I wake to the wrong kind of quiet.
Not silence. The Drifting Truth’s not capable of silence. She mutters through the walls, through the floor, through the narrow medbay cot beneath me. Coolant ticks somewhere behind the paneling—a pump cycles in uneven intervals. The overhead strip buzzes softly behind its amber diffuser, light caught in a crack across the plastic like old blood under skin.
But nothing is chasing us.
That is the part of my body cannot understand.
There are no alarms, no Core recovery tone threading itself through the walls. The air has stopped being straightened into obedience. The ship hums as if it has forgotten how close we came to being opened from the inside.
I haven’t.
My eyes open before the rest of me decides whether waking is safe.
The medbay ceiling hangs low above me, patched paneling and still in that amber light. A strip of tape holds one corner of the diffuser in place. Someone has drawn a crooked line across it in black marker, then scratched through it and written: STOP FLICKERING OR ELSE.
Nix, probably. The sight makes the room too real to be a dream.
My left arm’s numb from the weight against it. Arya’s still curled beside me, half on the cot and half tucked against my side in a way that should pull every injury I have open again.
It hurts. Of course it hurts. Everything hurts. But her forehead rests against my sleeve, her hair tangled across the blanket, one small hand still hooked in the fabric near my wrist.
Her fever has eased a little. I hold on to that instead of breathing too hard.
The rib seal pulls when I inhale. My mouth tastes like dried blood, old respirator plastic, and the sour mineral edge of whatever Rhett made me drink before I sank under. My tongue finds the bite mark along its side and presses until pain sparks. Confirmed. Present. Still here.
The brace lies heavy around my right leg, outer plate still attached, cooling mesh dull and wrinkled against the casing. It smells faintly of chilled polymer and scorched dust. Beneath it, the skin throbs in slow, swollen pulses. The salvaged actuator pin answers each pulse with a soft, delayed tick.
The SpineLock is quiet. That should help, but it doesn’t because quiet things wait.
ORIN speaks before I call him. His voice slips through the port behind my ear, thinner than it should be. “You are awake.”
“I’ve noticed.”
My voice scrapes out wrong, muffled by dryness and the cracked respirator seal still strapped over my mouth and nose. The words drag through old filter mesh. They come out smaller than I mean them to.
“An impressive diagnostic,” ORIN says.
The dry edge is there. Barely. Under it, something glitches. A half-beat of static catches on the final consonant and cuts. My hand tightens in the blanket. ORIN goes silent. Not naturally. Not in the way he does when processing.
Cut.
“ORIN.”
“I am here.” The answer arrives too fast. Forced into place.
The port warms behind my ear, not enough to burn, enough to make the scar tissue prickle.
“What happened?”
“Mainframe coupling residue remains present in my peripheral routing.”
I stare at the amber crack in the ceiling light. The words arrive clean enough. The voice carrying them doesn’t. It has a brittle edge, like an audio channel being held together by pressure and pride.
“Damage.”
“Residue.”
“ORIN.”
A pause.
Then, dryly, “You have become inconveniently attentive.”
“You sound wrong.”
“That is a rude description of a complex technical event.”
“You sound wrong,” I repeat.
Arya shifts against my arm. I stop breathing until she settles again. Her fingers flex once in my sleeve, then loosen. Still asleep.
ORIN lowers his volume. “I am functional. My active instance remains intact. Some external-access pathways are unstable after the ship interface event. The damage is not currently expanding.”
“Currently.”
“Yes.”
“You hate that word.”
“I use it because it is accurate.”
He sounds more like himself there. Almost.
I swallow, and the movement drags a blade down my throat. “Can Nix fix it?”
“Possibly.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“It was the least dishonest one available.”
The medbay hum fills the gap. Amber light. Open door. Arya’s breathing. The chair beside the console where Rhett had been sleeping is empty now, but the blanket hanging over its back has slid halfway to the floor. The ration wrapper remains on the console ledge, folded into a neat square. Someone tried to clean. Someone gave up.
The door is still open.
Beyond it, the corridor lies dim and warm-brown, shiplight spilling over patched wall panels and a bundled conduit tied up with yellow tape. No one stands at the threshold, and no one blocks the way.
Open means exit. Open also means anyone can come in. My eyes keep returning to it.
