Kara stared down at the pages splayed across the table, trying—and failing—to concentrate. After everything that had happened, focus felt impossible. Crying in front of Teorin was bad enough. If she couldn’t translate something before nightfall, she’d feel completely useless.

  She forced herself to breathe and tried again. Across the room, Teorin was still asleep, sprawled uncomfortably in another booth. She couldn’t imagine sleeping there, but he was apparently tired enough not to care.

  Kara studied him for a moment, curiosity creeping in. How had he even gotten involved in this? He couldn’t be much older than her, and yet here he was—dead father, arsonist brother, and on a classified Novem mission. Just what had pulled him into this mess?

  A chime sounded.

  Kara jumped. Her hands clenched against the table, but it was just the shop bell for the door. She held her breath.

  Then voices.

  Kara listened, straining to hear. John was speaking. His tone was casual. Friendly. She exhaled slowly, forcing her fingers to unclench. This waiting was awful. Maybe Teorin had the right idea, but they couldn’t both sleep.

  She rubbed her arms, glanced toward the hall to the front, but all she could see was empty shop. Still, her pulse took a long time to settle.

  Kara turned back to the pages, forcing herself to focus. The page in front of her was one of the ones Jeron had claimed came from a book. They were just copies, but even so, this wasn’t standard paper. Some other material.

  The text was ancient. Old Aralinian. A dead language.

  They had no idea what it had sounded like, but scholars had reconstructed a rough system. Semi-alphabetic. Each character stood for a group of consonant and vowel sounds, a syllable per character.

  Some of the words she recognized. Others she didn’t. That was the problem. This wasn’t going to be fast.

  At least part of the document seemed to be a scientist’s logbook. Many pages held diagrams of plants, each carefully labeled. From what Kara could tell, the author was tracking some kind of botanical experiment. Not immediately useful. But if it documented terraforming? That could still be important.

  Kara sighed and flipped through more pages. There had to be something else here. Novem’s computer had flagged this as significant. She just had to figure out why.

  She scanned for anything related to space travel. Twenty pages in, her eyes snagged on a diagram.

  Her breath caught. Her hands froze on the edge of the page. Not plants this time.

  A figure. A human figure.

  Kara’s mind raced. A human. Here. On Aralin before the Atalanta. That wasn’t possible.

  They’d always assumed the colonists were the first. All archaeological evidence pointed to that being true. But this…

  This was a picture. Not speculation. Not hypothesis.

  A record.

  Kara’s pulse hammered. Novem didn’t need her to translate this. Jeron hadn’t mentioned it. Why? Why hadn’t they gone public? This was a monumental discovery.

  She stared at the image, a knot forming in her stomach. Something wasn’t right. She needed answers. Kara’s gaze flicked to Teorin.

  No. Not yet. She’d figure out what was up with this image first.

  Then she’d wake him up.

  ***

  Teorin woke to someone nudging his foot. He groaned and tried to sit up, only to slam his shoulder into something solid. His eyes flew open. Kara stood in front of him, arms crossed.

  It took a moment to remember why he’d passed out on a bench in an ice cream shop instead of a real bed. He collapsed back against the bench, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. His whole body ached. He needed an actual bed before his spine permanently twisted into the shape of a table.

  He groaned. “Is it dark already?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then why am I awake?”

  Silence.

  Teorin sighed and forced himself upright, carefully avoiding the table this time.

  Kara wasn’t even looking at him. Her gaze was fixed on the wall, expression calculated but unnerved, like she was working through an equation and didn’t like the answer. If she wasn’t even going to acknowledge him, why wake him up?

  “Hello? Kara? Did something happen?”

  Her eyes flicked to him, focusing. “Nothing happened. At least, not recently. It’s been quiet, but…” She shivered. “I found something in the documents.”

  “Really?” That was good news. If these pages actually held something that could get them off-planet, then all of this insanity would be worth it. But Kara looked unnerved, not excited. His stomach tightened. “Is it bad?”

  “Sort of.” Kara exhaled. “How much do you know about Torolt? About Old Aralin?”

  Teorin shrugged. “Not as much as I should, considering I work for an archaeology company. Just that it’s a bunch of alien ruins.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Kara nodded. “Right. With an emphasis on alien. We’ve always thought there were no humans here. Mainly because all the door handles, counters, and architecture are the wrong height. And the art, it mostly depicts a reptilian species. Bipedal, but definitely not human.”

