—Searches are cold. The results are colder.

  On the trip back to Rankis, Genichiro was barely on the bridge at all.

  He barricaded himself in the maintenance room and kept hammering at the terminal—and at Miyu’s logs—until the hours stopped meaning anything. Every so often I’d bring him something to drink and peek in.

  Every time I peeked in, I got yelled at.

  “Don’t come in. You’ll bring dust!”

  “I’m coming in quietly so I don’t bring dust!”

  “Your presence is loud.”

  “What does that even mean, ‘presence’?”

  But even while he shoved me out, Genichiro never bothered to hide the screen.

  He wasn’t hiding it because, I guess, that was his way of admitting I counted as “one of us.”

  Messy, rude evidence… but evidence.

  The display was a flood of cross-reference logs—names, years, regions, registry equivalents, immigrant-ship manifests, accident reports, missing-person lists.

  Searching “Shiraishi, Miyu” obviously turned up nothing.

  Twentieth-century Japan was… what, hundreds of years ago? It felt like a fossil era. Maybe it was around when “life logs” first started being digitized, but unless you were a historian with a very specific obsession, you weren’t digging that up.

  Hell, the miracle would be if any of it survived at all.

  “Isn’t it… impossible?” I said.

  Genichiro didn’t even look up. “The moment you decide it’s impossible, it’s over.”

  “I don’t really like that kind of grit-talk.”

  “It’s not grit.” He tapped the terminal like it had personally offended him. “It’s volume.”

  That was Genichiro.

  He didn’t pray for answers. He beat information until it cracked.

  “Tell me what you remember,” he said to Miyu, blunt. “The smaller the detail, the better.”

  Miyu—somehow an android that wasn’t running on Gara XFI?Za A/B, the arsenic-breather-grade compounds—had passed contamination checks. Which meant she could move around the ship without being sealed in a quarantine box.

  Right now she was sitting stiffly on a chair in the maintenance room.

  Her hands rested on her knees. Her posture was too perfect—mechanical-perfect.

  But her eyes…

  Her eyes looked like a human trying not to panic.

  “…The school name…” Miyu shut her eyes.

  “…A white school building… a gym…”

  “Place name,” Genichiro cut in.

  “…I don’t know…”

  “Uniform color.”

  “…Navy… I think…”

  “Skirt length or—”

  I snapped before I could stop myself. “That is not something you ask a girl!”

  “If it’s necessary, I ask.” Genichiro’s tone didn’t change. “If it’s not necessary, I cut it. Right now, I cut it.”

  Miyu made a small sound—almost a laugh.

  Then she frowned, like the act of laughing hurt in a way she couldn’t locate.

  “…Clubs… I might’ve been… on the library committee…”

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  “Good.” Genichiro pounced on the word. “Library committee. Do you remember the school layout?”

  “…The library… by the windows…”

  Fragments came out.

  But fragments were still fragments.

  Genichiro was scary because he could turn fragments into search terms.

  He switched the interface into old-style Japanese character handling and ran a reconstruction search through Earth’s cultural archives. Then he ran fragment searches through accident records too.

  “Cat.” “Truck.” “High school student.” “Missing.”

  It was way too broad. Too many hits.

  But somewhere in that mess, there might be a shape that matched.

  “…Nothing,” Genichiro spat.

  Nothing.

  Which meant Miyu’s past was either never recorded, or the record was erased, or it wasn’t what she thought it was.

  All three options were terrible.

  So Genichiro did what he always did when reality refused to cooperate.

  He attacked it from a different direction.

  Miyu’s body.

  Materials. Manufacturing philosophy. Standards.

  Grabhul tech—alien and toxic by default—was woven through it, but human design was mixed in too. That meant someone had translated between worlds.

  “…This is similar to an old Earth standard,” Genichiro muttered.

  “Huh?” I leaned in. “Similar how?”

  “Connector layout. Redundancy.” His eyes narrowed. “Closer to the safety philosophy in old medical equipment.”

  Medical equipment.

  Safety philosophy.

  The words caught in my head.

  Genichiro pulled up another archive—old Earth medical standards, body simulation work, prosthetics… and the taboo lineage of research into “reproducing the soul.”

  Taboo research never really dies.

  It just changes its name and survives.

  Space didn’t change that rule.

  Miyu’s voice came out small. “…Am I… taboo?”

  Genichiro answered without hesitation—so straight it made me blink.

  “You’re a product. The sin belongs to the bastard who made you.”

