Blood Moon

Blood Moon:

An Alpha City Novel

By BK Blackwood

Chapter 1:

Alpha City, Luna

The Moon had never been silent—not really. Not to Isaac Drexler. It hummed beneath the surface, in the patient thrumming of reclamation engines, in the whisper of recycled air rushing through the titanium guts of Luna Prime, in the metronomic clack‑clack of the mag‑rail that stitched the domes together like surgical sutures over scarred regolith. Isaac had tuned his ears to that alien murmur thirty years ago, back when he still wore a badge and clung to belief. Since then, the hum had become reluctant company, a feral heartbeat that reminded him he was alive.

Tonight, after fourteen straight Earth‑standard days of colony “night,” the hum turned into a scream as the phase of the moon prepared to cycle the cooling units on.

He heard it first in the pipes overhead: the shriek of pressure regulators over‑compensating, the frantic shiver of worn metal. The scream traveled, became the whine of a broken servo in the corridor outside his door, then the sub‑audio rattle inside his skull. It insisted, and Isaac—who had sworn never to listen again—found himself sitting up on his bunk as though jerked by invisible wire.

The comm‑link on the bulkhead cracked alive, a bolt of static bright enough to paint a jagged line of text across the cramped hab he thought he’d never read again. Isaac blinked. The holo‑chessboard in his lap flickered; a virtual pawn threatened his knight—a three‑week stalemate he’d refused to resolve out of sheer spite. He thumbed the board dark and reached for the comm switch, thumb hovering.

Answer and the scream stops being private. Decline and the past gets a forwarding address. 

He answered.

“Drexler,” he said, voice rough with recycled gin.

Chief Orla Sanjani’s voice came through like a ghost stepping barefoot across cold tile. “There’s been a murder.”

No pleasantries. No bullshit. Orla had commanded Vice the same year he’d cracked his first homicide; she knew exactly how to spend his attention.

He exhaled. “That still happens.”

“Not like this,” she replied. “Not on Luna. Not in thirty-two years.”

There it was—the hook. Orla dangled it with professional cruelty, and Isaac felt the barb bury itself under scar tissue. Thirty-two years since the last confirmed homicide—two whole generations of lunar citizens raised to believe blood belonged only to Earth‑side crime dramas.

“You pulled me out of retirement for a body?” He tried detached. “Send the bots. You’ve got algorithms that rebuild motive faster than I can lace my boots.”

“We did. Forensics drones swept the scene. They flagged an anomaly.”

“Meaning?”

“Inconclusive. The uncertainty index spiked off the chart. Old sub‑routines defaulted to the fail‑safe directive.”

He rubbed a thumb over the ridge of the scar across his knuckles. “Fail‑safe meaning ‘call a human.’”

“Meaning ‘call someone who still remembers what blood looks like on real ground.’”

He hadn’t meant to come back.

Not to the Directorate, not to any version of the job. After the Pell Disappearance—he refused to call it murder without a body—he’d resigned, stuffed every unsolved file into a hard‑sealed trunk, and drifted into the Outer Sector. District 19 had once been the beating heart of the Aristarchus mining initiative; when the H3 ore veins dried and investor money evaporated, the sector withered into a gutter for the forgotten. Perfect, Isaac had thought. A place where memories could erode.

He almost succeeded.

He leaned forward, feet finding the chilled deck. “Who’s lead?”

“Officer Cleo Drexler.”

His heart did a small, stupid thing—skipped, then stumbled. “She’s not ready.”

“She’s your daughter.”

“She still hates me.”

“Then maybe this will help.” Orla paused; when she spoke again, the words fell like iron filings. “The victim is Juno Pell.”

The room cinched tight enough to strangle breath. Juno Pell. A name that still bled from the margins of Isaac’s old notebook where he’d scribbled theories until the paper tore.

“Juno Pell was a ghost,” he managed.

“Not anymore.”

