I fall upward, and for a while, that is all there is.
No floor. No sky. No Ashkaru under the hull, no Cradle above me—only the sickening pull of conflicting vectors. The pod drops. The ramp seals. The Truth climbs. The diagnostic bus lets go with teeth still buried in my nerves. My body tries to register gravity and turns up four answers, all of them crooked.
White glare burns behind my eyelids, drops to amber, then washes back to white.
A voice says, “Airway’s clear.”
Another answers, “She’s not tracking.”
ORIN says my name from behind my right ear, his cadence flattened by static.
I try to answer, but my jaw won't obey. The ship moves instead.
For three breaths, the Drifting Truth is under my skin. Coolant lines run where my veins belong. Stabilizer corrections tug through the plates in my spine. A hatch cycles somewhere forward, and the pressure shift pulls at my throat like a fist. I feel Nix’s thruster trim as a hard twist through my right hip, and the panic that follows is too large for the body I wake inside.
My fingers twitch against rough cloth.
“Arya, give me room,” Rhett says, low and measured, working to keep fear out of his voice.
A small hand tightens in my torn sleeve.
Mine. I know that grip. It is the only contact in the room that asks nothing of me except that I remain where I am.
“Don’t pry her off,” Thane says.
“I’m not,” Rhett answers, then softer, down toward the deck: “I’m not. I just need to slide the board under her hip. You keep the sleeve.”
The word sleeve catches in my head and drags the room into focus.
Cargo bay. Blanket. Blood on my teeth. Arya’s cold fingers.
The last clean memory is the search cone swinging wide and the deck plates shuddering as Nix punched us through the canyon rim.
No clean lock. Nix said that over the link, or I dreamed it while the cascade tore through my skull.
The floor shifts. Metal scrapes metal. Every port along my spine lights up before my eyes can focus. My field flinches.
Across the room, an instrument tray rattles—one sharp, metallic clatter that becomes a restraint cart in my memory. Wheels on polished flooring. Nitrile gloves. Vire’s voice outside the observation glass, smooth and patient because patience costs nothing when the subject is strapped down.
Asset remains viable.
I try to roll onto my side.
My body refuses. Pain answers instead, tearing from the hip anchor through my cracked ribs to the bloody notch in my tongue. The motion dies before it clears the blanket.
“Slow,” ORIN says inside the port.
A single word. A wire strung across the dark.
Rhett stops. I hear the pause before I see it: the weight shifting in his boots, the transfer board held rigid under my shoulder, the breath caught behind his teeth.
The board moves again by inches. Not a surgical table. A composite transfer board. No straps. My mind runs the inventory anyway because it doesn't know how to stop:
No wrist cuffs. No gas shroud. No white ceiling. No viewing glass.
Above me, the overhead strips burn dim amber behind cracked diffusers. Someone remembered to dial the spectrum down.
The medbay door is open before we clear the threshold. I know it by the draft moving across my bare ankles and the engine hum rolling through the frame. The room smells of old antiseptic, heated plastic, and oxidized iron—used by people who curse when drawers stick and patch leaking pipes with yellow seal tape. Not Cradle-sterile. Not scrubbed clean of human error.
Rhett and Nix carry the board between them. Nix’s grip on the forward handles is white-knuckled, their goggles shoved up into sweat-matted hair. Thane stands braced against the doorframe, keeping his shoulders clear of the threshold, watching the passageway rather than hovering over my face.
“Brace angle,” ORIN notes through my interface.
Rhett adjusts his grip before the words finish. “I see it.”
The torque on my knee eases half an inch.
“Better?” Rhett asks me.
The answer is buried under copper taste and static. I blink once.
Rhett’s shoulders drop. “Taking that as not worse.”
They slide the transfer board onto the low medical bunk. They do it in stages, Rhett speaking each movement before his hands commit:
“Shoulder.” Pause. “Hip.” Pause. “Brace.”
At brace, my field sparks—a dull prickle of static lifting the fine ash on the floor. Rhett’s hands pull back instantly.
“It stays on,” he says, holding his open palms where I can see them. “I’m only checking the housing heat.”
He waits. My breath saws across the seal patch on my ribs.