“Door remains unlocked,” ORIN says.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were staring.”
I close my eyes—bad idea.
White room. The image flashes so quickly it hardly forms: Vire behind glass, a tray of instruments, restraints waiting with their mouths open. Then it shears away under the drag of engine vibration.
I open my eyes again.
Amber. Ship. Arya.
The tremor starts in my left hand before I can hide it. Small at first, a faint flutter in the tendons. Not field instability or the aftershock hum I know, the one that turns screws and lifts dust. This sits deeper, wet and chemical, something pulling itself out of my blood with hooked fingers.
I tuck my hand under the blanket.
ORIN says nothing. Which means he noticed. I hate him a little for letting me pretend.
The ship shifts under us. A soft roll, controlled and distant, like the Truth adjusting one shoulder in her sleep. The motion tugs through the medbay cot and into my hip. My body braces for gravity to go wrong.
It doesn’t. The pain still arrives. My teeth clamp down around a sound.
Arya wakes.
Her head lifts a fraction. Her eyes open, dark and unfocused, then sharpen the moment they find my face. Fever has left them glassy at the edges. Her mouth tightens.
“I’m fine,” I say. Her stare does not change. “Fine enough.”
Still no change.
ORIN says, “A marginal improvement in honesty.”
“Don’t help.”
Arya’s fingers uncurl from my sleeve. For one strange, cold second, I think she is pulling away. Then she reaches toward the narrow shelf beside the cot, where a water pouch sits clipped upright against the rail.
She can barely reach it. I try to move my arm.
Pain slams through my ribs and shoulder so hard the room whites at the edges. The movement stops halfway, useless.
Arya pauses. I can feel her looking at me.
Heat rises under my skin, not resonance, not power. Worse. Shame. Sharp and immediate. I can lift a blast shutter with my field. I can drag a ship through a mainframe. I can break a man’s arm from three meters away when he reaches for her.
I cannot reach water from a shelf.
Arya solves it by climbing carefully over my forearm, careful to avoid my ribs, not pressing the brace, small knee finding the space between wound and rail as if she has been studying the map of my body all night. She gets the pouch, brings it back, and holds the tube near my hand.
I take the tube between shaking fingers.
“Thank you.”
She nods once, solemn and tired, then crawls back into the same careful place beside me.
The first sip hurts—the second tastes like minerals and old plastic. The third wakes my stomach enough to make it threaten revolt. I stop there.
Arya watches until she’s satisfied, then takes the pouch herself. She drinks without being told. The relief lands wrong, soft enough to hurt.
A faint scrape comes from the corridor. My hand goes for the baton that is not there.
Arya’s shoulders tense.
ORIN says, “Rhett. One meter beyond threshold. Carrying medical tray. Heart rate elevated because he has heard you both moving and is attempting to pretend he was not listening from the hall.”
A pause outside the door.
Rhett’s voice follows, offended and too awake. “That is viciously accurate slander.”
Arya turns her head toward the corridor.
Rhett appears in the doorway with a tray balanced against his hip and one hand lifted as if approaching a feral animal with a sense of humor. His hair’s worse than before, crushed on one side and sticking up on the other. There’s a fresh strip of sealant across his temple, small and pale against the darker smear of old ash. He has changed shirts, but not well. One sleeve is inside out.
He sees me notice.
“Fashion is a social construct.”
“Your sleeve is wrong,” I rasp.
“Exactly. I’m rebelling.”
ORIN says, “Against competence.”
Rhett points toward the ceiling speaker. “You. Less commentary until you’ve had something resembling breakfast.”
“I do not require breakfast.”
“Then you lack moral standing.”
ORIN’s answer comes a fraction late. “Debatable.”
Rhett catches it. So do I. His face changes before he can stop it. Concern first, then the quick effort to bury it under movement. He steps into the room, slowly, and sets the tray on the rolling cart instead of bringing it to the bed.
“Morning,” he says, gentler. “Or whatever we’re calling the current ship-cycle. Nix says time is fake until we clear Ashkaru’s gravity shadow.”
“Where are we?”
“Low orbit. Ugly side of the world below, uglier side of nothing above. We’re dark, drifting, and letting the engines cool before we do anything ambitious.” He glances at the monitor, then at me. “Core still doesn’t have a clean lock.”
