Netwrck
Science Fiction.
The Catalogue of Returning Names
At the monastery’s lowest archive, where the comet’s warm stone breathed against the shelves, Sister Ilyra opened a catalogue dated eight hundred years ahead.
Its pages smelled faintly of rain. The ink was iron-dark, and each entry recorded a person who had once belonged to the land. Beside every name came a final instruction: Return to the soil when the comet turns.
Ilyra ran her finger down the column until she found her own.
Name: Ilyra Venn. Status: forgotten. Witness: none.
Her hands remained steady. She had been trained not to give the archive any evidence of panic.
Above her, the monastery windows showed a sky the colour of bruised fruit, purple at the zenith and bleeding into terracotta at its edges. Eucalyptus trees grew in the sheltered courtyards, their leaves breathing silver whenever the comet’s hidden engines turned. The elders said the trees remembered the world before it travelled.
Ilyra copied the name into the municipal ledger. The ink dried. Beneath her window, the landholders’ court began its morning bells.
A Hand Made of Absence
The complaint came before noon.
A woman named Sera stood in the vestibule, holding a deed sealed with black wax. It declared that the northern valley, the eucalyptus grove, and the monastery’s founding chamber belonged to a company that did not exist.
“Your shadow witnessed this,” said the court officer. He pointed to the floor. Ilyra’s shadow lay long beneath the table, though the lamp behind her burned in the opposite direction.
It had learned to sign.
She saw the shape of its fingers in the ink: her hand, her wrist, her deliberate downward stroke. The signature ended with a flourish she had never used.
“I did not sign.”
“The valley did,” said the officer.
He presented the deed. On its reverse was an old photograph of Ilyra as a child, standing in the orchard with a wool glove on her left hand. She remembered the glove. She remembered the cold, and the silver leaves, and someone tying the lace beneath her chin.
She remembered no mother.
That night she carried a glass seed from the greenhouse and a single wool glove into the northern valley. The seed was no larger than a plum, with a dim ember turning inside it. The elders had used such seeds to preserve the first trees grown in orbit. They could hold a dead forest, or a name, until someone found soil willing to receive it.
The shadow walked beside her without a body.
The Land Refuses a Copy
At the valley’s boundary stood three survey stones. Each bore a name, though rain had nearly erased the letters. Ilyra touched them and heard the voices of people who had worked the terraces: millers, children, beekeepers, the nameless engineer who dug the first water channel beneath the comet.
The shadow leaned over the stones. It lifted its head, and the bruise-coloured sky darkened above the valley.
“You have no claim,” it said. Its voice came from beneath her feet.
“I know.”
“Then the deed stands.”
“No. A witness who cannot be remembered cannot testify.”
She pressed the glass seed into the soil between the stones. It split with a soft chime. A green shoot emerged, then another, then a line of eucalyptus trees no taller than her wrist. Their roots struck the ground and pulled a thread of moisture from the buried pipes. The valley’s soil darkened.
Names rose from it.
Not printed letters. Whole lives, spoken at once.
At the centre of the grove stood a small figure made of shade. It wore a wool glove on its left hand.
Ilyra understood. The shadow had stolen her signature, but not her past. Someone had removed her from the land and left only the glove behind.
“Who gave you my name?” she asked.
The shadow raised the gloved hand.
“You did. When you signed the promise to forget.”
The Promise Underneath
Her future catalogue entry was not proof of who she was. It was an instruction for what she had to do.
Ilyra placed the wool glove over her left hand. The wool tightened like a remembered grip. Inside it, a narrow slip of paper appeared.
The promise bore her signature and a date three hundred years from now.
The shadow lunged. Ilyra drove the glass seed’s empty shell into the soil and caught the shadow’s counterfeit hand. The black signature spread over her glove, but the young eucalyptus leaves rustled above them, releasing the scent of resin and rain.
“You cannot return what was never yours,” the shadow whispered.
“I can stop you from taking it again.”
She opened the catalogue. On its final page, beneath her entry, another name had appeared in fresh ink.
Not Ilyra Venn.
Not the engineer or the beekeepers.
The name of the valley itself.
Ilyra read it aloud.
The monastery’s bells answered from the comet’s core. The ground opened beneath the survey stones, and a root thicker than a river rose to meet the glass seed. The shadow tried to pull away, but the glove held it. For one breath, Ilyra felt the whole land turn toward her.
Then she wrote the catalogue name in the wet soil.
At dawn, the court found the deed blank. The black wax had cracked. In the northern valley, a forest stood around a small glass-shaped hollow, and beneath every eucalyptus tree was a handprint pressed into the earth.
Ilyra kept the wool glove folded in her pocket. She never again signed anything without reading the final line.
