The Patient Wren had surveyed for eleven turns when it found the world every settler in the Reach dreams of.

Dessa Oru, the youngest reader on the team, kept the scans open on her wrist long after she should have closed them. Seventy percent water. Moving plates. A star that had not flickered in four billion years.

“Perfect,” said Reckoner Varga, leaning over Dessa’s shoulder. “Water, warmth, a good heavy moon to keep the seasons steady. If you sat down to design a world for living things, you’d draw this one.”

Mars, 2057

The descent took seven minutes, and for every one of them, Commander Amara Okonkwo forgot to breathe.

Below the lander Perseverance II, the north polar plains of Mars rolled out like a rust-colored ocean, streaked with the white of ancient ice. It was the year 2057, nearly ninety years after the first boots touched the Moon, and a decade after the lunar colony had grown from a handful of domes into a proper town. Humanity was finally about to stand on another world.

The midday sun hung over the Levant like an anvil, baking the cracked earth into fine white dust. Through the shimmer of the heat haze, a heavily guarded convoy rolled along a deserted trade road, bound for the coastal fortress at Acre. Iron-rimmed wheels groaned beneath the weight of three sturdy carriages, each packed with iron-bound chests of gold bullion being transferred from an inland Templar vault. Surrounding the cargo was a squad of twelve armored knights, their white surcoats bearing the crimson cross, swords glinting in the blinding glare.

Sublevel Four

Dr. Elias Verhoeven had not seen the sun in eleven days, and he had stopped noticing. Down on Sublevel Four of the Halcyon Institute, the only light that mattered was the pale blue glow of the incubation chamber and the thin green line of a heartbeat on the monitor.

Eight years. Two hundred and six trials. He kept every name in his head. Marcus, whose heart simply stopped. Ines, whose muscles tore themselves from the bone. Some volunteers had come for the money. Others had come for the promise: a human being with no ceiling. Strength, speed, intellect, perception, every one at its maximum, all at once.

There was no courtroom.

He had expected scales. A bridge. Fire somewhere off to the left. There was only a floor that was not a floor, a light with no source, and the sudden, total knowledge that he was known.

He tried to speak. His mouth would not open.

So his hands spoke instead.

His right hand went first, in his own voice, and it talked about the money — the small amounts, then the larger ones, then the signature that was not his. His feet named the doors they had carried him through. His skin testified last, and that was the worst of it, because skin remembers what the mind agrees to forget.

The first one arrived on a Tuesday. Subject line: Re: Sunday long run — bring the gazebo poles.

I don’t run. I have never in my life owned a gazebo. I marked it as spam and forgot about it.

Four more came that week. Then a photograph: nine people in reflective vests standing in a car park under a sky the colour of wet cement, and underneath it, one line.