Dr. Mara Okafor hadn't slept in forty hours. On the quarantine moon Cessil-9, eleven mine workers had each spoken one strange word into the comms log, then gone quiet. When they woke, they answered to other names and wept for cities nobody had ever heard of. Their blood was clean. Whatever this was, it wasn't in the blood. It was in the voice. The comms log blinked on her screen, waiting to be played.

Mara played the log. Eleven voices said the same word: a wet, clicking sound her own throat tried to copy before she clamped her mouth shut. She slapped the speakers off, heart pounding. The word wanted to be repeated. That was how it spread. She had to know where it came from.

Mara ran the word through the lab analyzer. It matched a pattern buried in the ancient rock cores the miners had cracked open last week. The word was a key. Something down in that rock had been waiting for a mouth to say it out loud. She grabbed a suit and headed for the shaft.

Mara decided the miners should never have spoken it. She set charges to collapse the shaft and bury whatever was below. But as she armed the timer, the eleven infected workers appeared at the tunnel mouth, calm and smiling, blocking the only way out.

Mara couldn't fight all eleven. So she spoke to the one closest, the man who'd been Worker 7. "Aanvi," she said gently. He froze. Then she kept naming them, real name after real name, like throwing ropes to drowning men. One by one they blinked, looked at their hands, and remembered Cessil-9.