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He scanned Lysa’s. “Subject H-25. Basalt grid.” Kesta looked up. “You’re separating us?”

“Assignments are fixed.”

Lysa grabbed Kesta’s forearm before the guards could pull them apart. “Listen to me. When the pod opens, do not activate the beacon unless you see walls or firelight. Do not follow voices you cannot see. Find high ground before second moonrise.”

“What happens at second moonrise?”

Lysa’s grip tightened.

“Everything that hunts by heat wakes hungry.”

The guards dragged her through the door.

“Lysa!”

“Find a camp,” she shouted. “And do not let the first man who offers water decide what you owe for it.”

The door slammed. Kesta was left with Mira’s body and the guard whose face she had memorized. He nudged the dead woman with his boot. “Pod weight tolerance allows two.” Kesta went still.

“No.”

“Her assigned pod cannot launch without a living biometric.”

“You’re putting her in mine?”

“Efficient use of capacity.”

They did not clean Mira first. A smear of blood remained beneath her nose, and one bare foot was gray with the sanitation mist from the holding room. Kesta tore a strip from the hem of her own shift and wiped Mira’s face. The guard watched with impatience.

“She cannot feel that.”

“I can.”

Kesta folded Mira’s hands over her stomach. The narrow cloth around her wrist had come loose, so Kesta retied it and tucked the knot beneath the transport band where it would not slip away during descent. A technician moved along the launch row checking seals. His scanner paused over Kesta’s band and flashed amber.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Assignment confirmation.”

“To what?”

The technician glanced toward the guards before lowering his voice. “Surface grid.”

“Chosen by whom?”

He walked away without answering. Across the bay, another woman began shouting that her coordinates had changed since intake. She struck the pod glass with both palms until a guard shocked her through the restraint harness. The woman slumped, but the coordinates remained unchanged.

Kesta studied the stacked capsules, each marked with a different descent vector. The pattern was too deliberate for random scattering. Someone had arranged a placement grid. Someone had chosen where each woman would fall.

The launch bay smelled of coolant, hot metal, and fear. White pods lined the walls in stacked cradles. Through a shielded port, Kharon-Veil filled the darkness below—ash-colored continents, red lightning, no visible cities. A prisoner in the next pod pressed both hands to the glass.

“They don’t send criminals there,” she mouthed.

Kesta leaned closer to her own window. “What do they send?” The launch clamps engaged. The woman’s answer came through the shared comm a heartbeat before separation.

“Witnesses.”

Kesta’s pod dropped.