Pala Ridge lay in a shallow bowl between two low, stony hills, a patchwork of fields and greenhouses stitched together by irrigation lines and dirt tracks. The soil was marginal but obedient and the weather control array on the far rise did just enough to keep the worst of the storms off the crops. A scattering of prefab houses, a co-op store, a bar, small chapel and a fuel depot completed the picture.

Aram Kindek ran the co-op and the landing pad. She knew exactly how many sacks of crops they had in storage and how often the old atmospheric scrubbers needed their filters kicked back into life. She knew which kids were cheating their labour rotations and which elders would complain if the rain schedule drifted by an hour.

On the morning the Pilgrims arrived, she was arguing with the weather console. “No, you can’t give sector three an extra misting,” she told it, tapping the control surface with a chewed fingernail. “We’re low on reservoir reserves as it is. They’ll just have to water the crops by hand like everyone else.”

The console blinked a sulky amber at her before submitting to her adjustments. Outside the little office, she could hear the distant buzz of an agri-drone passing overhead and the soft clank of someone wrestling with a jammed crop hopper.

The comm pipped once, twice. A polite, insistent sound. Aram frowned. Off-world traffic was rare. She stabbed the answer key.

“Pala Ridge landing,” she said. “If you’re lost, you’ve taken a spectacular wrong turn. State your business.”

The screen spat static for a heartbeat and then cleared to show the sky feed from the old pad camera. A ship was coming down out of the washed-out blue: not a company shuttle, not the familiar boxy lines of the co-op transports, but a patchwork thing with odd angles and mismatched plating. Its hull was a dull, charred grey, painted here and there with looping symbols that caught the sunlight and threw it back in a faint violet sheen.

“Aram?” a man’s voice came over the line. Harlan, from the fuel tanks. He sounded uncertain. “You seeing this?”

“I am,” she said. “Have we got them on transponder?”

“Sort of. It’s… garbled. Reads as… Pilgrim’s Grace one second, then Grace of the Veil the next. No corporate registry. Not on any of my lists.”

“Unregistered ships don’t just drop in for a drink,” Aram muttered. “Get the hazard flags up. And keep the fuel valves locked till I say otherwise.”

“Yes, boss.”

She watched as the ship flared its manoeuvring thrusters and came down on the landing pad with a low, metallic sigh. Dust billowed up around it, coating the lower hull in a fresh layer of grit. The engines powered down. For a few long moments, nothing moved.

Then the main hatch irised open. Three figures descended the ramp.

They wore dark, layered clothing that fell somewhere between practical and ceremonial: long coats over reinforced trousers, patches of armour fixed over chest and forearms with the improvised neatness of people who had learnt to stitch with metal. Their heads were covered by smooth helms etched with faint, curling designs. Around each neck hung a small, matte-black cube on a thin chain, bouncing gently with their footsteps.

Aram leaned closer to the screen. The camera resolution failed to decide whether the cubes were reflecting the light or swallowing it.

“Lovely,” she said under her breath. “Mystery monks.”

She opened the external channel. “Unregistered vessel, this is Pala Ridge pad control. You set down without clearance. That’s rude. State your business.”

There was a brief crackle. Then a voice replied, clear and calm, with a faint resonance that sounded like an echo from a much larger room.

“We are pilgrims,” it said. “We seek shelter, food, and fellowship. We can pay.”

“That’s three things we’re short of,” Aram replied. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not immediately moved to generosity.”

A soft huff of sound that might have been amusement came through the channel. “We have money,” the voice said. “We also have gifts, if those are of interest.”

“That depends on the gifts,” Aram said. “Pala Ridge isn’t a temple. It’s a working farm. We’ve room for travellers if they pull their weight. You start preaching to my folk, we’ll have words.”

“As you wish,” the voice said, neither offended nor cowed. “We will trouble you only as much as we are worth.”

The three figures began walking again, across the baked dirt and towards the low cluster of buildings.

Aram cut the channel, grimaced, and reached for her jacket. “Of course you will,” she murmured. “Of course you will.”

Later

By evening, most of the colony had an opinion about the Pilgrims. You could not land anything on Pala Ridge without half the settlement knowing within an hour. The news moved along irrigation lines and between greenhouse rows, carried on shouted questions and the casual gossip shared over the communal sinks.

