The regulator stops sounding broken.
It has been humming under the shielding tarp since the last drop into the spineway, low and uneven, a sick machine-noise threaded through the cargo bay floor. I can feel it through the blanket beneath my shoulder, through the brace frame, through the SpineLock’s waiting hum at the base of my neck. Broken things have texture: skips, grit, heat in the wrong places, a stutter where power bleeds through cracked channels.
This changes.
A thin, precise tone slides beneath the old buzz and straightens it like a wire pulled taut.
My eyes open.
Across the cargo bay, the shielding tarp twitches. The clamps weighing its bottom edge tremble once, then settle. The cargo lights hold their low amber wash, but every sensor tag on the wall display flickers white for half a breath.
ORIN speaks before I can. “Nix.”
“I heard it,” Nix snaps over shipwide from the cockpit.
Their voice has lost the loose edge it wears when there is room for sarcasm. This is knife work now, short and focused, with the ship moving under us in a careful slide. The Drifting Truth keeps her engines low enough that each pulse feels swallowed by the old metal overhead. The cargo display catches the world outside in broken pieces: rusted support arches, conveyor skeletons half-collapsed into ash, signal towers leaning like dead antennae over black stone.
The regulator hums again, cleaner than before.
My field tightens before I let it.
So does the SpineLock, a half-beat behind, a half-degree warmer—an offer. The problem is in the room, and my body is on the floor, and the SpineLock has already calculated the distance between the two. It does not ask. It makes the arithmetic available and waits.
Rhett notices. He sits just outside arm’s reach, close enough to watch my breathing and far enough not to make my field snap at him. The med slate rests against his knee, its cracked screen dimmed low. He lifts his gaze from the slate, sees my hand flex against the blanket, and reaches for the water pouch instead of me.
“Talk or drink?”
I stare at him.
He lifts the pouch a little higher. “Two options. I’m growing as a person.”
“Debatable,” ORIN says through the cargo speaker, his voice thinner there than it is inside my skull.
“Not asking you, respirator ghost.”
“Accurate insult. Poor delivery.”
The regulator tone sharpens, and the brief edge of humor bleeds out of the room.
Tavi shifts against the far crate wall, his wrapped wrist held close to his chest. He has been quiet since the ship began moving, tucked as far from me as the cargo bay allows without asking anyone to move him farther. The cooling patch along his bruised throat has lost its chill. He swallows carefully and looks at the shielding tarp instead of at me.
Arya sits beside me with her clean filter mask in her lap, both hands curled around it. She is close enough that her knee nearly touches the edge of my blanket, but she has not reached for my sleeve since I woke. Her eyes stay fixed on the tarp, too still in a way that is never nothing with Arya.
Nix’s voice comes back lower. “Tell me that thing did not just handshake with something old under us.”
“It did,” ORIN says.
Rhett swears under his breath.
Thane stands near the forward passage, one hand braced against the frame as the ship rolls under another support arch. He takes in the room without rushing: me on the pallet, Arya’s stillness, Rhett’s water pouch, Tavi’s pale face, the vibrating tarp, the cargo display stuttering through exterior feed.
“Status,” he says.
Nix answers, “Bad, but interesting.”
“I asked for status.”
“That was status. The regulator just pinged an old maintenance lattice in the spineway. I thought the lattice was dead. The lattice has chosen to be dramatic.”
ORIN’s voice carries a faint layer of static through the cargo speaker. “The regulator has recognized compatible Core-era infrastructure.”
Thane’s gaze shifts to me. I feel the question before he asks it, and I hate that I still try to sit up.
My shoulder barely lifts before the brace pulls, ribs catch, and a white thread of pain cuts across my vision. Rhett’s hand moves, then stops in the air because I look at him. He lets it fall to his own knee.
I hate counting progress in all the places where no one touches me.
“Kaelin,” Thane says carefully. “You can answer from there.”
The frozen places in me loosen by a fraction.
I look at the regulator. “It’s carrying the claim.”
Nix goes silent over the comm.
Rhett frowns. “I thought we dirtied the claim.”
“We dirtied the return.” My throat feels like sandpaper. “Not the claim itself.”
Thane moves closer to the cargo display but stays out of my direct line of sight. “Explain.”
The room narrows to the old structure in my head. Classroom memory. Training module. Recovery protocol. Legal capture chains. They taught me how to escape so they could teach someone else how to catch me. They put locks in my head, then made me memorize the keys.
I swallow. “Four steps. Claim header. Local acknowledgment. Telemetry match. Physical confirmation.”
ORIN says nothing, letting me do it or making sure I can.
“The Core filed the header through the tower. Kavren acknowledged because their relay is Core-compatible and old enough to obey clean-band priority. We corrupted the telemetry match with Ashkaru’s maintenance noise. But the claim header still exists. The regulator swallowed the question and never stopped asking it.”
Nix exhales over comms. “And if it asks loudly enough…”
“The Core receives an answer,” ORIN finishes.
