The Archivist's Ghost

On New Earth, the floors clean up after you. The tiles at Concordia Terminal are full of nanites, and Austin Caine watches his scuffed boot prints fade within seconds of landing, in a city where people walk in straight lines, speak in modulated tones and never look at one another. Caine is a disgraced investigator, exiled for corruption, and that is why a frightened junior archivist named Pell sent for him. Her colleague Mira Thorne worked the pre-Custodian records, the oldest files about Earth, and found something she would not talk about. Three days ago she vanished. Her apartment has been scrubbed of every trace, and the Custodians, Pell recites, do not involve themselves in individual matters.

The nanites in Thorne's apartment have done their work: no dust, no scent, three identical gray jumpsuits hanging exactly ten centimeters apart. But machines follow rules, and these clean surfaces, not what lies under them. Caine pries the panel off her desk and finds a data chip wedged inside. He is still reaching for it when two Custodian enforcers step through the door, moving and breathing in perfect unison, and give him twelve hours to leave the planet. He promised Pell he would find Mira Thorne. On a world built to erase every trace of a person, that promise now comes with a deadline.