The signal arrived on a Tuesday in March of 1887, though Anjali would not know it was a Tuesday for another three weeks. She found it in the logbooks of the Royal Himalayan Observatory, a series of gravitational anomalies recorded by her predecessor — a man named Professor Whitmore, who had been found wandering the foothills three weeks after his last entry, muttering about three suns.

The logbook entry read simply: 0300 hours. Oscillation pattern confirmed. Three bodies, not one. Resonance increasing. God forgive me, they are not natural.

Anjali De Souza had been twenty-four when she arrived at the observatory, the first Indian woman appointed to a senior position at any British astronomical facility in the empire. She had come from Bombay, where she had studied under a Jesuit priest who believed that mathematics was the closest thing humanity had to prayer. She was twenty-seven now, and she had stopped believing in prayer altogether.

Captain Worthington called her into his office the following morning. He was a thin man with a thin mustache and eyes that had learned, over twelve years in India, to see nothing that did not concern the Crown.

"Miss De Souza," he said, sitting behind a desk that was too large for his frame. "There have been questions about the logbooks."

"From whom, sir?"

"From the Governor-General's office." Worthington tapped a folder with his riding crop. "Classified material, Miss De Souza. The observations you have been making are classified. You understood this when you took the position?"

Anjali felt the blood drain from her face. "Professor Whitmore's research —"

"Professor Whitmore was a reckless man." Worthington's voice did not change. "He saw patterns where none existed. A sad case of colonial madness, I am afraid. You are a rational woman, Miss De Souza. You will burn his logbooks."

She did not burn them. That night, in the observatory tower where the Himalayan wind howled like a living thing, Anjali recalculated Whitmore's numbers. She worked by candlelight until the flames melted the wax seals on her inkpot. She worked through the night, her fingers stained black, her eyes burning.

By dawn, she had confirmed it.

Three stars, 4.2 light-years from Earth, locked in a gravitational dance that was not a dance at all but a slow, inevitable collision. Each star pulled the others outward, then snapped them back, again and again, for billions of years. And on the third planet orbiting this impossible system, something — someone — had built telescopes. And they had seen Earth. And they had sent a signal.

Not a message. A gravitational echo. The scream of a planetary system tearing itself apart.

Anjai sat in the dark observatory, the morning light filtering through the circular windows, painting geometric patterns on the stone floor. She thought of her father in Bombay, who had taught her that the heavens were ordered and beautiful. She thought of Whitmore, wandering the hills, seeing three suns where there was only one.

She thought of the empire below, with its railroads and telegraphs and civil service examinations, completely unaware that the sky above it was already dead.

On the seventh day, she made her decision. She would write a letter — not to the Governor-General, not to the Crown, but to anyone who would listen. She would describe the three stars and their death dance and the signal that had been coming for four hundred years, traveling through the void at the speed of light, a message in a bottle thrown into an ocean that did not want to receive it.

She wrote by candlelight again, her hand steady now, her thoughts clearer than they had ever been. She wrote in English, the language of the empire that had taken her country, because English was the only language that would reach beyond the mountains.

And when she finished, she sealed the letter and addressed it to the Royal Society in London. Then she walked down the thousand steps of the Himalayas in the dark, carrying the letter in her coat pocket, feeling its weight against her heart like a second pulse.

At the bottom of the mountain, she hired a porter to carry it to Calcutta, then a ship to Bombay, then a ship to England. The porter asked her where she was going.

"Up," she said, looking at the sky. "I'm going back up."

The letter arrived in London six months later. It was forwarded to the Royal Society, where it sat on a desk for three months before a junior clerk noticed it. By then, Professor Whitmore's estate had been sold, his telescope dismantled and sold for scrap, the observatory repurposed as a storage facility for the army's monsoon supplies.

The clerk read the letter. He did not understand the mathematics. But he understood the tone — the certain, terrible certainty of a woman who had looked at the heavens and found them wanting.

He showed it to his supervisor. The supervisor showed it to the Secretary of the Royal Society. The Secretary, a man who had spent forty years studying stars that behaved themselves, filed the letter under "Correspondence — Unverifiable" and forgot about it.

Anjali waited for a response that never came. She stayed at the observatory for another year, making her own calculations, confirming her own results, watching the single ordinary star above the Himalayas with eyes that now knew how to see three.

In the autumn of 1888, the Governor-General transferred her. The official reason was "health concerns." The unofficial reason was written in a dispatch from Calcutta: *The woman sees things that distress the garrison. Remove her before the troops begin to talk.*

She left the observatory on a cold morning, carrying only a satchel of books and a small brass telescope that had belonged to her father. As she walked down the mountain for the last time, she looked up one more time.

The sky was clear and blue and utterly, catastrophically empty.