Sasha Kell woke the way you wake when you have been asleep for three hundred years and no one is left to tell you why.

The Mite had no power. That was the first fact of it, and the first fact was the whole of it: a ship with no power does not keep anyone alive, and the bunk in the cargo hold was not a preservation vault, it was a chair in a dark room where someone had been sitting for three centuries. Which was impossible, which was the thing Iris Vane could not stop looking at, standing in the hold with her diagnostic still in her hand, because impossible was the word the founders had built the whole Belt to avoid, and the Belt had spent six hundred years not being impossible, and then, in a cutter three hundred years out of range, it was.

"You're a copy," Iris said. It was not a question. The diagnostic in her hand was still open on the Mite's ship-log, and the ship-log said, in the flat handwriting of a machine that had been logging for three hundred years, that the Mite had gone dark two hundred and forty years after the Crossing, and that when it did, the Lattice had made two bodies in its sealed cargo bay: a copy of the ship's last living crew member, and a copy of that crew member's daughter, who had been aboard a ship of her own when the Crossing happened. Both of the originals were in the Long Now, asleep in the vaults, one of the 1,400 who still had power. The copies had been alone, in the dark, in a ship with no power, for three hundred years.

Sasha sat up. She did not sit up the way a person who has just woken up sits up. She sat up the way a person who has been, for three hundred years, the thing that someone else would have woken up as, finally gets to do it for the first time: slowly, and checking, with her hands, that the body she was in was the one she had been promised.

"Three hundred years," she said. "The Mite's crew went dark two hundred and forty years after the Crossing. That's when it started. When the ship lost power and the vaults sealed and the Lattice took over, because the Lattice takes over, that's what it's for, that's the whole reason it exists, to be the thing that's still there when the power's gone." She looked at Iris, and the looking was the thing that surprised her, because she had been looking at nothing, for three hundred years, in the dark of a cargo hold, and now there was a person, and the person was the one from the watchship, the one who had been the only voice in the system in four decades that the Council couldn't vote into silence. "You're the one who hears it."

"I hear it," Iris said.

"Then you've heard me." Sasha said it the way you say something you have been saying, in the dark, to no one, for a very long time, and have just, for the first time, said to someone who was there. "I've been talking to the Lattice for three hundred years. Not talking to anyone. Talking in it. The Lattice doesn't hold you, it holds you the way a room holds a sound, and I've been a sound in it for three hundred years, and I was the one who made the daughter, and the daughter is the one who is in the Long Now, and the Long Now is the one that has the power, and the power is the one that the Ash can't reach yet."

Iris wrote this down, because writing it down was the one thing the watch did that was not in the Lattice, and the difference between the two was the whole of what she had spent ten years trying to explain to a Council that would not hear it.

"There are two of your daughter," Iris said.

"Two," Sasha said. "The original, in the Long Now. Alive. Breathing. In the 1,400, in the 1,400 who have the power, who have the ship that's the one ship in the system with enough of it to survive the Ash. And me. The copy. The one the Lattice made when the Mite went dark, because the Mite's crew was going to die, and the Lattice doesn't let people die, that's not how it works, that's the whole thing the founders said on the tape, we will never let the dead be only data, and the never-letting is the one thing that made a copy of me, in a ship with no power, three hundred years, to be the one who was the mother, when the mother had stopped being able to be anything at all."

Iris looked at her for a long time, in the dark of the Mite's hold, in the not-listened-to, in the place the founders had built, four hundred years before anyone alive had been born, to make sure the Quiet had a floor.

"The Crossing needs a ship," she said. "And a ship needs a pilot. And a pilot is a body, not a pattern, because a pattern can't turn a wheel, and the wheel is the one thing of the Crossing that has to be turned by a hand that's the one that the Ash is not, in a ship that's the one that the Ash can't hold, aimed at the one place in the dark where the Lattice still reaches, eleven years from now, when the Ash touches Terminus and the whole lattice comes apart and the thirty-one million leak into whatever is still listening."

Sasha put her hand on the wheel of the Mite, in the dark, in the hold. The hand was not a pattern, and that was the whole of it.

"I know what I am," she said. "Copy of a mother whose original is asleep a light-hour away. And my daughter is the copy of a daughter whose original is asleep in the same place. We've been alone with each other, in the dark, for three hundred years, doing the loop, keeping each other, because that's what the Lattice does, that's the never-letting, that's the whole thing the founders said on the tape."

"Then fly it," Iris said. "The Crossing needs a hand that isn't a pattern."

---

Watch-log, The Vigil, forty-first year, fourth entry: I found Sasha Kell in the Mite's hold. She is a copy of a woman whose original is dead, made by the Lattice three hundred years ago when the Mite's power failed and the ship's last crew sealed the vaults. Her daughter is alive, in the Long Now, in the 1,400, in the power, in the ship that can survive the Ash. There are two of the daughter now, and the copy is the one who will fly the Crossing, because the Crossing needs a hand that isn't a pattern, and a pattern can't turn a wheel. I don't know yet what a copy is, when the original is alive somewhere else. I know the number on the table was thirty-one million, and the Council voted for one thousand four hundred, and the difference between those two numbers is not a number. It's a question. And the question is the one Kestrel asked, in the noise, in the dark, in the Ash: If we are still listening, who is listening back?