THE LEDGER OPENS

Your nav deck goes dim for half a heartbeat. Not a fault — a notification. A contact has appeared on long-range sensors and refuses to identify. Your scanner struggles to draw it; the hull reads as cold crystal, hexagonal, slow, deliberate. It closes to 2,000 meters and matches your heading exactly, like a moon pretending not to watch. Your comms suite receives a single packet. No sender. Three words: 'YOU ARE LISTED.'

Your hail is accepted but no face loads. The voice that answers is layered — one speaker recorded on top of another on top of another, like a chorus that has been practicing for centuries. 'Pilot. I am Eye-of-the-Ninth. You have folded the Timeline on your own authority. The Null Tribunal has entered your flight log into the Ledger of the Hollow. This is your notice. If you rewind again we will assign a prosecutor. If you cease, your Ledger entry will quietly gather dust. We do not negotiate. This is recorded. Fly well.' The contact disengages at a perfectly even rate and the nav deck brightens back up.

Your deep-scan returns partial data. The hull is not metal. It is closer to black tourmaline — a single crystalline slab grown around a reactor your instruments cannot resolve. No thrust signature. No heat bloom. You are not looking at a ship so much as a statement. As your scan completes, the contact emits a narrow-beam pulse directly at your cockpit. It does not damage the hull. It writes a single word on your flight recorder in a script your translator renders simply as: LISTED.

'You ask because you do not know, which is itself a crime of ignorance, but a lesser one. The Loom is the substrate under what you call reality. It does not tolerate abandoned threads. When you rewind a choice, the thread you drop does not unspool — it persists. It hollows. The Loom is now, because of you, measurably heavier. Every rewinder carries a small weight of Nulls they made and cannot unmake. We do not punish. We record. When the Loom begins to tear, we ask the Ledger who tore it. Do not ask us questions that reveal you are new to this. You are not new. You are simply not yet convicted.' The contact is already pulling away.

You pull hard on the stick and burn. The Tribunal Eye does not pursue. It watches you leave with the patience of a cathedral. Your navcomputer registers a quiet entry in a log you did not write: Pilot listed. Contact archived. Your fuel reads two percent lower than the burn should have cost.

The Tribunal Eye is gone from your scanners but not, you suspect, from your life. Later — quietly, the way these things happen — your HUD gains a small violet dot in a corner you had not been using. Your nav computer calls it 'Ledger Entry'. You can open it to see what the Tribunal has logged against you so far. For now, it reads: one warning served. Do not fold the Timeline lightly.

The Eye pulls away at the same patient speed it arrived. You do not feel brave. You feel named. Your nav computer registers a new entry it did not write: LEDGER STATUS — CONTESTED. Beneath it: A PROSECUTOR WILL BE ASSIGNED. Somewhere, maybe very far, a hull of black crystal is being cast. A name is being told to it. The name is yours.