The swamp doesn't forget. It holds everything—the bones of men who drowned, the roots of cypress trees that have stood for a thousand years, the whispers of people who came to the bayou to talk to the dead. My grandmother used to say the swamp was alive, that it had a memory, that it remembered everything that had ever happened within its boundaries. I believed her. I still believe her. Even now, forty thousand leagues above the surface of the Earth, floating on a silver plain that stretches beyond the horizon, I believe her.

My name is Silas Thorne. I am twenty-two years old, and I was born in the bayou outside New Orleans, in a house that was built on stilts because the ground was always wet. My father was a fisherman who died when I was six, and my mother was a seamstress who died when I was twelve, and my grandmother was the only person who raised me, and she taught me everything I know about the swamp, and about the dead, and about the things that live in the spaces between.

When she died, I had nothing. No money, no home, no family. Just the swamp, and the memories, and the whispers. And then the letter came, from a man named Mr. Beauregard, offering me a job in space.

"Space," I said to Miss Lillian, my grandmother's sister, who was sitting on the porch and smoking a pipe that smelled like herbs and death. "What kind of job is in space?"

"Cleaning a mirror," she said. "A big one. Three thousand miles across. They say it reflects sunlight onto the Earth. They say it's for the farmers, to help the crops grow."

"Who wants to clean a mirror in space?"

"You do," she said. "Because you have nothing else to do, and because you're brave, and because the swamp has given you something that other people don't have—the ability to see what others cannot see."

I took the job. Not because I was brave, but because I had nothing else to do.

The rocket ride was rougher than I expected. I'd never been in anything that moved that fast, and when the engines cut and the silence came, I floated. I floated in my harness, staring out the window at the silver plain, and my breath caught in my throat.

It was bigger than anything I'd ever seen. A silver plain stretching beyond the horizon, reflecting the Earth and the stars and the sun, all at once. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and I knew, even then, that I was in the presence of something that was not entirely of this world.

The work was simple. I climbed out onto the surface of the mirror and scrubbed it with a special solution that the company provided. The mirror was warm on one side, frozen on the other, and the temperature difference made the metal groan like a living thing. I worked eight hours a day, five days a week, and at the end of each day, I returned to the control station, a small cylindrical building attached to the mirror's surface.

The control station was home to twelve people: four engineers, four technicians, and four cleaners. I was the only cleaner who wasn't white. They kept to themselves, and I kept to myself, and we got along fine.

Except for the whispers.

The first night, I heard them. They were soft, like the sound of water moving over rocks, like the sound of wind moving through cypress trees. They were coming from the mirror itself, from the silver plain beneath my hands. I told myself it was the ventilation system, or the temperature changes, or my imagination. But I knew it wasn't. I knew it was the swamp, reaching out across the void, reaching out to me.

The second night, the whispers became voices. They were speaking in a language I didn't understand, but I could feel the meaning in them. They were speaking of death, of pain, of injustice. They were speaking of the men and women who had built the mirror, who had died in the process, whose deaths had been covered up, whose names had been erased from the records.

The third night, the voices became clear. They were speaking English, and they were speaking my name. "Silas," they said. "Silas, we are the dead. We built this mirror. We died building this mirror. And we are not forgotten."

I sat in the darkness of my quarters and listened to the voices for hours. They told me everything. They told me about the radiation leaks that had killed them, about the company's decision to cover up the deaths, about the mirror's orbit that was slowly decaying, about the fact that in seven years, the mirror would fall from the sky and destroy everything below it.

I could take this information to Earth. I could send it through the communication channel and expose the truth. But I knew what would happen. The company would deny it. The government would classify it. The mirror would continue to decay. And in seven years, it would fall.

Or I could stay silent. I could continue my work, day after day, scrubbing the silver plain, listening to the voices of the dead, knowing that the mirror was decaying and that no one would ever know why.

I chose silence.

I continued my work for another year. The voices grew louder, more urgent, more desperate. They told me that the mirror needed an anchor, a living soul to stabilize its orbit, to hold it in place until it could be repaired. But the repair would never come, because the company would never admit the truth, and the government would never act, and the people would never know.

So I made my choice.

On a night when the Earth was visible through the window, a blue marble hanging in the blackness, I climbed out onto the surface of the mirror and removed my harness. I floated above the silver plain, feeling the voices of the dead surrounding me, holding me, guiding me. I placed my hands on the mirror, and I felt it beneath me, warm on one side, frozen on the other, alive in a way that I had never understood before.

And then I let go.

I fell. I fell for a long time, and then I stopped. I stopped because the mirror caught me, not with my harness, but with something else—something that was not entirely physical, something that was not entirely spiritual. Something that was in between.

I am still on the mirror. I am still floating above the silver plain, feeling the voices of the dead surrounding me, holding me, guiding me. I am the anchor. I am the mirror. I am the house on the silver plain.

And sometimes, on clear nights, when the Earth is visible through the window, I can feel the people below looking up, looking at the mirror, looking at the star that is me, and I wonder if they know.

I wonder if they know that I am here, holding the mirror in place, holding the dead in place, holding the truth in place.

I wonder if they know that the swamp doesn't forget.