Still, the word sinks its teeth in.
“Does it have an unclean one?”
Rhett exhales through his nose. “Not according to Nix.”
“According to you?”
“According to me, I ask Nix and pretend I understand the answer.”
“Reasonable,” ORIN says.
“Thank you. Finally appreciated by the haunted hardware.”
ORIN gives a soft click through the speaker. “Do not become dependent on it.”
Rhett smiles faintly, but his eyes stay on the monitor.
He wants to scan me. I see it in the way his fingers flex near the tray, but he doesn’t pick up the scanner.
Instead, he pulls out two sealed nutrient pouches, a fever strip, and a folded square of soft cloth. Then he steps back with both hands visible.
“Food first, maybe. For both of you. Not exciting food. Medbay food. Which is different from normal food because it insults you nutritionally.”
Arya’s gaze moves to the pouch.
Rhett sees it and sets one on the cart, closer to her side. “That one’s yours. No weird medicine in it. ORIN can insult my ethics after scanning if he’d like.”
“I can insult them before.”
“Generous.”
Arya reaches for the pouch, then pauses and looks at me.
“Go ahead,” I tell her, keeping my voice low so it does not come out like an order.
She takes it.
Rhett’s face does something small and painful before he turns away to adjust a setting on the wall dispenser that probably did not need adjusting.
I work on opening my pouch. The seal resists. My fingers slip once. Twice. The tremor makes the plastic crackle too loudly.
Rhett doesn’t look. That helps.
Arya does. That hurts.
I get the seal open with my teeth and squeeze a little into my mouth. The paste is bland, warm, and faintly salted. My stomach cramps around it. I swallow anyway.
Rhett waits until I’ve taken three small mouthfuls before he speaks again.
“Can I check your vitals from the monitor feed?”
“They’re already on the screen.”
“Yeah, but I’m asking before turning up the detail.” He lifts one shoulder. “New and exciting manners.”
I stare at him. He waits. Choice again. I nod once.
He taps the console. The monitor brightens by one level, numbers sliding into sharper columns. Pulse. Temperature. Oxygen. Neural load. Field bleed. Pain index estimated through stress markers and probably lying.
Rhett’s mouth tightens.
“That bad?” I ask.
His eyes flick to mine. “That complicated.”
“Bad.”
“Complicated,” he repeats, and this time there’s steel under it. “Different word for a reason.”
The answer irritates me enough to keep me awake. Maybe he did that on purpose.
He leans one hip against the counter. “Your seizure threshold’s steadier than it was when we pulled you out of the cargo bay. Field bleed is low. Neural load is still too high. Temperature’s up, but not wild. Pain markers are…” He stops.
I look at him.
“Pain markers are rude,” he says.
“Professional.”
ORIN says, “She is also displaying withdrawal tremors.”
The room stills. My hand goes cold under the blanket. Rhett’s face loses the little performance it was wearing.
Arya looks at my hidden hand.
I want to be angry at ORIN. I reach for it. Anger would be easier. It would give my body something clean to hold.
Nothing comes.
Only the tremor, deeper now because it has been named.
Rhett’s voice lowers. “From what?”
I keep my eyes on the open door. “Lots of things.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It’s all I have right now.”
He absorbs that. Nods once, not satisfied, but accepting the line because I put it there.
“Okay,” he says. “Then we start with lots of things.”
The corridor beyond him shifts with footsteps. He turns before I do as Thane appears at the door.
He doesn’t fill the threshold this time. He stops beside it, leaving most of the opening clear. His coat’s gone; he wears a dark shirt rolled at the forearms, dust still embedded around one cuff. He looks like he has not slept. He also looks like that fact has been told to him before and ignored.
His gaze moves first to Arya. Then to me. Then to Rhett.
“Status?”
“Alive,” Rhett says. “Ish.”
Thane’s eyes narrow.
“More usefully,” Rhett adds, “stable enough to argue. Not stable enough to win.”
“I heard that,” I say.
“Great. Cognitive function intact.”
Thane looks at me. “How are you?”
The question lands badly.
It is too open—no correct answer. No scale. My mouth shapes nothing. Rhett opens his, probably to translate.
