The Long Masquerade — The Witness Plates

Cover: The Long Masquerade

A translucent man before the whole settled system: three and a half centuries of hiding in plain sight.

The Liturgy of the Delay

Thursdays on the laser-link, while Terrance ages and he doesn't. (Part One, Entry 45)

Eleven Minutes

February 2091: the first great grief of a memory that cannot blur. (Part Two, Entry 57)

The Onyeka Compact

2210: a surgeon reads an impossible scan and asks what it costs to tell her. (Part Two, Entry 60)

The Loneliest Name

The Belt salvage years: a man in a suit, talking to his own hands. (Part Three, Entry 63)

Sunward-Out

September 19, 2288, 04:40 yard time: the GS Marek departs with 3,411 souls. (Part Three, Entry 66)

The Broken Sky

June 12, 2381: the first fold-jump, watched from a crowd. (Part Four, Entry 71)

The Towns That Hang

Europa builds downward: chandelier settlements over a hundred kilometers of lightless water. (Part Five, Entry 72)

The Iapetus Bloom

October 9, 2404: sabotage plus shortcut births a colony-killer. (Part Six, Entry 76)

The Walk

361 years of hiding against eighty thousand strangers, live on every feed. (Part Six, Entry 77)

The Matches

Pattern-archaeology unseals three centuries of faces, all of them his. (Part Six, Entry 78)

The First Morning

October 15, 2404: he sits on the rampart of the colony he saved and gives his first name. (Part Six, Entry 80)