The signal didn't repeat.
That was the first unsettling thing.
The second was that no one else could trace it not even Damien's most advanced diagnostic sweeps. The frequency wasn't just hidden. It was hiding from the galaxy itself.
And yet, Elara had felt it. In her bones. Like a ripple from something buried far deeper than code.
"It's under the memory layer," Damien said, staring at his flickering console. "Under recursion. Like something carved beneath the software of the universe itself."
Nova paced the bridge, restless. "That's not a place. That's a myth. You're talking about pre-conscious echo theory. Thought that was all junk."
"It's not junk," Valen said grimly from the helm. "It's the reason Seed Zero was so afraid."
The silence that followed wasn't empty it was waiting.
They traced the distortion to a cold zone at the edge of the Revenant Drift—a starless pocket of black space where even quantum signatures decayed unnaturally fast.
