The world comes back in pieces.
Heat first, and not the clean, controlled heat of a sterilizer unit or the bone-deep burn of resonance forced through nerve channels, but something wider. Dirtier. Heat with grit in it. Heat that crawls over my face, into my mouth, and settles there like ash.
Then sound.
A long, thin hiss. Metal cooling. Sealant foam bubbling somewhere behind me. A warped alarm trying to finish a warning no one is alive enough to hear.
Then pain. All of it at once.
My spine lights from the base of my skull to the hardwired ports beneath my lower back. The SpineLock shudders against my vertebrae in broken pulses, making my muscles twitch purposelessly. My right leg is dead below the thigh.
Not numb. Dead. A cold, heavy absence trapped inside a frame of metal that has been crushed sideways at the knee.
My ribs don’t want air. I drag a breath in anyway, and something sharp opens under the harness line along my right side. Wet heat spreads beneath my shirt, slow at first, then sticky where the fabric clings to skin. Dust scrapes down my throat when I inhale again.
Something small moves against my hand.
Arya.
My fingers close before my vision clears. Her hand is still inside mine, slick with sweat and dried blood and too warm. Fever-warm. Alive-warm.
My eyes open. The pod is on its side. Or the world is.
The viewport has cracked into a white web, every fracture filled with orange light from outside. Smoke plumes along the ceiling—no, the wall—thin at first, then thicker where the panel has split open. Straps hang loose overhead. A storage compartment has blown apart, scattering emergency packs across the slanted floor. One seat has folded inward like a crushed rib cage.
Arya lies half-pinned beneath a tangle of restraint webbing near my hip, eyes open and fixed on me.
She doesn’t cry. She just stares.
For a second, my mind supplies the wrong room around her: white walls, observation glass, a handler’s hand clamped too tight around a child’s arm.
The pod groans, and smoke and orange glare come back.
“ORIN,” I rasp.
Static snaps behind my ear, and for one sick instant, nothing answers.
Then: “Initial assessment: regrettably, you remain alive.”
Relief hits so hard that the field under my skin twitches. It starts in my teeth first, a thin metallic ache, then crawls down through the ports along my spine. The air between me and the console warps like heat over metal. A loose panel screw lifts, shivers, and drops as the console spits a weak spray of sparks.
ORIN’s voice sharpens inside my skull. “Do not do that. Hull integrity is decorative at this point.”
I laugh. It tears something in my throat and comes out wrong.
“Status,” I manage.
“Crash impact severe. Internal atmosphere compromised. External atmosphere breathable within tolerable margins, assuming you are not attached to long-term lung function.” A pause. “Arya’s pulse is elevated. Conscious. Minor cranial bleeding. Fever persistent. Your injuries are numerous enough that listing them now would be inefficient.”
“Summarize.”
“You are damaged.”
“Useful.”
“I was being merciful.”
The pod shifts under us with a low metallic complaint. The sound travels through the seat frame and into the brace. Pain flares through the bent knee actuator, sharp enough to bleach the edges of my sight.
Arya’s grip tightens.
I turn my head toward her. Even that makes my neck burn. “Can you move?”
Her lips part. No sound comes. Her eyes flick down toward the webbing tangled around her legs, then back to me.
“Okay.” My voice sounds like someone else’s. The voice I use when pain doesn’t matter because pain isn’t part of the command. “I’m gonna get you out.”
Sitting up’s a mistake.
The brace screams first, a stripped-servo whine buried inside bent carbon-silicate. The damaged knee actuator catches, releases, and catches again, sending a grinding jolt through the dermal ports along my thigh. My stomach lurches. For one second, the pod smears sideways and becomes the Cradle ladder: Arya below me, watching with silent concern while ORIN tells me the survival odds.
My palm slams against the floor. Metal dents under it—the present steadies.
“Kaelin,” ORIN says, quieter. “Your field is rising.”
“I know.”
“Knowing has not historically prevented you from making the situation worse.”
“Then keep talking.”
“About your vitals or your poor decision-making?”
“Either.”
“Both are unstable.”
I grit my teeth and reach for the strap cutter clipped beneath the pilot’s seat. My fingers shake. The first attempt misses. The second catches the handle. My shoulder pulls wrong when I twist, and fire runs down my side where the harness slammed across my ribs during impact.
Arya watches every movement. Not helplessly. Not like a child waiting to be saved, but like she’s memorizing what hurts.
“Hold still,” I tell her.
She goes even more still than she already was.