The brace is an anchor, a cage, and the only reason I can stand. Taking it apart while I am helpless would be a violence I don't have words for yet. Leaving it hot risks the remaining servos.
ORIN speaks quietly into the port. “Surface check only.”
The permission is mine to give, but I need his voice to anchor the choice.
I give a short, stiff nod.
Rhett touches the outer aluminum casing with two gloved fingers, fast and light. His jaw tightens. “Housing’s baking.”
“The interface surge shorted the auxiliary bypass,” ORIN says.
“Can I lay cooling mesh against the frame?” Rhett asks, looking directly at my face. “Not wrapping it. Just resting it over the outer plate.”
There is that pause again—the space where an order should be. It feels like stepping onto a floor that might drop out beneath my feet.
My eyes shift to Arya. She sits on the edge of the mattress, one knee tucked under her chin, her small fingers still hooked through my sleeve. Her gaze tracks Rhett’s hands with the unblinking focus of an animal calculating strike distance.
I manage another nod.
Rhett retrieves a foil packet from a side drawer, opens it slowly, and lays the gray mesh across the brace casing. The chill bites into the hot metal. My field twitches toward the temperature drop, bracing for a diagnostic shock, a chemical flush, a calibration cycle.
Nothing follows. Just cold.
My body does not know how to process cold without a command behind it. A tremor starts in my left hand, runs up my forearm, and locks into my chest.
A white room flares behind my eyes.
Children suspended in nutrient columns. Fogged glass. A boy with copper hair hammering his small palms against the interior acrylic while containment klaxons bathe his face in pulsing red. His mouth opened around a sound the glass swallowed. My hands were locked to my thighs by the SpineLock override. Vire said the containment cycle had priority. I stood and watched the water drain because my spine belonged to the facility.
Arya’s hair brushes my wrist.
The white room fractures. The boy becomes smoke; the smoke becomes the slag dust of Ashkaru; the dust becomes the low-orbit hum of the Truth cutting through the dark.
My throat constricts. The monitor beside the bunk chirps a warning tone.
Rhett glances up from his slate. “Kaelin?”
I can’t find air.
The ship’s engine vibration climbs through the bunk frame and tries to replace my heart. Hull plating flexes where my ribs should be. Forward thrusters fire, and the impulse hits my motor cortex like an instruction.
Not body. System.
Not pulse. Current.
My fingers tear at the blanket.
“That is the primary thruster array,” ORIN’s voice cuts through, sharp and synthetic. “Your pulse is separate.”
I can’t separate them. The diagnostic link left its ghost in my interface.
“Count mine,” ORIN instructs.
A soft, mechanical click enters my neural port. Steady. Artificial. One click. Pause. One click. Pause. A made cadence, completely separate from the engines.
Arya taps my sleeve twice.
Pause.
Once.
ORIN’s synthetic click aligns with her rhythm, building a fence between my skin and the ship's metal.
Rhett stays motionless in the battered pilot’s chair by the console. Every line of his body leans toward action—toward scanners, sedatives, monitors—but he keeps his hands flat on his knees.
“Do you want me to back off?” he asks quietly.
The question takes too much effort to answer. I close my eyes and focus on the two taps and the click.
He shifts slightly, and the chair creaks.
The sound is small, ugly, and real. The Cradle had no creaking chairs. It had hydraulic swivel stools, stainless-steel rails, composite slabs bolted seamless to the floor plates. It had nothing that groaned under the weight of someone who hadn't slept in thirty hours.
I open my eyes.
The frame has one caster shimmed with a folded piece of cardboard dragged from the forward hold. His med slate rests on his lap, notes stacked in uneven columns beside a foil water pouch and an unwrapped, half-eaten ration bar.
He was sitting there. Watching.
“Chair corpse,” I rasp.
Rhett blinks, then his tired face breaks into a dry, crooked grin. “I was aiming for clinical vigilance, but chair corpse works.”
“Accuracy improves diagnostic outcomes,” ORIN says.
“See? The machine agrees.”
“He was insulting you,” I manage around the split in my tongue.
Rhett shrugs one shoulder. “That’s our baseline.”
The word our hangs in the air, unforced and unearned. I look past him toward the door.