The ringing in his ears nearly drown out the bleeding scream. “Where?”

“I’ll send the packet,” Orla said. “And the prime suspect? Her brother—Vance Pell. The one who vanished thirty years ago.”

The channel dropped into silence so complete it made the earlier scream seem merciful.

Isaac stared at the dead comm for a long time, counting the hammer‑fall of his pulse. Then he stood, joints protesting lunar gravity that was lighter than Earth’s but heavier than regret, and began to suit up.

Now came the ritual of departure, and Isaac observed ritual. He packed slowly, choosing items that were less equipment than psychological armor: an ash‑wood fountain pen his late wife had loved; a first‑edition e‑paper of Bashō’s moon haikus; a ceramic flask of yaupon tea—contraband, priceless. Each object a tether he could haul on if the tunnels of the past tried to swallow him.

District 19 never truly slept, yet human psyche insisted the colony’s clocks follow the 24 hour cycle, and “night” was soon ending. The alleys empty; only sanitation bots and people who profited from darkness crept about. Isaac stepped onto mezzanine six and regarded his rust‑patched hab—a barnacle clinging to vacuum shielding. The door auto‑locked behind him. Nothing inside worth stealing except loneliness, and there was plenty of that to spare.

Descending the helix stair, he passed a mural of phosphorescent lunar graffiti: the phases of Earth stylized as a serpent eating its own tail.

At the tram concourse he paused beside an antique‑tech stall. The lanky vendor slid him a canvas pouch: a spool of copper wire, an obsolete memory wafer, a stub of graphite.

“Things that remember when electrons fail,” Amanuel said. “You always preached redundancy.”

Isaac paid with a tap of his dorsum. “Thank you.”

“Bring her home,” the vendor whispered, as though he knew exactly which her mattered.

He boarded the mag‑rail southbound. Across the aisle a minor snored, heading for school or likely playingggg hookie; I Issac was envious; an old woman crocheted yarn spun from bio‑polymer. A terran‑model synth conductor scanned Isaac’s creds without comment; its status LED reflected off the analog wristwatch Cleo had gifted him on his promotion day—back when she still looked at him like a hero.

He twisted the crown, winding springs—human‑scale seconds, sacred because they ended.

The datapacket Orla sent pulsed on his flex‑view. He opened it, letting the soft light obscure and wash the cabin. Victim: Pell, Juno Seraphine. Age at death: 26. Case Status: Missing, cycle 15-108, declared deceased in absentia, cycle 17-115. Update: Body discovered, cycle 48-228. in Sector 7 Oxygen Reclamation Plant, sub‑basement 3. Condition: desiccated; lacerations consistent with scalpel or micro‑laser, no cauterization. Lack of lividity due to partial vacuum. Autopsy drone inconclusive.

He zoomed on a holo still: a slender figure in maintenance coveralls curled like a comma on cold deck plating. Mouth open, eyes wider—death mid‑sentence. Two precise incisions nested beneath each scapula. Metadata said the cuts led to cavities where something had been carefully removed.

“What were you carrying, Juno?” he muttered.

The packet’s last page was a warrant dated yesterday, 48–230: Bring Vance Pell into custody. Isaac closed the file; in the dark reflection of the window he saw a gaunt man with rust‑brown eyes and week‑old stubble. A stranger who used to be him.

Chief Sanjani waited at Checkpoint Delta, stripped of uniform, wearing a charcoal jumpsuit that blended with logistics staff. Short, square‑built, hair in an uncompromising silver bun. She nodded.

“Inspector,” she said.

“Don’t,” he replied. “I’m a civilian.”

“Not anymore.” A retinal scanner swept green across his face. “Congratulations; you’re reinstated.”

“Against my will.”

“Consider it conscription.” She walked beside him into Security Wing Gamma—rows of weapons cages and holotables. She handed him a matte‑black Mark‑7 coil gun.

“I don’t carry anymore.”