  “And this matters why?”

  Kara set a page on the table. Then another. The first was a hand. A human hand. The second—

  “That…” Teorin squinted. “That looks a lot like a human.”

  A figure, drawn with alien characters scrawled below it.

  “Yes, it does.” Kara’s voice was carefully even. “Look at the edges.”

  Teorin examined the lines framing the images. Squiggling. Uneven. Kara laid down a third page. Another hand, but this one was scaled.

  Once all three images sat side by side, the pattern jumped out. The squiggled lines were only present on the human hand and human figure, though they looked a little different on each. The reptilian hand? No lines.

  Teorin’s stomach dropped. It wasn't just some weird art style. “Is that supposed to be pulsing?”

  Kara shrugged. “I think it’s some kind of luminance. It’s not super clear. Could be depicting either, but it’s definitely showing some kind of wave.”

  Teorin exhaled. That was… a lot. “So, you’re saying a human was here. Before us. And they had… abilities? An affinity?”

  Kara nodded. “That’s exactly what it looks like.” She hesitated, gaze flicking toward the next page in her stack. “And I’m pretty sure there was more than one human.”

  Something about her tone made Teorin’s skin prickle.

  Kara met his eyes. “I don’t think they were here willingly.”

  His blood went cold. “Why?” he asked.

  Kara slid another page forward. This one had no pictures, just writing. “Whoever wrote this… they weren’t speaking of humans as equals.” Kara’s jaw tightened. “This particular human seems more like a slave, and I’d guess the others were too.”

  Teorin stared at her. “That’s illegal.”

  Kara rolled her eyes. “On most planets, yes. But we’re talking about centuries ago. Long before the Atalanta ever came to Aralin. The slave trade was alive and well back then. It didn’t matter what species you were. If you were sentient, you were currency.”

  Teorin’s chest felt tight. “So, why are you so sure these humans were slaves?”

  Kara grimaced. “Because I read the next few pages.”

  She flipped to another passage, fingers tensing against the paper. “Whoever wrote this was trying to figure out why the human developed these strange abilities when they didn’t, but when they couldn’t get answers…” She swallowed. “They resorted to harsher means.”

  Teorin felt sick. “Harsher means?”

  Kara didn’t flinch. “Human experimentation.”

  Silence.

  Teorin’s skin crawled. Was that why Kara had looked so unnerved? Only now that she was saying it out loud, she didn’t look unnerved. She looked distracted.

  “That’s…” Teorin shuddered. “That’s horrible. You know that, right?”

  Kara blinked like she was snapping back into the conversation. “Of course, it’s horrible! I read it. I sat there feeling sick through the whole thing.” She exhaled sharply. “But what can we do about it now? This is ancient history. Whoever these people were, they died centuries ago.”

  Right. It was still awful. He pushed the thought away. “So, there were humans here.” Teorin took a breath, trying to focus. “What does that mean for us?”

  Kara exhaled, flipping a page between her fingers. “I’m not sure yet. There are a lot of implications. Technically, I think I just upended a core belief of the second-largest religion on Aralin.”

  Teorin blinked. “What?”

  “The Keepers believe the ancient Aralinari transcended, and that affinities are vestiges of that transcendence. But if only the human slaves had affinities…” She trailed off. “That throws a bit of a wrench in that idea.”

  Teorin just stared. No, that definitely wasn’t what he’d been asking about. “Are you a Keeper?”

  “No.”

  He tilted his head. So, why…?

  “Oh, you meant you, not ‘us’ as in society,” Kara said, finally catching his expression.

  “Yeah. Not so much a philosopher.”

  “Right. Well, there’s more, and I think this part will actually interest you.” She pulled another sheet from her stack. “There’s a kind of autopsy report a few pages later, which—yes, horrible—but the author mentions taking samples to a central lab. Apparently, it was some kind of sample library. And…”

  She tapped the page. “It was underground.”

  Teorin’s breath left him slowly.

  An underground lab.

  That was huge. If it was intact, if anything inside had survived the bursts, that could be a game-changer. Information, alien tech… Maybe even something they could use. But confirming the existence of a lab wasn’t the same as finding it.

