The Extra's Rise

Erebus opened the bead in a room that didn't exist.

He called it a cold pocket: a slice of his Necropolis leaned just out of phase with Luna Base, all black stone and quiet pressure, no air to carry a spark if the thing chose to die messy. I stood with him at the threshold; the rest watched through a pane that was glass only because people like seeing glass.

"Gently," I said.

"I am bone," he replied, amused. "I do nothing else."

His hand was a cage of ivory. The bead hung within—sleek, faceted, the color of old smoke. Reika's two-letter No still clung to it like frost.

"Valeria?" I asked under my breath.

"Wrong tool for hitting," she murmured from my hip. "Right tool for a line if he needs one."

Erebus tapped one facet. A seam appeared that hadn't been there, as if the bead remembered how to be honest. He slid a thin splinter of bone into the seam and turned it like a key. The bead sighed without sound and unfolded into three petals.

Inside, it wasn't gears. It was a lattice. Fine as hair, redder than blood, arranged like a web that had learned geometry and then fallen in love with it.

Cecilia leaned closer to the pane. "That's not ours."

"It's not human," Rose said, already reading the pattern the way she reads contracts: forwards, backwards, until the lies are lonely.

Kade grunted, fingers tight on his tablet. "If that touched the belt—"

"It didn't," I said. "Reika stopped it. Tell me what it wanted."

Erebus lifted the open bead and let thin light pass through the web. It refracted in ways I didn't like. Rachel's hand hovered near the Redeemers' lantern at her belt without touching it.

"It's a mapper," Rose said. "Not of position—of behavior. It doesn't care where our stones sit. It cares how they respond."

"Stimulus, response, signature," Seraphina said. "Copy, then exploit."

"Cheating," Kade muttered.

"Efficient," Cecilia corrected.

Erebus pinched the web at three points. It sang. Not sound. Intent. The same wrong taste I'd felt when it licked our field.

"Can you break it without telling its friends?" I asked.

"Naturally," he said, and his fingers made a small, final motion. The web didn't burn. It became dust that refused to settle. He gathered the dust into a sealed bone ampoule and wrote a sigil on it that meant later in a sharp, dead language. "I will distill whatever will not be rude to touch."

Kade exhaled. "So they're looking for how we bend."

"We just taught them we can be polite and firm," Rose said. "Good first lesson."

"Second lesson," Reika added, eyes on me. "We change the tune."

"We randomize response within safe tolerances," I said. "No two pillars bounce the same twice. Nothing to predict."

Kade's mouth twitched. "I can live with that."

"Make it true," I told him.

He left already writing.

Rachel glanced at the pane one more time. "There was a flavor in that web I don't want near our people."

"Lysantra's mark," I said softly.

Her jaw set. "I'll lay a Purelight wash on the belt nodes the Redeemers touch. It won't purge what isn't there, but it will keep it from liking us."

"Do it," I said.

We broke from the pocket with a plan and went straight to work. Elias spun up a short, plain bulletin—non-human probe intercepted; field unchanged; procedural notes appended—and sent it as a courtesy to the five capitals. Replies arrived with their usual personalities: South's tidy thanks; North's simple receipt; West's skull and a thumbs-up; East's hope for tea; Central's footnote about orbital junk our sweep would catch while we were at it.

"Stage three?" Elias asked.

"Polar crowns," I said.

Kade reappeared as if summoned by the words. "North first. Bedrock at Peary is honest. South can sulk until we teach it manners."

"Redeemers?" Rachel asked.

"Corners, caches, quick lanes," I said. "Same as belt. No heroics."

Reika rolled her shoulders. "Outer ring at two-fifty."

Cecilia pulled her hood up like a thief. "Chaos test on your count."

Seraphina checked a new bundle of frost-etched flags. "Ice behaves if you ask it first."

Rose slid a thin folder into Elias's hand. "Ownership writ for the crowns. It prevents arguments we don't have time for."

I looked down the corridor toward the canteen. "Where's Stella?"

"Updating her triangle-truck math for polar loads," Rachel said, smiling despite the morning. "We'll bring her a rock."

We took the warp.

The north pole wasn't night. It was shadow that had forgotten day existed. The rim of Peary crater held a narrow band of light like a crown. Inside, the floor lay in cold the sun hadn't touched in a billion years.

"Beautiful," Seraphina breathed, and the word didn't fog.

The cold tried to take my breath through the suit. Redeemers set lanterns anyway; their soft suns carved islands out of the dark. Erebus's porters carried stone and spar; their steps didn't leave prints where he didn't want prints.

"Anchor there," Kade said, pointing to a ledge that looked like it had never moved. "If it argues, we listen."

"What do you need?" I asked him.

"A hole cut like a promise," he said.

"Valeria?" I asked.

"Straight," she said. "No flourish."

I drew a small, honest law into my hands—this line ends where I say—and cut without noise. The regolith parted like silk; the ice under it gleamed like old glass. I stopped where my bones told me the stone began and stepped back. Rachel laid Purelight in a thin wash over the exposed circle, not to warm it, but to convince it our hands were clean. Seraphina set her frost flags and listened. "Four centimeters left," she said. "There's a lip." I shaved the lip away. She nodded once.