“You do tonight.”

Another cage yielded a silk‑wrapped object: his badge, number 340019.

“Really?” he asked.

“Cleo needs backup, not interference. Do the job you taught her.”

Orla keyed a privacy shroud over the holotable; hexagonal facets of amber light unfolded like petals around the three‑meter workstation, sealing them into an acoustic cocoon that swallowed the din of Security Wing Gamma. Outside the veil, armorers argued about coil‑charge calibrations, data‑clerks pushed trolleys stacked with memory bricks, and an entire phalanx of rookies queued for inoculations against whatever micro‑pathogens the outer domes had cultured this quarter. Inside the shroud, there was only the hum of the projector and the synchronized breathing of two veterans who had seen the lunar colony in every season of its fragile history.

Orla Sanjani stood ram‑rod straight—she always had—but beneath her poise Isaac sensed fatigue coiled like barbed wire. The silver in her bun had multiplied since their last case together, and the soft lines around her eyes had become etchings. Yet her irises still carried that unbeatable tungsten glow: the look of someone who had balanced too many political knives on the tip of principle and refused to let a single blade nick her conscience.

She called up two holo‑panes with a flick. The first was what he expected: wide‑angle stills from the oxygen‑reclamation plant in Sector 7, timestamped ten lunar hours ago. He recognized Juno Pell’s body—rounded shoulders, narrow hips, hair that had once been dyed ultraviolet and now lay dull and frost‑crusted. The second pane, however, corkscrewed Isaac’s gut: the same body relocated to Sector Seven’s central dome, arranged supine among the meticulously raked swirls of a zen garden reserved for the board of trustees. The image was subtler than the reclamation‑plant gore but amplified its horror by juxtaposition. Crimson rivulets spidered through obsidian sand toward the immaculate white roots of a bonsai valued at ten million credits. Someone had turned a murdered researcher into living protest art.

“Same victim, new location,” Isaac murmured, touching the two panes so their metadata columns aligned. The forensics tags confirmed identical tissue degradation, vacuum‑burn patterns, and DNA markers.

“Dragged her out of cold storage, staged the tableau, cleaned their tracks, and broadcast the find to a dozen info‑brokers before the drones even registered the pressure breach,” Orla said. Her voice was low, even. “It was an announcement, Drexler.”

He nodded. “Whoever did it wants us to see the dots and draw the line straight to me.”

She blinked once—agreement. Then she zoomed into the third‑order telemetry from dome security: entry logs, badge IDs, route overlays. A single credential glowed red. INSPECTOR I. DREXLER – LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE – LAST ACTIVE 28.115. Isaac’s stomach iced over. Those codes had been dead for decades, entombed in an archive nobody touched because the Directorate preferred to forget its failures.

“I scrubbed your old files myself,” he said quietly.

“Which means someone with root access rewrote a corpse of code, then piggy‑backed its handshake onto the dome’s optic scanners.” Orla pinched out a cascade of cascading hashes—evidence of the breach. “It’s elegant spoofing. Two-factor retinal, thermal, gait analysis—all perfectly imitated.”

“Impossible without high‑res biostat capture,” Isaac countered. “Only a handful of systems keep that level of legacy data.”

“Helios‑Edge Biotech is one,” Orla replied, and threw a corporate command hierarchy in front of him like a guillotine blade. “Guess who still holds a controlling share?”

He didn’t need to read the name. He could almost feel the letters burn before they appeared: Elias Pell.  Patriarch, visionary investor, architect of half the med‑tech margins in the inner system. Father to Juno and Vance. Thirty-five years ago he’d been a brash frontier engineer willing to fund risky projects. Now he was an invisible emperor whose public holograms were weeks out of date and whose flesh‑and‑blood presence was rumored to be cryo‑sedated for longevity trials.

“They’re baiting me,” Isaac finally said, voice thick. “Or framing me. Either way, the story moves with my shadow.”