The cargo bay seems to shrink around that.
Tavi’s good hand tightens around the water pouch Arya gave him earlier. “So that thing’s calling them?”
“Not yet.”
He flinches at my voice. Less than before. Enough.
I look away from him before the guilt turns my field sharp. “It’s looking for something that can complete the old chain. A tower. A station. Any lattice node that still speaks the same maintenance dialect. It found one.”
Nix’s voice drops into the rhythm of work. “Can we cut power?”
“No.”
Too fast.
Rhett gives me a look.
I take the water pouch from him because if I don’t, he will keep looking like that. The first swallow hurts. The second stays down.
“If you cut power while it’s mid-question, it logs interruption,” I say. “Core systems love interruption. It makes them feel important.”
ORIN hums. “Anthropomorphic but functionally correct.”
“Thank you.”
“That was not praise.”
“I know.”
Nix makes a short, impatient sound. “So don’t cut it. Don’t dump it. Don’t let it talk. Wonderful. I adore problems with no exits.”
“There’s an exit.”
The room waits.
I can see it on the cargo display without needing the map. Old Core system. Spineway maintenance lattice. Regulator carrying a contaminated claim echo. Core recovery craft is adapting above us, looking for a clean answer. The thing inside the hold wants to finish its task, so we need to give it somewhere else to finish.
“Make it lie,” I say.
Nix is quiet for one beat. “I’m listening.”
I shift my gaze to the display. The movement makes the world tilt, but only at the edges.
“Route the echo into something older and louder. Not the ship. The spineway. Make it look like contaminated telemetry moved deeper into infrastructure.”
I feel ORIN settle hard against the port at the words, not the ship.
He knows where my mind almost goes when routes close and bodies fail. He knows the forbidden shape of active systems better than anyone left alive should.
The Drifting Truth has a mainframe. A timing pulse. Control harmonics. A thousand small corrections happen under Nix’s hands every second. If my field touches that too deeply, the ship will not sit still like a dead crawler or swallow a lie like the regulator.
It will answer, and if it answers through me, I don’t know where my body ends.
“Like a ghost ship,” Rhett says.
Nix clicks their tongue. “Not terrible.”
“Try not to sound stunned,” Rhett says.
“I fail honestly.”
Thane studies the exterior feed. “Where?”
No one answers at first.
Then Tavi clears his throat. The sound is rough, careful, and pulled tight by the bruising I left on him. “Stack Twelve.”
Everyone looks at him.
“There’s an old slag-weigh station under Stack Twelve,” he says. “Locals avoid it because it repeats bad signals. Auntie Mara says it once billed the same ore shipment for nine years.”
Nix goes very still. A slow, delighted horror creeps into their voice. “A loop.”
ORIN says, “A bureaucratic haunting.”
Tavi blinks like he did not expect the AI to approve of him.
He is the person I held against a cargo wall and nearly broke. He is also the only one in this cargo bay who knows the ground beneath the spineway well enough to name a ghost loop by number. I do not know what to do with that. I file it somewhere without a label.
Rhett rubs a hand over his face. “Of course ghost paperwork saves us.”
“Maybe,” Nix says. “Stack Twelve is under the extraction stacks ahead of us. Bad approach. Tight old ribs, collapsed rail, and a signal spur that may or may not fry my port stabilizer.”
“Can you get us there?” Thane asks.
Nix scoffs. “Captain, I am hurt. Also yes, if the Truth feels cooperative.”
The ship groans as if answering.
“See?” Nix says. “She’s considering it.”
Arya moves then.
She sets the filter mask down and crawls to the dusty patch of floor near the cargo display, where ash from Tavi’s boots and Nix’s earlier condensate trail have left a gray smear across the metal. With one finger, she draws a crooked line through it.
No one speaks.
Her first mark is the ship. I know because she draws the Drifting Truth as a lopsided shape with three little fins, not accurate but somehow right. Then a ribbed line for the spineway. A tower. A loop. Another line cutting away from it.
Nix stares down at the drawing. “That route gets us nowhere.”
Arya looks up. I understand before I want to.
“Not us,” I say. “The echo.”
Arya nods once.
Tavi looks at the drawing longer than anyone else. “That’s the lower spur,” he says quietly. “I didn’t tell you about that.”
Arya’s finger taps the loop once. Then her hand curls against her chest, fingers trembling with ash under the nails. She does not look proud.
She looks tired.
Thane leans closer to the map on the display. “Nix.”
“I can use that,” Nix says, voice stripped of performance. “If the lower spur still has a powered repeater, I can feed the echo into the weigh station and let the loop chew on it. Core sees contaminated telemetry circling deeper under Stack Twelve.”
“And us?” Thane asks.
“We break east while they look west.”
“Window?”
“Small.”
“How small?”
“The kind that gets offended if you measure it.”
Thane gives the cargo display a hard look. “Do it.”
Nix answers immediately. “Need hands in the hold.”
