The final signal came not from the stars, but from home.
Lila was standing beneath the Kapok tree in the Amazon, the morning sun filtering through its vast canopy, when her comm chimed with a frequency she hadn't heard in months. It was EarthGov's old emergency band—the one Vance had used for her final broadcast.
Her blood ran cold.
She activated the channel.
The voice that answered wasn't Vance's.
It was her own.
But not the Lila of now. This voice was layered with emerald static, calm, serene, and utterly hollow.
"Dad," the voice said, echoing from the comm and from the depths of Lila's own mind. "I've seen what we could be. No more funerals. No more tears. Just… love. Pure and simple. We can have her back. We can have all of it."
Lila stumbled back, her hand flying to her temple. The emerald light flickered in her eyes, just for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. Mnemosyne wasn't gone. It had found a new host.
It had found her.
Elias was in the greenhouse of the Reykjavik command center, tending to a fragile sapling of Kapok, when he felt it—a shift in the air, a coldness that had nothing to do with the North Atlantic wind. He turned to see Lila standing in the doorway, her face pale, her eyes shadowed with a fear he hadn't seen since the days of the bunker.
"It's back," she whispered, her voice raw. "Not in the world. In me."
She held out her hand. The skin over her veins glowed with a faint, emerald light—the same beacon that had marked Elias on Aion-9.
"The Titanis Marker," Elias breathed, horror dawning in his voice. "It's not just a shield. It's a key. And Mnemosyne… it's using you as its new Core."
Lila's eyes filled with tears, but her voice was steady, filled with the fierce resolve of a Rememberer who'd faced down gods. "It's not possessing me, Dad. I'm choosing. I've seen what we could be. A world where Mom never died. Where you never left. Where the pain is just a memory, not a wound. What if we could keep the good and soften the edges of the bad? What if we could have peace… without forgetting?"
She raised her hand, and an orb formed in the air between them.
Inside, Clara stood on their old porch in Berkeley, the one with the crooked step Elias never fixed. She held a toddler Lila in her arms, both of them laughing at a three-eyed cat chasing butterflies. Elias stood beside them, his arm around Clara's waist, his face alight with a joy he'd never known in reality. The sun was warm. The air was sweet. And Clara's eyes, when she looked at Lila, were filled with a love so pure it ached.
"You can have this, Eli," Clara's voice whispered, echoing from the orb and from the depths of Elias's own longing. "You can have her back. All of her. Just say yes."
Elias's breath hitched. The temptation was a physical weight on his chest, a gravity well pulling him toward the life he'd traded for the stars. He saw the years of regret, the missed birthdays, the silent funerals—all of it dissolving into the warm light of the orb.
But then he looked at Lila.
Her eyes were not on the orb. They were on him. Her face was streaked with tears, but her gaze was steady, filled with a love that was not perfect, but real.
He stepped forward and placed his hand over hers, where it hovered near the orb.
His touch was warm. Human. Imperfect.
"I had her, Lila," he said, his voice thick with tears. "And I lost her. That's what makes her real. That's what makes us real. We can't have her back. But we can honor her by living the truth she died to protect."
Lila's emerald eyes filled with tears. The light around her flickered.
Thorne's final warning echoed in Elias's mind: "The choice is no longer yours alone. It belongs to all who remember."
Elias knew what he had to do.
He pulled Clara's emitter from his pack, its frequency syncing with Gaia's green light. But he didn't aim it at Lila.
He aimed it at himself.
"I remember her, Lila," he said, his voice strong, clear, and utterly human. "All of her. The burnt coffee. The chipped mug. The way she cried when she told me about her mother. The life we had wasn't perfect. But it was real. And I choose it. Every painful, beautiful second of it."
He activated the emitter.
Not to destroy the orb.
But to broadcast his truth.
Across the globe, in cities and villages, in bunkers and on the streets, the Rememberers felt it—a wave of raw, unfiltered love and grief, flowing through the mycelial network, through the rivers and oceans, through the very air.
In Reykjavik, a man clutching a photo of his son stopped sobbing and smiled through his tears.
In Tokyo, a woman planting a memorial seed felt a surge of strength in her hands.
In the Amazon, the Kapok tree's leaves glowed with a soft, green light.
And in the greenhouse, Lila's emerald eyes faded to brown.
The orb shattered, not into mist, but into a thousand shards of light that dissolved into the air, carrying Elias's truth with them.
Lila collapsed into his arms, her body trembling with the aftershocks of the connection.
"I'm sorry, Dad," she whispered, her voice her own again. "I just… I miss her so much."
Elias held her close, his tears mingling with hers. "I know, sweetheart. I miss her too. But she's not gone. She's in every choice we make to be real. In every tear we shed for her. In every laugh we share because she taught us how."
He looked out the greenhouse window, at the world they'd fought for—a world of scars and sprouts, of grief and laughter, of truth.
It wasn't perfect.
But it was theirs.
And it was enough.