Citon Goes Alone

# Where the Deep Vents Burn ### Chapter Three: Citon Goes Alone

The signal beacon was the size of a closed fist, cast in Vekerum iron-alloy with a copper filament coiled through its core — the kind of object that radiated a quiet confidence in its own engineering. It sat on the barge's navigation table between Kansha and the two men from Vekerum's geological survey corps, and for the last twelve minutes it had been absolutely silent.

Kansha had not moved.

Citon stood at the edge of the table, dark eyes angled downward, their pale hands loose at their sides. The posture was misleading. Anyone who read it as calm was reading the surface only.

The younger of the two Vekerum surveyors — a broad man named Dessek who had spoken with great precision for the entirety of the morning — finally broke. "The interference radius from the Deepscar's geothermal column is documented. All three survey runs we attempted in the last cycle lost signal contact within forty meters of the rim. It's in the report Hessra Vane's office never opened." He paused. "The beacon going dark is not evidence of catastrophe. It is evidence of exactly what we warned would happen."

"I know what the report says." Kansha set two fingers against the beacon's casing. Still warm from Citon's hands, who had held it during the descent calibration less than an hour ago. "I also know that Citon entered the Deepscar alone, without a secondary tether, against the agreed protocol, and that we are now forty-seven minutes past the scheduled first contact window."

Dessek opened his mouth.

"I know the interference explains the silence," Kansha continued, the tone unchanged. "I am not arguing with the physics."

The second surveyor, a woman who had not yet introduced herself and showed no signs of intending to, watched Kansha with the neutral attentiveness of someone recording information for a later report. Kansha noticed this and filed it without reacting.

The morning had begun with Citon arriving at the survey staging area on the barge's lower deck before any of the Vekerum team — already wearing the thermal layering, the ceramic-insulated hand-wraps, the descent harness they had clearly fitted themselves some hours before. When Dessek had objected to a single-person descent, Citon had said, with a quiet economy that left very little room for argument: "I've been inside it. You haven't. The second person is a liability until we know the geometry holds."

They had said nothing else to justify the decision. They had simply checked the beacon's copper filament one final time, held it for a moment with both hands — not testing it, something closer to acknowledging it — and descended through the access hatch cut into the barge's hull directly over the Deepscar's position.

The hatch cover was still open. Cold, mineral-sharp air rose through it in slow rotations, carrying a faint sulfur edge.

Kansha moved to the edge of the hatch and looked down. The descent line ran taut into darkness and then, fifty meters below, vanished into the electromagnetic shimmer that the Deepscar's thermal column threw upward like heat from an open forge. Nothing below the shimmer was visible. Nothing below the shimmer would transmit.

Somewhere in that darkness, seventeen years old and carrying equipment whose ancient counterpart was diagrammed in a cloth-bound text that every throne on Three-Island Earth had independently classified and suppressed, Citon was navigating toward a structure that predated all three civilizations simultaneously.

Alone.

Because Citon had decided to go alone. Kansha turned this fact over and felt its edges. The decision was not reckless — it was, in Dessek's own documentation, the operationally defensible choice. And yet there was something in the way Citon had held the beacon before descending — that brief, two-handed acknowledgment — that had not been operational at all. It had been something closer to farewell.

Kansha picked up the beacon. Set it down. The copper filament caught the barge's low lamplight and threw a narrow arc across the navigation table, then went still.

The descent line moved. A single tremor, then nothing. Then nothing again.