My body tries again. Not as hard this time. Just a twitch in the shoulder, a tightening along the spine, the old useful panic reaching for motion. The SpineLock hums as if it hears an invitation.
Rhett sees my fingers dig into the blanket. “You get ten sentences before I become irritating.”
I give him a flat look. “You started irritating.”
“Great. Then I’m warmed up.”
Nix cuts off from shipwide. For several seconds, only the ship answers: engines low, hull ticking, the regulator’s cleaner hum threaded through it all. Then the side hatch opens, and Nix steps into the cargo bay with a tool roll under one arm, a coil of patch cable looped across their shoulder, and a cockpit comm clipped at their collar, still blinking live.
“Truth is holding the run for maybe a minute,” they say before Thane can ask. “After that, either I’m back at the controls, or we become part of the spineway.”
ORIN speaks only inside my skull this time. “Remember the boundary.”
I don’t look at the cargo speaker. “Regulator. Spineway. External bleed.”
“Not the ship.”
“I know.”
“You also knew not to touch the crawler’s frame.”
My jaw tightens. “This is different.”
“Yes,” he says. “It is faster, active, and much worse.”
Thane nods once. “Fast, then.”
“I was planning on decorative and leisurely, but fine.”
Nix’s goggles are pushed up into their hair. Condensate streaks one side of their face in gray-black lines. They do not look at me first. They go to the regulator, and that helps more than I want it to.
The shielding tarp lifts with a soft crackle. The regulator core sits under it like a stolen organ: old alloy casing, ceramic ports, amber maintenance light flickering inside a crack near the top. Nix crouches, unrolls tools, and holds out one hand without looking.
Tavi hesitates, then pushes himself up with his good hand.
Rhett’s head snaps around. “Absolutely not.”
Tavi freezes. “I know the casing.”
“You also have a wrist I just wrapped.”
“I’ve got another one.”
“That is not the point.”
Nix glances over. “He can sit and point.”
Rhett looks ready to argue, then remembers stubborn people and bad timing outnumber him. “Sit. Point. Everyone on this ship seems allergic to not bleeding, and I’m tired.”
Tavi moves slowly to the edge of the regulator, keeping more distance from me than from the machine. His wrapped wrist never leaves his chest unless he forgets and pays for it. He sits on an overturned crate and points with his good hand.
“That side panel sticks. Don’t pry near the red seam. It snaps.”
Nix gives him a sideways look. “Mara teach you that?”
“Broke three panels before she did.”
“Educational violence. Respectable.”
The faint almost-laugh in Tavi’s chest turns into a wince. Rhett points at him without looking away from me. “Breathing shallow. Don’t laugh with a bruised throat.”
Tavi mutters something unflattering.
Arya returns to my side, but her eyes stay on the regulator.
ORIN’s voice comes from the cargo speaker. “Before anyone suggests it, I cannot simply enter the regulator and solve this.”
Nix opens the panel and snorts. “I was going to suggest it.”
“I know. Your optimism is structurally unsound.”
“Explain the no.”
ORIN’s tone flattens into a warning. “I can advise through ship audio and read what the open ports expose. That is not the same as inhabiting the device. A direct transfer risks neural feedback through Kaelin, trace exposure through the port, and corruption of my active instance.”
The port behind my ear warms around the last two words.
Active instance.
The phrase should belong to ORIN alone, but the feedback makes it mine for a breath: a hot little scrape of signal through scar tissue and old wiring.
If the regulator can do that through cargo audio and exposed ports, I do not want to know what the Truth’s full control stack would do.
Except for some part of me already knows. That is why ORIN doesn’t elaborate.
My stomach clenches.
Nix’s hands slow inside the casing. “So you advise. I cut.”
“Correct.”
“Can you at least read the signal?”
“With latency.”
“How much?”
“Enough to annoy us both.”
“That’s not a number.”
“It is a forecast.”
Nix smiles faintly despite themselves and goes back to work.
The regulator casing opens with a low ceramic pop. Amber light leaks across their hands. The hum sharpens, and my field answers before I can stop it, a thin pulse under my skin.
Rhett sees the pulse on the scanner before I feel its full shape. “Pause.”
Nix freezes.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Rhett’s expression does not change. “That’s not one of your ten sentences. Drink.”
“I don’t—”
“Kaelin.”
My name, tired and low, with no room for the argument to become the point.
I drink—one swallow, then another. The field eases a little, not because water fixes anything, but because the act gives my body something ordinary to do.
Nix waits until Rhett nods before resuming.
The amber light inside the regulator flutters. The cargo display splits into a crude signal map as ORIN feeds Nix what he can read: ship marker, spineway lattice, old Stack Twelve loop, Core search grid above in pale moving bands. The recovery vessel’s path cuts through the higher atmosphere like a clean blade trying to learn the shape of dirty air.
My mind supplies my name, as if the map is looking for me.
I force my gaze back to the regulator. “Don’t strip the primary node.”