The cutter’s edge hisses through the restraint webbing. One strap snaps loose, then another. Arya shifts carefully, small hands braced against the slanted floor to keep from sliding through the pod’s tilted interior. When the last strap falls away, she crawls toward me without hesitation.
Toward me.
Something pulls tight behind my ribs, too sudden and too soft to be pain. The SpineLock does not answer it. No correction pulse. No clean command. Just my heart kicking hard, because she is crawling toward me like I’m safer than the wreck.
The pod groans again. This time, the sound comes from behind us, deeper in the frame. A pressure line ruptures with a white scream.
Steam bursts across the cabin.
Arya flinches.
I catch her around the shoulders and tuck her against me before the spray hits. It scorches the edge of my sleeve and hisses across the deck plating where her hand had been a heartbeat earlier.
“ORIN.”
“Exit required,” he says. “Immediate.”
“Where?”
A dim blue schematic stutters across my vision, projected through the interface behind my ear. Half-corrupted pod frame. One hatch is pulsing red.
“Primary hatch obstructed,” ORIN says. “Emergency seam partially responsive. Manual force recommended.”
“Manual force.”
“Yes. The elegant method involving you doing something inadvisable with your already damaged body.”
I shift Arya behind me and drag myself toward the hatch.
The floor’s no longer a floor. It’s wall, slope, and wreckage. My right leg trails uselessly until the brace jerks it forward in a delayed, ugly motion. Every movement pulls at the hardwired connection where the SpineLock feeds into the lumbar brace unit. The crash bent something close to the pelvic anchor. I can feel it grinding where it should glide.
Not broken enough to stop. Definitely broken enough to punish.
The hatch controls are dead. The emergency release has sheared halfway off its mount. I hook both hands into the recessed seam and pull.
Nothing.
“Again,” ORIN says.
“I know.”
“Do not rupture your thoracic wound.”
“I’ll try to schedule that later.”
“Your sarcasm module survived. Wonderful.”
I pull again.
Metal shrieks. My shoulders strain. Pain sparks down my back in bright, clustered bursts. The SpineLock responds to the stress with a hard pulse that locks my abdomen and tries to straighten me. It almost helps.
Then it misfires.
My right leg kicks sideways, slamming into the hatch frame. The brace jams. The neural socket near my knee fires wrong, a hot electric bite that vanishes instantly into cold absence.
Arya’s hands appear beside mine. Small fingers wedge into the seam.
I freeze. “No. Move back.”
She doesn’t. Her jaw sets, and her eyes lift to mine.
There’s a gray smear beneath one eye. Her hands are too small to do much against Core alloy, but she braces anyway, feet planted on the tilted deck, every line of her little body saying with me.
I swallow.
“On three,” I say. She nods once. “Three.”
ORIN sighs into my implant. “This is not how counting works.”
We pull.
The hatch gives. It tears loose with a scream of warped metal and a burst of hot dust that slams into my face. Daylight floods the pod.
It comes in thick and yellow-white, filtered through a sky the color of old bruises. Air rolls into the cabin, dry enough to hurt. It smells of scorched mineral, rust, dead machinery, and something bitter underneath. Not rot. Just old chemical decay baked into the ground for too long.
One breath makes me cough until my ribs spasm.
Arya presses closer, eyes watering behind the sting.
Outside, the wind makes no familiar sound. Just a low, sandpaper drag over open ground and the slow ticking of the pod shedding heat.
“Atmosphere breathable,” ORIN reports. “Particulate load hazardous. Trace industrial toxins. Low moisture. Planetary designation confirmed through residual nav cache: Ashkaru.”
Ashkaru.
The name sounds wrong.
Solen’s coordinates. ORIN’s destination lock. A word from a dying message turned into a planet beneath my hands.
“Recommend filtration masks,” ORIN adds.
“Do we have masks?”
“Emergency stores may contain one child-size filter hood and one damaged adult respirator.”
“May?”
“I am attempting optimism.”
The pod shifts again beneath us.
We don’t have time.
I push Arya toward the hatch first. “Careful. Don’t touch the glowing seams.”
She crawls through the opening, thin shoulders scraping the warped frame. In that awful moment, she vanishes into the light.
Then her hand appears again, gripping the outer edge.
Getting out isn’t climbing. Climbing requires two working legs and a body that understands up from down. I haul myself through the hatch by my arms and drag the brace after me,e inch by inch. The bent knee catches on the lip. Metal grinds against metal. Pain bursts deep in the socket where the brace fuses to bone.
A sound tears out of me before I can stop it. Arya’s hand shoots toward my sleeve.
