Page 94 of Pocket Wife

“Three decades ago?” Lucy asks.

“Likely.”

Torren checks his scanner. “There’s residue on the seam. Old tool contact. Same side as the pulse response.”

Kaun’s voice lowers. “Could Kade have opened it?”

“No,” I say. “He found it. He marked it. He failed to remove it.”

Lucy’s face hardens. “So Helix came back with better tools.”

The warning tone from the tribunal slate cuts across the ridge.

Jessa looks down, confused. “New filing.”

I already know before she reads it. Helix has not retreated. It has changed rooms.

Sen’s voice slides through the open channel, smooth as polished glass. “Helix Extraction Consortium hereby files emergency petition to seize the Resident Refusal Registry under contamination risk and contested custody.”

Salo responds at once. “Denied pending neutral retrieval.”

Sen does not pause.

“And,” she continues, “Helix submits a preservation priority claim. If the registry is authentic, its species-diverse signatory structure may qualify as abandoned interstellar cultural property rather than resident civic property.”

Lucy goes very still.

I look over the cylinder, then the symbols carved into the stone, then every resident standing beside the water that has kept them alive.

Helix has failed to destroy the registry.

So now it means to steal it in the language of preservation.

Lucy’s voice is quiet. “Tell me that does not mean what I think it means.”

I wish I could.

“They are invoking preservation law meant to protect artifacts from extinct or displaced cultures,” I say. “Because the registry includes multiple species and old covenant marks, Helix wants it treated as an artifact, not a living civic record. If the tribunal accepts that, the registry could be removed from Solaris Valley for off-world custody.”

Lucy turns back to the cylinder.

Then at the cistern.

Then at the people gathered around both.

“But we are not extinct,” she says.

“No.”

“And we are not gone.”

“No.”

Her voice sharpens. “Then they do not get to call our living memory abandoned.”

I could not love her more if I tried.

The field eventually empties. Witnesses return to homes, carts, and the fragile relief of a victory not yet lost. Torren stays to guard the cylinder with Jessa and two council members. Samuel leads Celia toward the clinic. Nara carries her sleeping son through the dust.