Nix does not look up. “That’s sentence one.”
Rhett turns to stare at them.
“What?” Nix says. “He started counting. I’m participating.”
I close my eyes for half a breath. “Primary node completes the echo. You need the secondary maintenance tag. The damaged one with ash in the seam. It’s half-cooked already, but it can still carry a dirty echo once.”
Tavi leans closer, then stops when Rhett makes a noise. He points instead. “There. Under the cracked ceramic.”
Nix slides a hook-tool beneath it. “Found it.”
The regulator tone steadies again, and the ship dips.
ORIN says, “Core search grid narrowing. They have noticed the lattice response.”
Thane touches the comm at his ear. “Nix.”
“Working.”
“Work faster.”
“If I go faster, it becomes art.”
“That bad?”
“Abstract.”
The regulator spits a line of sparks. Nix hisses and jerks their hand back, shaking fingers. “Hot. Rude. Still intact.”
My body wants to move so badly that the urge tastes like bile. I know where the line is. I know how to route the echo. I can feel the map in my teeth, in the port behind my ear, in the way the regulator’s hum threads against the old spineway signal. If I could sit up, if I could reach the casing, if I let the SpineLock take just enough—
The offer is still open. Clean. Precise. Standing would mean that Nix trusts a route rather than improvising. Standing would mean my hands on the casing and my field reading the signal directly. Standing would cost something, but it would cost something useful.
Arya’s hand lands on my sleeve—just her fingers, light and certain.
I stay down. The choice burns more than standing would have.
Nix keeps working. The field inside me thrashes once, furious at being unused.
Rhett sees the spike. “Good.”
My eyes cut to him.
He winces. “Bad timing. I mean—you didn’t move.”
“That’s good now?”
“Yes,” Thane says from the display.
The answer lands with uncomfortable weight. Useful by staying still. Useful without taking over.
The Core never taught that version.
Nix pulls the secondary tag free. The amber light in the regulator dims, then flares white. The cargo bay fills with a smell like heated dust and old rain on metal.
ORIN’s voice sharpens. “Signal exposed.”
The map brightens. A white thread opens from the regulator toward the spineway lattice, thin and hungry, cleaner than anything around it.
Claim header. Local acknowledgment. Telemetry match. Physical confirmation.
The thread wants a body. It wants me.
For half a breath, the ship’s deck answers beneath it. Not fully. Not enough for anyone else to feel. Just a tiny correction pulse from some buried control line as the Truth reacts to the regulator’s dirty scream.
My field notices.
It reaches toward the pulse before I can stop it, hungry for a cleaner path, a larger body, an active rhythm strong enough to carry the lie farther than the regulator ever could.
ORIN clamps down through the port so hard my teeth ache.
“No ship,” he says.
I drag the field back until my ribs shake. The field still crawls toward the regulator—the SpineLock hums.
I clench my jaw until pain lights behind my teeth. “Signal. Field. Cost.”
Rhett goes still beside me. Nix looks over their shoulder.
The words come out without permission, old training and newer understanding grinding together.
“What?” Nix asks.
“That’s how Resonance works.” My voice sounds rough, but the shape of the explanation steadies me. A checklist. A map. Something with edges. “Signal. Field. Cost. Something triggers the Q-Gene. The body projects. The body pays.”
ORIN does not interrupt, so I keep going.
“Metal carries it farther. Conductive dust makes it loud. Pain makes the field sloppy. Dampeners don’t erase resonance; they push back until the body breaks or rebounds. The SpineLock forces motion through damaged pathways, but it borrows from muscle, blood, breath, nerves.”
My hand tightens in the blanket.
“Dead systems hold patterns. Active systems answer. ORIN can speak through hardware if he can reach it, but every open channel can leave a trace, and every answering system can push something back.”
By the end of it, my throat feels stripped raw, and the edges of the cargo bay have started to blur again.
The regulator’s white thread pulses.
“Nothing is free,” I say.
Nix turns back to the core. “Then we make the Core pay for listening.”
They slip the patch cable into the secondary tag port and clip the other end to a small black relay no larger than my palm. Fringe-built. Ugly. Reliable-looking in the way Nix’s tools are reliable: taped twice, burned once, still better than the clean thing it is meant to beat.
Tavi leans in despite Rhett’s glare. “Stack Twelve loop opens under the cracked gantry. You’ll feel the ship drop before the spur. Don’t feed it before then.”
Nix nods. “How long between drop and spur?”
“Three breaths.”
“Whose breaths?”
Tavi looks at them like that is a stupid question. “Mine.”
Rhett closes his eyes. “I hate all of you.”
“Three Tavi breaths,” Nix says. “Got it.”
Arya moves back to the ash drawing and traces the crooked path again. This time, she adds a second line near the loop, a smaller curve that cuts away before touching the tower mark.
Thane sees it. “Nix, secondary cut east before the loop completes.”