I shake my head hard. “Still here.”
Her eyes narrow like she knows exactly what I didn’t say.
I pull again. The brace comes free all at once, and I spill out of the pod onto Ashkaru.
The ground hits harder than it should.
Under me isn’t dirt or sand. It’s something between ash, crushed glass, and compacted slag. It scrapes my palms raw and gets into the split along my knuckles. Heat radiates up through it even though the light is weak. My cheek presses against the surface for one breath, two, long enough to feel the planet’s texture against my skin.
Dry. Dead. Unwelcoming.
I push on to one elbow.
The pod has carved a trench through the flats before coming to rest against a slope of black slag. Behind it, the crash path smokes in a long scar across the ground, pieces of hull plating scattered like shed scales. The escape craft’s white Core alloy is scorched gray now, hazard striping blistered, one side peeled open where the atmosphere chewed through it.
Beyond the wreck, Ashkaru stretches in every direction.
A basin of gray-black grit and broken stone rolls toward a horizon jagged with dead industrial bones. Mining towers stand half-collapsed in the distance, their lattice frames warped by heat and age. Conveyor bridges hang between cliffs like snapped tendons. Farther out, skeletal derricks lean over pits too wide to be natural. The wind moves through them and comes back thin and metallic.
No birds, insects, or running water.
The sky hangs low and dirty, streaked with brown-yellow clouds that move too fast near the upper layers and barely at all beneath. Somewhere far overhead, debris burns in slow orange lines—the last fragments of the Cradle or the pod’s heat shielding or both.
One streak flares white, then vanishes.
The place I escaped from is still falling.
Arya crouches beside me, arms wrapped around herself. Her bare feet are planted in the powdery ground. She stares at the sky.
I don’t ask if she understands what she is seeing. Her hand finds mine anyway.
“Exterior scan incomplete,” ORIN says. “Local interference is extensive. Mineral content includes ferric slag, silicate glass, and conductive particulate. Charming place.”
“Can the Core track us?”
“Not through standard Recall Grid. The crash, atmospheric disruption, and my considerable competence have interfered with immediate beacon integrity.”
“Immediate.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Unknown.”
I hate unknown.
Unknown means a room with no corners mapped. Unknown means Vire standing behind glass with her hands folded, waiting to see what I do when the rules change.
I force myself upright. The world tilts.
Arya grabs my arm with both hands. She cannot hold my weight. Not even close, but the pressure helps me find where my body ends and the air begins.
“Thanks,” I say.
She blinks at the word. Then looks away, as if being thanked is more dangerous than the crash.
The pod hisses again. I look back.
Smoke thickens along the rear seam. Coolant bleeds in pale streams from the ruptured engine housing, sizzling where it strikes the ground. The hull’s internal lights flicker erratically behind the cracked viewport.
Shelter, my mind supplies. Wreckage. Walls. Shade. Defensible if reinforced.
Then the pod makes a deep popping sound.
ORIN’s voice goes flat. “Revised assessment: not defensible.”
“Explosion?”
“Eventually.”
“How eventual?”
Another pressure valve bursts. Flame licks blue-white along one broken seam.
“Less eventual.”
I nod because nodding is easier than feeling whatever tries to rise in my chest.
“Then we take what we can.”
The hatch opening has cooled enough to touch with a cloth. I wrap a torn strap around my hand and climb back inside.
Every part of me objects.
The pod’s interior has become a tilted furnace. Smoke gathers in the upper corner, black and oily. The cabin smells of cooked wiring, ruptured battery acid, and the faint, sterile scent still clinging to Core materials.
Home, some damaged part of my mind tries to say. No. Not home.
Container. Vehicle. Wreck.
I make myself work.
First, water.
The emergency dispenser is cracked, but not empty. I find two sealed hydration bulbs wedged under a collapsed side panel and one larger cartridge still locked in the reserve unit. The extraction lever sticks. I kick it with my left foot.
Nothing.
I hit it with the broken strap cutter handle until the casing splits, then pry the cartridge loose while sparks spit over my wrist.
Second, filters.
ORIN guides me by pulsing a small directional marker across my interface. Survival panel. Left wall. Beneath the collapsed restraint bracket.
One child-size filter hood. One adult respirator with a fractured seal and a clogged intake.
I hold both for a second too long. Arya stands near the hatch, watching.
I toss her the hood. “Put that on.”
She catches it against her chest but doesn’t obey. Her eyes drop to the respirator in my hand, then back up.
“I can repair this one,” I say.
