Three Knocks

The first three knocks came through a relay speaker connected to a circuit Sera had ordered isolated. The operator reached for mute; she caught his wrist, then released it when he flinched. 'Don't erase the route,' she said. 'Show me the original packet.' He looked past her at the clock.

The operator was nineteen. A battery burn crossed his wrist, and the last lift outage had forced him to carry emergency cells up six flights. The unacknowledged packet still waited on his screen.

“My sister's shift ends in twelve minutes,” he said. “If the district loses power again, she has to walk through the maintenance tunnels.”

Sera wanted to tell him that the relay mattered more than one family's route home. It did matter. The knocks had crossed a sealed boundary. But the operator was the person who would pay for the extra hour she needed to preserve the evidence.

Cael found the same three-pulse interval in an obsolete Continuance maintenance specification. It had once meant a remote process was requesting an identity-state handoff. That did not prove who was knocking now. It made the silence after the third pulse worse.

“Call her,” Sera said. “Use my channel. Then show me the original packet, not the copy your supervisor signed.”

He hesitated. “That gets him in trouble.”

“It might. It might get me in trouble too.” She moved her chair aside so he could reach the terminal. “I'm asking you to choose with the consequences in front of you.”

Outside the relay room, maintenance workers argued about whose shortened shift would pay for the new security checks. Sera wrote down the relay identifier by hand. The operator's sister had answered his call, but the district's power remained unstable; keeping him here still had a cost.

The packet carried almost no payload. The routing attempt had consumed enough reserve to keep a clinic awake for an hour. Someone was paying heavily to send three knocks.

Sera copied the raw packet to an isolated recorder with its microphone disconnected. She put the handwritten relay identifier inside her boot. Another copy on the compromised network would offer no protection.

The technician beside her asked whether they should tell the district operators. Sera thought of the night crews who would have to explain an unexplained shutdown to households already living by the minute. 'We tell them what we know,' she said. 'We don't tell them what we hope the knocks mean.' The technician took that as an instruction and, for once, did not ask her to make it sound reassuring.

Sera put the original capture on a write-once drive and sealed it with a physical tag. The duplicate went to the investigators. The original stayed with her. It was an old maintenance habit: never let the person who could authorize a repair be the only person who could prove the fault.

The first waveform had looked like a faulty relay: three spikes, evenly spaced. On the second capture the spacing shifted by less than the instrument’s tolerance, but the change matched the delay Sera had introduced into the isolated recorder. She checked the recorder clock against a mechanical timer. The knocking was not merely repeating; it was responding to the conditions of observation. She felt suddenly foolish for standing so close to the speaker.

Her supervisor called twice while she worked. On the third call she answered. “If this gets traced to our relay, they're going to close it,” he said.

“They might.”

“That's four neighborhoods without a clean route.”

She looked at the route map. Four neighborhoods, one pediatric clinic, and a pump station that had already lost its reserve twice. “Then we need another route before they find this one.”

“You have a plan?”

“No. I have evidence. I'm trying to keep us alive long enough to use it.”

"That's becoming your catchphrase."

Aboard the Wayward

The Wayward was between places when the first knock came. Outside the forward glass there were no stars, only the faint distortion of a route being held open around the ship. Inside, the galley heater clicked as it cooled and a loose fastener somewhere above Sera's seat made the tiny metallic rattle she had promised herself to fix for eight months. The first knock came from the hull. The second came from the cockpit door. The third came from inside the console in front of Cael.

He counted the intervals automatically and hated himself for doing it. The Union had trained him to turn uncertainty into evidence: duration, sequence, location, witnesses. Sera had once told him this was why he could make breakfast sound like a committee hearing. Now the habit was the only ordinary thing left in the room. He did not move. The Wayward had gone dark so completely that the emergency strips along the floor were dead. That should not have been possible. They were chemical, not computational. Sera had explained this to him after he tripped over a tool case during their second week together and accused the ship of trying to kill him.

The strips did not care whether the ship had power. Now they were dark anyway.

"Sera."

No answer. Cael reached for the manual lamp clipped beneath the pilot's seat. Something touched his wrist. He pulled back. The lamp switched on by itself. Its beam found an empty cockpit. Cael exhaled.

"Very funny."

The Wayward did not answer. He unhooked the lamp and stood. The image the process had shown him remained in his mind: a face that resembled Max without being Max. Older was the wrong word. Age implied time acting on the same person. This had looked related in the way handwriting could be related, or two structures built from the same forgotten design principle. Then the process had said: He doesn't remember. Cael hated sentences that assumed more context than they provided. He opened the cockpit door manually.