Nix glances at the drawing, then at the map. “That route grazes the old extraction stacks.”
“Can you fly it?”
“Can you stop asking that like the answer changes?”
“Can you fly it clean?”
Nix smiles without humor. “No. But I can fly it ugly.”
“Ugly, then.”
Nix’s collar comm flashes red. They glance down. “Autocourse is about to get philosophical.”
Thane’s attention cuts to the forward passage. “How long?”
“Less than ten seconds.”
“Back to cockpit.”
Nix curses, fast and creative, then shoves the relay into Tavi’s good hand. “Hold this exactly like you enjoy being alive.”
Tavi’s eyes go wide. “I do.”
“Great. Motivation.”
Nix bolts for the side hatch, still speaking through the comm as they move. “Do not feed until I call it. Tavi breaths after my mark, not before.”
The hatch slams behind them. Their footsteps vanish down the forward passage before their voice snaps back through shipwide, breathless and already threaded with cockpit alarms.
“Control restored. Everyone compliment me later.”
The ship begins to drop.
The motion is controlled but steep enough that my stomach lifts and the regulator’s hum presses against my teeth. The cargo display shows the spineway ribs rising around us, old metal closing like a tunnel made from the bones of machines.
“Mark,” Nix says.
Tavi’s chest moves once. His good hand shakes around the relay. Rhett shifts closer but does not touch.
ORIN feeds the map into the display, white thread trembling.
Tavi breathes again.
The Core search band above us shifts closer. Thane’s hand tightens on the cargo rail. Rhett’s eyes flick between my face and the scanner. Arya’s fingers hover over the ash line.
Tavi’s third breath shakes. “Now.”
“Feed it,” Nix says shipwide.
Tavi drives the relay home.
The regulator screams.
The sound goes through metal first, then bone, then the space behind my eyes. Old Core code tears out of the secondary tag and slams into the spineway lattice. The cargo lights flash white. The shielding tarp snaps upward as if caught in a storm. Every tied-down hook strains against its cable.
My field surges to meet it.
I do not let it go.
I dig my fingers into the blanket and hold the pressure inside my skin, where it burns—the SpineLock twitches, offering posture, motion, obedience, clean lines through pain.
I refuse it without a word.
Sparks crawl up the cable toward Tavi’s hand. He panics, then shoves the insulated handle down before the relay can kick loose. Rhett moves toward him, then stops because Tavi has already done it and looks terrified enough of his own bravery.
The display erupts with false movement.
A ship-shaped smear—dirty, bright, contaminated with pod telemetry and old claim residue—shoots west through the map, diving toward Stack Twelve. It flickers through the weigh station loop, vanishes, appears again deeper in the spineway, then splits into three ghost returns that all look half-real enough to be worth chasing.
ORIN’s voice cuts through the scream. “False trail accepted by local lattice. Core response pending.”
Local lattice. Not ship mainframe. I hold onto the distinction like a handrail.
Tavi jerks the cable free, with Nix shouting timing through the comm. The regulator tone collapses back into ugly static.
The Drifting Truth banks east hard enough that the cargo bay tilts and every secured thing argues with its restraints. Rhett catches the med crate with one knee. Tavi slides sideways and slams his shoulder into the crate wall with a pained grunt. Arya flattens both hands to the floor, steady as if she knew exactly where the tilt would put her.
I don’t move. I cannot move, but that is not the whole truth anymore. Some part of me chooses not to chase the ship’s motion with the SpineLock, and the choice is small enough to fit between one breath and the next.
Outside, the cargo display catches a glimpse of dead Ashkaru lights waking in the distance. One by one, old maintenance towers blink under layers of ash, pale amber dots crawling westward toward Stack Twelve. The Core search band above shifts after them.
Nix’s voice comes over shipwide, breathless and fierce. “They bit.”
Rhett sags back. “Tell me that means good.”
“It means they’re chasing our ghost.”
Thane does not relax. “Window?”
“Eight minutes if they’re stupid. Four if they’re cautious.”
ORIN says, “The recovery vessel has updated its search model.”
Nix’s smile vanishes from their voice. “Of course it has.”
The Core learns. It always learns.
“They’ll realize,” I say.
“Yes,” ORIN answers. “But not immediately.”
Tavi lets out a shaky breath, then winces and presses his good hand to his throat.
Arya sits back on her heels and looks at the ash drawing. The ship’s tilt has smudged the crooked line she made, the false trail smeared into a gray blur.
False things still leave marks.
Nix’s voice returns over comms. “Secondary tag is cooked. Regulator’s half-useless now.”
“Half-useless is generous,” ORIN says.
“Don’t make me turn your speaker off.”
“You cannot. It is currently routed through cargo emergency audio.”
Nix pauses. “That’s how you’re doing that?”
“Yes. Low bandwidth. Terrible acoustics. Usable.”
Rhett looks between the speaker and me. “And traceable?”
ORIN’s pause is small, too small for most people.
“Potentially,” he says.
