# Chapter 30: Graduation Packet

**74 days until keyhole crossing**

Elian graduated under a sky Mira had not seen in twenty years.

The packet opened with a crowd, blue Earth daylight, and a young woman in a flight academy sash pretending not to search the audience for parents who were light-years away. Elian was twenty-one. Taller than Mira. Of course she was.

"I was going to send nothing," Elian said later in the private segment. "That seemed fair. Then Grandma said fairness is a small god and I should choose a better one."

Mira laughed and cried once, badly, then kept watching.

Elian had become sharp, capable, still wounded. She spoke of rescue flight school, of hating the mission less on some days, of understanding statistics without forgiving them. She held up the green dragon, now patched so many times it looked like a map.

"I am not saying I forgive you," she said. "I am saying I know more now. Those are different."

The packet ended with her looking directly into the recorder.

"Come home if you can."

Mira replayed that line until Jonas took the slate gently from her hand.

Then Hana summoned them.

The final model waited in the command room. The mass drivers had done more than anyone had dared hope after the iron scar relocation. The impactors had landed. The valley array was ready. The polar fuel was loaded.

The Wanderer still grazed the keyhole.

Not through the center. Not doom certain. But close enough that the uncertainty cone touched catastrophe.

"We need the fusion-standoff burn," Hana said.

Jonas looked at the alignment model and saw the manual failover case no one had discussed aloud.

Mira saw him see it.

Neither spoke.

Below, Earth-2 prepared for the final seventy-four days.