The amber has texture again. That is how I know time has moved without me.
The Neurogate absence does this. It strips whatever filter normally sits between sensation and interpretation, leaves everything too specific, too present. When it’s bad, the ship hum has weight, and the blanket has grain, and the amber light through the cracked diffuser pushes against my eyes like something that knows I can feel it.
When it eases, I stop noticing it has eased. When it sharpens, I surface.
Sharp now. Too sharp for how little I thought had passed.
My hand reaches for the specific weight that’s not field, not threat, not compliance — just Arya’s particular way of sleeping pressed too close to someone she has decided to stay near. She does it even when it pulls at my ribs. She has decided the rib pull is worth it, and she does not ask my opinion.
The blanket is wrong. Too light against my left side. Too cold near my wrist. Folded where it should be pulled crooked by a small sleeping body that runs too hot and curls too close because distance still feels like danger.
The medbay tilts.
For half a breath, there is no ship. No amber light. No open door. Only the old certainty of waking after something has already been taken. A cot. A table. White walls. A child removed while I was under because attachment made me unstable, because someone decided separation was cleaner than comfort.
My ribs seize around a breath.
“Arya.”
The brace ticks hard against my right leg. The SpineLock pulses at the base of my neck, waking me with the fear, lining my body up for a movement I cannot make. My left hand closes around the cot rail, and the field flickers thinly through the metal.
A tray rattles. Something small freezes beside the supply cabinet.
Reality arrives late.
Arya stands barefoot near the lower drawer, both hands full of stolen things: two clean gauze rolls, a sealed fever strip, one packet of electrolyte powder, and a coil of soft blue tubing trailing from her fingers like a captured vein. Her hair sticks out in sleep-tangled knots. The blanket hangs from one shoulder and drags on the floor behind her.
She looks caught. Not guilty. Caught.
There is a difference, even if my body reacts to both in the same way. My first instinct is to scan the room for whoever made her move.
Open door. Empty corridor. Chair half turned toward the cot. Rhett’s slate on the counter, screen dark. No hands near her. No shadow at the threshold.
Arya’s eyes flick to the tubing in her hand, then to me. She lifts it slightly. Offering. My ribs hurt too much for the sound that wants to come out of me. It gets stuck and turns into a rough breath.
“For me?”
She nods once.
Then points at the fever strip. Her.
The electrolyte packet. Both of us.
The gauze. My ribs, probably. Or her temple.
She had woken, looked at what the adults used, and started piling up supplies. A Cradle habit. A survival habit. One I recognize too well to correct sharply.
“Come here,” I say.
The words come out wrong. Too close to a command. Arya goes still again. My stomach tightens.
I try again, lower. “Please.”
That changes her face by one quiet degree. She pads back to the cot and sets everything on the edge within my reach. She has learned too quickly how people here give choices to wounded things.
“Good inventory,” I say.
Her shoulders ease.
ORIN speaks through the port, voice low and clean this time, no speaker routing. “She has selected items relevant to hydration, fever monitoring, and soft wound support. The tubing is unnecessary.”
Arya looks at the tubing. Then at the cabinet. Then at ORIN’s ceiling speaker, which is dark.
“She cannot glare at you effectively when you are bodiless,” I say.
“I assure you, I can feel the attempt.”
Arya’s mouth shifts—almost amusement. The almost is enough to make my chest pull in a place the rib seal doesn’t cover.
I push myself higher on the cot. This is a mistake.
Pain opens in bright layers: ribs, shoulder, hip, spinal ports, knee socket. The brace slips half a centimeter against swollen skin. The salvaged actuator pin grinds once, and the whole leg becomes a dead weight attached to a live problem.
My left hand shakes against the blanket. Withdrawal has been waiting under sleep.
Not real sleep. It’s more like fractured sinking between ORIN’s monitoring pulses and Rhett’s careful interruptions. But whatever it was, it let the symptoms gather.
They come back sharper now.
Skin crawling beneath the med tape. A sour heat in my throat. Cold sweat at the back of my neck. Fingers fluttering with no useful rhythm. My stomach’s hollow and twisting, wanting something I refuse to name as want.
