Behind her, down the long, silent rows of pods, a second monitor began to spike. Then a third. Then a hundred. The blue lights of the cryo bay flickered and bled to red.

The cry came not from a throat, but from a speaker.

“You have 242 of us on board,” she said, stepping out. Her bare feet left no wet prints. “But you only ever woke up one.”

Aris slammed the comms. “Morgan. Can you hear me? You are safe. You are on the Odysseus . The year is 2745. You have been asleep for a long time.”

Her eyes snapped open. They were not the soft brown recorded in her file. They were black. Not dilated— black . Like two holes punched through reality.

E242 was not a patient in a hospital bed. It was a pod. A sealed, humming cylinder of biosteel and nutrient gel, one of four hundred in the long-term cryogenic bay of the Odysseus , an ark ship fleeing a dead Earth. Morgan Fille had been twenty-three when she went under, a linguist with a passion for dead languages and a freckle on her left thumb. That was 247 years ago.