Orla snapped her fingers, projecting a 3‑D wireframe of Sector Seven’s corporate dome. Red pips indicated board‑member residences, executive offices, and the zen garden at the center—an architectural mandala that served as both meditation and showpiece for investor tours. The map rotated, and a faint line pulsed from the garden straight down through service corridors, freight lifts, and abandoned utility tunnels until it intersected with Sub‑Basement 3 of the oxygen plant: the original crime scene.

“Vector’s too precise for coincidence,” she said. “Our unsub wanted to draw a vertical connection—hell to heaven in a single straight shot.”

Isaac’s detective mind clicked old gears into motion. Presentation, message, mythic resonance.  It was classic dramaturgy, the kind you found in old Earth homicide manifestos: Zodiac letters, Jack the Ripper’s taunts, performers craving audience. But this unsub knew the colony’s psychology. Thirty‑two years without a murder had bred a generation of lunar citizens convinced violence could be engineered out of humanity, provided sufficient algorithms watched the doors. A staged tableau in Sector Seven’s holiest botanical sanctuary was like detonating a scarlet flare against black sky.

“What about the lift logs? Vac seals?” he asked.

“All wiped. We only identified the spoof after drone thirty-one mis‑noted shortwave interference. Whoever it is knows our sensor hierarchy and its blind folds.”

He rubbed a hand over his face. The stubble rasped under his palm. “So the board will argue containment, sweep it under NDAs, pay a bereavement dividend to the public, and rewrite colony history again. We can’t let them.”

“I’ve already felt the tremors,” Orla admitted. “Sector Seven’s legal counsel filed three injunctions against Directorate presence inside the dome. Emergency Executive Authority overrides them, but we’ve got about six hours before an appellate algorithm ties us in knots. If we don’t show a credible lead, the board will bring in their own security and bury the case.”

Isaac looked at her. “You knew this would happen when you called me.”

“Yes,” she said. “I also know Cleo will follow evidence wherever it points, even if that means storming Helios‑Edge’s data vault. But she’s operating on rookie adrenaline. She needs a counterweight—someone who has watched the city spin lies and still found a fulcrum.”

“My presence unbalances her,” Isaac warned.

“Only until the first shot’s fired,” Orla replied. She zoomed the garden image, highlighting the bonsai’s rootball. An embedded sensor tag pulsed. “Forensics pulled a surgical implant from the soil. Prototype micro‑drive. Encryption exotic enough that station AI refused to parse it, citing potential treaty violations. We think it’s data Juno smuggled out of Helios‑Edge.”

“If that drive holds patient trials or proprietary genome trees—”

“—then it’s worth more than Luna’s ice reserves.” Orla locked eyes with him. “Cleo doesn’t yet appreciate how deep Helios’s talons run. She’ll treat this like homicide. You know better.”

Silence filled the alcove. Isaac studied the ghost of his own credentials on the screen, layered beneath Juno’s blood‑blackening the sand, and thought of Vance Pell: prodigy coder, haunted brother, boy who had once shared ice cream with Juno on the colony promenade while Isaac took statements from their father. Motes of the past swirled.

Finally he spoke. “Alright. I’ll play lightning rod. Eyes open, armor thin, heart ready.”

Orla dropped the privacy shroud; the wing’s cacophony poured back in. She plucked a slim data‑wand from the table and slid it into his breast pocket. “Red wire, blue sheath. One poke and it dumps forensic video straight to broadcast. Dead‑man’s switch.” She gripped his wrist, a rare gesture of personal loyalty. “If they pin this on you, don’t go quietly. Make them bleed truth. Cleo is senior officer at scene command; you follow her lead unless life or evidence is at stake.”

“I remember chain of command.”

“Good. Then remember this: Sector Seven’s board has enough political gravity to bend law. Don’t give them leverage.”

He clipped the badge to his belt.

