The regulator stops sounding broken.
Since our drop into the spineway, it had been grinding under the shielding tarp—a dull, uneven machine-chatter vibrating through the deck plates. Broken things have texture: skips, friction, heat bleeding through cracked channels.
This changes.
A clean, high-frequency harmonic slides under the clatter and pulls the noise straight.
My eyes open.
Across the bay, the tarp twitches. The lead clamps holding its hem shift half a centimeter, then bite. The amber wash of the cargo lights stays steady, but the sensor tags along the forward bulkhead flicker white in unison.
ORIN speaks before I can draw breath. “Nix.”
“I have it,” Nix snaps over the shipwide link.
The looseness is gone from their voice. The Drifting Truth is running low and blind, her thrusters dialed down until every pulse feels choked by the overhead shale. On the cargo display, the exterior feed stutters through rusted support arches, conveyor spines sheared off in old collapses, and dead signal towers leaning like broken needles over the ash.
The regulator hums again, pitch climbing a fraction.
My field tightens before I can check it.
Along the floor, two loose brass washers roll three inches toward my bare heels, click against the frame of my leg brace, and stop.
The SpineLock answers immediately. A sharp spike of heat behind my ear, an invitation to bypass the dead weight in my hip, the residual drag of the tranquilizer, the ache in my ribs. Threat detected. Distance: four paces. Route clear.
I force my hands flat against the blanket and keep my weight down.
Rhett sits two paces off my left shoulder, just outside reaching distance. His med slate rests against his knee, the screen dimmed to a slit. He tracks my fingers digging into the wool, then reaches for the water pouch on the crate beside him instead of moving toward me.
“Water,” he says, not an order.
I swallow around a throat that feels lined with slag. “Not thirsty.”
“Lying takes calories,” Rhett says, setting the pouch within arm's reach. “Drink half.”
“Medically sound,” ORIN notes through the cargo speaker, his synthetic cadence flattened by the low-bandwidth channel. “Your neural interface temperature is climbing.”
“Thank you, ORIN,” I mutter.
“You are welcome.”
The regulator’s tone sharpens, and the room goes quiet.
Across the bay, Tavi sits wedged between two structural ribs, his splinted wrist held tight against his sternum. The cooling dressing on his bruised throat is already curling at the edges, gray-white against the yellowing skin. Every time the deck tilts, his eyes dart to the tarp, then to me, then to the floor between us. He doesn't ask to leave, but he keeps his boots tucked under his thighs, ready to push back if my field slips again.
Arya sits by my right knee, her clean filter mask resting in her lap. She doesn't reach for my arm. Her gaze is fixed on the vibrating canvas across the room, her small shoulders rigid.
Nix’s voice returns over the comm, stripped of humor. “Tell me that unit didn't just handshake with the spineway.”
“It did,” ORIN says.
Thane steps into the forward passage frame, one hand braced on the buckled door track as the ship banks around a hanging gantry. He takes in the hold in a single pass: the tarp, Tavi’s posture, Rhett’s scanner, my hands against the deck.
“Status,” Thane says.
“The regulator caught an active lattice,” Nix replies. “Fringe-era sub-channel running under the old extraction spine. I thought the whole grid was dark.”
“Compatible Core infrastructure,” ORIN adds. “The corrupted claim header is broadcasting through the lattice.”
Thane looks down at me. “Can it reach orbit?”
I push up on my left elbow. The movement wrenches the damaged brace pin in my right knee, and a gray wave washes through my vision as the lingering sedative fights my balance. Rhett’s hand twitches forward, then drops back to his knee, honoring the perimeter.
“Not directly,” I say, my voice rough. “The return we dirtied at the yard corrupted the local telemetry. But the claim header itself is still whole inside the regulator’s buffer. It’s asking for confirmation.”
Thane steps to the display rail, keeping clear of my line of sight. “What happens when it finds it?”
