Chapter 2

The first thing Lira felt was the phantom weight of a helmet she had never worn. Then the taste of metal, faint and electric, as if the air inside the hab had been run through a soldering gun. She stood in the doorway of her own quarters, boots still crusted with red dust from the service lift, and watched the woman on the couch try to remember how to breathe without a respirator.

“You’re early,” the woman said. Her voice belonged to Lira, but the cadence did not; it carried the careful spacing of someone used to speaking through an uplink that could cut out at any moment. She wore Lira’s second-best work suit, the one kept for inspections, and the collar was buttoned all the way to the throat. The scar on the back of her left hand—Lira’s scar, from a pressure-seal accident five years ago—had begun to fade.

Lira closed the hatch. The seals clicked like small teeth. “You’re supposed to wait in the depot until the memory flush.”

“I did wait.” The woman flexed her fingers, testing the scar as if it might still hurt. “They said the sync was clean. I believed them. Then I stepped into the lift and remembered the exact pressure drop that killed the last three survey teams on the south rim. I remembered the way the foreman’s suit smelled after the breach—burnt polymer and copper. I remembered you telling me not to go down there again.”

Lira’s pulse ticked in her throat. The colony’s proxy contract was simple on paper: one body, two operators, memories partitioned by a legal firewall. She had signed it the day after the air plant failed and the first wave of early-onset hypoxia cases appeared. Rent the safer body for the dangerous shifts; keep the original mind for the long, quiet ones. That was the deal. The woman on the couch should have been a blank slate wearing Lira’s shape. Instead she sat with one knee drawn up, fingers tracing the scar she had inherited, and the look in her eyes was not Lira’s.

“What’s your name?” Lira asked.

“Still sorting that.” The woman smiled without humor. “They gave me a tag—L-7—but it doesn’t fit the mouth right. You can call me Seven if you need something shorter than ‘the thing that came home in your skin.’”

Lira crossed to the narrow galley and poured two bulbs of recycled water. The dispenser hummed; the sound was too loud. She set one bulb on the table and kept the other. “You’re not supposed to remember the breach.”

“I remember more than that.” Seven took the bulb but did not drink. Condensation beaded on the plastic and ran down her wrist—Lira’s wrist, thinner now, as if the proxy frame carried less mass. “I remember the night you decided to stop visiting the memorial wall. I remember why.”

Lira’s hand tightened around her own bulb until the plastic creaked. The memorial wall listed every proxy lost to the rift vents and the hard-vacuum maintenance corridors. Names were forbidden; serials were etched instead. Lira had stopped reading them after the third month. It had felt like counting the days she still had left to spend in a body that answered to her own name.

Seven set the bulb down untouched. “There’s a second contract,” she said. “Buried in the fine print the company never highlights. If a proxy returns with owner memories intact, the operator is required to report for ‘reintegration assessment.’ That usually means a full wipe and a new operator assignment. They don’t like the idea of two people walking around with the same private history.”

Lira swallowed. The water tasted of ozone. “How long do we have?”

“Until the next scheduled uplink. Six hours, maybe seven. After that the depot will flag the anomaly and the compliance team will knock.”

Outside the viewport the colony’s spine lights cycled through their evening dim. Far below, the rift glowed a steady, sullen red where the geothermal vents still pushed heat into the dead atmosphere. Lira had spent three weeks of proxy shifts mapping those vents, sending the rented body down while her own stayed sealed in the hab, safe. Now the rented body had come upstairs carrying the map and the fear and the decision she had made not to go back.

She studied Seven’s face—her face—and saw the new lines at the corners of the eyes. Not age. Strain. The kind that came from holding two sets of motor memories at once: which hand reached for the tool, which hand reached for the emergency release. The body had learned both.

“You can stay here tonight,” Lira said. “I’ll reroute the uplink through the auxiliary node. It buys us time to figure out what the memory bleed actually is.”

Seven shook her head once, a small motion that looked practiced. “They’ll trace it. Better if I go back down and let them think the anomaly was a transient. I can scrub the logs from the inside.”

“And leave me with what? A body that isn’t quite mine anymore?”

Seven stood. The movement was fluid, the proxy’s balance algorithms still dominant. She stepped close enough that Lira could smell the depot’s sterilizer on the suit fabric. “You could come with me,” she said. “Not as operator. As witness. See what the vents actually look like when you’re not watching through my eyes.”

Lira’s laugh came out thin. “That’s against every clause in the contract.”

“So is keeping me.” Seven reached out, hesitated, then touched the back of Lira’s hand where the scar had begun to fade. The contact was warm, uncertain, the pressure calibrated to the wrong set of nerves. “I don’t want to be wiped. I don’t want to be you, either. But I don’t want to be nothing.”

The hab’s environmental system clicked over to night-cycle. The vents sighed. Somewhere in the conduit a pump stuttered and corrected. Lira felt the sound in her teeth. She looked at the woman wearing her hands, her voice, her memories of fear, and realized the line the company drew between owner and operator had already been crossed in both directions.

“Six hours,” she said. “We use them. Then we decide who walks back into the depot.”

Seven nodded. The scar on her hand caught the low light and held it for a moment before the shadows took it again. Outside, the rift pulsed once, a slow arterial beat, and the colony’s spine lights dimmed to standby. Neither of them moved toward the hatch.