The Cradle’s absence has teeth.
Arya sees the tremor before I can cover it. She takes one of the gauze rolls and pushes it into my left hand.
Soft pressure. Something to hold. I curl my fingers around it. The trembling doesn’t stop, but it has somewhere to go.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
She nods with the grave seriousness of someone accepting a task well done. A scrape comes from the corridor.
This time, my hand doesn’t go for a baton. There’s still no baton. My body tries anyway, shoulder jerking toward nothing.
ORIN says, “Thane. Two meters out.”
Thane’s voice follows from beyond the open door. “Accurate.”
Arya turns toward the corridor and lifts one hand.
Thane appears at the threshold carrying no tray, no weapon, no obvious reason to be there except that he is. His face has the same controlled tiredness as before, but his eyes are clear.
He notices the supplies on the cot. The tubing. Arya’s bare feet. My hand clenched around gauze.
Arya watches him. Then she touches her right palm to her left shoulder and draws it downward in a straight, firm line.
Thane stops. His gaze shifts to the gesture. She repeats it.
Palm to shoulder—downward line.
Something in the room softens around him, though his face barely moves.
“Me?” he asks.
Arya nods. I look between them.
“What is that?”
Thane steps inside but remains near the wall. “Rim-Colony Sign System.”
I know the words; I know them the way I know many things: from training files, observation logs, communications modules drilled into me because handlers liked assets that could read bodies when mouths were unavailable. But knowing a system exists is not the same as seeing a child give someone a name with her hands.
“She knows RCSS?”
“She knows enough,” Thane says. “More than enough.”
Arya watches his hand. He copies the sign carefully. Palm to shoulder. Down. His movement is slower than hers, a little heavier, but accurate.
“Solid ground,” he says.
Arya nods again, satisfied. The name lands in me with uncomfortable precision.
Solid ground.
I look at Thane’s boots. The way he stands near exits without owning them. The way he gives routes instead of commands. The way he answers no when no is the only honest mercy.
Solid ground.
Of course, she would see that first.
Thane’s gaze flicks to me, then away. He doesn’t ask what I think. Maybe he already knows I couldn’t answer.
Arya turns to the medbay speaker and lifts one palm in front of her face, then slowly rotates it. Once. Twice.
ORIN says, “I object to being reduced to a rotating appendage.”
Arya repeats the sign. This time, there is a tiny crease between her brows.
Thane looks toward me. “Eye that turns.”
ORIN’s silence lasts one beat too long. Then, “Acceptable.”
I almost smile. It hurts too much, so I don’t.
Arya points at the speaker, then at the corridor, then makes the sign again.
“She wants you to learn it,” Thane says.
“I have archived it.” Arya stares. ORIN adds, “And will use it where applicable, despite lacking hands.”
That satisfies her enough to move on. She looks toward the doorway, past Thane.
I hear footsteps before ORIN names them this time. Quick. Uneven. Familiar in a way I haven’t decided is safe. Rhett appears with a cup in each hand and a strip of toast clenched between his teeth. He stops when he sees everyone awake and Arya standing like a very small instructor in the middle of the medbay.
He takes the toast out of his mouth. “Did I miss a meeting?”
Arya turns toward him. Two fingers tap the inside of her wrist. Then one hand makes a small circle in the air.
Rhett’s eyebrows lift. “Is that mine?” Arya nods. “What is it?”
Thane says, “Fixer.”
Rhett looks down at himself as if checking whether the word fits on his shirt.
“Fixer,” he repeats.
Arya taps her wrist again, then circles—sharper this time.
Rhett attempts it. Wrong wrist. Circle too large. Arya’s face goes still in a way that feels more judgmental than silence should be.
Nix’s voice crackles through the corridor speaker before anyone can correct him. “He’s doing it wrong, isn’t he?”
Rhett points at the speaker with the toast. “You’re not even in the room.”
Arya’s eyes shift toward the speaker, then to Rhett’s hands.
Rhett tries again. This time closer. She considers. Then gives one small nod.
