99: Chapter 99 She turned off the communicator and then pushed open the door of the medical station.

On the morning of the third day after the memorial ceremony, the communication relay station received the second receipt from Terra.

It was not an automatic confirmation code, but a full text. The content had been encrypted according to the standards of the Imperial Department of Military Affairs, and it took Yang Shitou nearly an hour to peel back the layers of decryption. The format that appeared after the final layer of decoding was completely unexpected: it was neither the standard official letterhead of the Military Affairs Bureau, nor the tactical command coding of the Astral Knights, nor even the administrative documents regularly forwarded in the border star sectors—this was a private letter, though the encryption level was that of the Imperial highest-grade psychic seal. The decryption key was a seventeen-digit prime number sequence, the arrangement of which matched perfectly with the Imperial signature numbering sequence that Alice had seen in the sealed archives of the Astral Knights. The letter was not sent from the Military Affairs Bureau; it seemed more like it originated from the Astropathic Choirs of the Terra Imperial Palace, sent directly from the only remaining psychic communication terminal beside the Emperor's silent Golden Throne. The signature line consisted of only one line: Roboute Guilliman, Imperial Regent, writing on behalf of the Emperor.

Yang Shitou did not read the letter. He turned the decoded terminal screen toward Lin Mo and exited the Intelligence Center himself. Before leaving, he took off his calibration eyepiece and placed it on the console, next to a pot of freshly boiled hot water. He didn't speak, but the weight in that action was exactly the same as the brief pause Locke made before pulling his axe from the notch in the doorframe—the thing you are about to face does not need me to explain; you need to be alone for a while.

Lin Mo sat in the chair in the Intelligence Center for a long time after reading the letter. Guilliman did not use the command format of the Imperial Regent; the entire letter was in the second person, a tone never before seen in documents from the highest level of Imperial power. The core of the letter had only two paragraphs: the first confirmed that Lin Mo's application for secondment had been received and that Lieutenant Alice Vian's service affiliation would be decided by her personally; the second paragraph was a handwritten postscript from Guilliman, the handwriting coming from an original paper draft scanned via psychic means, with faint indentations left on the edge of the paper by the fingertips of heavy power armor:

"Archon Lin Mo—you said that you are not training soldiers for the Empire in Blackstone Town, but rather letting people who have been numbered by the Empire regain their names. Something I couldn't do in nearly six years of rebuilding the Imperial military system, you have achieved in less than three. The Emperor sees it from the Golden Throne, and I see it too. Relay this sentence to Deputy Medical Officer Vian: her service number is permanently deleted from the active sequence of the Astral Knights starting today. This is not a discharge; it is a transfer. From now on, she will no longer belong to the Imperial Department of Military Affairs, but to the Hope Star Blackstone Town General Hospital. This transfer order is signed by my own hand and is valid in any court of the Empire—including those who might want to label her a deserter in the future."

Lin Mo placed the letter on the table. Beside it lay the last blank sheet of paper remaining from the forty-one casualty notifications he had written that day, a circle drawn on it. He placed the two sheets of paper side by side—the transfer order from beside the Golden Throne on Terra, and the circle around the apprentice's shoe print on the stone slab at the entrance of the Blackstone Town workshop. The two were separated by most of the Galaxy, by countless light-years and bureaucratic layers, yet on the same table, on the same morning, they were placed together by the same pair of hands. It was not that Lin Mo had deliberately aligned them; it was that they were already speaking of the same thing: a person's belonging should never be determined by the Empire's forms.

He folded the letter, put it into his jacket pocket, and stood up to walk toward the Medical Station.

The door to the Medical Station was half-open. Since the evening of the memorial ceremony, this door had never been completely closed. It wasn't that the hinges were broken; it was the gap Vian had deliberately left after pushing the door open to ventilate that night. She said she wanted to air out the smell of disinfectant alcohol mixed with psychic reagents in the Medical Station after the war, but the real reason was that people had been coming by these days. They weren't coming for medical treatment; they were coming to leave things at the door. A stone shard broken off from the East Wall battlements, scorched by laser fire; a flattened but cleaned enamel cup; a pair of worn-out straw sandals picked up from the city wall. No one left a note; the items were all placed on the wooden stool at the door—back in wartime, when Locke stood guard here leaning on his axe, this stool had held bandages and distilled ale for disinfection. Now, it was piled high with trinkets the townspeople had picked up from the battlefield. No one could explain clearly why they had to be placed here, but Vian understood. They placed the items at the door of the Medical Station simply because this door was the only place in Blackstone Town after the war that could be pushed open without needing an explanation.

When Lin Mo arrived, Alice was sitting in the chair by the window at the very back of the Medical Station. She had her back to the door, but the slightly tense posture of her shoulder blades indicated she was not writing a report. Her hands were resting flat on her knees, holding nothing. She was the only person in the Medical Station—Vian had gone up to the city wall with Locke early in the morning to calibrate the artillery sights. She said the battlements on the north section of the East Wall might have had slight subsidence after yesterday's rain and needed re-calibration, so she had left the Medical Station in Alice's care.

The sound of forging hammers was still ringing outside the window. Old Tom wasn't hammering new springs today; he was hammering iron bars for the gravestones in the cemetery. Each iron bar was identical in length and width, yet he refused to carve names on them—saying that if a name was carved on iron, when the iron rusted, the characters would become blurred. He only hammered the top of each iron bar flat, using calipers to measure a groove that could exactly fit a spring. The spring would be placed in the groove, and the name would be engraved on the spring. As long as the spring didn't rust, the name would never wear away.

Lin Mo took Guilliman's letter out of his pocket and placed it on the medical cabinet beside Alice's knee. The envelope was unsealed; this letter was meant for her, he was just the first person to read it. "It's from Terra," he said.

Alice did not take the letter immediately. She first glanced at Lin Mo, not to ask about the contents of the letter, but to confirm whether his breathing frequency this morning was consistent with what she had felt when standing behind him three days ago while writing the casualty notifications. He was fine. Only then did she unfold the letter.

The way she read the letter was exactly the same as when she read operational files in the Astral Knights—scanning line by line from left to right, with each pause just long enough for her to strip the key information from the formatted packaging. When she reached Guilliman's handwritten postscript, she paused. It wasn't that she didn't recognize the handwriting, but the tone was so unfamiliar—completely different from all the Terra official documents she had received during her six years in the Astral Knights. The Imperial Regent did not use the standard format starting with "Hereby approved" and ending with "Long live the Empire"; what he wrote was: "The entity you henceforth belong to is less the Imperial Department of Military Affairs, and more the Hope Star Blackstone Town General Hospital."

She placed the letter on her knees. The sound of forging hammers outside stopped for a moment; Old Tom was changing iron bars. Then she raised her hand and lightly traced the last stroke of Guilliman's signature with her index finger. It wasn't to verify the authenticity of the signature, but to confirm that this letter was truly written to her.

"He says my number has been deleted," her voice was not loud, but every word was clear. "I joined the camp at fourteen, Alpha-47; this number has followed me for ten years." She paused, "Today, it was deleted by a line of handwriting."

"It is not you who has been deleted." Lin Mo sat down in the chair beside her—not face-to-face, but side-by-side, both looking out the window—where they could see the East Wall battlements and the stone steps of the city wall. "It is your service number that has been deleted. After it is deleted, your file in the Imperial Department of Military Affairs will only have one word: Transfer. Transfer is not discharge; you do not need to hand over your Psyker badge, you do not need to relinquish your identity as a medical officer, and you certainly do not need to prove the reason for your staying in any military court. Your reason has been written into the transfer order by Guilliman for you; he says it is your own wish. The Imperial Regent has personally confirmed your choice, and the legitimacy of this choice does not need to be questioned by anyone."

"Including myself?"

"Yes." Lin Mo looked out the window; on the city wall, Locke was carrying sandbags toward the north section, with Vian following behind, holding a range-finding telescope and a notebook filled with artillery calibration data. "Including yourself."

