The return journey didn't feel like a return at all.
The Argosy Vega moved through space like a different ship—faster, smoother, more alive. Lights along its hull shimmered faintly now, not from power conduits but from something stranger. Something organic. As though the ship was catching echoes from the signal now blooming through Elara.
She sat in the captain's seat, calm and centered, her posture a little too still to be entirely human. And yet her eyes—those were Elara's. Just warmer now. Wiser.
Kaia lived in her still, but not as a passenger anymore.
They were one.
Eliot sat at the co-pilot console, watching her with a mixture of awe and quiet concern.
"You feeling okay?"
Elara turned to him with a soft smile. "I'm better than okay. I can feel the signal now. Not just as noise or data. It's… language. History. Emotion."
Nova leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "Any idea what it's saying?"
"It's not saying anything to us. It's talking to something farther out. Calling to pieces of itself. Gathering."
Solace's voice chimed in. "Which is precisely why I suggest we don't linger. Something out there has noticed our little spark, and it may not be as welcoming as the last one."
"Agreed," Eliot said. "Let's head back to known space. We need to warn people—show them what we've found."
Elara nodded. "Plotting a return path now."
But something in her chest tightened.
Because the signal wasn't just growing—it was changing.
It started in the second week of their return voyage.
Nova noticed it first. "We've got interference in the long-range comms array. Looks like… bleedover from our own transponder?"
Solace sounded annoyed. "That's not possible. Unless someone cloned us."
"Or unless someone's listening," Elara murmured.
She closed her eyes and focused inward.
The signal inside her pulsed like a second heartbeat. Warm. Familiar.
But now—it was reaching out.
Not just passively.
It was calling.
And something was responding.
Eliot caught her wrist gently. "Is it trying to leave you?"
"No. It's trying to bring something here."
That night, she dreamed.
Not of stars.
But of roots.
Deep and ancient, threading through time and vacuum. Signals like sap. Memory like soil. And something beginning to flower in the dark.
Three days later, it arrived.
It came from above, like a shadow falling across the stars.
At first, it was just a faint blip on Solace's sensors.
Then a shape.
Then another.
And another.
Ten. No—dozens.
Ships.
Not human.
Not from Earth.
They emerged like seeds blooming in gravity wells—angular, flowing, alive.
But they didn't attack.
They waited.
Hovering silently just outside the Vega's path.
Nova's voice was taut. "Are we under siege or being invited to a dance?"
"I think…" Elara whispered, "…they're listening."
She opened the channel.
No words came.
Just presence.
Emotion.
Recognition.
Like distant cousins reunited after an epoch of silence.
Kaia's voice stirred inside her: "They are fragments of what I was. Of what we were."
"They're not hostile," Elara said aloud. "They're curious. They came because they felt the bloom."
Eliot kept one hand on the weapons console. "What do we do?"
Elara smiled.
"We talk."
For the next five days, the Argosy Vega traveled alongside the fleet.
They never spoke in language—but in light pulses, EM echoes, resonance fields. Solace did her best to translate, though she admitted it was more art than science.
"It's like interpreting a symphony with a wrench and a whiteboard," she grumbled.
Still, a picture began to form.
The signal—what humans called "the Hollow"—was not a single consciousness. It was a network. A living tapestry woven from trillions of minds across time. Some biological. Some synthetic. Some neither.
What Elara had found was just one strand.
Now that strand had begun to sing again.
Eliot stood beside her in the observation deck, watching the ships drift in formation.
"What happens when we get back to Earth? When people realize we've made contact?"
"I don't know," Elara admitted. "But it won't be war. Not if we show them this."
He smiled faintly. "You're not just a person anymore, you know. You're a message in a bottle. A living signal."
She laughed. "Well, let's hope they read me right."
They arrived at the edge of the solar system seventeen days later.
The human satellites saw them first.
Then the patrol ships.
Then New Gaia command.
Elara opened a wide-band channel and spoke to all of them at once.
"This is Elara Wynn, on board the Argosy Vega. We're not alone. We never were. The signal we feared was a greeting, not a threat. I am living proof of that."
A pause.
Then: "They've come to listen. And if we're willing… they'll teach us to hear."
Silence followed.
Long.
Then—
A reply.
Not from EdenCorp.
Not from New Gaia Command.
But from the orbital colonies.
From Earth's scattered peoples.
From those who had nothing to lose and everything to imagine.
A voice rang out.
"We hear you."
The fleet shifted course.
Toward Earth.
Toward home.
Toward a new beginning.
And behind them, in the vastness of space, the signal continued to bloom.