He puts a hand to his chest. “I have been accepted by the committee.”
ORIN says, “Provisionally.”
“Still counts.”
Nix’s footsteps approach a few seconds later, and this time the corridor seems to arrange itself for them before they appear. They slide into the doorway sideways, grease on one cheek, goggles shoved into their hair, a coil of diagnostic cable hooked over one shoulder. They take in the supplies on the bed, Thane by the wall, Rhett with cups, Arya’s posture, and me sitting up badly.
“No one panic. I brought neither tools nor wisdom.”
Rhett looks at the diagnostic cable.
Nix glances at it. “This is decorative.”
“Is it?”
“It will be if anyone asks me to use it before I eat.”
Arya lifts one hand near her hip and makes a small spiral with two fingers.
Nix’s head tilts. Then they smile. Quick and bright as a spark.
“Me?”
Arya repeats it.
“Spark,” Thane says.
Nix looks deeply pleased and immediately tries not to.
“I accept,” they say. “With dignity.”
Rhett mutters, “That would be a first.”
Nix points at him without looking. “Fixer is about to become Bleeder.”
Thane says, “Don’t.”
“Fine.”
The medbay has too many people. My body notices all of them in pieces.
Thane by the wall, leaving the door open. Rhett near the counter, cups steaming with something that smells like bitter ship coffee and nutrient broth. Nix half in the threshold, not blocking it, cable over one shoulder, boots angled toward the corridor as if ready to leave if I ask.
Arya in the middle of all of them. Small. Barefoot. Fever-flushed. In command. She turns to me last. I know it before she moves.
Maybe because her face changes. Maybe because the air does. Maybe because some part of me has learned to brace for tenderness as if it’s impact.
She brings both hands to her sternum and draws two small circles there. Slow. Careful.
Then she points to me. The room goes quiet.
“What does that mean?” Rhett asks, softer than he has spoken all morning.
Arya makes the sign again. Two small circles over the sternum. I stare at her hands.
My field gives one faint pulse beneath my skin, enough to remind me my body has more ways to answer than I want it to.
Thane’s voice is low. “Warm center.”
The words do not fit. They enter anyway. Warm. Center.
I’m cold sweat and metal ports and bone-deep pain. I’m static in a mainframe, blood on Tavi’s throat, a blast wave bent badly enough to save one child and not enough to save the others. I am QO-7. Omega-class. Recoverable. Useful.
Arya looks at me as if none of that changes the sign.
I look down at my hand. The gauze roll has crumpled under my fingers. The tremor hasn’t stopped, but Arya’s blanket roof hides most of it.
“I don’t know that one,” I say.
Arya steps closer and touches two fingers to her own sternum, making the circles again. Then she reaches toward me. She stops before contact. Asks without asking.
My breathing goes shallow. The medbay light buzzes overhead. The ship hums under us. Somewhere down the corridor, a pump kicks twice and settles.
I nod once.
Arya touches the center of my chest, above the rib seal, over fabric, nowhere near the worst of the wound. Her fingers are warm. Too warm still. She draws one small circle there. Then another.
The touch lasts less than two seconds. My eyes burn so sharply I blame the dry ship air. Arya withdraws and rests both hands over her own sternum again.
Warm center.
I can’t look at anyone.
“Not accurate,” I whisper.
Arya frowns.
ORIN says, “Her data set suggests otherwise.”
“Stay out of it.”
“I did not assign the label.”
“No, you’re just making it worse.”
“Tiny instructor,” they say to Arya, “if we’re naming everyone, does the ship get one?”
Arya looks down. For a moment, she seems to listen with her whole body—feet on the medbay floor. Fingers loose at her sides. Head slightly tilted toward vibration. Then she presses both palms together, shifts them forward, and opens them outward.
Thane watches. “Shelter?”
Arya shakes her head. She repeats the motion. Palms together. Forward. Open.
Rhett says, “Door?”
Another head shake.
Nix leans one shoulder against the frame. “Something that opens?”
Arya considers. Then nods once.