“The recovery ship updates its vector,” I say. The Core protocols surface in my head with clean, cold precision—conditioned data, unyielding and exact. “Four steps to asset recovery. Claim header. Local acknowledgment. Telemetry match. Physical confirmation. We jammed the third step. The regulator is trying to rebuild it using the spineway’s relay points.”
Tavi’s voice comes from the shadow of the bulkhead, hoarse and thin. “It’s calling them down.”
I look toward him, then pull my eyes back when he flinches against the metal. “Not if we give it something else to finish on.”
Nix cuts in. “Cut power to the casing?”
“No,” I say. “A dropped signal registers as an active abort. The Core search grid treats an interrupted return as a primary trace point. They’ll triangulate the last ping.”
“Then we lie louder,” Nix says. “Where?”
Silence sits in the bay for two beats. The regulator’s tone rises another semitone, vibrating in the plates of my neck.
“Stack Twelve,” Tavi says.
Everyone turns toward him. Tavi pulls his splint closer to his chest, but his chin stays up.
“Stack Twelve has the old ore-weigh station,” he says, speaking carefully through his bruised throat. “The lower feeder runs on an automated loop. Mara said the intake relay has been stuck repeating the last shift's manifest since the Fringe pulled out. If you dump a signal into it, it just spins.”
Nix whistles low over the link. “An infinite loop. Core telemetry chewing on a dead ledger.”
“Can the regulator bridge to it?” Thane asks.
“If we pull the secondary maintenance tag,” I say, forcing the words through the thick numbness in my tongue. “Route the echo into the lower rail spur instead of the ship. The search grid will see our return dive into the weigh station and stay there.”
Arya moves then.
She slides off her bare heels onto the floor plates, crawls two paces to a patch of fine ash tracked in from the dock, and presses her palm flat. With one finger, she draws a single crooked line through the dust—the spineway. Then a hard drop, a loop beneath a jagged arch, and a second line breaking sharp to the east.
Nix watches from the display mirror. “That lower spur has a two-meter clearance under the gantry. It’s a slag run.”
“Arya?” Thane asks quietly.
The girl taps the eastern cut once, hard enough to leave her nail white, then pulls her hand back to her chest.
“East cut is clean,” I say. “The high route is what they’ll watch.”
Thane doesn't hesitate. “Nix. Pre-set the drop. We need the bypass wired before we hit the spur.”
“I’m on the deck,” Nix says.
The side hatch cycles open. Nix drops into the cargo hold carrying an insulated tool roll, three heavy patch leads, and a field shunt clipped to their harness. Their goggles are pushed up into a mess of sweat-matted hair, face streaked with dry soot.
They don't look at my brace or the blanket. They go straight to the tarp.
“Truth is on inertial trim for ninety seconds,” Nix says, dropping to their knees before the regulator. “After that, we drift into a gantry rib.”
“I can point out the tag,” Tavi says, his voice shaking as he stands.
Rhett rises half an inch. “Tavi—”
“I worked the housings with Mara,” Tavi says without looking at Rhett. He stops four paces away from the regulator, well clear of my pallet, his good hand extended. “Upper left sub-plate. The blue seal is burned off, but the spring-latch is intact.”
Nix jams a pry-bar under the rim. Ceramic shatters with a dry crack.
The regulator’s core flares—a sharp, cold violet light that spills across the deck plates. The harmonic pitch doubles.
My SpineLock hits like an electric wire driven down my vertebrae. My right leg snaps straight, the brace joints squealing as the linkages lock in response to the active frequency. A spray of loose rust chips lifts off the deck, hanging weightless in the air between my hands and the open casing.
“Field spike,” Rhett warns, his voice low, steady, not shouting. “Kaelin. Look at me.”
I can’t. The regulator’s signal is carving a groove through my skull. It feels like an open door—a path to push through, to take the casing in my hands, to force the alignment myself. The lab conditioning claws up through my ribs: Secure the asset. Complete the circuit. Obey.
“Kaelin,” ORIN’s voice strikes directly through the neural port, sharp and cold. “The regulator is an external sink. Do not bridge the casing. You will ground the surge through your own implants.”
