You were never good enough. They chose you because you were expendable. Nine minutes isn't a buffer. It's a countdown.
He stood on the launch platform, his pressure suit humming with recycled air. Above him, the sky of Kepler-186f was a bruised purple. Below him, seven kilometers of vertical shaft plunged into the planet’s crust—a natural fissure lined with ancient, crystalline growths that the science team called "singing glass."
Ten years of guilt. Seven kilometers of descent. Nine minutes of mercy turned to seven seconds of truth.
He reached for it.
"Nine minutes on the mark."
Above, the purple sky waited. The comms crackled: "Leo? You're ascending early. Report."
Not nine minutes. Seven seconds.
"Remember the objective: retrieve one intact singing glass fragment and ascend. No deviations. The pressure at depth will fog your cognitive clarity inside thirty seconds. You will feel euphoric. You will want to stay. That’s the crystal singing to your nervous system. Ignore it."
Leo looked down and saw not his reflection, but a younger version of himself—age ten, the year the选拔 trials had taken his brother. The boy stared up with hollow eyes and whispered, "You left him."
And the singing glass all around him—the dark, dead shards—ignited at once, not with light but with sound. A single, perfect note: the note his brother had hummed the night before the trials, the last sound Leo had heard before walking away. ten789
For the first three kilometers, the shaft was wide as a cathedral. Stalactites of singing glass glowed faintly amber, vibrating at a frequency he felt in his molars. His suit's audio pickups translated the hum into a low, wordless choir. Stay, they seemed to say. Listen.
But for now, he had the crystal. And the singing had finally stopped.
Six kilometers. His heads-up display flickered. Pressure warnings blinked yellow, then orange. The singing glass here was black as obsidian, and silent. Dead. That was wrong. Every sample from the upper shaft had sung. Why were these dark? You were never good enough
Then he saw it: a single crystal, no larger than his thumb, floating in the exact center of the space. It was transparent, almost invisible, but it hummed at a pitch that made his joints ache.
Leo didn't grab the crystal. He opened his suit's sample pouch and let it float inside on its own. Then he fired his ascent thrusters and rose, not looking down, not listening to the boy in the mirror.