I

The woman who walked into my office smelled like expensive perfume and expensive trouble. Same perfume, same trouble, only this time the trouble came from the stars.

"Mr. Morretti?" she said. She was standing in my doorway, thirty-something, dark hair cut in a sharp bob that cost more than my monthly rent, wearing a coat the color of midnight and eyes that said she hadn't slept in days.

"Depends who's asking," I said. I didn't stand up. I don't stand up for anyone. Not anymore.

"My name is Corvette Vance. My husband was Dr. Elias Vance. He died three weeks ago."

I put down my glass. Synthetic whiskey. Tasted like iodine and regret. "I'm sorry for your loss."

"He didn't kill himself."

"Then how did he?"

"That's what I need you to find out." She placed a credit chip on my desk. It glowed faintly blue—enough credits to keep me in whiskey and rent for six months. "Elias left me a message. He said: 'The forest is too deep. We're all running in it.' I don't know what it means. He was a dimension physicist. That's the kind of nonsense they deal in."

I picked up the credit chip. It was warm from her hand. "What did the authorities say?"

"Accidental exposure to an unstable dimensional field. Lab accident." She said it with the exact tone a person uses when they don't believe a word of it. "I disagree."

"How much longer do you need an answer?"

"Before the body is buried. Three days."

I should have said no. I should have taken the credits, told her I'd look into it, and forgotten about it by morning. But the credits were warm, and I was bored, and trouble had been chasing me since I left the Space Fleet, and trouble doesn't care about good decisions.

"Three days," I said. "Don't spend it all in one galaxy."

II

Elias Vance's lab was on Level 7 of the Mars Research Complex, a windowless concrete box in a building full of windowless concrete boxes. New Shanghai—the colony's main city—spread out below me, a sprawl of neon signs and acid rain and corporate towers that pierced the smog like teeth.

The lab had been sealed with ICE security tape. Interstate Corporate Enterprise. The biggest private power on Mars. They owned the water, the air, the gravity generators. They owned everything except the truth, and they were very, very good at keeping that too.

I cut the tape with a knife I'd had since my Fleet days. Inside, the lab was exactly what you'd expect from a dimension physicist's workspace: chalkboards covered in equations, monitors displaying data streams that meant nothing to anyone without a PhD in theoretical physics, and a desk that had been thoroughly searched and searched again.

But searchers miss things. They always do. They look for things that can be carried away—data chips, research notes, physical evidence. They don't look for things that are hidden in plain sight.

I found Elias's research in the chalkboard. Not the equations—the equations were for show. I found the marginalia, the little notes he'd scribbled in the corners between the big scary math. Notes that told a different story.

"The Nocturne signal is not random. It's a map." "They're not hiding. They're hunting. And we're the prey." "The Dark Forest isn't a metaphor. It's a description." "ICE knows. They've always known."

The Dark Forest. I'd heard the term before, in the Fleet. A theory about interstellar communication: the universe is full of civilizations, but every civilization stays silent because revealing your location means death. Like a dark forest where every hunter carries a gun, and the moment you make a sound, someone shoots.

Elias hadn't just believed this theory. He'd proven it. And proving it had gotten him killed.

I was photographing the chalkboard margins with my retinal recorder when the door opened behind me.

"Mr. Morretti," said a voice I recognized. Director Kessler of ICE Security. He was fifty, clean-shaven, wearing a suit that cost more than my lifetime earnings. "You're trespassing on corporate property."

"I'm investigating a death. I have a warrant."

"You have a credit chip from a grieving widow." He stepped into the lab and closed the door. "Let me help you understand something, Jack. Some truths are too expensive for people like you to uncover."

"People like me?"

"People who need money. People who can be bought." He smiled, and it was the smile of a man who had never been refused anything. "The Vance case is closed. The dimensional accident was real. Your widow friend can collect the insurance. Or she can find out why her husband really died, and discover that some forests are too deep to run through without being caught."

I looked at him for a long moment. Then I smiled back. "Director Kessler, I've been caught before. It's not as scary as it sounds."

III

The truth, like most truths, was hiding in a bar.

The Rusty Airlock was on Level 12, the kind of place where the air recyclers worked half-heartedly and the synth-whiskey was diluted with enough water to power a small river. I sat in the back corner with a drink I couldn't afford and two people who knew too much.

First was old man Harlan, a retired Space Fleet veteran who'd served twenty years and come home with one leg and a head full of classified operations. He was drunk, which meant he was talking.

"The Dark Forest is real, Morretti. I saw it. I was on the Kepler Station when—no, I can't say more. But you want to know about Vance? He was close. Too close. He found the signal. The real signal. Not the Nocturne greeting message. The one that came after."

"What signal?"

"The one that said: 'We see you.'"

The second person was a young engineer named Tessa, who'd defected from ICE three months ago and was now living off the grid in New Shanghai's undercity. She found me because Harlan pointed me at her.

"ICE has been monitoring the Dark Forest signal for years," she said, her voice low and urgent. "Vance cracked the encryption. He found out that the signal isn't just a warning. It's a coordinate system. Every civilization in the forest has a position, and the signal tells you where everyone else is."

"Then why hide it?"

"Because if everyone knows where everyone else is, the forest becomes a shooting gallery. ICE doesn't want the public to know that we're not alone. They don't want panic. They want control."

Tessa leaned closer. "But that's not the worst of it, Morretti. The worst is that Vance didn't just find the signal. He found something in his own DNA. A genetic marker that matches the Nocturne coordinate system."

My stomach did something unpleasant. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that Elias Vance discovered that his ancestor was the sole survivor of the last dimensional war. And that your DNA, Morretti, carries the coordinate code. The code that tells every hunter in the Dark Forest exactly where to aim."

IV

I sat in an abandoned space station orbiting Mars, the kind of derelict hulk that ICE had forgotten about, and I thought about what Tessa had told me.

My DNA. A coordinate code. A target painted on my genes by a war that happened a thousand years ago.

I thought about Corvette. About how she'd walked into my office with her expensive perfume and her expensive trouble, and how I'd taken her case because I was bored and broke and stupid.

I thought about Elias Vance, who had tried to tell the truth and been silenced for it.

I thought about the Dark Forest, out there in the space between the stars, full of hunters with guns, and the universe was so big and so dark and every civilization was running, trying not to make a sound.

But what if someone made a sound?

What if someone screamed?

I activated the device Elias had built—the one that could read and broadcast the coordinate code hidden in my DNA. It was a crude thing, cobbled together from salvaged Fleet technology and Vance's research notes, but it would work. It would broadcast my genetic signature across every frequency, every band, every wavelength. It would light up the Dark Forest like a flare.

Corvette's voice came through the comms, distant and worried. "Jack, what are you doing? Kessler's ships are moving. They know what you're planning."

"Tell the forest," I said into the comms, "the game is over."

I pressed the activation button.

The station glowed. Not with light—with coordinate data. My DNA, decoded and broadcast, painting my position in the Dark Forest for every hunter to see. The Nocturne signal responded instantly, a cascade of responses from civilizations that had been hiding for millennia, suddenly aware that someone had lit a fire in the darkness.

I smiled. For the first time in my life, I wasn't running. I was standing still, and I was making noise, and I was the loudest thing in the entire universe.

The dimensional conversion hit like a wave of golden light. It was beautiful, in the way that dying is beautiful when you've made your choice.

I became a beacon. A coordinate. A scream in the Dark Forest that would echo for a thousand years.

And somewhere, in the space between stars, something heard me.