I repeated this a dozen times. Bugs and watches, all one color. No amber cap. I dropped back to Aszerat. Every reflection, not just those in the residences, or in the energy corridor, or the cargo bays – had a single, square, amber-framed glimmer. I’d never thought twice about it since every one of the millions of reflections within Aszerat had the feature. Never did I suspect it was anything more than some default color scheme. Now, I was convinced that it was anything but. It felt genuine, as if it had been imprinted from direct experience. I flew back up the cord and punched open the lid like a drug addled space vampire startled awake from cryosleep.

“It’s a door!” I blurted across the deck.

I explained as best I could that, for whatever reason, the third prior hadn’t been able to imprint information about Aszerat in the same way as Bugs and Watches had during their lives. Naecia and Izairis, too, verified that they did not have anything but monochromatic reflections, through which the glimmers – though they both called them “moments” – were layered. I tried to articulate my feeling that this third person was somehow hamstrung in what they could get to stick. Almost like the act of imprinting had been done through effort rather than experience – except when it came to the location of the Chime. There was something more original or genuine about that glowing amber square on the endcap of every reflection... and I wasn’t entirely sure that it was because of any intent on the part of the imprinter. After all, it was my working hypothesis that they were trying to hide the Chime, not give it away.

Nevertheless, whatever quality we Stringers held for snooping around in the memories of our forebears had steered me to somewhere in the Blue Quadrant, and – if I was reading this unintentional hint correctly – it was somewhere up high, behind an amber door.

There were two cygies – eight Earth days – left before the earliest that the Timelance could arrive when we got to Aszerat. Obsessed, I’d gone back into the dredge again, pounding through the upper floors of the highest buildings in the city’s Fungal district until Naecia finally made me stop. The axon diadem showed my coherence plummeting each time I entered – a sign that my brain was finally wearing out. I hadn’t slipped the cord like Naecia, but I’d lost almost ten percent of whatever it was coherence measured. The dredge was no longer giving me anything new anyway. The trail had gone cold.