Isaac nodded. Leverage is for people with something to lose, he’d told her. Yet, leaving the alcove, he felt the renewed drag of priceless vulnerabilities: a daughter on the line, a promise to a dead woman, and a planet that would never forgive him if he failed twice.

The service car hissed as magnetic clamps disengaged, sliding into the spinal tube that tunneled beneath Alpha City like a giant arterial vein. A soft tremor passed through Isaac’s boots at departure—nothing like the old click‑clack of Earth trains he’d ridden as a rookie, but enough vibration to remind the body of inertia.

Inside the compartment, lighting auto‑shifted from utilitarian white to a dusky amber in deference to colony circadian protocols. The two forensics techs—Yara Menendez and Halric Ong—settled opposite Isaac on fold‑down seats, each cradling a shock‑mounted crate labeled CS‑EVIDENCE/HAZMAT/HUMAN‑TISSUE . Their conversational murmurs were brief, coded, respectful. They knew his history. Everybody did after the Directorate AI scraped newsreels to announce his reinstatement.

Yara offered a foil packet of stim‑gum. “Orange‑mate flavor. Cuts the recycled‑air funk.”

He waved it off politely. “If I dose caffeine now, I’ll crash before report drafts.”

Halric smiled shyly. “My dad used to quote your deposition on the Svalbard Incident—said you were the last inspector to get a full confession without psy‑coercion.”

Isaac shrugged, uncomfortable. “Different era. Suspects still believed in redemption.”

The tram whooshed around a gentle curve; gyros compensated, but the sensation of gravitational mischief still tugged at inner ear. Isaac focused on the viewport. The sprawl of Alpha City unfurled overhead in inverted relief: domes stacked like translucent pearls, habitat strata glowing pastel where photovoltaic skin met starlight. Cargo crawlers traced slow neon vectors along surface corridors—tooth‑up beetles ferrying ice, algae cultures, isotopic fuel rods. Farther away, the ancient rim of Aristarchus crater rose jagged, serenaded by a perpetual dust halo kicked up by ore haulers.

A concert of colony sound reverberated through the carriage frame: the subterranean rumble of mass drivers launching ore canisters to orbital smelters, the bass thump of regolith compactors reinforcing tunnel walls, the harmonic whine of thousand‑kilowatt turbines bleeding load at shift change. Isaac closed his eyes, letting those notes weave into the Moon’s primeval hum inside his chest. When he was a younger man, that chorus had felt like possibility. After his resignation, it had become eulogy. Tonight it felt like prophecy again—ominous, irresistible.

The evidence crate at his feet vibrated faintly as though its contents objected to being moved. A yellow bio‑flag on the lid pulsed CONTAINMENT INTEGRITY: LEVEL 2.  He visualized the micro‑drive Orla mentioned lying inside a sterile vial, its surgical titanium shell no larger than a baby’s milk tooth. Data stones, the press had nicknamed them: injectable archives capable of storing exabytes in quantum‑fold crystal lattices. The technology was still in clinical trials on Terra; Helios‑Edge must have smuggled prototypes off‑planet, far from regulatory oversight.

He thumbed his flex‑view to overlay schematics. Sub‑Basement 3 of the reclamation plant had been decommissioned and left to dust since the facility upgraded to closed‑loop CO₂ scrubbers. Yet someone had accessed the freight lift, depressurized the chamber, drained the lumen grid so motion sensors thought the room inert, and performed methodical surgery on a living—or recently deceased—subject. Removal of thymus and pituitary suggested endocrine exploitation: hormones for life‑extension cocktails, perhaps. High‑value tissue for covert bio‑pharm labs. But why resuscitate Juno’s corpse in a public garden? That step transformed a profitable harvest into an act of ideological defiance.

A memory surfaced: Juno at age fourteen, touring the central bio gardens on a school field trip. She’d tugged Isaac’s sleeve—he’d been her father’s assigned security escort that week—and asked whether the carefully pruned cherry blossoms could ever “feel lonely” in artificial gravity. A strange question from a prodigy. He’d answered that loneliness was a human luxury trees didn’t need. She’d looked at him with pity that made him uncomfortable all day.

Halric broke the reverie by tapping his tablet. “Sir, drone feed from the dome just updated. Cleo authorized ‘canary burst’ protocols.”

A canary burst: temporary lifting of data‑silence embargo so all sensors could transmit full‑bandwidth telemetry for ninety seconds. High risk of leaks, but a crucial info flood.

Yara angled the holograph so Isaac could see. Dozens of miniature wire‑frame entities danced above a blueprint. Each represented a drone or officer. Cleo’s avatar, tagged LEAD/ DREXLER C. , pulsed at the garden’s edge, directing micro‑spectrometer swarms across the sand ripples.

“She’s taking core samples every twenty centimeters,” Yara noted, admiration coloring her tone.

Isaac studied his daughter’s digital ghost. Tactical crispness in her angles. A slow pride tempered by dread. He zoomed out, mapping evacuation routes, choke points, vantage zones. The dome’s glass‑fiber roof was rated for micrometeorites but not small‑arms fire. If Helios‑Edge—or a proxy—intended to strike, they’d exploit that weakness, maybe deploy monofilament drogue lines from an orbital drone.

He pinged Cleo’s channel, typed a single phrase: Check upper lattice for micro fissures. She responded with a curt Already on it, old man. The affectionate jab eased tension in his shoulders.

A chime announced approach to Sector Seven. Grav plates ramped up resistance for deceleration, the cabin’s ambient lighting shifting to soft aquamarine—the corporate shade of the dome’s owner consortium. Isaac secured the crates, double‑checked the coil‑gun’s mag‑ring alignment.

Halric swallowed. “You think we’re walking into an ambush, Inspector?”

“I think we’re already inside one,” Isaac said. “The minute they forged my badge, the game board was set. All we can do now is choose whether we move like pawns or queens.”

Yara cocked her head. “I’ll take queen, thanks.”

The tram doors parted with a whisper. Pressurized vestibule air kissed their faces—too sterile, perfumed with juniper resin and ozone scrubbing. Isaac inhaled slowly, the way divers do before plunging, and stepped onto a glass skywalk that curved upward like the throat of some luminous beast gobbling them toward the dome’s heart.

Sector Seven’s central dome loomed beyond the skywalk: a colossal hemisphere of fused silica threads and graphene ribs, six hundred meters across, crowned by a fractal lattice that doubled sunlight filtration and kinetic shielding. The structure’s outer shell refracted lunar day into shimmering rainbows; at its zenith, a venting aperture exhaled faint vapor streaks—a cosmetic flourish designed to mimic Earth clouds for homesick executives.

At the base, the perimeter checkpoint resembled a minimalist cathedral: white pillars of self‑healing ceramic, frosted plex screens scrolling executive welcomes in five languages, and a single narrow causeway forced visitors to slow, to submit. Directorate crime‑scene tape—brilliant indigo photonic bands—cut a jagged ring around the entrance, its edges flickering with warning glyphs that no civilian dared test.

Two corporate sentries awaited: young, athletic, their polished breastplates embossed with a stylized helix entwined by laurel branches—the Helios‑Edge crest. Pulse‑pistols rested high on tactical harnesses, more ornamental than practical. Security doctrine for high‑net‑worth zones favored non‑lethal mez rounds and litigation shields rather than messy firefights. Behind them stood a Directorate lieutenant in midnight‑blue armor. Her name tag read Liu, R. —one of Cleo’s academy classmates.

Isaac advanced, badge displayed. Lieutenant Liu’s visor iris dilated, scanning the chip. Her expression remained professionally neutral but her voice carried subtle warmth. “Inspector Drexler. Captain Drexler asked me to expedite your entry. No press allowed past the cordon. No board reps either—they’re fuming in the envoy lounge.”