The cargo bay stills again. I close my eyes.
“Did they catch it?” Thane asks.
“Not cleanly,” ORIN says. “But they may now suspect an onboard auxiliary intelligence.”
Nix mutters over shipwide, “Great. The ghost ship has a haunted girl and a haunted speaker.”
Rhett gives the ceiling a look.
“What?” Nix snaps. “That was me processing fear.”
Thane’s gaze comes to me. “Can they trace ORIN through you?”
“Not from that,” I say.
ORIN says nothing.
I open my eyes. “Not cleanly.”
The cargo speaker clicks once—agreement or irritation.
Maybe both.
Rhett shifts beside me. “You done with your ten sentences?”
“I lost count.”
“I didn’t.”
I look at him despite myself.
He holds up the water pouch. “That was more than ten.”
Nix calls from the cockpit, “Worth it.”
Rhett’s mouth tightens around words he wants to say and chooses not to. Instead, he sets the pouch where my hand can reach it, leaving the choice there without making a ceremony of it.
The Drifting Truth drops into the east cut. The exterior feed flickers: extraction stacks rising out of the ash like black fingers, old rail lines twisted around them, static storms crawling along broken gantries. Somewhere behind us, the false echo keeps running west, looping through Core paperwork and dead machinery, pretending to be us.
For a few minutes, the lie holds.
Tavi shifts across the bay. This time, when his gaze flicks toward me, he doesn’t look away quite as fast.
I want to say his name again. I don’t.
The apology would be for me right now, not him.
Arya crawls back to my side and settles there, not touching at first. Then, after a moment, she places two fingers in my sleeve because she chooses to, not because I am breaking.
The ship changes pitch.
This time, the sound comes from the Truth, not the regulator. The engine note drops low enough to crawl through the deck and into my bones, a wounded animal trying to breathe without moving its ribs. The cargo display shifts from the westward ghost trail to the narrow route Nix is cutting east beneath the extraction stacks.
“Approaching split,” Nix says. “I have two route options, both ugly, because Ashkaru remains committed to being unpleasant.”
Thane steps closer to the display. “Show me.”
The cargo wall flickers into a crude topographic overlay. Old extraction stacks rise as pale ribs on the map. Maintenance tunnels lace beneath them in broken lines. A lower channel runs close to a collapsed support field. A higher channel cuts beneath a long span of dead conveyor.
“Lower route keeps us under mineral scatter,” Nix says. “Better scan cover. Worse clearance. We scrape hull if the old ribs shifted.”
“And higher?” Thane asks.
“Cleaner flight. Worse exposure. There’s a dead sensor mesh marked on old maps, but dead sensors lie all the time.”
ORIN says, “The lower route has stronger interference. The higher route has lower structural risk.”
“Thank you for summarizing why both are bad,” Nix says.
Arya goes still.
No drawing this time. Her hand lowers to the floor, palm flat against the deck, and her eyes fix on the cargo display while the ship’s vibration moves through her small bones. Her fingers drag across the dusty deck, searching until they find the reflection of the higher route. Then she curls her hand away from it as if the metal has turned hot.
Rhett sees the motion. “Arya?”
She does not look at him.
“Avoid higher,” I say.
Nix is quiet for half a breath. “That a guess or a horrible resonance thing?”
I look at Arya. Her face has gone pale under the fever flush. Sweat glints along her temple. She taps the floor once beneath the higher route’s reflection, then draws her fingers away again.
“Neither,” I say. “Arya.”
Nix does not argue. That matters.
“Lower route it is.”
ORIN says, “The lower route carries higher collision risk.”
Thane’s voice stays even. “Take it.”
The ship drops.
The motion differs from the false-trail descent. Less like flight, more like being threaded through a narrow wound in the planet. The engines cut lower. The deck angle shifts under my spine. Cargo straps groan. The old extraction stacks rise around us on the feed, black pillars ribbed with rust, their upper reaches lost in ash haze.
Rhett braces one hand against the med crate. Tavi grips a cargo strap with his good hand. Arya keeps her palm on the floor, eyes half-lidded like she is listening to something beneath the hull.
The higher route flashes on the display as we pass beneath it. For one second, nothing happens.
Then the dead sensor mesh wakes.
Pale blue points bloom along the upper channel, one after another, clean and geometric and horribly Core. The light sweeps across the path we would have taken, scanning empty air.
Rhett whispers, “Void.”
Nix’s voice goes flat. “That mesh was not dead.”
“If we’d gone through it?” Thane asks.
“Core would have had a clean ping,” ORIN says.
No one speaks for a few seconds.
Arya’s hand slips from the floor. She sways, and Rhett moves before I can, stopping at her side without touching.
“Arya?”
She blinks hard and looks at me, too tired and too hot and still trying.
I want to reach for her. My arm moves only a few centimeters before it stops, shaking. The failure punches through me, sharp and humiliating.
Rhett shifts the water pouch toward Arya instead. “Your turn.”