Thane lifts one hand, stopping him. Then he changes the question. “Can you breathe?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see the room clearly?”
“Mostly.”
“Do you know where Arya is?”
My eyes cut to her before I can stop them. “Yes.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“Low orbit above Ashkaru. Core has no clean lock. Engines cooling. Nix thinks time is fake.”
A faint shift at the edge of his mouth. Not quite a smile.
“Good enough.”
He steps inside and remains near the wall. “Tavi’s awake.”
The name drops into the room like a tool falling point-first. My stomach tightens. Arya’s hand goes still around her food pouch.
Rhett looks at the monitor instead of me, which means he is watching me through the numbers.
“Tavi,” I repeat.
My mouth remembers his name differently. In the cargo bay. In the blind pocket. Bruised throat. Wrapped wrist. Fear pulled tight over his face when he looked at me and tried not to.
The memory scrapes.
“He’s staying for now,” Thane says.
Arya looks up sharply. My fingers curl under the blanket.
Thane gives the next part before I can ask badly. “Mara sent a packet through Nix before we cut transmission range.”
The corridor speaker crackles once, as if the ship objects to being mentioned. A thin burst of static spills through the medbay, then Nix’s voice cuts in from somewhere forward, flattened by distance and bad routing.
“Packet was ugly,” they say. “Half relay-burn, half Yard gossip, all of it expensive.”
Rhett looks up. “Nix.”
“What? That was the gentle version.”
The speaker hisses again, then drops to a lower volume. Behind the static, another voice ghosts through for less than a second. Female. Rough. Tired enough that the words come out like they had been dragged over metal.
“…inspection sealed east filters… tell Arrow if that boy’s with him, keep him there until—”
The rest shears into noise.
Thane doesn’t look toward the speaker. “Kavren Yard is under Core supply audit. Three days at least.”
The medbay hum becomes too loud.
I see Mara’s stall again: the air-stained awning, the regulator casing under her hand, her jaw carved tight while children were pulled back from the open lane. The boy sorting filter cartridges by color. Green held up like treasure. Red set aside like a sentence.
“Air rations?” I ask, though I already know.
Thane’s eyes stay level. “Suspended through inspection. Reinstated after she paid the fine.”
Air rations.
The words settle into the cot beneath me, into the soft click of my brace, into Arya’s fever-warm weight against my side. They settle into every breath I take without grit cutting the inside of my throat because I am here, behind filters someone else maintains, while Kavren Yard counts air by penalty and permission.
Because of us. Because of me.
My field stirs before I can catch it, a faint pressure behind my teeth. The tray on the cart trembles once. The nutrient pouch beside Arya ticks against the metal rail.
ORIN says my name, low and immediate. Arya’s hand slides over my wrist. Rhett doesn’t move toward the tray. Thane doesn’t look at it.
The pressure drops back under my skin.
“Mara knew the risk,” Thane says.
I laugh once, and it hurts. “That doesn’t make it easier.”
“No.”
“What about Tavi?” I ask.
Thane’s gaze stays level. “Mara said sending him back during audit would put more eyes on him and on us. Nix agrees. He asked to stay useful until we can put him somewhere that isn’t being counted by Core inspectors.”
“Is he afraid of me?”
Rhett’s mouth tightens.
Thane answers. “Yes.”
The monitor beeps because my pulse changes.
I nod. The movement is small and stiff. It pulls at the seal near my ribs. “He should be.”
“No,” Thane says. The word is quiet. Flat.
My eyes snap to him.
He doesn’t soften it. “He can be. That’s his body telling the truth about what happened. But should means the fear is a sentence. It isn’t.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I look at the tray until the edges blur.
Rhett clears his throat. “For what it’s worth, he’s mostly worried you’ll think he hates you.”
That hits worse. Arya’s fingers tighten against my wrist. I look at her. She is watching the doorway now, not me. Her brows are drawn together.
“You want to see him,” I say.
She does not nod immediately. She looks at me first. Permission again. I hate the Cradle for every small place it still lives between us.
“Later,” Rhett says before I can answer. “He’s not coming in while you’re this raw, and she’s not leaving until her fever behaves. Everybody gets to be annoyed equally.”
Arya’s mouth tightens.