ORIN’s voice clicks. “That is generous phrasing.”
“I can make it less useless.”
Arya doesn’t move.
I crouch with more difficulty than I want her to see and pull the hood open. “Arya.”
Her name makes her still. Alert.
“You first.”
She stares at me for another breath, then lifts the hood over her head. The seal cinches too large around her neck. I tighten it carefully, fingers slow against the soft skin under her jaw. She doesn’t flinch. Her eyes stay on mine through the clear front panel, distorted by scratches.
“There.” My voice goes rough without permission. “Better.”
Her small hand lifts and touches the cracked respirator I haven’t put on.
“Later,” I say. She frowns. “Bossy for someone who doesn’t talk.”
ORIN says, “She is communicating more effectively than you.”
I glare at the nearest dead console, since it no longer has a body to glare at.
He hums in my skull. “Observation, not criticism.”
Third, medical.
The medkit has come loose from its wall mount and split open across the floor. Half the contents are ruined. I salvage two antiseptic ampules, three dermal seal patches, one roll of compression weave, a fever strip, and a cracked injector that might still deliver if the cartridge isn’t compromised.
No neurostabilizers. No suppressant taper. No Q-Mito booster.
Nothing that will stop the withdrawal crawl already starting under my skin. My hands pause over the empty medication slot. The shape of it’s too familiar.
The Cradle never missed doses unless it wanted to see what happened.
A tremor moves through my fingers. Fine at first, then sharper. My field answers with a faint buzz that lifts gray motes from the pod floor.
ORIN’s voice softens by one degree. “Kaelin.”
“I’m fine.”
“No.”
His presence holds steady in the port behind my ear, silent and unblinking without needing an eye.
I shove the medkit shut. “We don’t have what I need. So we move without it.”
“Your body will object.”
“It always does.”
Fourth, tools.
A shock baton from the emergency security locker, half-charged. A coil of insulated wire. Two thermal blankets, thin but intact. A compact fusion torch with thirteen percent fuel. Three ration bars sealed in a silver wrap. One cracked flare beacon I disabled before it could signal to anything overhead.
The pod is full of useful things I can’t carry. That is its own kind of cruelty.
A Core survival craft assumes trained adults with functioning legs and intact chain-of-command protocols. It assumes rescue. It assumes coordinates transmitted to people who want you alive for reasons that may not be kind.
It doesn’t assume one damaged Omega, one fevered child, and an AI trapped in a neural port on a planet that looks like it eats ships.
I pack what I can into an emergency sling bag, then repack it twice.
Water against my hip. Medkit on top. Baton within reach. Blankets rolled tight and strapped beneath. Components are distributed so the weight won’t drag too hard on my right side.
Arya helps without being asked.
She gathers small things first—clips, straps, a sealed packet of electrolyte tabs that has slid under the bench, the loose filter mesh from a broken vent. She sets each item in a careful row near my knee.
Sorted. Soft. Hard. Useful. Unknown.
I watch her place the last buckle with trembling fingers. Her shoulders draw inward as she continues.
I reach for one of the straps and thread it through the bag. “Keep sorting. We’ll use what we can.”
A little of the tension leaves her.
ORIN says, “Arya has identified three viable fasteners you missed.”
“I saw them.”
“No, you did not.”
“I would’ve gotten there.”
“Eventually?”
“Don’t start.”
His silence is almost smug.
The labor helps. Work is better than thought. Work has edges. Weight. Sequence. Pull the strap. Test the seal. Check the charge. Count the rations. Recount the rations. Figure the distance against water; estimate Arya’s intake. Lie to myself about mine.
Outside, the wind worries at the hatch.
Fine gray grit blows in with every gust, soft as powder until it touches skin.
Then it scratches.
It collects in the seams of my brace, dulling the exposed actuator teeth, clinging to the damp blood around my calf. I wipe it away with the edge of a torn sleeve, and more settles instantly.
My foot has gone from numb to a needling pain. That is worse.
Numbness can be ignored. Needling means the damaged neuropad near the knee is still trying to speak to nerves that have never worked properly without help.
The brace’s lateral anchor took the worst of the crash. The memory-alloy band at my hip sits half a centimeter out of alignment. Half a centimeter’s enough to make each step a negotiation. The carbon-silicate strut along my calf has cracked near the lower port, exposing a sliver of internal cabling.
I touch it—the leg jerks.
Pain flashes hot, then vanishes into a cold hollow.
Arya makes a small sound. A tiny caught noise that escapes before she can trap it. She stares at my leg, eyes wide behind the filter hood.
