The Cell opened like a coffin. Wesley suspected that was the engineer’s first draft and nobody had argued.
Wesley climbed in, the bar tucked beneath his pillow. Against protocol. Against every regulation. But he couldn’t leave it in his pack, couldn’t let it out of reach. It pulsed against his skull, warm and patient.
“All is well,” his aunt said from the doorway, already half-turned toward her own Cell, the phrase worn smooth from eight thousand repetitions.
All is deeply concerning. All is mysterious and forbidden and statistically likely to get me recycled, processed, and cheerfully redistributed as someone’s breakfast protein. All is extremely not well, but the script only had one line.
“All is well,” he replied. The words came out flat. Rehearsed. The same words his aunt had said. The same words everyone said. The Partisant had reduced goodnight to a loyalty oath and nobody had noticed.
The seal hissed. Leather pressed against his back. The chemical sweetness coated his throat before he could resist.
The hum started. 7.83 hertz, vibrating against his skull. The forgetting frequency. His mother’s voice surfaced through the spreading numbness:
Dreams are how the soul speaks to itself. The Cells silence that voice.
He’d never dreamed. Not once. Neither had anyone he knew.
But tonight, as the void pulled him under, something was different.
The bar pulsed beneath his pillow. The warmth spread through the leather, through his red hair, into his skull. And somewhere in the chemical darkness, a shape emerged.
A woman’s face. Pale as frost. Eyes closed. Tubes running from her arms.
Mom.
Temperature readout visible: negative 196 degrees Celsius. Liquid nitrogen range. She wasn’t dead. She was frozen. Sleeping. Waiting.
And behind her, through a viewport, he could barely see the curve of something blue.
Earth.
He was seeing Earth from above. From a moon. His mother was on a moon, frozen in ice and silence, and the planet they’d told him was dead hung in the darkness behind her like a promise.
[ENCRYPTED:Station designation Persephone-Seven.]
The vision shattered. Wesley’s eyes snapped open—but the Cell held him, the chemicals still flooding his system, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything but lie there with the afterimage burning behind his eyes.
Eight years. Eight years since they’d told him she was recycled. Eight years of believing she was gone, that he’d never see her face again except in failing memories.
But she wasn’t gone. She was waiting.
The bar pulsed beneath his pillow. Warm. Patient. A message sent across an impossible distance, from a mother to a son, breaking through the forgetting frequency that was supposed to erase everything during sleep.
His chest ached with something he couldn’t name. Loss and hope tangled together, suffocating him.
Wesley’s eyes closed. His lips barely moved.
“She’s alive.”
The words hung in the chemical darkness. True. Impossible. Everything.