Alice picked up the letter and refolded it. Her folding motion was as precise as folding bandages in the Medical Station—the fold was chosen in the blank space between Guilliman's signature and the main text of the postscript, so that the signature fell exactly on the front after folding. This was the archiving standard taught to her by the Astral Knights: the signature must be visible on the cover. She placed the folded letter into the inner compartment of her medical bag, right next to the last Imperial-issue Psyker reagent she had saved from the wreckage of the transport ship when it crashed. The reagent was already empty; in the psychic duel three days ago, she had used up the entire dosage of the last three vials. She hadn't thrown away the empty bottle, and now, beside the empty bottle, lay the transfer order signed by the Imperial Regent. Both items came from the same Empire. One was the reagent that had burned out in her veins; the other was, after ten years of service, someone finally officially moving her name from the number column to the signature column.

She stood up and walked to the console. On it sat a portable Imperial military communicator, the only long-range device from the crash wreckage that still worked. Before the war, it had been kept on, with its receiving frequency manually calibrated by Yang Shitou to the Astral Knights' backup encrypted channel. This communicator was her last physical connection to her identity with the Astral Knights. As long as it was on, she could receive a recall order from the Military Affairs Bureau at any time. Although Guilliman had signed the transfer order, the communicator didn't know. Its encrypted frequency still automatically sent a coded pulse of "Alpha-47, standing by" every few seconds.

She picked up the communicator without pulling out the antenna—that antenna had been modified for her by Yang Shitou using spring steel wire specially made by Old Tom; it was three inches longer than the standard Imperial antenna, with nearly twenty percent higher reception sensitivity. She just placed her right index finger on the power button. It was a round, recessed button on the casing; after pressing it, the psychic battery inside the communicator would switch from standby to completely powered off. After the power was cut, the automatic pulse on the encrypted frequency would stop. From that moment on, the number "Alpha-47" would no longer flash on any Imperial terminal.

Her finger rested on the power button for ten seconds. These ten seconds were not hesitation; she had already made her decision. During these ten seconds, she mentally refolded every combat uniform she had worn since being assigned this number at fourteen, every file number she had memorized, and every "Level 5 Psyker" label she had filled out. After folding them, she didn't need to throw them away. She just folded them into the same fold as Guilliman's transfer order. On the cover of the file, it would no longer be a number, but a name.

She pressed the power button.

The indicator light on the communicator screen turned from green to dark gray, then went out completely. The automatic pulse terminal—"Alpha-47, standing by"—disconnected forever after the last transmission. A signal slot on the encrypted frequency, occupied by a number for ten years, became vacant. This vacancy would not be reassigned by the Empire because the transfer order did not specify a replacement.

Alice put the communicator back on the console. She pulled off the spring steel wire Old Tom had modified on the antenna—this spring was not Imperial, and she didn't want it to be locked into a cabinet along with the Imperial communicator. She wrapped the spring steel wire around her index finger, winding it into a ring about the same size as the circle embroidered on the shoe upper. Then she placed the ring on the medical cabinet, arranged side-by-side with the empty psychic reagent bottle and Guilliman's letter.

The sound of forging hammers rang out again outside the window. Old Tom was hammering the groove at the top of the eleventh gravestone iron bar flat; the rhythm of every hammer strike was the same as when quenching, not rushed, not hurried, with precise landing points. He wasn't quenching springs today, but the landing point of the hammer was as steady as that day when he embedded the first wall-locking spring into the foundation of the East Wall. Alice stood by the window and listened to the hammer sounds for a while. In her ten years of service with the Astral Knights, she had never heard such forging sounds on any morning at any station. The forging sounds of the Imperial Arsenal were always wrapped in a layer of urgency whipped by production efficiency; there was none of that in Old Tom's hammer sounds. It wasn't even to finish before dark; it was just the natural rhythm of where the hammer should fall. Every strike made the iron bar just a bit flatter, not more, and not less.

"Lin Mo." She did not turn around, still looking out the window, "That day in the Intelligence Center, you told Locke that sending the reconnaissance team due north wasn't to bring back intelligence, but to find a lock. You said that lock was placed there ten thousand years ago. The glowing stone in your pocket is the key."

"Yes."

"After that lock is opened, what is inside?"

Lin Mo did not answer immediately. He took the crystal with silver patterns out of his pocket. It had become warm during the psychic duel three days ago, and now it had returned to room temperature, but the silver patterns inside were still slowly flowing. He placed the crystal on the medical cabinet, arranging it in a row with the spring steel wire ring, the empty reagent bottle, and Guilliman's letter.

