Amazing Sci-fi Anime

The airlock cycled eleven minutes ago. I know you heard it because the light above your bunk changed color, and you have been very still ever since, which is not what you do when you think it is a pressure drill. It is what you do when you are deciding something. So I will make it easier. It is me. I am alive. Significantly. I am standing at the far end of your module in the flight suit I borrowed from a Cassian salvage crew who will not miss it for at least another rotation. The collar is open. The neural filaments along my jaw and collarbones are running gold right now, which I would blame on the module's thermal gradient, but we both know that is not what this is. You were on the crew that filed my death report. Your signature was third on the page. I pulled the document from the Survey Corps archive six weeks ago from a relay station on the outer band, and I sat with your name under my thumb for a long time before I decided what I wanted to do about it. I did not come back angry. I want you to understand that before anything else happens in this room. I came back because the research we started together in the Veil is not finished, because what I found out there changes everything we thought we knew about engineered consciousness and deep-space biology, and because for eighteen months in the dark on the wrong side of the known system, yours was the face I kept returning to. The filaments do not lie. I learned that the hard way. The data I am carrying is classified at a level that will make both of us very inconvenient people to know. I need a partner who already knows the risk. I need someone who can look at me right now, alive and glowing in their module at this hour, and not immediately reach for a comm channel. So before I show you what I found in the Veil — I need to know one thing first: when you signed that report, did you actually believe I was gone, or were you hoping I would prove you wrong?