“They’re polite,” Ain the barkeep said, wiping out cracked cups with a cloth that had seen too many years and too few washes. “Paid for their stew without haggling. One of them fixed the flicker in my ceiling lamp without me even asking.”

“Fixed it how?” Aram asked.

“Hands in the panel, few sparks, muttering something. Light’s steady now. I’m not complaining.”

Sister Miri, Pala Ridge’s volunteer chaplain, was practically glowing. “They attended evening prayers,” she said, eyes bright in the lamplight. “Listened to the readings, offered their own reflections about paths and patterns. It was… beautiful.”

“It sounded like a headache,” Aram said. “And I notice they haven’t introduced themselves beyond ‘pilgrim’. That usually means they’re either hiding something or trying very hard to be symbolic.”

Miri’s mouth tightened. “You never complain when the co-op reps turn up and call themselves ‘partners’ as if they weren’t tallying everything we owe them.”

“I complain all the time,” Aram said. “Just not to their faces.”

She let the argument drift. It had been a long day: three irrigation leaks and a misaligned weather projector that had dumped half a promised rainstorm on the wrong field. Orbital mechanics and Pala Ridge’s fragile power grid were a worse combination than any religion could be.

All the same, she lay awake longer than usual, listening to the faint, altered hum of the settlement’s generators. In the small hours, she thought she heard singing.

Later

The first cube turned up in the barn.

Harlan found it, perched neatly on a bale of hay. It was the size of his palm, edges precise, the surface dark as wet stone. When he touched it, half out of curiosity, he felt a brief tingling in his fingertips, as though he had brushed against an old electric fence.

He took it to Aram. “Found it by the north stalls,” he said, setting it on her desk. “No one owns anything that looks like it.”

Aram looked at it without touching. “Leave it,” she said.

“You don’t want to scan it? See if it’s worth anything?”

“I want it not in my office,” she replied.

He shrugged. “You want, you throw it out. I’m not getting in the middle of whatever this is.”

After he had gone, she sat and regarded the cube for a long time. It did not do anything. It merely existed, absorbing the weak afternoon light. The office’s old ventilation fan rattled as usual. The power indicators on her consoles blinked their slow cadence.

She picked it up. The tingling ran up her fingers and settled briefly in her wrist, an almost pleasant buzz, as if the nerves were being tuned. She dropped it at once.

“Right,” she said. “That’s enough of that.”

She wrapped the cube in a rag, took it out to the edge of the ridge where they dumped broken equipment, and hesitated for just a second longer than she should have. The ravine below was deep. Old river-cut, long-dry. A good grave for junk.

“Not our problem,” she muttered.

She threw it. It fell, bounced once off a jut of rock, and vanished into the shadow. She dusted her hands, turned back, and told herself firmly that that was that.

By dawn, there were three more.

One on the bar, beside Ain’s battered till. One on the rough-hewn altar in Miri’s chapel, nestled among candles and worn prayer-cards. And one by the main pump-house, sitting atop the control panel.

“They’re gifts,” Miri said, holding hers in both hands like a relic. “They call them reliquaries. Points of stillness. Places to listen. Isn’t that a lovely idea?”

Aram looked from the cube to Miri’s earnest face and back again. “It’s an idea,” she said. “Lovely isn’t the word I’d use.” Aram rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Right. For now, no one touches them. No one moves them. No one prays to them. You hear me, Miri?”

Miri’s smile faltered. “They’re not idols, Aram. They said so. They’re… reminders.”

“Of what?” Aram asked.

Miri’s gaze went a little distant. “Of the pattern underneath.”

“Underneath what?”

“Everything,” Miri said, as if it were obvious.

Later

Within three days, the farm began to misbehave. The power flickered, not enough to shut anything down permanently, just in sharp, irritating bursts that sent the lights stuttering in the middle of a meal. The weather control array on the ridge developed a curious hesitation, its rain cycles starting a moment too late, its wind direction predictions lagging reality by just enough to be noticed.

“We’re overdue a full refit,” Jev grumbled, elbow-deep in the pump-house guts, the cube on the panel beside him as immovable as a paperweight. “I’ve been telling you that for months. Systems like this, you run them hot long enough, they start thinking for themselves.”

“That’d be a step up from how you treat them,” Aram said. “Can you fix it?”

“Sort of. Maybe.” He thumped a junction, listened to the change in pitch. “Half the grid’s older than I am.”