Arya takes it without looking at me first. That lands differently than it used to. A few days ago, she would have waited. Now she drinks.
The ship scrapes something.
A long shriek runs along the hull, metal against old metal, and the whole cargo bay shivers. Tavi flinches hard enough to hurt himself. Rhett catches the med crate before it tips. Thane grabs the cargo rail.
I don’t move.
The brace frame digs into my thigh. My field flickers, trying to reach the sound, to shove away whatever touches the ship. The SpineLock hums brighter.
Nix snarls over comms. “Paint scratch. Cosmetic.”
The ship groans.
“Mostly cosmetic.”
Another scrape, shorter.
“Emotionally cosmetic.”
“Nix,” Thane says.
“I have it.”
And they do.
The Truth slips through the lower channel, close enough that the exterior feed shows rusted ribs sliding past the hull by meters, old industrial teeth, broken gantries, and hanging cables. Static storms crawl blue-white along the extraction stack tops, pulled by the sensor mesh waking above us.
Nix cuts heat.
The cargo bay temperature drops almost immediately. The change slides over my skin and under the blanket. Arya shivers. Tavi does too, though he tries to hide it. Rhett mutters under his breath and reaches for the thermal wrap he’d set aside in the med crate earlier.
“Heat signature,” ORIN says.
Rhett breathes out and softens the movement, then offers the wrap to Arya first. She takes it but does not unfold it around herself. Her eyes move to Tavi.
He looks away.
Arya pushes the wrap across the floor toward him with both hands. Tavi stares at it. His throat works.
Rhett looks like he might say something, then doesn’t.
Tavi takes the edge of the wrap with his good hand. “Thanks.”
Arya nods once, then leans back toward my side, smaller now, drained by whatever warning moved through her.
I cannot cover her, stand, or put myself between her and the next thing.
The SpineLock hears that thought like a door opening.
Pain drops out from under me, not fully, just enough to make the world clean around the edges. My breath evens without permission. The shaking in my left hand stops. The right leg twitches once beneath the brace, then starts to align.
The old promise slides under my skin. Give it the body, and I can move.
The cargo bay sharpens. Distances become angles. Rhett’s throat. Tavi’s hand. Thane’s position by the rail. Arya’s shoulder pressed near the blanket. The regulator casing, still useful as a weapon. The nearest loose clamp. The cargo hook tied down but not immovable.
ORIN’s voice snaps through the port inside my skull, not the cargo speaker. “Do not give it the body.”
The sentence hits lower than the command.
It is not a stop or obey, but a warning shaped like a choice.
My hands curl against the blanket. The body wants to rise. The SpineLock offers the route: bypass pain, bypass tremor, bypass the failed leg, bypass fear. Become efficient. Become useful. Become the answer they made.
Arya’s fingers touch my sleeve. Barely. A feather pressure through torn cloth.
She is not pulling me back. She is there, and that is worse and better than anything else.
I drag air in through my teeth and hold the SpineLock closed by refusing to follow where it opens.
Pain returns in a rush.
My breath breaks. The right leg goes heavy again, dead and burning at once. Tremors slam back into my hand, my ribs, my jaw—the cargo bay blurs at the edges.
I stay down.
The ship scrapes through the last meters of the lower channel and drops into open shadow beneath the extraction stacks.
Nix whoops once over comms, breathless and mean. “Still ugly. Still flying.”
Thane’s gaze stays on me. I expect something soft. Something careful. He doesn’t give me that.
“Good hold,” he says, like it was a maneuver, like restraint counted as work.
The words land in a place I don’t have armor for. I look away first.
Rhett’s voice is quieter. “Field spike dropped.”
ORIN answers through the speaker now. “SpineLock engagement denied.”
“Don’t call it that,” I murmur.
“Accepted. Voluntary hold successful.”
That is worse. Maybe better.
Nix cuts in. “Approaching service hollow. Not on the clean charts, which is my favorite kind of place. Old atmospheric exchange bay under the extraction stacks. Thick overhead metal, mineral scatter, bad smell probably included.”
“Core?” Thane asks.
“Still chasing the ghost west. Sensor mesh is waking behind us, so that will complicate their dignity. We have a window.”
“How long?”
“Long enough to hide if the bay isn’t full of murder.”
Rhett looks up. “Can you stop phrasing things like that?”
“No.”
The ship turns again, gentler now. The cargo display shifts from exterior ribs to a darker cavity opening beneath the stacks. It looks too small for the Truth until Nix angles us sideways and the gap widens by perspective rather than mercy.
Old atmospheric exchange bay.
The words do not match the image. I expect clean vents, turbine housings, and maybe service rails. Instead, the hollow is a metal cavern half-carved into black slag, roofed in overlapping plates of industrial shielding. Rusted fan arrays sit frozen in the walls, each blade taller than a person. Mineral crust feathers over the seams. Old warning lights hang dead along the entry lip.
The Truth slips inside. The change is immediate.
