Mara left Luyet with the feeling of a hand still stained by soil. The star-grid had receded in her mind and yet left traces: a hunger to design, to knit longevities. She resisted that hunger, mapping other species with a renewed humility. But at night, when the lum-tree wind chimed in distant colonies, she sometimes felt the old pattern stir and, for a moment, imagined a universe where elder memories were not seeds but gardens—tended, contextualized, grown with care.