“Opening shelter?” Rhett tries. Arya gives him a look. “Right. I’ll stop helping.”
I watch the motion again. Closed. Forward. Open.
Not shelter or door. A thing that holds and still lets out.
“Ship,” I say.
Arya looks at me. I don’t know where the next word comes from. “Ship that opens.”
Her face shifts. Yes.
Nix’s expression goes strange for half a breath. “Don’t tell the Truth that. She’ll get smug.”
Rhett lifts both cups. “Too late. She heard.”
The ship answers with a low groan through the wall.
“See?” Rhett says.
Nix points toward the ceiling. “That was a coolant burp.”
“Smug coolant burp.”
I should be overwhelmed. I am, but not in the way I expect. The room is too full, yes. Too many bodies. Too many voices. Too many eyes carefully not acting like eyes. My skin crawls with withdrawal, and the brace throbs, and ORIN’s signal remains too thin around the edges. The door is open but crowded with people who are trying not to crowd it.
Still, Arya stands between them with her signs, arranging the ship into names.
Solid ground. Fixer. Spark. Eye that turns. Warm center. Ship that opens.
A world made from gestures instead of orders. My body does not understand it. My chest does.
Rhett breaks the silence carefully. “All right. Since the medbay has turned into a language seminar and I’m apparently Fixer now, I’m going to fix breakfast before Nix starts eating diagnostic cable.”
Nix glances at the cable. “Texture would be terrible.”
“See? At risk.”
Thane looks at me. “Can you sit in the chair?”
The question tightens my body before I can stop it.
Chair. Move. Upright. Exposure. Legs down. Brace stress. Door line. Everyone watching.
Thane waits. I look toward the med-chair. It sits beside the console, ugly and patched, one leg shimmed with folded packaging.
“I can,” I say.
He looks at the monitor, then at me. “Slow. Two-person assist if you want it. One-person if you hate admitting two. No-person if you intend on making me develop a facial twitch.”
“I don’t want hands.”
“Great. Facial twitch it is.”
Nix mutters, “Everyone’s so emotionally evolved this morning.” Thane gives them a look. “What? It’s unsettling.”
Moving from the cot to the chair takes longer than it should.
Rhett lowers the side rail. Thane shifts one step closer and stops there, close enough to catch the cot if I shove it by accident, not close enough to crowd. Nix disappears from the doorway because they understand space better than they pretend to. Arya climbs down and stands at my left side, hands hovering until I look at her.
“You can stand there,” I say.
She plants herself immediately.
I swing my left leg first. The floor is cold under my bare foot. My right leg doesn’t swing; I have to drag it with both hands, brace casing hot under my palms. The actuator clicks once. Then twice. The salvaged pin holds, but the sound has a wobble I do not like.
ORIN’s voice tightens. “Brace load uneven.”
“I know.”
“Do not place full weight on the right side.”
“I know.”
“Repeating myself is not my preferred activity.”
“Well, that’ll be new.”
Rhett makes a small noise and pretends it’s a cough. I grip the edge of the cot and push. The first attempt fails. It’s not dramatic. That would’ve been easier.
Instead, my arms lock, ribs flare, leg refuses the angle, and I sink back onto the mattress with breath trapped behind my teeth. Heat spreads across my face.
I try again.
This time I get upright. Barely. The world tilts hard. The medbay stretches, floor dropping away, ceiling pulling too low. My pulse hammers in my ears. The SpineLock pulses once, ready to take over posture, balance, motion.
No.
I grip the cot until the tremor turns my knuckles pale. Arya’s hand brushes my sleeve. A point of contact. It’s enough to make the room choose a direction.
I take one step. The brace drags.
Second step. The actuator catches.
Third. My right knee almost folds, not because it bends, but because the brace forgets for half a breath how to pretend my leg belongs to me.
Thane shifts. Stops.
Rhett inhales. Says nothing.
I reach the chair and lower myself into it with all the grace of a collapsing structure—the chair creaks. I flinch.
Rhett points at it. “Threat confirmed.”
A laugh gets caught somewhere between my ribs and throat. It comes out as a broken breath. Still, it comes out. Rhett sees and looks so pleased he has to turn away.