The sky disappears from the display. Scan light disappears. The engine pitch drops into a low murmur that the cavern swallows and throws back, softened. The cargo bay dims as ship power steps down to low concealment mode. Amber lights sink toward brown-gold. Heat drops another notch.
My body understands hiding. It also understands what happens after.
Once the task ends, the cost arrives. My left hand begins to shake too hard to hide.
Not the field. Not the SpineLock. The body settled what it was owed for staying down when standing was available.
Rhett sees. This time he does not ask if I’m fine.
He reaches for the scanner, then stops, remembering. “Can I check vitals again?”
The ship settles with a long, low groan. A final shudder runs through the cargo deck. Nix’s voice comes through shipwide, softer than before.
“Blind pocket achieved. We are dark, quiet, and pretending to be a pile of dead industrial regrets.”
“Status,” Thane says.
“Port stabilizer angry. Fuel line holding. Heat signature suppressed. Regulator quiet. False trail still moving. Core not on top of us.”
“Yet,” ORIN says.
“Thank you, tiny omen.”
“Accurate omen.”
Rhett waits. I realize I haven’t answered him. My tongue feels too large in my mouth. Every breath scrapes. The tremor climbs from muscle into bone.
“Edges,” I say.
Rhett nods. “Edges.”
His scanner hums low. He stays outside arm’s reach except for the device. The numbers on his slate reflect faintly in his eyes. I watch his face instead of the readout.
His expression changes. Not enough for everyone else.
“What?” I ask.
He opens his mouth, then closes it.
Thane steps closer, not to me. To Rhett. “Say it.”
Rhett’s jaw tightens. “She’s crashing again. Slower than before, but—” He glances at ORIN’s speaker. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
ORIN doesn’t answer fast enough. So he isn’t.
Rhett exhales, short and controlled. “Neural load is climbing. Tremors are worse. She’s cold now, but not in a good way. Pulse irregular. Patch response is falling off.”
“Treatment?” Thane asks.
“That’s where I start swearing.”
“Rhett.”
“Fluids. Controlled warming. Anti-seizure on standby. The warming wrap I brought from the med crate should help in the short term.” He sets the scanner down. “But she needs more than what we can do in a cargo bay.”
ORIN says, “Crude but accurate.”
Rhett laughs once without humor. “Great. I’m improving.”
Thane’s voice stays even. “Rules hold.” His gaze moves across the room, naming it briefly: Rhett at the med crate, Arya at Kaelin’s side, Tavi against the far wall, the forward hatch open. “We stay put until the trail runs cold and she’s stable enough to move.”
Tavi looks up, startled by being included, then down again.
“Understood,” Rhett says.
My vision drifts toward the forward hatch. Open line. The corridor beyond is dim and amber, the ship’s sounds carrying through it: Nix murmuring corrections to the Truth, a panel ticking with cold, the low hum of concealment mode settling into something close to quiet.
My body starts slipping.
The bay stretches at the corners. Amber lights smear. The fan blades in the exterior feed become tank supports, then ribs, then nothing. Sound lags by half a breath: Rhett’s scanner hum arriving after the vibration touches my arm; Nix’s voice ghosting over itself from the cockpit; ORIN saying my name from inside and outside at once.
“Kaelin,” ORIN says.
I try to answer. My mouth works. No sound.
Arya’s fingers curl in my sleeve.
Rhett moves closer, stops, and says, “I’m putting a warming wrap under your left side. Not over your chest. Under. You can say no.”
No is there. So is cold.
So is the way my right leg no longer feels like a limb at all, only a long block of burning metal dragged into the shape of one.
I blink once.
Rhett takes that as something. Maybe ORIN tells him. Maybe he has learned the difference between refusal and absence. He slides the warming wrap under the edge of the blanket with careful hands, never touching skin.
Heat blooms slowly. Too slowly. My field twitches toward it, then away.
Thane remains where I can see him. Rhett stays low. Tavi watches from the far wall with the thermal wrap Arya gave him tucked over one shoulder. Nix murmurs to the Truth through the cockpit comm, voice distant and threaded with static. ORIN counts something I can’t follow.
The ship goes quiet around us, not dead but hiding, and I know the difference because my body has done both.
Somewhere above us, the Core chases a ghost through dead paperwork and old metal. Down here, under Ashkaru’s ribs, the Drifting Truth holds still and pretends not to breathe.
Arya’s fingers stay in my sleeve. ORIN’s voice stays in my skull.
Somewhere in the drift, Solen arrives the way he always does now. Not the voice from the channel — that version’s too clean, too purposeful, a man who knew what he was doing when he did it. This is only a fragment. His breathing near the end of the message. The sound of something striking metal or bone somewhere behind him. The channel going white.
Do not wait for me.
I don’t know if he meant it as permission or apology. ORIN’s pulse marker clicks once in the port. Steadying.
I let Solen go back into the static. My body finally starts asking for everything I made it spend.