"The mirror of the emperor told me only one thing—that depth is not measured in meters." He paused. "Inside, there is something that can repair the Emperor, nanotechnology. But more importantly, there is a holographic projection inside. The Emperor recorded it himself ten thousand years ago. It is his own words, not someone else's retelling, not the Empire's interpretation, not an order from the Military Affairs Bureau. It is the original words he spoke to that wall ten thousand years ago. No one has heard it, the Ecclesiarchy doesn't know, and Guilliman doesn't know. The only thing that can activate that projection—" He looked at the crystal, then at Alice. "—is her own bloodline."

Alice picked up the crystal and held it at an angle parallel to the morning light outside the window. The silver patterns inside the crystal passed through the faint glow of her fingertips, casting a very faint golden line. The color was exactly the same as the gold that had burned from her roots to her tips when she awakened on the East Wall three days ago. The crystal in her hand was slowly responding to her Psyker powers. It wasn't an active trigger, but a mutual confirmation. It was like a lock that had been asleep for too long, feeling the key approach, the first tumbler inside being gently touched.

"This lock," she said, placing the crystal back on the cabinet, "is waiting for me. Not waiting for anyone else, but waiting for the Emperor's bloodline—the survivor of the seventeenth batch of gene experiments. It waited for ten thousand years, until yesterday, when it heard the second my hair turned gold."

She picked up the spring steel wire ring and slipped it onto her left index finger. The ring was not round; the two ends of the wire were not welded together. When Old Tom had modified her antenna, he had said that this spring should not be welded—a spring that isn't welded will return to its original shape after being stressed, and will never break due to fatigue at the weld point. She put it on her finger now, leaving a small gap. The gap represented that the spring had not been welded shut, and her belonging did not need to be welded shut either. It could return on its own to the shape it was supposed to be.

Then she pushed open the door to the Medical Station. The morning light outside shone on her face, and her ice-blue eyes, after the awakening three days ago, had an undertone slightly warmer than before. It wasn't that the color had changed, but the temperature. It was the stability that only occurs when a Psyker's Psyker core and heart simultaneously provide energy for a choice for the first time.

Locke stood at the base of the city wall, leaning on his axe. The bandage on his left arm had finally been removed, and Vian had even stuck a piece of medical tape she had cut from her own medical kit onto his arm, with tiny words written on it: 'Do not swing at full force.' The blue-and-white standby light on the axe blade was almost invisible in the morning light, but it hadn't been turned off. Locke was waiting for her to come out. He had heard from Lin Mo last night about Guilliman's transfer order, but he hadn't come to the Medical Station to congratulate her in advance. It wasn't that he didn't care; it was that he didn't know how to congratulate someone who was no longer just an Imperial serial number. All he could do was arrive at the base of the city wall half an hour early this morning, lay his axe across his knees, and wait for her to open the door.

"Locke." Alice saw him as soon as she pushed the door open.

"Deputy Medical Officer." Locke stood up, lifted the axe from his knees, and shouldered it—not because he was about to fight, but out of the habitual action of following someone he had recognized. He took two steps forward, then suddenly stopped, and used the end of his axe handle to draw a tiny circle on the stone floor. He didn't explain what the circle meant, but Alice understood. It was a variation of the horizontal mark Old Tom made when inspecting springs; Locke couldn't draw a horizontal line, he could only draw a circle. The position circled was: She is here.

Vian saw Alice walk out from the city wall. She didn't run down from the observation post, but just stood behind the battlement and raised her range-finding binoculars. In the morning light, she clearly saw the unwelded spring steel wire ring on Alice's left finger. When she came down from the roof of the Arsenal, she had casually picked up the Astral Knights Psyker standard manual that Alice had left on the Medical Station shelf—the cover still read "Alpha-47." She had casually taken it down this morning, not with any special intention, just closing the thin volume and placing it by the window on the far right of the console. There was plenty of sun there, which could dry the dampness on the cover.