“Enjoy the fireworks,” Isaac said.

Liu stepped aside, but one corporate guard raised a gloved palm. “Helios‑Edge protocols require biometric confirmation. Your credentials were flagged for anomaly.”

Isaac almost laughed. The audacity. “You mean the credentials someone stole from archives to drop a corpse at your shareholders’ feet?”

The guard stiffened. Liu cleared her throat. “Directorate protocols supersede. Let’s not delay the Inspector.”

But Isaac stopped. He saw opportunity. He unclipped the badge, held it as though examining wear. “Run your scan,” he told the guard. “Let’s ensure we’re all looking at the same anomaly.”

The guard, thrown off balance by the cooperative tone, nodded. A scanning brace slid from the checkpoint arch and projected concentric rings of green light across Isaac’s face, wrists, gait sensors. A chime sounded. The holo display read: CREDENTIALS VERIFIED – TIMESTAMP 48:199. Forty‑nine minutes before Juno’s body had appeared in the garden.

Gasps fluttered among onlookers. Lieutenant Liu’s brow furrowed. Isaac spoke loudly, letting his voice carry toward the knot of execs behind a transparent partition where they eavesdropped. “There. Someone with root access manipulated logs to place me on site at the time of the murder relocation. Your own scanners prove it false, because if I were here then, they’d read a second earlier timestamp from physical presence.” He pointed at the display as it cycled to CURRENT TIME 48:251.  “The discrepancy is your smoking gun—suggesting data forgery at the system core.”

Whispers ignited among the corporate entourage. A woman in pearl‑lined enviro‑silks—board liaison, Isaac guessed—muted her comm call and stared daggers. Isaac gave her a curt nod, then stepped through the ion scrubber. Electric mist crawled over his clothes, neutralizing surface pathogens.

Beyond the checkpoint, a sunlit concourse unfolded: vaulted ceiling alive with faux skylarks programmed to flutter among hanging gardens. Cascading pools emitted soft chimes as controlled micrometeorites seeded ripples—an art installation quantifying cosmic randomness. Everything smelled of money and curated nature, so unlike the raw metal tang of District 19.

He tracked Cleo’s AR beacon via his wrist slate. The route led through a ring of boutiques—luxury exosuit tailors, zero‑g perfumeries, off‑world art dealerships—every storefront dimmed behind privacy shutters out of respect for the “incident.” Security drones hovered at regular intervals, projecting polite but impenetrable barriers. A small crowd of dome residents had gathered near the garden entrance, some weeping, others streaming commentary over social feeds despite jamming fields. The morbidity of wealth always found an audience.

As he approached, a low sonic hiss signaled the decontamination curtain parting. The interior zen garden sprawled beneath a wave‑shaped plex canopy that refracted light into pearlescent columns. Smooth basalt boulders, imported at ruinous expense from Earth’s Izu Peninsula, anchored spiral patterns in fine black lunar regolith. The bonsai—an ache‑beautiful miniature sequoia spliced with lunar‑hardy moss—rose at the exact center, its roots entangled with silver capacitor filaments to monitor growth metrics.

At its base, Juno Pell lay like the garden’s discarded heart. Her coveralls, once cerulean, had oxidized to purple beneath vacuum exposure; blood carved maroon delta channels through sand. Forensics drones hovered, their vents whispering prayers. Officers in gray‑striped lunar suits walked the perimeter. And there, kneeling with improbable calm, Cleo Drexler gently extracted core samples with a vibra‑spoon while issuing orders via subvocal comm.

Isaac paused at the threshold, unseen for a moment, watching his daughter’s competence radiate. She had inherited her mother’s grace, his restless analysis, and forged them into something steel. Guilt stabbed him—both for the pride he felt and the years he’d stolen from that pride.

Then she sensed him, perhaps by shift in air currents, but didn’t look up.