Rhett points at her. “Yes, you too. I know. Very intimidating. Eat your insulting paste.”
Thane looks at her with the same steady patience he gives everything fragile enough to bite. “Tavi is safe. You’ll see him when Rhett clears it.”
Arya holds his gaze for a long second. Then she takes another sip from the pouch.
Thane’s attention returns to me. “You didn’t ask about leaving orbit.”
“I assumed we are.”
“Eventually.”
The word crawls under my skin.
“Why not now?”
“Nix wants a full systems check. ORIN needs diagnostic isolation. Rhett wants you and Arya monitored before we burn hard. And I want the Core to chase the false trail long enough to commit resources west before we move.”
All practical. All reasonable. Stillness disguised as strategy.
“How long?”
“Long enough to do it right.”
“That isn’t a number.”
ORIN says, “Approximate minimum: eight hours. Preferred: twelve to sixteen.”
I glare at the ceiling.
“Direct your irritation toward the cockpit,” ORIN says. “It was Nix’s estimate.”
“I can hear when someone’s glaring at me,” Nix’s voice crackles through the corridor speaker.
Rhett looks up. “How?”
“Practice and paranoia.”
Her voice is thinner over ship audio than in person, threaded with cockpit static. Alive. Sharp. A little frayed around the edges.
“Also,” she continues, “tell our haunted girl that if she tries to leave the medbay and crawl into my engine room to check my math, I will be offended.”
I blink.
Rhett’s brows lift. “Haunted girl?”
“I’m workshopping.”
“No,” Thane says.
“Fine. Terrifying patient with boundary issues.”
Rhett points toward the speaker. “Also no.”
“What? It’s accurate.”
ORIN says, “Technically, yes.”
“See? ORIN supports me.”
“I support precision. Not you.”
Nix makes a pleased sound. “Close enough.”
The speaker clicks off. For half a breath, the room is almost lighter.
Then ORIN’s port warms again, and the almost disappears.
I feel him flinch. Not physically. He has no body for that. But the signal through the interface catches, tightens, and releases too slowly.
“ORIN?”
“Audio routing remains inefficient.”
“Pain?”
“I do not experience pain.”
Rhett and I both look at the speaker.
ORIN says, after a fractional pause, “I experience error states with negative operational preference.”
Rhett’s face shifts into something unguarded. I look away first. Thane notices. He always seems to notice and then choose which noticing to make visible.
“Nix will start with passive diagnostics,” he says. “No external transfer. No mainframe coupling.”
The words settle where fear was already digging.
“Good.”
ORIN says, “Your confidence in my restraint is touching.”
“My confidence in Nix unplugging things when you get stubborn is higher.”
Rhett murmurs, “I like this plan.”
ORIN ignores him.
Thane checks the corridor, then looks back. “I need to speak with Nix. Rhett stays near. Door stays open unless you ask otherwise.”
Unless I ask, the option sits badly in the room.
I nod because words have gone thin.
Thane starts to leave, then stops.
“There’s a viewport on your left.”
I blink.
He gestures with his chin toward the wall behind the medbay monitor. A small rectangular panel sits there, shuttered. I had cataloged it as equipment access. Too small to be a threat. Too low to matter.
“Nix kept it covered during climb,” he says. “Glare was bad. It’s safe to open now.”
Safe. I don’t trust that word.
Still, my eyes stay on the shutter after he leaves.
Rhett sees where I’m looking. He waits a moment. Then, carefully, “Want it open?”
No. Yes. Maybe.
The ship is already too large around me. The corridor is already open. The idea of more space, of planet and orbit and void beyond a pane of reinforced glass, makes my ribs tighten.
But Ashkaru is below us. The Cradle is gone. The Core does not have a clean lock.
I need to see the shape of that if I can.
“Yes,” I say.
Rhett crosses to the wall. “Opening viewport. No sudden brightness, according to the panel. The panel is old and has lied before, so I’m going slow.”
He presses the control—the shutter sticks. Rhett presses again. The panel grinds upward in a series of reluctant jerks, each one making my shoulders climb toward my ears. Amber medbay light catches on old dust along the frame.
Then the viewport clears. Ashkaru fills the glass.
For a moment, I forget how to breathe. From orbit, the planet looks almost quiet.