“It looked worse before,” I say.
That doesn’t help.
ORIN says, “Untrue.”
“Not now.”
“Accuracy matters in crisis.”
“So does morale.”
“Your morale or hers?”
I don’t answer.
The pod groans deeper this time—the floor trembles under my palm.
ORIN’s tone sharpens. “Fuel cell instability increasing.”
I shoulder the bag. The weight nearly takes me down. My knees buckle, and the old instinct comes hard.
Wait for instructions. Hold position until ordered. Do not waste energy. Do not make unauthorized movement. A damaged asset must preserve its function for retrieval.
Retrieval.
My breath shortens.
I tighten the strap across my chest, ignoring the way it digs into bruised ribs. Then I take the baton in one hand and hold the other out to Arya.
She comes immediately, and her hand slides into mine. We climb out of the pod for the last time.
Outside, Ashkaru has widened while we worked.
That’s how it feels. As if the planet pulled back, revealing more of itself now that I have enough consciousness to understand what it is.
The basin isn’t empty.
Closer to the crash site, the ground is broken into plates of dark slag, some glossy like cooled oil, some dull and powder-coated. Thin cracks run between them, deep enough in places to swallow Arya’s foot if she steps wrong. Pale mineral crust feathers along the edges, brittle and sharp.
Farther out, the land dips into old extraction cuts. Terraced walls carved by machines rise in steps taller than buildings, each level marked by rusted rails and abandoned rig platforms. Cable lines sag between skeletal towers. Some still hold warning flags, shredded by years of wind until they look like strips of dried skin. The Core has been here, or something like it.
It cut the planet open, took what it wanted, then left the wound to dry.
Just ruin large enough to become geography.
I turn slowly, mapping what I can.
Ridge line to the west. Broken tower cluster north. A collapsed conveyor bridge to the southeast, maybe shelter beneath it if the supports hold. Open flats east, no cover. Smoke column behind us, marking the pod for anyone with eyes.
“ORIN, scan for settlement.”
“Interference continues. Long-range unreliable.”
“Short-range, then.”
“Thermal pockets beneath industrial debris. Possible fauna. Possible heat vents. Possible malfunctioning machinery.”
“Settlement,” I ask again.
“No confirmed settlement within immediate scan radius.”
“Thane Arrow?”
“No confirmed signal.”
I look toward the horizon. The words from Solen’s message replay in my head, distorted by memory and crackling static.
Thane Arrow. Drifting Truth.
He made it sound like a route. Ashkaru makes it look like a sentence.
The pod snaps behind us, and Arya flinches into my side. Blue flame licks higher along the rear seam.
ORIN’s voice goes sharp. “Distance. Now.”
We move.
I keep Arya on my left, away from the dragging brace and the exposed cabling along my right side. The bag pulls at my shoulder. The baton knocks against my thigh with every uneven step. Grit slides under my bare feet inside torn lab-issue soles that barely survived launch. The left foot feels every shard. The right foot feels nothing until it feels too much.
After ten meters, my breathing changes. After twenty, sweat runs down my spine and stings the inflamed skin around the ports.
After thirty, my hip begins to pulse.
After fifty, I understand that the wreck was still a kind of mercy because at least it had walls.
The planet does not. There’s too much sky. It presses down without ceiling panels, without lights, without corners. My eyes keep searching for surveillance nodes, only to find empty air. The emptiness should help.
It doesn’t. It makes every direction a threat.
Arya stumbles once on a ridge of glassy slag. I catch her before she falls, but the movement twists my brace.
The actuator seizes. My leg locks straight. The rest of me keeps moving.
I hit the ground hard enough to drive the air from my lungs. The bag slams against my ribs. The medkit inside cracks against bone. All I can do for a moment is lie there with my cheek in the ash, listening to the rough scrape of my own breathing.
Arya drops beside me. Her hands flutter over my shoulder, my arm, the strap of the bag. She doesn’t know where she is allowed to touch.
“I’m okay,” I say.
She stares.
“I’m not okay,” I correct. “But I can move.”
I push myself up on both hands. My arms shake. Ash clings to the sweat on my palms and turns into gray paste in the lines of my skin.
The brace refuses to bend. I reach down, find the manual release notch near the knee, and press.
Nothing.
Again.
A spark snaps from the exposed casing. Pain fires up the nerve channel so violently that my jaw locks.
Arya grabs my wrist, just hard enough to stop me from doing it again. I look at her. She looks at the brace, then points with two fingers toward the damaged actuator casing.