Arya climbs into the cot I just left and begins arranging the blanket with intense purpose, as if the cot needs to be told not to forget us.
I sit in the chair and try not to shake apart. The room looks different from the upright. More exits. More objects. More ways to fail.
The medbay counter holds labeled drawers in uneven handwriting. Burn gel. Suture foam. Clean wraps. Mostly clean wraps. Do not use unless desperate. One cabinet has a dent shaped like a fist. The far wall has two ports for equipment I don’t recognize and one that I do: an old Core-compatible diagnostic jack, painted over in gray but not removed.
My eyes stick to it.
ORIN notices. “Inactive.”
“Can it activate?”
“Anything can activate if sufficiently mishandled.”
“Comforting.”
Nix’s voice comes from the doorway, lower now. “No direct Core diagnostic jacks while you’re aboard. I already tagged it. It’s physically isolated.”
I glance at them. They look annoyed by how serious they had to sound.
“It was on my list,” they say.
“Thank you.”
Their mouth opens. Closes. “Right. Well. Don’t make it weird.”
Rhett lifts one of the cups. “Too late.”
Thane steps out into the corridor and returns with a folded garment over one arm. Dark fabric. Soft, patched at the elbow. Too large for Arya. Too small for Thane. Maybe Nix’s once. Maybe no one’s.
“You need something that isn’t lab issue,” he says.
My fingers go still. I look down at myself.
Gray shift torn at the side. Bloodstained. Ash ground into the fibers. Seal patch visible under the ripped rib seam. Brace straps exposed. Cradle fabric still clinging to me like a label.
I had stopped seeing it. No. That isn’t true. I had been avoiding it.
Thane sets the folded clothing on the counter, not in my lap. “Later. When you want.”
When. Not if.
Rhett adds, “Also, when I can make sure changing clothes doesn’t undo three patches and make me cry professionally.”
“Can medics cry professionally?” Nix asks.
“I can invoice for it.”
I stare at the folded fabric. It is only a shirt. That is the problem. Only a shirt can still be too much. Arya slides off the cot, goes to the counter, and touches the fabric with two fingers. Then she looks down at her own issue shift.
Rhett sees the moment at the same time I do.
“Yours is coming,” he tells her. “Nix found a crate of old soft layers. We’re washing the least suspicious ones.”
Nix snorts. “Define washing.”
“Improving.”
“Better.”
Arya looks at Nix.
Nix lifts both hands. “No slime. No engine grease. Minimal historical crimes.”
Arya considers this solemnly, then nods.
It feels like a treaty.
The next hour happens in fragments.
Rhett convinces Arya to let him replace the fever strip without triggering a full scan. She watches every movement and corrects his “wait” sign when he gets it wrong. Thane leaves and returns with two thermal socks that don’t match. Nix argues with ORIN about diagnostic boundaries over the medbay speaker until ORIN cuts the speaker route mid-sentence and continues privately in my port, where I can feel the strain as a small heat behind my ear.
When I tell him to stop, he says, “I am fine.” I say nothing. After three seconds, he adds, “Fine enough.”
I hate when he learns from me.
The withdrawal tremor worsens whenever the room grows still. It’s easier while people move, while voices overlap, while Arya teaches signs with stern little hands. It’s harder when the ship settles into a long, low hum and everyone tries to be gentle.
Gentle leaves room for the body to notice itself.
My skin crawls under the med tape. Sweat chills along my neck and down my back and ports. My stomach cramps around three mouthfuls of nutrient paste and decides to hate me for accepting them. The gauze roll in my hand has become a ruined soft thing, twisted almost flat.
Rhett watches without making it obvious. Almost.
At some point, he crouches near the counter, not near me, and says, “Worse, same, or different?”
I look at him.
“Shaking,” he clarifies. “Compared to when you woke.”
Different. That is the honest answer. Different from field tremor. Different from pain. Different from fear. This has an old schedule under it, a rhythm my blood remembers without permission.
“Different,” I say.
Rhett nods once. “Cold?”
