The next morning, the station had changed.
No one could explain how.
The corridors were the same.
The lights burned just as dimly.
The generators ran at the same rhythm.
Yet everyone felt the same strange impression — as if the station had been waiting for them.
“The connection with the ‘Asteria’ is dropping more and more often,” Salomė reported.
On the monitor, signal strength rose and fell like breathing.
“Is the planet interfering with the signal?” Nojus asked.
“Not the planet,” Mira answered.
She pointed at the screen.
“Every time, the connection drops when the station passes into the shadow side of the orbit.”
“The Dark Orbit…”
No one said anything more.
That name sounded like an old superstition.
Lyra went alone back to Aronas’s cabin.
She felt something had gone unnoticed.
The notebook lay where she’d left it yesterday.
But one page was open.
She was certain she hadn’t left it that way.
On the page was just one line.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
The handwriting was Aronas’s.
Lyra closed the notebook.
Her hands were shaking.
She had spent years trying to remember that day.
The academy corridor.
Her brother standing by the window.
“They only delayed the mission by a week,” he said happily. “They’ll check the reactor once more and we fly.”
She said nothing.
For two days already, a technical report had been sitting on her terminal.
The reactor had a manufacturing defect.
Low probability.
But not zero.
She wanted to show him the document.
She really did.
But at that very moment she remembered her last conversation with her father.
“Aronas was always braver than you.”
“Not everyone is born an explorer.”
“Someone has to stay on Earth, after all.”
That evening she closed the report.
Tomorrow, she thought.
I’ll tell him tomorrow.
The next morning the expedition had already launched.
“Captain?”
Mira’s voice tore her from the memory.
“We found the black box.”
It had been hidden beneath the floor of the central server.
Small.
Almost undamaged.
Salomė connected it to the system.
The screen lit up.
The last recording.
The station’s captain.
“If anyone is watching this…”
His face was gaunt.
His eyes red.
“Nothing is attacking us.”
He drew a labored breath.
“At least not the way we thought.”
The image glitched briefly.
“This isn’t a life form.”
“Not a virus.”
“Not a parasite.”
“Not…”
He suddenly fell silent.
He looked at something beyond the camera.
For the first time, fear sounded in his voice.
“It doesn’t create anything.”
“It only…”
The camera shuddered.
“…shows.”
The recording cut off.
“Shows what?” Nojus asked quietly.
No one knew.
That same day, an argument began.
A trivial thing.
About the storeroom door.
Nojus insisted it had been open.
Salomė swore she’d locked it herself.
The recordings showed both versions.
Different cameras captured different events.
“That’s impossible!” Nojus shouted.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m saying what I saw.”
“And me?”
Silence.
For the first time since the mission began, the crew scattered without another word.
That evening Lyra went alone to the observation dome.
The whole planet lay beneath her.
Up close it looked even stranger.
Its surface was like a mirror flooded with black water.
Starlight didn’t reflect off it.
It simply vanished.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Lyra froze.
The voice sounded from behind her back.
She turned around.
Aronas.
This time, clear.
Just as she remembered him.
No spacesuit.
In his old academy uniform.
“You can’t be here.”
“Where else should I be?”
“You died.”
He smiled.
“Do you really believe that?”
Lyra took a step back.
“What are you?”
“You already know.”
“No.”
“You know.”
A brief silence.
“Why didn’t you show the report?”
She felt the floor disappear beneath her feet.
“I…”
“You read it.”
“Yes.”
“You understood.”
“Yes.”
“But you stayed silent.”
Tears welled in Lyra’s eyes.
“I didn’t want…”
“For me to fly off?”
“No.”
“For them to stop me?”
She shook her head.
“I was too late.”
Aronas smiled sadly.
“No.”
“You chose to wait.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Captain!”
Salomė’s shout came through the radio.
The vision disappeared.
She was alone in the dome again.
Everyone gathered in the laboratory.
Mira was pale.
“Look at this.”
She pointed at the biological scanner.
“I scanned myself.”
“Then again.”
“The results were different.”
“How?”
“In one scan, I have an old fracture on my left arm.”
“In the other — it’s not there.”
“Maybe a device malfunction.”
“No.”
She placed a childhood photo on the table.
“I really did break my arm.”
“Only…”
She frowned.
“I can’t remember which one.”
The silence dragged on.
Each of them tried to remember some small detail from their own life.
And for the first time realized they didn’t trust all of it.
Lyra looked through the laboratory window.
In the distance, the planet loomed black.
Suddenly it became clear to her.
She remembered the captain’s words.
“It doesn’t create anything.”
She looked around at the crew.
Nojus stared silently at his hands.
Mira turned the old photograph over and over.
Salomė kept checking the time again and again, as if expecting the clock to be lying.
No one here was forcing them to be afraid.
No one had ordered them to lie.
No one had created their guilt.
They had all brought it with them.
The station only wouldn’t let them turn away from it.
Lyra looked at the planet once more.
For the first time since arriving, she didn’t see an enemy in it.
She saw a mirror.
And understood that the most terrifying part of the journey was only just beginning.