ORIN interprets, “She is indicating the external jam.”
Arya picks up a thin strip of metal from the ground—part of the pod’s outer casing, still warm but not glowing—and holds it out to me.
A pry tool. Small. Crude.
I take it carefully. “Good.”
Again, that startled blink. No one praised usefulness or observation unless it served protocol.
I wedge the strip into the casing and lever. Metal shifts with a gritty click. The knee unlocks halfway.
A temporary fix.
We keep going.
Behind us, the pod finally gives up pretending it’s a structure. The first explosion is smaller than I expected.
A hard internal thump. The kind of sound a body makes when it hits something hard.
Then the rear fuel cell blows.
Heat slams across the flats and throws our shadows long in front of us.
The ports along my spine fire.
I turn before the thought finishes, putting myself between Arya and the wreck as the field snaps outward from my ribs in a jagged pressure curve. Not a wall. Not clean enough for that. The air buckles amber-gray in front of us, gritty with conductive dust, and the first wave of debris strikes it hard enough to rattle my teeth. Some fragments veer aside. Some punch through.
The cost hits immediately.
Pain drills behind my eyes. My ears ring—the ground tilts. A fist-sized shard of hull plating spins past close enough to cut the air by my cheek and buries itself a meter away. Smaller fragments rain down around us, hissing. One strikes my shoulder and burns through the fabric.
Arya is under me.
I don’t remember pulling her down. My arms are locked around her, body curled over hers, brace awkward and useless to one side. She trembles against my chest.
The field collapses back into my skin with a static snap. I taste blood.
ORIN’s voice comes through thin static. “Kaelin. Respond.”
I grimace. “Alive.”
“Arya?”
I loosen my hold. She pushes back just enough to look up at me. The filter hood is smudged with soot. Her eyes are wet but steady as she nods.
The pod burns behind us.
I sit back on my heels, crooked and aching, and watch flames crawl through its frame, blue at the base, orange where they catch on interior insulation.
The thing that carried us out is now a blackened shell split open in ash.
Small. Ugly. Final.
The pod was Core-made. A survival craft built by the same hands that built our cages. It still saved us. It was still the last enclosed space between us and the planet.
Now everything useful is in the bag swung over my shoulder. Everything else is fire.
“Secondary detonations possible,” ORIN says.
Arya shifts closer until her shoulder presses into my arm.
“Give us a minute.”
“Time is not our ally.”
ORIN is right.
But for a second, the pod’s fire becomes the Cradle collapsing again: tank glass, white fog, a child’s face disappearing.
I couldn’t save everyone.
Arya’s hand slides back into mine.
I glance down at her. She is small and filthy. The filter hood makes her face look smaller, more fragile.
Her grip does not match.
I squeeze, and then I stand.
The collapsed conveyor bridge becomes our first destination because it’s the only shape in the landscape that suggests cover.
It takes a long time to reach.
Time moves strangely on Ashkaru. There are no clocks, no shift chimes, no medication schedule, no overhead voice announcing tests, meals, or sleep periods—the light changes by dull increments behind the ash clouds. The wind rises and falls.
Steps become the only measure. Thirty before I have to stop. Twenty-seven the next time. Forty-two when the ground smooths briefly. Twelve after a slope.
Arya counts in her own way. Her lips move behind the filter hood, silent numbers shaped carefully. At each pause, she crouches close to my bad side, not touching unless I sway.
Once, she offers me the hydration bulb before taking any herself.
I push it back. “You first.”
She pushes it toward me again.
“Arya.”
Her eyes narrow.
ORIN says, “It appears you have encountered a smaller, quieter version of yourself.”
I scoff. “I’m not this stubborn.”
His silence’s offensive.
I take one swallow to satisfy them both. The water is warm and tastes faintly of plastic. Arya drinks after, obedient only once she knows I have.
The land dips near the conveyor ruins. The ground there is worse—powdery ash over hidden scrap, every step uncertain. Old machine parts jut from the surface: gear teeth, cable bundles, cracked ceramic insulators.
The conveyor bridge once carried ore from the terraced pits to a processing plant farther down the basin. Now, one end has collapsed into a mound of black slag. The other remains attached to a rusted tower, angled down like a broken spine. Beneath the slanted structure, shadows pool.
Shade. Maybe shelter. Maybe something living.
I stop at the edge.
ORIN runs a short-range sweep through my interface. Dust shifts beneath the bridge. No immediate movement. No heat signatures large enough to be human. The supports groan faintly in the wind.