  Rude, as always. But he didn’t miss the point.

  Then the terminal pinged.

  A match notification—no, not a perfect match. A warning for a similar pattern.

  Genichiro’s eyes narrowed to slits.

  “…Shiraishi.”

  My heart jumped. “You found her?!”

  “I found something.” He kept staring at the screen. “But it’s not her. It’s… a lineage.”

  On the display was a record from a very old immigrant ship—early, early diaspora history. Back when humanity first scattered into the dark.

  And in those records, the name “Shiraishi” showed up again and again.

  Engineering-adjacent. Medical-device-adjacent. Safety-philosophy-adjacent.

  Genichiro’s fingers stopped.

  That was what terrified me.

  When he stopped moving, it usually meant the truth on the screen was the kind you didn’t want.

  “…Genichiro?” I said.

  Without looking away, he spoke.

  “…Could be blood line.”

  The maintenance room’s air changed.

  Miyu’s breath caught. “…Blood line… whose…?”

  Genichiro finally looked at her—just once.

  And for the first time, his gaze wasn’t the way he looked at a tool.

  It was the way you looked at a person.

  It was… rare.

  “My last name is Shiraishi, too,” he said. “You might be… an ancestor. Or connected to one.”

  “Ancestor…?” Miyu’s face twisted. She was getting better at making expressions, but this one wasn’t simple happiness or sadness.

  It looked like fear.

  Genichiro’s voice went lower. “There’s someone in my family line. A guy who got into quantum computer research and went wrong in the head. Talking about launching human minds into higher dimensions. Saying dead people were ‘in there’ too…”

  “What, like a religion?” I asked.

  Genichiro actually nodded. “Yeah. Some nonsense about supercharging guardian spirits and chasing worldly benefits. His son tried to escape the ‘group’ and got on an immigrant ship. And if something followed him…”

  Miyu’s voice shook. “…Then… I…”

  “…You’re my family?” she asked, like the words were too sharp to touch.

  “Don’t know,” Genichiro said, blunt.

  But his don’t know had weight. Responsibility. He wasn’t tossing it out to dodge the problem.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated. “But I can’t say you’re unrelated either. So I’m going to dig.”

  He started punching deeper—past privacy layers, into the strata where records got “disappeared.”

  The terminal threw up a warning in small letters: ACCESS LOGGING ENABLED.

  It was dangerous territory.

  Genichiro didn’t hesitate anyway.

  A blunt man goes quiet when he’s unsure.

  He wasn’t quiet.

  So he wasn’t unsure.

  I let out a slow breath and turned to Miyu.

  “…Miyu. Are you scared?”

  Miyu nodded slowly. “…I’m scared. But… I want to know.”

  That want to know was human.

  A machine waits for the output.

  A human wants the truth even when it might hurt.

  Genichiro muttered, almost like he didn’t realize we could hear him.

  “…Even if you can’t cry, that’s human.”

  Miyu blinked at him. “…Was that… comfort?”

  “No,” Genichiro said instantly. “Observation.”

  I jabbed a finger at him. “You think saying ‘observation’ makes anything okay?!”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think it makes it okay. But I’m saying it.”

  He was a pain.

  And somehow… oddly warm.

  That night, Miyu stood in front of the bridge window.

  She stared out at space like it was an answer she couldn’t read.

  A black sea.

  I stood beside her.

  “…Nardia,” she said softly. “If I’m… someone’s copy… what do I do?”

  The question stabbed straight into my chest.

  I didn’t have a perfect answer.

  But saying nothing felt worse.

  “Copy or original,” I said, “it doesn’t change the fact that you’re here right now.”

  Miyu’s lips curved, just a little.

  Her smile was starting to look less borrowed.

  “…You say things like that.”

  “I do.” I huffed, trying to sound tougher than I felt. “I’m a princess.”

  “Princess…?”

  “The Black-Snow Princess.” I tilted my chin. “Self-proclaimed, maybe.”

  “Self-proclaimed, but confident.”

  “Shut up!” I snapped, but I couldn’t stop the corner of my mouth from twitching. “I’m the daughter of my colony’s President. That makes me a princess. Technically.”

  Miyu’s shoulders shook—just a little.

  She couldn’t cry.

  But she was starting to laugh.

  And maybe that was her body’s way of choosing to live.

  Across the bridge, one of the terminals chimed once—too soft to be an alarm. A line flashed and vanished before I could read it: UNAUTHORIZED TRACE DETECTED.