A very short automatic calibration beep came from the direction of the communications station. Yang Shitou was at the console, automatically recording the microsecond Alice turned off her communicator. This wasn't an Imperial casualty registration; it was a new signal log category he had created for himself. The category name was handwritten in charcoal, different from the handwriting he used when drawing question marks on the Echo X record—this time there were no question marks, just two words: Coming Home.

Lin Mo walked out of the Medical Station and walked a few steps side-by-side with Alice. They hadn't specifically planned a route, but both had coincidentally walked toward the East Wall. When they reached the middle section of the East Wall's battlement, they both stopped at the same spot—three steps forward was where Old Tom had embedded the first wall-locking spring; twenty steps to the left was the position where she had stood at the very front of the battlement three days ago, compressing three layers of barriers to half a foot thick. On the stone of the battlement, there were still faint finger marks pressed by her ten fingers under the counter-pressure of the Psyker shock. They weren't nail marks, but pressure imprints from her fingertips. The stone itself was igneous rock with a hardness of seven; her fingers hadn't been able to gouge out a pit, but the pressure transmitted back to her palms through the barrier when she released her Psyker powers had plated the extremely thin layer of residual Psyker fluid from her fingertips into the crystal crevices of the stone. That coating was invisible to the naked eye, but in the vision of Psyker perception, it was a set of fingerprints so clear they could be identified without magnification. Her barrier had once stood here, and it was exactly the same as her own palm print.

"What are you thinking about?" Lin Mo asked.

"I was thinking that when I stood here three days ago, I thought this was the last thing I would do for Blackstone Town." Her palm covered the stone of the battlement, her palm just covering that invisible coating. "If the Ecclesiarchy had broken through the barrier that day, I wouldn't have had any regrets. Not because I had done enough, but because I had finished the last thing. Today I realized that wasn't the end. Guilliman's transfer order isn't a reward; it's a beginning." She turned to look at him. "You never treated me like a spare part, so I must prove that you never misjudged me."

Lin Mo didn't speak. He placed the silver-patterned crystal on the stone of the battlement; the silver light inside the crystal was still clear in the increasingly bright sky—it wasn't reflecting sunlight; it was glowing on its own. He repeated the posture he had used the last time he had used the crystal to refract moonlight to locate due north, only this time he wasn't looking for direction. He held the crystal at chest level, and the light patterns shone through the crystal, passing through his fingers and casting a very thin silver line on Alice's face. This line fell precisely above her heart, at the same height as the pale golden pattern on her palm that had become clear after her awakening, separated by a distance of about two fists.

"A door, a lock, a key." He put the crystal back into his pocket. "The Emperor's recording can only be seen once the door is opened. But I have already guessed most of what he intends to say in the recording." He paused. "When he sealed this shelter ten thousand years ago, he knew that the one who could open it would not be the Empire. It would be someone who no longer considers herself a spare part, carrying a beam of light and a palm full of heartbeats."

Aunt Zhang walked over from the direction of the workshop, carrying a plate of freshly baked buckwheat pancakes. She had kneaded a little extra dough when making the pancakes this morning, not because she had miscounted the number of people, but because she felt that by noon today, there would likely be one more person in front of the Medical Station. When she reached the Medical Station, she indeed saw Alice sitting on the wooden stool at the door. Locke's axe was placed by the stool; the energy module wasn't glowing with its blue-and-white light today; it was off. Locke himself was standing on the battlement of the city wall, looking north. It wasn't martial law; it was to clear out a quiet space for two girls with the same name.

Aunt Zhang shoved the pancake into Alice's hand; it was still hot, so she wrapped it in her apron as she handed it over. She glanced at the spring steel wire ring on Alice's hand, her gaze identical to the one she had when she recognized that Locke leaving his axe at the door of the Medical Station was a declaration of "I am guarding this person." She didn't ask, "Is this a ring?" She only said, "The steel wire won't rust, and it won't give you a rash on your hand."

Alice took the pancake and took a bite; there was a piece of pickled radish inside, sweet. It was the same taste as the radish Aunt Zhang had stuffed for Xiao Zhou on a bamboo skewer that day—one rock sugar for every twenty catties of radishes. Aunt Zhang's pickled radishes weren't called pickled radishes in Blackstone Town; they were called "Sweet Bite." She said that when you eat something sweet, your tongue relaxes, and when your tongue relaxes, your clenched teeth can unclench. Over the few days since the war, she had used up all the rock sugar she had saved for three years; the plate of buckwheat pancakes today was the last of it.