“Structural integrity poor,” he says.
“Will it fall?”
“Eventually.”
I scan the space beneath the conveyor. Three sides partially blocked by fallen plating and ore bins. One open side faces the flats. Low ceiling. Dry ground except where mineral crust glitters in pale lines.
“We’ll rest there.”
Arya ducks in first before I can stop her. She moves lightly, testing the ground with careful feet, then turns and waits for me inside the shadow.
My body does not want to crouch. The brace does not want to fit under the low angle of fallen machinery.
I get down anyway, one hand on a rusted support beam, the other gripping the bag strap so it won’t drag. I have to angle my leg sideways and pull it through by hand.
By the time I reach the back wall, sweat has cooled under my shirt and left me shaking.
The shelter smells of rust, dust, and old oil baked into metal pores. The ground is hard and uneven, but it doesn’t smoke.
I set the bag down. Arya crouches opposite me, watching.
The hood’s filter is already gray. I don’t like that.
“Come here,” I say softly.
I check the hood seal, wipe grit from the intake with my sleeve, and adjust the neck cinch again. Her hair clings damply to her temples. The cut near her hairline has dried to a dark shade. When I touch around it, she doesn’t pull away.
“Sorry,” I murmur when she winces.
Her eyes flick up, confused. Sorry’s not a useful lab word.
I open the medkit and find the fever strip.
It adheres to her neck with a faint chirp. A slow amber line crawls across the indicator.
Too high, thankfully not high enough for immediate organ risk, but high enough that dry air and exertion will worsen it. High enough that a real medbay would have started fluids, cooling, and a scan.
We have warm water, a cracked medkit, and shade under a dead machine.
I break one hydration bulb open and mix a quarter packet of electrolytes into it, swirling until the powder dissolves.
“Small sips,” I tell her.
She takes it with both hands.
While she drinks, I clean the cut on her temple. The antiseptic ampule hisses when it breaks. Arya’s shoulders tighten, but she stays still. I press a small seal patch over the scrape. It’s too large for her face; I trim the edge with the strap cutter.
“There.”
She lifts a hand to touch it.
“Leave it.”
Her hand drops. The obedience is wrong.
My throat tightens. “Not because you did something wrong. It just needs time to stick.”
She watches me for a moment. Then nods, slower this time. I look away before the expression in her eyes can become something I have to name.
My turn. The shoulder burn is superficial, but the cut across my ribs is not.
When I peel the fabric away, dried blood pulls at the edges and fresh blood wells beneath it, darker now—my abdomen cramps at the sight.
ORIN says, “That requires treatment.”
“I know.”
The words come out sharper than I mean.
I clean the wound with half an ampule and use one of the larger seal patches. The adhesive bites hard. Chemical warmth spreads through the cut, then deeper, knitting tissue enough to slow bleeding but not enough to erase the pull with every breath.
The brace is worse.
I loosen the outer panel near the knee and tip out a thin stream of ash. Some of it has mixed with lubricant and blood into a gray sludge. The exposed neural socket sparks once when air hits it.
My leg jerks. Arya’s cup stops halfway to her mouth.
“I’m okay,” I say automatically.
Neither of them answers.
I use the insulated wire to secure the cracked strut more tightly against the brace frame. Then I strip the filter mesh from the broken respirator and wrap it over the exposed actuator teeth to keep more grit out.
The adult respirator is salvageable after all, if salvageable means the seal leaks and the filter will fail under sustained dust.
I clean the intake, pinch the crack in the side closed with a heated clip, and strap it over my mouth and nose.
Breathing through it feels like inhaling through old cloth and metal. Better than nothing.
Every word after that has to push through the damaged filter, dampened and rough around the edges. The mask steals half the smells from the shelter and leaves the worst ones behind: rust, hot plastic, old oil, blood.
When the immediate work is done, I line our supplies against the back wall.
Three ration bars: two and a half hydration bulbs, plus the larger cartridge. Medkit remains. Baton. Torch. Wire. Straps. Blankets. Broken respirator parts.
A list too short to survive on, too long to carry comfortably.
“We stay until the light drops,” I say, the words scraping dully through the respirator. “Then move. Less heat.”
ORIN says, “Remaining here is temporarily advisable. Night temperatures may drop significantly.”
“How significantly?”
“Thermal blankets advised.”
“Anything alive nearby?”
“No large signatures. Small thermal flickers beneath the slag field eastward.”
“Animals?”
“Possibly.”
“Hostile?”
“This planet does not seem committed to hospitality.”
I lean back against the rusted wall.