Arya’s small hand touches my bare left ankle. Her skin is cold, but the contact breaks the circuit in my head.
The floating rust chips drop, scattering across the iron plates. My breath comes in a ragged gasp.
“Secondary tag is exposed,” Nix grunts, ignoring the sparks licking across their gloves. “Tavi, which line?”
“The braided copper,” Tavi rasps. “Clip the shunt there. Don't touch the return pin or it blows the local fuse.”
Nix snaps the shunt into place. The violet glow snaps to a dull amber.
“Bypass set,” Nix yells, scrambling back to their feet and bolting for the forward hatch. “Hold onto something bolted down!”
The hatch slams.
The Drifting Truth drops like a stone.
Gravity tears loose. The deck drops out from under my hips, and the cargo straps shriek as three crates of machine salvage groan against their mountings. Rhett drops to one knee, bracing his slate against the deck. Tavi grabs a structural rib with his good hand, his boots skidding across the metal.
“Mark!” Nix’s voice screams through the comms. “Stack Twelve in three—two—one—dump it!”
Through the cargo speaker, a sound like tearing sheet metal erupts as the regulator shunts its corrupted telemetry into the spineway lattice.
On the cargo display, the Core search grid—three pale blue vectors sweeping the canyon rim—hesitates. The central beam locks onto the massive, repeating ghost return blooming from the weigh station under Stack Twelve. The blue light shifts west, descending into the dead slag loops.
The Drifting Truth wrenches hard to the east.
The hull scrapes something massive—a long, screaming groan of ancient steel biting steel that rattles my teeth in their sockets. My brace slams against the pallet frame, sending a jolt of pain up through my hip.
Then we are through.
The ship levels out, engines whining as Nix throttles down into a crawl. The violent orange glare of the exterior feed dies, replaced by absolute, suffocating dark.
“We’re in the exchange hollow,” Nix breathes over the comm, their voice trembling with adrenaline. “Thick overhead slag. Signal scatter is total. We are officially a rock.”
The cargo bay lights step down to a faint, reddish emergency glow.
In the corner, the regulator goes dark. The high-frequency whine cuts out, leaving only the dull, heavy thrum of the ship’s idling atmospheric scrubbers.
Silence settles over the bay, heavy and cold.
Tavi sags against the bulkhead, his good hand shaking violently as he slides down to the deck. He looks across the hold, catches my eye, and doesn't look away immediately. His jaw works, but no words come out. He just pulls the thermal wrap over his shoulders and leans his head back against the iron.
I try to speak, to tell him the field is down, but the words turn to ash in my mouth.
The cost arrives all at once.
The SpineLock releases its grip, and the artificial strength drains from my muscles like water through a broken seal. My vision narrows to a pinprick of dull red light. My left arm collapses under my chest, my face hitting the rough wool of the blanket. Tremors rack my spine, fast and uncontrollable, rattling the brace pins against the floor.
“Neural crash,” ORIN reports, his voice distant, fading into the static behind my ears. “Field exhaustion compounded by tranquilizer rebound. Core temperature dropping.”
Rhett is already moving, keeping his motions visible, stopping two paces away before kneeling.
“Kaelin,” he says, his voice flat with forced calm. “I have a warming wrap. I’m sliding it under your shoulder.”
I manage a single twitch of my chin.
The heat hits my left side—not enough to stop the shivering, but enough to keep the dark from freezing over completely.
Arya curls her fingers into the hem of my torn sleeve, her breathing small and even against the floor.
On the wall display, the Core search grid sweeps over the western horizon, circling a ghost that isn't there. But the search vectors don't leave the sector. They tighten, methodically closing off the outer canyons, waiting for the dead line to break.
They will realize. It is only arithmetic.
Through the static in my skull, Solen’s last broken transmission flickers across my memory—not a promise, just the cold weight of what comes next.
Do not wait for me.
I close my eyes and let the dark take the rest.