The signal arrived before anyone agreed to listen for it. By the time the lattice translators caught the carrier wave, the message had already crossed seven realities and lost most of its sender behind it.

Vesna had spent three Solarae years inside the archive vault, sorting fragments that nobody else would touch. She liked the silence the way other people liked weather — as a thing that pressed against the skin and reminded you that you were small.

On the morning the transmission resolved, the vault's quantum needle began to tremble in a pattern she had only seen once before, in a sealed dossier marked with the Novum censor's burnt sigil. She placed her palm flat against the resonance panel. It was warm. It should not have been warm.

Somewhere, very far away, a voice that did not belong to her century said her name. Not the one her mother had given her. The other one. The one that had only ever existed on a world she had never been allowed to visit.

Outside, the moons were still in their measured procession. Earth — or what humanity now called Earth — had been a memory longer than most civilizations had been alive. And still, the archive insisted: the past was incoming.