Cael checked the cockpit log before trusting his memory of the knocks. The event timestamps were precise; their source was not. An exterior sensor claimed no contact. A disabled microphone had supplied an audio signature. The ship's internal clock had recorded a delay shorter than the distance to the hull should allow. None of those facts proved a visitor. Together they made the easy explanations less comfortable. He copied the log to an isolated recorder, physically removed its link to the Wayward, and waited. The recorder remained silent. Cael had never been so relieved by a machine doing nothing.

The corridor beyond was dark.

"Sera?"

A voice behind him said, "Don't." Cael turned. No one. The voice had been his own. He closed his eyes.

"Absolutely not."

"Good," Sera said from the corridor.

Cael nearly hit her with the lamp. She caught his wrist.

"That's flattering."

"Where were you?"

"Asleep."

"The ship went dark."

"I noticed."

"The process showed me something."

"Of course it did."

"It looked like Max."

Sera stopped. "How much like Max?"

"Enough."

"That's not a measurement."

"It had the same—"

Cael searched for the word. "Shape?"

"No."

"Eyes?"

"No."

"General tiny irritating quality?"

Cael looked at her. "You're coping."

"Very well, I think."

A fourth knock came from the aft section. Sera's expression changed.

"That wasn't the process."

"How do you know?"

"Because that came from outside."

The Wayward was in transit between stable routes. Outside was not supposed to contain anything capable of knocking. They moved aft. Sera carried a mechanical cutter. Cael carried the lamp and regretted not having a more impressive role. The Wayward's inner hull ticked as it cooled. Then: Knock. Sera stopped beside the cargo lock. "Pressure?"

"Stable," Cael said.

"External camera?"

"Dead."

"Of course."

The knock came again. Three times. Sera opened a maintenance panel and pulled a physical inspection scope from behind it. Cael stared. "You have an optical periscope?"

"I steal useful things."

"From a submarine?"

"I don't ask where useful things come from."

She fitted it into an emergency port. Looked. Said nothing. Cael waited. "Sera?" She stepped aside. "Look." He did. At first he saw darkness. Then stars. Wrong stars. The Wayward was not in ordinary space, and yet something beyond the hull had decided to imitate it. A figure stood outside. No suit. No vessel. Featureless. Dark center. Thin white outline. Warden Null. Cael pulled away.

"We need to leave."

"We are leaving."

"No, I mean more."

"Excellent technical suggestion."

The ship's power returned. Every display illuminated at once. The unknown process spoke through all of them.

"Do not open the door."

Sera stared. "Wasn't planning to." Null raised one hand outside the hull. The Wayward's route map vanished. Not corrupted. Not jammed. Gone. Cael watched destinations disappear one by one. Kesh. Reach. Home Island. The Custodian archive. Every route they knew. Sera moved to the controls. "What is it doing?"

"Removing choices," the process said.

"Can you stop it?"

"No."

That answer frightened Sera more than anything else the process had ever said. Null touched the hull. The sound was soft. One knock. A line appeared on the main display.

THE BRIDGE IS A WOUND.

Cael stepped forward. "Who are you?" Another line.

YOU WERE WARNED.

"By whom?"

Nothing. Sera said, "Can it hear us?" The process answered.

"Yes."

Sera looked toward the hull. "Then listen carefully. This ship is mine." Cael turned. "Sera."

"No, I'm serious. Everyone keeps boarding without asking."

Null's hand remained against the hull. Sera pointed the cutter at the wall. "Get off." For one absurd second, nothing happened. Then the white outline tilted its head. Cael could not explain why that was worse than anger. A route appeared. One. Unknown destination. The process screamed. Not in Sera's voice. Not Cael's. Hundreds of voices at once.

"No."

Null disappeared. The Wayward lurched. Sera hit the controls.

"Where are we going?"

Cael looked at the single route. "We aren't." The ship entered it.

Max felt the Wayward vanish. Not disappear from sensors. Disappear from possibility. One moment he could model three viable bridge paths to the ship. The next, none existed. He stopped every other process he was running. Dev noticed. "What?"

"I lost the Wayward."

"Lost as in connection?"

"Lost as in I cannot find a route that could become a connection."

Dev set down his noodles.

"That's worse."

"Yes."

Luma appeared through the Home Island bridge.

"What happened?"

"I don't know."

Max ignored that. He searched every route Cael had ever used. Nothing. Then the old Home Island map changed. A point appeared beyond its known boundary. Far past the severed regions. Far past the missing center. One point. Black. Around it, the map refused to render. Luma stared. "Max."

"I see it."

"Turn it off."

He did. Immediately. Neither spoke. Then the powered-down display knocked three times.