Kade lowered the first crown-stone with a crane that wasn't there until Erebus decided it should be. It settled and hummed a tone only engineers love. Kade's shoulders finally dropped a finger-width.

"Next," he said.

We moved sunward along the rim. The second foundation sat half in shadow, half in the line of light. The ice complained when Reika brushed it with script; she stopped, frowned, and wrote in the air instead, a line of refusal that didn't touch the ground but taught it a courtesy.

"Better," she said, as if the crater had apologized.

Cecilia threw a soft, lying breeze across the lane to see if the flags wavered. They didn't, and she made a pleased noise at the back of her throat that usually means she's about to break a rule. I gave her a look. She winked and behaved.

At the third site, something under the crust had ideas about shifting. Seraphina felt it first—her palm flattened on the ground, her eyes narrowed. "Hollow," she said. "A long pocket. If we stamp too hard, it sighs."

"Erebus?" I asked.

He tilted his skull, listening. "A vein of emptiness," he agreed. "It would like to be held."

"Rachel," I said.

"On it," she answered, and wove a Purelight brace under the pocket, thin as thread, strong as will. It wasn't a wall. It was permission to stay, with the promise of hands if it forgot.

Kade set the stone. It accepted.

We paced the rim and laid the last crown block into the narrow band of sun. When it hummed, Valeria purred. She likes when jobs end where they began.

"Tie-in," Kade said, and I lifted my palm to the new pillar at the rim. The belt reached up to meet it, threads of gold rising out of shadow and light. The crown's hum found the belt's note and the whole thing became a chord you feel in your teeth.

"Teach me you can breathe," Kade whispered to rock, and it did.

"Chaos," he said without looking, and Cecilia obliged. The crown didn't flinch.

"Paradox," I said, and Rose folded a thumb of space along the join, then taught it to unknot itself. No drift. No hunger.

"Script," Reika said to the air, drew one curved line that meant Enough, and the crown learned the word.

Rachel pressed her palm to the stone one last time. "No residue," she said. "Redeemers can linger here without bringing the wrong home." She slid a small cache into a shadow and marked it with a tag only her lanterns know.

We stood for a moment in the cold that doesn't care and watched the crown settle into the world like it had always been part of it.

"South pole next," Kade said.

"After we let this sing for an hour," I answered. "Then we move."

His tablet chimed. Elias on the open band: "Courtesy replies all in. Central asks for a fifteen-minute window tomorrow to move a satellite without touching your lines."

"Tell them to send me the path," I said. "We'll leave them a lane."

I turned to go and caught sight of something at the edge of the light. Stella's name lit on my slate first, then a photo: three triangles labeled load paths and a note that said convex ok when sun low? I snapped a picture of the crown with Earth peeking over Peary's lip and sent approved. She sent back a sticker of a moon with a smile.

Erebus floated across the link from his cold pocket. "A footnote on your bead," he said.

"Tell me," I said.

"I found a whisper of story clinging to the dust," he said. "Not language. Desire. It wanted the belt to want to be touched again."

"Lysantra," Rachel said, very soft.

"It will not linger where I keep it," Erebus assured her. "I have a place for such things to grow lonely."

"Thank you," I said. "Burn what you must. Learn what you can."

"Always," he said, and closed the channel.

We placed the south crown in a crater that hated visitors and loved collapsing in neat, geologic decades. It took everything we'd learned in three days and a few things we hadn't known we knew. Seraphina's ice sang; Kade's hands were steady; Reika lied to a ridge until the ridge found it easier to behave; Cecilia taught a gust to go bully itself; Rachel convinced a seam of dust that today was not its day to remember gravity was a rumor. When the last stone hummed, Kade finally smiled without hiding it.

"Aegis Luna breathes in circles," he said.

"Then we go home," I said.

We didn't cheer. We packed with the same care it takes to close a book you love and mean to open tomorrow. Back at Tycho, crews ate, laughed too loud, looked five years younger. Elias put CROWNS: GREEN on the map and didn't hide the way he stared at those words.

I stepped out onto the Yard rim one last time. The belt hummed under my boots. The crowns held. Earth hung above like someone else's promise kept.

Valeria was quiet against my side until she wasn't. "We're making a shield," she said. "Not a stage."

"Good," I told her. "I hate stages."

"Liar," she said, warm, and fell still again.

A soft ping in my ear. Vyr. "We caught a second bead," she said. "Far-side. It saw nothing and died polite."

"Good," I said. Then, because honesty is its own shield: "There will be more."

"I know," she said. "We'll be here."

I sent one last round of plain words to the five capitals. Polar crowns set. Belt integrated. Two probes intercepted; neither returned. Aegis Luna stable under test. Replies came back like different kinds of weather. They felt like a world telling itself it could breathe.

We had work waiting on Earth—plans to build and enemies that would rather we didn't. But tonight, the moon held a line we'd drawn, and that was enough.

"Tomorrow," I said to no one and to everyone. "We start teaching it to fight."

The belt hummed under my boots like a promise.