She let him work. The pump stuttered back into a steadier rhythm, but she could not shake the feeling that it was keeping one ear out for a different song.

Later

The Pilgrims stayed. They did not push. They helped mend fences, patched a greenhouse panel, coaxed an old soil tiller back into life with a few strokes of a spanner and a circuit bridge that should not, by rights, have worked. They spent their evenings in the bar, drinking slowly and listening; or in the chapel, talking quietly with Miri about paths and veils and the way silence could be full rather than empty.

People started to drift toward them. Not in droves, not all at once. One or two at a time: a field hand with a bad knee who came away after an hour leaning less heavily on his stick; a lonely lad from the back plots who started spending his off-shifts near their lodgings; Ain, who liked stories and found theirs fascinating.

“They talk about the lanes,” he told Aram one night, polishing a glass until it squeaked. “Say they used to be like rivers, not roads. That there were currents of… meaning, I suppose, between the stars, and that something broke all that up. Doesn’t that get under your skin, just a little?”

“I have enough trouble keeping actual water flowing downhill,” Aram said. “I don’t need metaphors getting ideas above their station.”

Still, she found herself listening in, sometimes, when she passed within earshot of their conversations. The lead pilgrim – who eventually gave a name as Kerys, though it never quite settled in her mind – spoke with an unhurried ease. There was a way they turned simple statements sideways, made familiar ideas sound like the echo of something larger.

Nothing obviously dangerous. Nothing you could pin to a specific lie. But it was the cubes that continued to bother her.

They multiplied, quietly. One at the door of the co-op store. Another on a fencepost overlooking the main field. One in the children’s corner of the communal hall, where the littlest of the colony had started leaving little offerings, like a polished stone or a broken toy.

Where they appeared, the air seemed to hum a fraction higher. The old wiring in the walls picked up a murmur that instruments could not quite isolate. The agri-drones flew their routes a little too close to them, as if acknowledging some new landmark.

At night, Aram lay awake and heard the generator house on the hill change its note, just a little.

Later

Aram found Troen sitting in the dirt by the paddock fence, staring at one of the cubes as if it were a campfire. He was twenty, with hair perpetually in need of a cut. He should have been in the east field, clearing stones. Instead he sat there, legs folded, hands resting lightly on his knees, the cube on the ground in front of him.

“Tro,” she said. “You bunked your shift.”

He did not look up. “I’ll do it later.”

“You’ll do it now,” she said. “We’ve got a storm coming in two days. Those furrows won’t clear themselves.”

No reaction. His eyes were fixed on the cube.

She squatted down, joints complaining. Up close she could see how pale he had gone.

“Troen,” she said, softer now. “Look at me.”

He turned his head. His pupils were a little wider than they ought to be in the daylight.

“They’re not dangerous,” he said. “You keep looking at them like they’re going to explode. They’re just… listening.”

“Listening to what?”

He smiled. It did not reach his eyes. “To the quiet underneath everything.”

“That line seems to be going round,” Aram said. “Did Kerys teach you that one?”

“They didn’t have to,” he murmured. “You can hear it if you sit long enough.”

She picked up the cube. The tingling was stronger this time, not just in her fingers but in her palm, a faint travelling warmth that crept toward her wrist. It reminded her of the prickling feeling you got when someone was staring at the back of your neck.

For a moment, just a heartbeat, the fields around them faded. Dark, towering shapes loomed at the edge of perception, as if she were standing in the shadow of something immense.

She dropped the cube. It hit the dirt with a soft thud, utterly mundane.

Troen flinched as if she had struck him. “Don’t,” he said sharply. “They don’t like that.”

Aram stood, wiping her hand on her trousers as if she could scrub the sensation away. “I don’t care what they like,” she said. “I care about you moving those bloody stones. Up. Now.”

He hesitated, then pushed himself to his feet with the sluggishness of someone waking from a deep sleep. As he trudged away, she looked back at the cube.

It lay where she had dropped it, dull and innocent.

Later

It escalated quickly after that. The next weather pulse overshot. Instead of a gentle mist, a full rainstorm broke directly over the settlement, hammering on roofs and flattening the first tender shoots in the nearer fields. The arrays on the ridge had not changed their schedule: the logs showed nothing unusual.

A day later, one of the agri-drones flew straight into the side of a silo. The collision did not breach the structure but the drone’s guidance system had no business failing like that. When they pulled the recorder, all it held was a smear of static threaded with a slow, almost rhythmic pattern of noise.