  “Any idea where it is?” Teorin asked.

  Kara pursed her lips. “That’s where it gets interesting. No map, of course. That would’ve been too much to hope for, but the author was a botanist,” Kara explained. “They mention a certain plant that only grows near the lab.”

  She flipped to another sketch: a spindly bush with star-shaped blossoms, each marked by an odd, wheel-like center.

  “It’s not an exact location,” she admitted. “It may not even be unique to one place. But they reference collecting samples near the lab. And…” She hesitated.

  Teorin nodded. “It’s more than we’ve ever had.”

  Kara exhaled. “Yeah.” She tapped her fingers against the pages. “There’s still a lot more. Maybe something more concrete. I haven’t even gotten to the part about space travel yet, but the initial computer translation suggested there’s a lot of that later.”

  Teorin let the weight of it sink in. If this was just the beginning, those pages might be more valuable than they even realized.

  “This is going to change everything,” Teorin said quietly, staring at the pages like they might burn a hole through the table.

  Kara nodded. “Majorly. On multiple fronts. You might not care that there were humans here with affinities, but in the scholarly community? That’s a bombshell.”

  She bit her lip, gaze flicking downward. Still preoccupied.

  Teorin frowned. “Did you find something else?”

  Kara shook her head.

  A lie? Maybe. Something was still nagging at her. Before he could press, footsteps echoed through the hall. Teorin’s shoulders tensed.

  A man appeared at the entrance, the shop owner. Teorin had forgotten his name, but from this angle, he noticed the luminance tattoo spiraling up the man’s bicep—a ship breaking through waves. The water even foamed and crashed, subtly shifting as if caught in an endless storm.

  Teorin had seen plenty of luminance tattoos, but maintaining a moving one like that subconsciously? That took practice.

  The man eyed them both. “You asked for a heads-up. Sun’s going down if you need to leave.”

  Kara nodded. “Right. Thanks, John. We’ll head out in a minute.” She hesitated. “And thanks for letting us stay here.”

  John nodded, then turned back to the front.

  Teorin had slept longer than he’d realized. His internal clock was completely off. “Time to go?” he asked.

  Kara passed him the pile of pages. She glanced toward the door. “Think there’s anyone out there looking for us?”

  He shoved the papers into his backpack with the wing jacket. “I’m sure of it. If they were willing to burn down a building, they’re willing to stick around.”

  Kara’s expression tightened. “You said your brother is with the da Silvas,” she said. “What’s their stake in all this? Why even go after the pages? The da Silvas don’t seem like your secretive mystery group. Their whole goal is getting off-planet.”

  Teorin frowned. That… was a good question.

  The pages were valuable, sure. But was it worth all this? The arson, the mercenaries, the risk? Solaterra was Novem’s corporate rival, but this didn’t seem like just a power move.

  “I don’t actually know,” Teorin admitted. But whatever it was, it was more than just escaping Aralin. And that scared him. He shook his head. “We should talk about this later.”

  “Right.” Kara checked the clock. “Lev should be at the tower soon.”

  They headed toward the front. Kara paused at the counter to speak with John again, voice low.

  Teorin continued to the door. Through the glass, he could see the last sliver of sunset burning against the cityscape. It was a sharp contrast to the forests he’d left behind two nights ago. Before Jeron had sent him to Trevor’s outpost. Before everything flipped upside down.

  He glanced back toward the counter. Kara was still talking, too quiet to hear. Was it just privacy? Or was she still deciding whether to trust him?

  Teorin clenched his jaw. If that was the case…

  This was going to be a very long night.

  [Lev] I have another book for you.

  [Archivist] Another!? Already?

  [Lev] What, you don’t like consistency? I’m being reliable. Responsible. Basically a model tenant.

  [Teorin] You? Responsible? That’s new.

  [Archivist] Lev, we've discussed this. Books are not rent.

  [Lev] But my rent is follows. Cross referencing gets follows. Plus, promoting stories is community service. I’m practically saving civilization one swap at a time.

  [Archivist] Perhaps, but.. This is not preservation.

  [Lev] It’s future-proofing! If humanity goes under, at least they’ll know what we were reading.

  [Teorin] Right because if humanity goes under, everyone's first question will be: I wonder what Lev was reading?

  [Lev] Not yet. But give it time.