Page 29 of Pocket Wife

“From records?”

“No.”

Her gaze stays on me.

The old answer would be safer. From precedent. From prior cases. From centuries of observing displacement across systems that called for suffering administrative change.

But safety has begun to feel like another form of absence.

“My people kept records of our homeworld until the records became more complete than the home itself,” I say. “By the time my generation was born, grief had already been organized into archives. We preserved everything except the world.”

Lucy is quiet for several seconds. Not empty, quiet. Listening quietly.

“That must be a lonely inheritance,” she says.

My gaze returns to the projection because the sentence requires no legal response.

On the screen, the old notes flicker around the damaged phrase: covenant witnessed beneath twin suns.

I save the fragment three times in separate storage.

Then I open a new search field.

Lucy leans forward. “What are you looking for now?”

“Every use of the word covenant in the earliest records.”

The system begins returning fragments. Too many corrupted. Too many partial. Still, line by line, something hidden starts to take shape.

Lucy’s hand rests near the table’s edge, close to mine but not touching.

For once, I don’t find her presence disruptive.

The search completes.

One result pulses at the bottom of the projection.

Covenant copy transferred to primary local archive.

Lucy goes completely still.

I read the line again.

Primary local archive.

Not the regional registry. Not any Helix-submitted chain. Somewhere older. Somewhere still unnamed.

Somewhere Helix has not yet found.

CHAPTER 13

LUCY

The alarm comes through the house wall before dawn.

Three short pulses. One long. Farm distress.

I’m out of bed before the final tone ends, boots half-laced, curls shoved back with one hand. Across the hall, my father’s door opens at the same time. Samuel Hartwell looks at me, and neither of us wastes breath asking what the other heard.