She couldn’t bring the relic home. So she would bring home the thing it was attached to. The asteroid would enter the atmosphere as a fireball, but the monolith would survive the fall. It would land in the Pacific, and its energy—she prayed—would still dampen the flare.
Elara smiled, blood on her teeth, and watched the stars spin. She had failed to remove. But she had not failed to save.
She closed her eyes. Seventy-two hours became seventy-two minutes of oxygen. The asteroid was tumbling toward the sun. If she left without the relic, Earth burned. If she stayed, she burned with the asteroid, and Earth still burned. remove failed
She wired the core to the monolith’s base. If you won’t be removed, she thought, then you’ll be moved.
Remove failed.
But the monolith wouldn’t let go. It had fused itself to the rock, to reality itself. Her extraction device had whirred, sparked, and then died.
Remove failed. The message wasn’t an error. It was a verdict. She couldn’t bring the relic home
On her wrist, the device flickered. Then, a new line: