Bor looks back from her perch, right on the silo’s lip. “You get used to it.”

We turn to follow her gaze, past Hail’s borrowed Decatur, and Salt’s silhouette behind it. “To crawling around in the dark?” he asks. “Or to the chance that your machine will lose its mind?”

Bor offers a feathered shrug.

A little blip flows along the net; a confirmation that her files have been scrubbed and overwritten with static. “Bury as deep as you can.”

Hail replies with a confirmation of her own. “Records deleted.” Salt isn’t far behind.

But the Juno and I have to lie.

Decaturs can wipe whole memory sectors on command, steamroll times and places with junk and semirandom noise. Memory is what they call it, but it doesn’t have much to do with remembering. Their minds are empty vessels, waiting to be filled with feeds from their eyes, the movements of their internal compasses, the calculations that keep them moving.

We aren’t so lucky. The things we’ve done are part of us now. We could burn them away, cauterise the parts of ourselves that hold the thoughts, but there’d be collateral. We’d lose more than just the things we chose to forget.

We send a message just like Hail’s, just like Salt’s and Bor’s and exactly what you’d expect; a list of all the files we would have destroyed, with file-signatures and storage addresses to match. We still remember the path we took to get here, the checkpoints we cleared, and every little trick the survivors have to keep themselves safe.

If we were younger we’d have had to find a way to hide it all, but the memory is a tiny spark on a horizon that’s centuries-wide, and clouded with all of the dark thoughts we’ve had along the way. If the hollows take us, they’ll have to beat our nightmares before they can find anything worth remembering. If they can manage that, they’ll have to sort the things we’ve done from the things we’ve dreamt, and we’re not sure we could even do that ourselves.

The others don’t seem to catch the lie, but they wouldn’t. We really did delete a log. In fact, we took an entire sector and wiped it clean, filled the empty space with the strangest sounds we could imagine.

We deleted a log, it just wasn’t ours.

Hail’s Spirit still rides with us, but we haven’t touched anything she’d need to hear it in her head again. A complete mind-state rests somewhere in a Wolf-issue server, locked up and left to bother Andrade’s technicians. A ghost copy is still plugged into the side of our cockpit. It lives inside us, still missing a body. Now missing a few hours in the Eye-light and a few mindless observations as it flew, buried in noise, extinguished forever.