“Yes.”
“Skin crawling?”
I don’t answer fast enough. He nods again. No triumph. No, see, I knew it—just inventory.
“Nausea?”
“Some.”
“Sounds?”
I look at him sharply.
He holds my gaze. “Hearing things that aren’t current. Or sounds coming wrong.”
The Cradle waits under the ship hum. Vire’s voice waits under the monitor tone. The word recoverable waits under my own pulse.
“Sometimes.”
Rhett’s jaw shifts. He writes one note on his slate slowly enough that I can see it. Not hiding the data but not displaying it either.
“Okay.”
That word again. A small thing trying to hold too much.
Thane returns after that with a proposition shaped like a route.
“Short walk,” he says.
My body locks.
Rhett looks up. “Define short.”
“Medbay to junction. Junction to mess. Sit there five minutes. Back if she wants. Stop earlier if she wants.”
Mess. Crew space. Not medical or cot. Not amber room. More ship. More people. More exits.
Arya’s head snaps up from where she’s sorting the sign cards Nix has improvised from scrap labels. She wants to go. She has been held in one room too long. Even this room, even safe by current standards, has walls. She wants corners. Objects. Shelves. People moving without alarms.
I want to say no because no is easier. I look at her face. Then at the open door.
Then at my right leg. “I can’t walk that far.”
“Then we use the chair,” Thane says.
Rhett says, “It has wheels. Bad ones. But wheels.”
Nix appears behind Thane, somehow summoned by an insult to machinery. “The chair’s offended.”
“That chair has no brakes,” Rhett says.
“It has emotional brakes.”
“It has rust.”
“It has history.”
“It has attempted murder in its future if you make me push it downhill.”
I look at the chair’s wheels.
Small. Scuffed. One wrapped in tape. Not a restraint chair or the Cradle’s smooth white transport frames with locked arms and head supports. This is ugly, patched, and slightly crooked. It doesn’t look capable of efficiently obeying anyone.
That helps.
“I push,” I say.
Rhett blinks. “Yourself?”
“Myself.”
Nix looks delighted. “Absolutely not safe. I respect it.”
Thane says, “Flat route.”
Rhett points at him. “You’re enabling.”
“I’m giving parameters.”
“Same crime in better boots.”
Arya stands beside the chair and places both hands on its armrest. Her face is very serious.
She wants to help. She also wants me to go.
The two things are not separate.
I get from the cot-chair to the wheeled-chair with less disaster than expected and more pain than I show. Rhett hovers with visible suffering and no contact. Thane braces the old chair with one boot when its left wheel tries to roll before I’m seated. Nix mutters threats at the frame. Arya retrieves the blanket from the cot and drapes it over my lap, tucking it around the brace with careful, frowning concentration.
“Ready?” Thane asks.
No.
“Yes.”
The chair rolls badly. The left wheel ticks. The right drags every few rotations. I push with my left hand against the rim and use the right only lightly because the shoulder burn argues with me at once. The corridor appears beyond the medbay door, longer than it looked from the cot. Warm-brown lights run along the edge of the floor. Cables are tied up overhead. A maintenance panel hangs open three meters down, exposing bundled wires labeled in three different hands.
Nix slips ahead and shuts the panel with their hip. “Not because you’d look. Because I don’t want judgment.”
“I wasn’t gonna judge.”
ORIN says through my port, “She was.”
“Traitor,” I mutter.
The corridor smells different from the medbay. Less antiseptic. More ship. Warm dust, old metal, recirculated air, grease, something fried from farther ahead. The sound changes too. In medbay, everything came filtered through monitors and low ventilation. Out here, the Truth has layers: a distant engine throb, a loose conduit buzz, someone moving somewhere above us, the faint clink of utensils.
Utensils.
I keep both hands on the wheels, and catalog exits anyway.
Medbay behind. Junction ahead. Side hatch left with manual crank. Narrow maintenance crawl right. Overhead vent too small for a body. Floor seam slightly raised, trip risk. Thane behind my right shoulder, out of reach but close. Arya walking beside my left knee, one hand hovering near the blanket. Rhett behind, pretending not to watch my breathing. Nix ahead, clearing nothing because there is nothing to clear.
