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Then a woman stepped into view. Human. Thin. Hair hacked short. A medical identification strip circled her upper arm. She looked directly toward the child holding the toy.

“Hide it,” the woman whispered.

The image ended. Kesta replayed the frame. The woman was not Elara Venn. But the strip bore the same mortality-audit prefix as the falsified casualty archive. Dreven watched Kesta’s face. “You know the marking.”

“I know what it means.”

“What?”

“It means the empire certified her death before it brought her here.”

The empty camp seemed to contract around them. Hallow had not merely been removed. It had been processed. They found the first implant in the communal washroom. It had been cut from someone’s neck and crushed beneath a drain stone. The second remained embedded in a torn collar. The third was lodged in the doorframe of a nursery, transmitting a pulse too weak to reach orbit. Kesta held the scanner close. “It isn’t tracking location now. It’s counting.”

“Counting what?” Keth asked.

“Bodies passing through the doorway. Height, mass, temperature.”

“A census,” Dreven said.

“Selection inventory.”

The words tasted like metal. Behind the nursery, Jessa uncovered wheel marks leading toward the northern flats. Too narrow for camp carts, too precise for local machinery. The tracks ended at a circle of fused glass.

“A lander,” Keth said.

“No engine burn,” Kesta replied. “Gravitic lift.”

“Imperial retrieval craft,” Dreven said.

The empire had come to the surface, taken an entire settlement, and left no battle because it had never feared resistance. Kesta walked the perimeter twice. On the third pass she noticed that every doorway bore a thin white slash at shoulder height. The marks were nearly invisible beneath dust. She scraped one into a sample tube.

“Protein again,” she said. “Related to the condenser growth, but not identical.”

Dreven looked from the mark to the empty camp. “A signal for the retrieval craft?”

“Or a screening agent. Something that reacts to specific biology.”

At the western shelter, the slash glowed faintly when Kesta brought her claim band near it. Everyone saw. The band warmed against her wrist. Dreven seized her arm, then released it so quickly it was almost the same motion.

“Kesta.”

“I’m fine.”

The white mark brightened again. Her scanner filled with text before the display corrupted:

SUBJECT CLASS: H-PRIME

PAIRING COMPAT—

The screen went black. Keth swore in his language. Dreven pulled a blade and carved the marked section from the doorframe. “We leave.”

“We take samples.”

“We leave now.”

Kesta faced him. “That mark recognized me.”

“Which is why you will not remain beside it.”