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 climbed down into the cracked shaft. At the bottom sat a smooth black structure, older than the moon itself. The carvings on it matched the shape of the word. She pressed her glove to them. Images flooded her mind: a dead species that learned to copy itself into sound, so any throat could carry it home.

They weren't a disease. They were refugees, and this moon was their last shelter, finally cracked open. Mara understood the choice now. She could let them in, become their carrier, and give a dying people a future inside her voice. Slowly, she opened her mouth and said the word out loud.