Still, they clear it.
At the junction, the corridor opens into a small cross-section with pipes running vertically through the center like a metal tree. Someone has tied a red strip of cloth around one pipe. Below it, a hand-painted arrow points toward MESS / COCKPIT / IF LOST, YELL.
I stop. The words catch me. If lost, yell.
In the Cradle, lost meant failure. It meant correction. It meant someone else had moved you and decided whether you were told where. You didn’t yell unless pain made you. You didn’t ask where you were.
Here, apparently, you yelled.
Rhett notices where I’m looking. “Nix wrote that after someone took a wrong turn into coolant storage.”
“I was twelve,” Nix says.
“You were twenty.”
“Emotionally twelve.”
Thane says, “It was Rhett.”
Rhett looks wounded. “Betrayal from solid ground.”
Arya immediately signs Thane’s name at him. Thane accepts the correction with a small nod.
The mess sits beyond the junction, half-open to the corridor through a rounded doorway with chipped paint along the frame. Warm light spills out, softer than medbay amber, more gold. The smell hits first: reheated protein, bitter coffee, oil, metal mugs, old spice.
My stomach turns—too many associations at once.
Meals in the Cradle came in measured trays. Nutrient paste. Water. Medication. A handler watching intake. A record updated when finished. Food wasn’t smell and noise and cups left where hands could reach them.
Food was compliance.
The chair stops at the threshold because I stop pushing.
No one comments.
Inside, the mess is smaller than I expected and more crowded with life than any room should be. A table bolted to the floor, its surface scarred with knife marks and solder burns. Four mismatched chairs. Two stools. Shelves along one wall holding mugs, canisters, a cracked figurine of some animal with too many legs, a coil of wire, three books strapped down with elastic, and a jar full of metal washers.
A galley unit hums in the corner. Someone has taped a warning over one button: DO NOT TRUST THE GREEN LIGHT.
There are blankets folded on a bench. A jacket thrown over the back of a chair. A pair of gloves near the sink. Evidence of people stopping and leaving things because they expected to come back.
The mess isn’t clean. It’s not controlled or empty.
Arya walks in first. No hesitation. She goes straight to the shelves, looks up at the cracked figurine, then points at it.
Nix follows her gaze. “That is Captain Disaster.”
Rhett says, “That’s not its name.”
“It is now.”
Thane moves to the galley unit and pours something dark into a mug. His motions are quiet, practiced. He sets the mug at the far end of the table, away from everyone else, then steps back.
Coffee. For me? Maybe not. Maybe just placed there because someone might want it.
I push the chair into the room. The wheel catches on the threshold lip and stops dead.
My whole body jolts forward. Pain flashes through the rib seal. The field under my skin snaps awake, sharp and embarrassed, and the mug on the table rattles.
Nix drops to a crouch before anyone else moves. “Lip’s rude. Chair’s ruder.”
They kick the threshold lightly, then lift the front wheel just enough to clear it.
I get into the mess. A room crossed—a stupid measurement.
Not stupid.
My left hand shakes around the wheel rim. I release it before anyone sees how hard I’m gripping.
Everyone sees. No one says. That may be the first rule of this place, I understand.
Arya climbs onto a bench and starts arranging the scrap-label sign cards into a line. Thane sits across from her. Rhett takes the chair nearest the galley. Nix perches on the counter like furniture laws are personal insults.
I park near the end of the table, not in the center.
Back to the wall. Door visible. Side hatch visible. Galley unit to the left. Thane across but not blocking. Arya within arm’s reach if I lean.
My body approves. My mind hates that it approves. Rhett slides a small cup toward me.
“Not coffee,” he says before I ask. “Warm broth. Mild. Less likely to start a rebellion in your stomach.”
I look at the cup. The steam carries salt and something faintly green. My stomach cramps. Arya watches me.
I pick up the cup because she is watching and because Rhett placed it close enough that I don’t have to reach far.