“It’s just interference,” Jev insisted. “The universe is full of noise.”

“It’s a tune,” Ain said quietly, looking over his shoulder at the trace. “Can’t you see it? There. The repetition.”

Aram rubbed at her temples. “We don’t have time for this. We need that drone flying. We’ve got one more sowing cycle before the budget tips over into ‘beg the co-op for a loan we’ll never pay back.’ Fix it, or strip it for parts and tell me which fields you’re writing off.”

Behind her, through the open door of the workshop, she could see Kerys standing by the well, talking to Miri and three of the younger hands. Their heads were bent close. The little cubes at their throats glowed faintly, as if picking up a light from somewhere deep in their cores.

Later

The first outright refusal came two days later.

“Jev didn’t come in,” Harlan said, standing in the doorway of her office, cap twisting in his hands. “I went to bang on his door. He’s in there with one of them. The pilgrims. Talking about… the grid. About how it would ‘work better’ if he let them tune it.”

Aram stared at him. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard a joke in a week,” he said.

She marched across the yard and up the track to the mechanic’s shack, boots crunching on the dry soil. The air felt thicker than usual.

The door to Jev’s place was ajar. She pushed it open without knocking. Inside, the room smelled of solder. The walls were lined with tools and spare parts, the floor with the usual flotsam of a life spent marrying obstinate machinery. Jev sat on an overturned crate, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped. Kerys sat opposite him on the workbench, relaxed

There was a cube between them on the floor.

“You’re late to the party,” Jev said, without looking up.

“We weren’t meant to have a party,” Aram said. “We were meant to have a working irrigation system.”

Kerys turned their head. Up close, their face was tired but open, the sort of face you trusted almost by default. But the eyes were too old.

“We’re trying to give you one,” they said. “Your systems are… misaligned. Fighting themselves. We can help.”

Aram ignored them. “Jev. Out. Now. I need you at the pump-house. We’ve got a pressure drop on line two.”

For the first time since she had known him, Jev did not move when work called.

“I’m talking,” he said. “We’re… looking at the bigger picture.”

“The bigger picture,” she repeated. “Does the bigger picture water the crops?”

Kerys smiled faintly. “It could, if you let it. You are all so busy pushing at your little machines, you do not see that they are part of something larger. The reliquaries can show you how the pattern fits. Where the leaks came from. Where the storms should fall. You felt it, didn’t you?”

Aram pretended she did not know what they meant.

“We’re managing,” she said. “We’ve managed for twenty years without you. We’ll manage twenty more. We don’t need your pattern. We need Jev’s hands and his bad temper at the pump-house.”

Jev finally looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, but there was a strange calm in them.

“Maybe we do need it,” he said. “Maybe that’s why everything keeps going wrong. Maybe we let them… tune things, just a little, and it stops fighting us.”

“They’re not tuning,” Aram snapped. “They’re taking. You don’t invite strangers to rummage around inside your skull, Jev. Why would you let them into the grid?”

Kerys tilted their head, considering her.

“Because,” they said gently, “the grid asked.”

Aram laughed once, harshly. “The grid is a pile of cables and short-sighted planning. It doesn’t ask for anything.”

Kerys smiled. “You hear it already. You just don’t have the words for it.”

She stepped forward, stamping on the urge to take a step back. The cube between them seemed to thrum, just at the edge of hearing.

“Pack up,” she said to Kerys. “You and yours. You’ve outstayed your welcome. You leave by first light tomorrow, or I call the co-op, and whatever scrap of legal pretext I can find to have you blacklisted from every half-decent pad this side of the Expanse, I’ll use it.”

There was a pause. Jev stared at her as if she had announced she was turning off the sun.

Kerys did not move. “And if we leave,” they asked, “do you think the pattern leaves with us?”

Aram swallowed. Her mouth was suddenly dry. “You brought those cubes,” she said. “You can take them.”

“We didn’t bring them,” Kerys said. “We found them. Like you did. Like others will. They’re older than we are. We’re just… the first ones gifted enough to listen.”

She wanted, quite desperately, to kick the cube across the floor. To see it crack. To prove it was just a lump of clever nonsense. Instead, she straightened her shoulders.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “First light. Be gone.”

She walked out before they could answer, before she could see any more in Kerys’ expression than that faint, unsettling patience.