I lay in my childhood bed, sinking into the sheets. Wrapped up in the familiar sounds, and scents, and feel of the space, so real and absolute, I knew that everything that had come before had been a miserable dream. I’d dreamt Kystrom destroyed and my family dead and myself alone. I’d dreamt a strange starship and an ancient secret. But it had just been dreams.

Downstairs, I heard Brigid’s voice raised with playful indignation, counterpoint to the lower tones of my father teasing and my mother laughing.

But no. To forget was the cruelest thing. My mother, my father, Brigid, all of Itaka. They were dead, and I remembered.

Downstairs, the talking ceased. A dark light fell on the room, dimming the sun to silver. I pushed aside the covers and set feet on silent floorboards.

With a nightmare’s certitude, my feet carried me to where I needed to go. I moved like a train on a track, no stopping, returning, diversions possible. I walked across the hall of my parents’ old house and halted before the door to Brigid’s bedroom.

LAB 17, it said on the door, scrawled in artful, girlish calligraphy on a piece of paper that I remembered saying “Brigid”.

That was funny. If this whole thing hadn’t been horrifying beyond measure, I might be able to laugh at the AI’s weird failure to integrate memory and dream. LAB 17 written in swirls and curlicues using sparkly pink pen. Honestly.

I pushed open the door.

Brigid lay where I had seen her last, a sprawl across the floorboards, facing the far wall as if she’d been running through the door when she’d died, fleeing whoever killed her. Her blonde hair was a spill around her head, soaked through with red like veins in an egg. I moved towards her body as I had moved towards her body almost ten years ago, and though I wanted desperately to do anything but this, I could not stop myself from crouching at her side and rolling her body over.

But when she rolled over her face was intact, whole and untouched. She blinked at me out of clear blue eyes and when I sat back she sat up.

I stared at my sister’s face for a long time, trying to make it make sense in my head. But I could not remember all her features precisely any longer, and I remembered her being the same age as me. But Brigid had been sixteen when she died, and I was twenty-five; she should look like a child in my eyes, and I could not make memory and reason match.

Brigid said, “What’s that in your spine?”

“It’s an implant,” I told her. “A leash.”

“It’s not supposed to be there?”

I shook my head. “It’s the only reason I went looking for the Philosopher Stone on this cursed ship.”

She raised her brows. That wasn’t Brigid’s mannerism, though. It was Lieutenant Gupta’s. “You could use the Stone to save me.”