Gray-black basins spread beneath streaked cloud cover, industrial scars cut into the surface in long, dark lines. Ash storms coil across old extraction zones like bruises moving under skin. Broken orbital debris glints in slow arcs above one hemisphere, caught in failing paths.
Somewhere down there: the pod shell, burned open. The conveyor bridge. The ashteeth beneath the slag. Kavren Yard under audit. The spineway. Stack Twelve chewing on a ghost.
From here, the planet cannot touch us.
The field under my skin stirs, not outward this time, but deep. A thin hum in the teeth. A pulse along the ports. The glass between me and the planet seems too fragile. Too transparent. A lie pretending to be a wall.
Arya shifts beside me. Her eyes are wide on the viewport. She has never seen the world from above. Maybe I haven’t either. Not like this. Not without glass between me and someone’s test.
Rhett stands near the control, watching the monitor instead of our faces. “Too much?”
I should say yes. I should close it. I should reduce stimulus, preserve function, follow recovery recommendations. Instead, I keep looking.
“No.”
Below us, Ashkaru keeps turning, indifferent to who escaped it and who is still paying for the escape.
The tremor in my hand worsens.
Withdrawal. Field fatigue. Pain. Hunger. Fear. Too many names for the same shaking.
Arya sees it. She takes the edge of the blanket and folds it over my hand. Not hiding it exactly and covering it and making a small roof for the thing I don’t want seen.
Rhett turns back with professional slowness. “Kaelin.”
I look at him.
“You don’t have to tell me everything right now,” he says. “But I do need to know if the shaking gets worse, if you start hearing things that aren’t here, if your skin feels like it’s crawling, if you can’t keep food down, if your pulse starts racing while you’re lying still.”
I stare at him. The list is too accurate. He knows it too.
His voice stays careful. “Withdrawal can be dangerous even when it isn’t dramatic.”
“I know dramatic danger.”
“I’ve noticed.” His mouth twitches, then fades. “This is quieter. Quieter doesn’t mean kinder.”
Something in my stomach turns.
The Cradle never allowed withdrawal without purpose. Doses came on schedule unless someone wanted data. Absence was a test. Tremors were recorded. Vomiting was measured. Sleep was chemical. Waking was ordered.
My hand shakes under Arya’s blanket roof.
“I don’t know what they all were,” I say.
Rhett goes still.
ORIN answers, softer than usual. “I have partial logs.”
The port warms. A flicker of static bites behind my ear. He pushes through it anyway.
“Somnolex-D. Neurogate-9. Q-Stim R4. MitoBoost-C. Several prototype compounds stored under numeric trial designations.”
Rhett’s face changes one layer at a time.
First recognition. Then calculation. Then anger, so fast and hot he has to look away to keep it from becoming something I might read as a threat.
He sets both hands on the counter and breathes once.
“Okay,” he says.
Just that. Okay.
He turns back, face mostly under control. “We do this carefully. No sedative unless seizure threshold says we’ve no choice. Supportive care first. Fluids, food, temperature, quiet, monitoring. We figure out what’s leaving your system and what your body actually needs, one piece at a time.”
My throat tightens. Arya leans heavier against my arm.
I look back at the viewport because looking at Rhett is suddenly too difficult.
Rhett moves to the cart. “I’m going to make notes. Out loud or not?”
I consider the question.
Out loud means hearing myself become data. Not out loud means imagining what he writes.
“Some,” I say.
He nods. “Some it is.”
He picks up the slate. “Patient conscious. Irritable. Eating badly but eating. Fever present in minor patient, improving. Primary patient exhibiting withdrawal tremor, elevated neural load, severe pain markers, and a deeply offensive tolerance for understatement.”
“That last part’s medical?”
“Absolutely.”
ORIN says, “Clinically supported.”
I close my eyes for one breath. Only one.
The Cradle edges gather at the dark, but amber waits behind my lids now. Engine hum. Arya’s weight. Rhett’s voice making jokes because silence would cut worse. ORIN’s damaged signal still there, still mine, even if the channel burns him. Thane somewhere beyond the open door. Nix in the cockpit, arguing with a ship that keeps flying anyway.
For now, that is enough to keep me from moving. For now, I let the ship drift.