The metal is warm through my shirt. The position pulls at my spine, but sitting without support is worse. My bad leg lies out at an angle I hate, brace half-bent, foot turned slightly wrong. I adjust it with both hands until the hip stops screaming.
Arya sits a careful distance away at first, knees drawn to her chest, hydration bulb cradled between her palms. Her eyelids droop. She jerks awake each time her chin dips.
“You can sleep,” I say. “I’ll watch.”
Her gaze shifts to the open side of the shelter. To the flats. To the smoke column still marking where the pod burned. Then back to me.
She doesn’t believe in watch any more than I believe in rest.
Fair.
I unroll one blanket and spread it over the least jagged patch of ground. Dust rises. I shake it once, uselessly, then fold part of it beneath itself for padding.
“For you,” I say.
Arya doesn’t move. I understand too late.
A separate blanket. A separate place.
Alone, even by a meter.
I adjust.
The blanket moves closer to where I sit. I pat the space beside my left hip. “Here, then.”
She comes immediately, as if she had been waiting for permission to admit she wanted to.
She curls beside me, not quite against me at first. Then the wind scrapes under the conveyor, and the whole structure creaks overhead. Her shoulder finds my ribs. Her head lowers toward my arm.
She settles against my side with the full, exhausted weight of a child who has survived too much and finally found a warm place to stop moving.
My arm hovers.
In the Cradle, touch was a function or forbidden.
Restrain. Examine. Move. Correct. Punish.
I lower my arm around her shoulders, loose enough that she can leave.
ORIN establishes a perimeter through the remaining pod-sensor fragments slaved to my port—the feed stutters at the edge of my vision: heat noise, static, wind, debris.
“Perimeter established,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“I will pretend that sounded sincere.”
“It was sincere.”
The shelter holds us in a pocket of shadow while Ashkaru moves outside. Dust slides over the flats in low sheets. Far in the basin, something metallic booms and echoes, a delayed collapse in one of the dead structures. The sound rolls for a long time before fading.
The silence is worse.
My body keeps waiting for the next instruction. For the lights to change. For a door to open. For Vire’s voice to measure what I have done and find it lacking. Without those cues, every muscle stays half-contracted, burning energy I don’t have. The withdrawal tremor deepens in my hands. I tuck the shaking fingers under the blanket where Arya won’t see.
She sees anyway.
Her small hand emerges from the blanket and covers mine. My breath catches behind the respirator.
“Your fever’s high,” I whisper through the clogged filter, because practical words are safer. “You need to sleep.”
Her fingers tighten once.
You too, the gesture seems to say.
“I don’t sleep well.”
That is not true.
I don’t sleep without chemical help. I don’t sleep unless my body is forced under and dragged back up at someone else’s convenience. I don’t sleep because the world changes when my eyes close, and I learned too early that waking up is not the same as being safe.
Arya’s head shifts against my arm. Her eyes close.
The trust is unbearable.
“Wake me if anything moves,” I tell ORIN.
“You intend to sleep?”
“No.”
“Then why give the instruction?”
“In case.”
“In case your body overrides your denial?”
“Something like that.”
“A sensible precaution. Rare from you.”
I let my head rest back against the metal.
Arya sleeps.
Not deeply. Her fingers remain tangled in my shirt. Each time the conveyor creaks, she stirs and presses closer. I keep my arm around her.
I listen to her breathing. To ORIN’s quiet signal pulse. To the wind moving over metal. To the distant ticking of the planet cooling.
My eyelids grow heavy. The moment they lower, the Cradle returns.
Glass. Fog.
A boy’s hand slipping down the inside of a tank. Solen’s voice cut into static. Vire’s shadow behind a clean pane of observation glass. The SpineLock humming, obedient to a command I have not heard yet.
QO-7… obey.
My eyes snap open.
Ashkaru waits outside, dark and vast.
No glass or white walls. No cradle. Just exile. Just a child asleep against me and ORIN keeping watch from the port behind my ear, bodiless and sharp-voiced and too stubborn to admit fear.
The wreck cannot save us. The shelter will not hold forever.
Somewhere beyond the basin, if Solen told the truth, there is a man named Thane Arrow and a ship called the Drifting Truth. Somewhere between here and there are scavengers, heat, cold, toxins, distance, and the Core’s long reach searching for what it lost.
My body throbs with every heartbeat. My brace clicks softly as the temperature drops. Under my skin, the resonance has quieted to a thin, exhausted hum.
I tighten my hold on the baton with my free hand and keep watching the dark.