Lira turned toward her. "We didn't send anything."
Essi's face had gone pale. She lifted the decoder and pointed at the main monitor.
A line of text had appeared where nothing had been a moment before. Bright. Pulsing. Waiting.
ARE YOU READY TO RECEIVE A MESSAGE?
No one moved. Outside the dome, the six moons hung over Lucidum like watchful eyes, and Lira had the terrible feeling that whatever was on the other side of that question had already been looking back.