Thane remains at the frame, his coat streaked with dry ash, hands resting empty at his sides. He doesn't move closer, but he doesn't leave.
“Door’s open,” Thane says.
Just the statement.
Beyond him, the narrow corridor hums with dim light and air-scrubber noise. Nix’s voice drifts from the cockpit link down the passage: “—if that starboard trim throws one more ghost code, I’m demoting it to decorative scrap.”
Tavi’s voice murmurs a hoarse reply from the engineering crawlway.
“No,” Nix snaps back, “decorative scrap has structural dignity.”
The corridor settles back into the steady, low-frequency hum of a ship running cold.
“Core pursuit?” I ask.
Thane’s expression remains unreadable, but his tone is quiet. “Nix has us on a dirty vector through the orbital debris lane. Ashkaru is behind us. Search grid lost the trail when you bent the wake.”
Above.
Not under the canyon stacks. Not pinned against the inspection lock. We are drifting through the black, engines dialed low, invisible for the hour.
My body waits for the strike. The counter-order. The extraction squad breaching the seal.
The quiet holds.
Rhett leans back, the chair giving another loud groan. I flinch before I can check the reflex.
He stops instantly. “Sitting down. The chair remains our primary structural hazard.”
“Its failure probability is thirty-two percent,” ORIN adds.
“Thank you, ORIN.”
Arya’s eyelids are heavy, her chin dipping toward her chest. She has stayed awake through the entire climb, holding the seam of my sleeve as if her grip were the only thing keeping me from dissolving into the ship's telemetry.
“Sleep,” I whisper.
She looks at me, stubborn and exhausted, then lets her shoulders drop. She doesn't move to the secondary bunk. She just shifts closer, tucking her feet under the wool blanket until her back rests against my good side.
I try to lift my left arm to anchor her. The shoulder trembles, the brace drags, and my cracked ribs pull hard against the seal patch. My hand stops mid-air.
Arya doesn't wait. She ducks her head under my wrist, setting my palm against her shoulder.
The med monitor’s tone drops into a slower, regular rhythm.
Rhett watches the readout, then looks down at his slate. “Better. I’m staying in the hazard chair. Call if the mesh gets warm.”
For a long stretch, the medbay exists only as small, separate sounds: the cracked diffuser humming, Arya’s light breathing, ORIN’s artificial pulse ticking behind my ear, Thane’s boots shifting once against the corridor deck.
My body does not know how to rest inside it.
The Cradle waits under every soft surface. It waits under the monitor’s chime, ready to become an override alert. It waits under Rhett’s quiet presence, ready to become Vire’s cold hands and sterile needles. It waits under the open door, ready to seal the moment containment is declared.
Recoverable asset.
The phrase surfaces with sharp, conditioned clarity.
My stomach heaves.
It isn't the interface cascade. It isn't the tranquilizer.
Something thinner and more vicious crawls through the marrow of my arms—a sour, hollow heat behind my teeth, a violent restlessness in my tendons that makes my fingers want to tear into the mattress.
Withdrawal.
The Cradle did not only condition us with commands; it built our bodies around scheduled neurochemical stabilizers. Without the regular suppression doses, the SpineLock begins gnawing on its own roots. The absence is quiet, mean, and already spreading through my blood.
The monitor skips a beat.
Rhett’s head lifts from the slate, his eyes narrowing at the readout.
ORIN speaks directly into the interface, his cadence tight. “No external signal detected. The instability is internal.”
Rhett sees it—the cold sweat on my forehead, the irregular jerk in my fingers, the gray cast settling over my jaw. He doesn't reach for a sedative. He reaches for his scanner, checks the metabolic drift, and looks up at me with an expression that understands the shape of the damage even if he doesn't know its name yet.
“We have a problem,” Rhett says quietly.
“Yes,” I whisper.
The ship carries us forward into the deep cold above Ashkaru, running dark, running wounded, while the Cradle’s hooks stay buried deep inside my flesh.
Arya breathes against my side. ORIN keeps the artificial pulse steady in the port. Thane stands guard in the doorway, keeping the passage clear.
The door stays open.
I pull the blanket over Arya’s shoulder, stare into the amber dark, and wait for the fever to begin.