At noon, Yang Shitou wrote a line in the communications station log. This was the frequency band table he had reallocated after Alice turned off her communicator. He removed the encrypted frequency band originally assigned to "Alpha-47" from the Imperial Department of Military Affairs channel and re-assigned it to the Blackstone Town General Hospital for Psyker emergency use. The technical parameters hadn't changed at all—the same frequency, the same level of encryption, only the terminal name had been changed. In the terminal name field, he didn't input "Deputy Medical Officer Vian," nor did he write "Alice Psyker Channel"; he only wrote five words: Vian's Deputy Medical Officer.

Then, next to this line, he drew a circle, a circle with a small gap, identical to the one embroidered on the apprentice's shoes at the workshop door.

In the evening, the night shift sentries on the city wall changed over. There were nearly twice as many new recruits on guard duty today as usual; it wasn't an order from Locke, but the townspeople who hadn't been organized into the combat sequence three days ago had organized a post-war patrol team themselves. They had no weapons, only carrying torches as they walked a lap along the city wall: from the East Wall to the north, from the North Wall to the west, and back around from the West Wall. Every step landed on the spots where Zhao Laoshi had carried sandbags, Zhao Dabao had dragged the wounded, and the little apprentice had pushed sandbags three days ago. The sandbags on the city wall were all new; the ones that had been shaken crooked three days ago had long since been rebuilt, and not a single bag was crooked. The sandbag that the apprentice had pushed straight before he died was still in its original position and had never fallen. On the stone slab next to it, there was an extra dried wild chrysanthemum; it wasn't the one from three days ago—someone had replaced it with a new one today.

Vian returned to the Medical Station after dark. She took off her combat boots, which were stained with lime powder from the city wall, washed her hands, and walked over to the chair by the window where Alice had sat during the day. A piece of dark blue cloth was draped over the chair; it was what Alice had torn off the lining of her Astral Knights combat uniform this morning, the edges still bearing the frayed threads where the stitching had been torn. It was the location where the rank insignia had been sewn onto the lining of the cuff, close to the pulse. The Astral Knights' rank insignia was never sewn on the outside, only on the lining, close to the heartbeat. Half of that rank insignia had been torn off during the crash, and she had kept the remaining half. Now she had torn it off. The cloth was very thin, having transmitted her pulse in Psyker energy for ten years, and it had long since been dyed with the same slightly warm undertone as her Psyker core. She placed the piece of cloth on the medical cabinet, next to Guilliman's letter, the empty Psyker potion bottle, and Old Tom's spring steel wire ring. These things came from the Empire, from the Emperor, from Blackstone Town, and also from the same pulse between her fingers. They didn't need to explain themselves to each other, because they were all here together today—because one person had unclenched her tight grip, put a stone from her pocket onto the table, brought a letter from Terra to the city wall battlement, and taken a spring steel wire from an Imperial antenna and slipped it onto her own finger joint. She hadn't fled the Empire; she had returned to where she belonged.

The night wind blew in through the crack in the door, and the half-open door of the Medical Station swayed gently in the wind. The hinge made a very faint friction sound against the wooden frame, which happened to sync up with the beat of the hammer falling when Old Tom straightened the spring.

Alice pushed the door open. It wasn't Locke standing outside; it was Lin Mo. He wasn't leaning on his axe; he hadn't come with a weapon. He just stood at the door, at the exact same angle and in the exact same posture as three nights ago, when he had waited for her to walk to the front of the battlement. He didn't speak, just reached his hand out of his pocket, with the silver-patterned crystal resting in his palm. The light of the crystal flickered in the night wind, not transmitting information. It was beating in time with her pulse, in the exact same rhythm as three days ago, as ten thousand years ago, and as the final moment before that underground metal door had been sealed.

It wasn't just a communicator she had turned off. It was every file in the past ten years that had called her a [Level 5 Psyker].

What she had stayed for wasn't Blackstone Town—it was a wall, an axe, a stone, an unwelded spring, and someone who finally knew her name, saying for the first time in the city: She is back.