Liora, leaning against the wall with her arms folded, gave him a doubtful look. "For how long?"
"I can manage several minutes."
Maerin sighed.
The first attempt produced static.
The second produced smoke.
The third produced an ancient error tone so piercing that everyone in the room flinched except Veska, who had invited herself to the process and declared that the sound was "less rude than expected."
The fourth attempt gave them one word.
HORIZON.
It appeared on the cracked screen in pale, flickering letters.
No one spoke.
Even Rohan, who had not been born under the shadow of that name, felt something settle in the room.
Tavin covered her mouth with one hand.
Bryan gripped the arm of his chair.
Liora’s eyes grew bright.
Maerin stood utterly still.
Then the screen went black.
Orrel swore so violently that Maerin had to tell him to remember he was in the presence of the crash ledger’s lower archive, which apparently made profanity worse.
"It responded," Tavin whispered.
Bryan’s voice was rough. "Can you recover more?"
"Yes," she said immediately, then hesitated. "Maybe. I think the casing protected part of the memory lattice, but the access pattern is damaged. The unit is not dead. It is confused."
"Confused old technology," Rohan said softly. "That seems fitting."
No one chastised him for the comment.
Perhaps because all of them understood exactly what he meant.
For the next two months, the memory unit yielded fragments.
Not a clean record. Not a neat revelation that changed everything overnight. The past on Cael Athis did not work that way. It emerged like salvage from compacted ash: broken, partial, dangerous to handle, and heavy with the possibility of cutting the hands that reached for it.
The recovered files were incomplete.
A cargo maintenance log naming Cargo Spine 7.
A damaged passenger registry that matched some early crash ledger names, confirming that at least part of the ledger had been copied accurately from ship records rather than reconstructed afterward.
A navigation error string.
A reference to "route deviation."
A timestamp that did not align with the merchant version of the crash.
That last fragment changed the air in Veyrhold.
Bryan noticed first.
He took the recovered numbers, compared them to old merchant transcripts, and spent an entire evening refusing to speak except to demand different ledgers. By dawn, his conclusion had spread among the elders, the watch, and the ash-house.
Horizon’s Mercy had not crashed in an unknown era beyond easy tracing.
The recovered timestamp placed its final recorded deviation within a period still covered by regional shipping archives, if those archives existed where the Gilded Heron claimed they did. In other words, the ship’s disappearance should have been noticed. It should have been searchable. It should have left a trace in civilised space.
The merchants had always claimed otherwise.
That did not prove they were lying.
But it made their story much less comfortable.
Rohan watched Veyrhold absorb the implication.
Some people became angry immediately. That was easiest. Anger gave the hands something to do: sharpen blades, check stores, mutter about merchant smiles and polished teeth.
Others became afraid. Fear moved more quietly. It kept people awake. It made them avoid the ledger hall, then drift back to it anyway. It made old women touch the names of ancestors as if apologising for learning too late that the world might have been crueler than even they had believed.
Maerin became harder to read.
She spent long hours with Bryan, Tavin, and the elders, listening to recovered fragments and comparing them against old trade records. She did not speak to Rohan about her father’s failed search for several days after the timestamp discovery. When she finally did, it was on the wall during a late watch, the two of them standing beneath a silver lens while ash moved in low sheets outside the settlement.
"My father believed the merchants’ version of the crash had gaps," she said.
Rohan turned toward her, careful not to interrupt.
Maerin’s face was lit faintly by the lens frame above them. The wind tugged at her scarf, and her eyes remained fixed on the eastern darkness.
"He did not think they caused the crash. Some people believed that, in the old stories. He thought that was too easy. Too dramatic. He said the merchants did not need to have created our cage in order to profit from maintaining it."
"That sounds more likely," Rohan said.
"Yes," she said. "It also sounds worse in some ways. If they found us after the crash and chose trade over rescue, then every generation after that was not abandoned by accident. They were managed."
Rohan let the word sit.
Managed.
It was colder than trapped. Less honest than enslaved. More polite than exploited.
Very merchant-like.
"Does the timestamp prove enough?" he asked.
"No. Bryan says it proves enough to ask better questions, not enough to force better answers."
"And the Gilded Heron arrives soon."
"In twenty-seven days."
Rohan looked east too.
The merchant ship had once been an abstraction. A cruel system, a distant chance, a goal on a quest panel. But now the days had shape. Twenty-seven days meant packing schedules. Trade tallies. Harvest counts. Repairs to the eastern road. Watch rotations. Argument in the elders’ hall.
Anxiety in the streets.
And for Rohan, it meant possibility drawing close enough to touch.
Or close enough to burn him when he reached.
"What are the elders planning?" he asked.
Maerin gave him a tired look. "To present the recovered timestamp carefully, request archive access from the merchants, and ask whether their captain can verify the records through civilised channels."
Rohan stared at her.
"That sounds useless."
"It may be."
"Maerin, asking the Gilded Heron to verify evidence that might show the Gilded Heron has been lying to Veyrhold for generations is like asking a skarn whether the blood around its mouth is suspicious."
Her mouth twitched, but her eyes remained tired.
"I know."
"Then why do it?"
"Because Veyrhold cannot afford to begin with accusation. Not openly. If we accuse and they cut trade, people die. Medicine, filter membranes, seed cultures, refined parts for the wall lenses — we depend on too many things they bring."