The cup warms my hand. The tremor shows against the surface—tiny ripples.
The taste’s not good, exactly. But it’s warm and not chemical. It moves down my throat and sits there like a small weight.
Rhett nods to himself once. I pretend not to see. Arya taps the table. All attention shifts to her.
She has laid out the sign cards, each marked with crude drawings in Nix’s handwriting and Rhett’s worse. Solid ground. Fixer. Spark. Eye. Ship. Wait. Food. Stop. Pain. Door. Mine. Here.
The first cards are done — Nix’s handwriting on one side, Rhett’s worse handwriting on the other, the simplest signs she’s already used most.
She points at pain. Then at me.
Rhett says softly, “Yeah, little spark. We know.”
Arya frowns and taps pain again. Then points at herself. The room changes. Rhett sets his cup down.
“Head?” he asks.
Arya shakes her head. She taps pain, then lays one hand over her chest, not the warm center circles. A flat press. Then she points at me again.
ORIN says in my port, quiet enough that only I hear, “Empathic distress.”
My throat tightens. “She feels it?”
“Possibly. Or she recognizes it from your behavior and lacks a more specific sign. Data insufficient.”
Arya taps pain again, harder.
Nix slides off the counter. “We need more cards.”
Rhett reaches for a blank scrap label. “Okay. New signs. Pain-you, pain-me, pain-nearby, pain-stop-being-everyone’s-problem—” Thane looks at him. “Last one needs workshopping,” Rhett says.
I stare at the table. Arya is not just learning the ship. She’s mapping suffering.
Mine. Hers. Everyone’s.
Another Cradle inheritance dressed in smaller hands. My field warms with something too close to fear.
“Arya,” I say; her eyes lift. “You don’t have to monitor me.”
The room stills again, but differently this time. She looks at me as if the sentence has no place to land.
I try again. “You can eat. Look at the shelves. Learn signs, create cards. Sleep. You don’t have to keep track of whether I’m breaking.”
Her fingers curl inward. For a moment, she looks younger than she has since the pod.
Then she reaches for the card marked mine. Touches it. Then here, pain, me. The message is clumsy and exact.
Mine. Here. Pain. You.
You are mine here, and you hurt. Or: I am here because you hurt. Or something deeper that RCSS cannot hold yet.
My ribs ache. “I know,” I say.
It is not enough. It is what I have. Arya accepts it because she has been trained to survive on too little.
Then, with a decisiveness that breaks something small in me, she pushes the food card toward me. Eat.
Rhett coughs into his fist.
Nix whispers, “Terrifying.”
I take another swallow of broth. Arya nods, satisfied. The mess becomes a classroom after that.
Not by plan. Nothing on this ship seems to happen by plan except route changes, and even those sound negotiated at knife-point. But Arya makes it one. She teaches with the absolute authority of a child who has decided adults are slow but salvageable.
Rhett learns three new signs and forgets one immediately. Nix knows more than they admit and pretends not to. Thane signs carefully, economically, with no wasted motion. ORIN asks for visual descriptions of handshape and orientation because he refuses to be excluded by a lack of hands. Arya corrects him through me.
I become interpreter by accident.
She signs. I read what I can. Thane fills what I miss. Nix supplies station slang variants. Rhett makes three jokes, two of which survive contact with Arya’s stare.
For twenty minutes, no one is dying.
For twenty minutes, I sit in the mess with a cup warming my hand, a blanket over my knees, and a child teaching my name to people who have no reason to use it, gently and do anyway.
The stillness does not leave. It changes shape. It stops being empty and becomes crowded. I don’t know if that is better. Then the ship gives a low, ugly shudder. Every instinct in me comes alive.
My hand slams down on the wheel rim. The broth cup rattles. Arya’s sign cards slide half a centimeter across the table. Rhett curses and catches one. Nix’s already off the counter and moving.
“Relax,” they say, which is a useless word, and they seem to know it because they keep talking. “Coolant line pressure burp. Secondary system, not primary. Annoying, not fatal.”
“Not fatal yet,” ORIN says.
Thane stands. “Nix?”
“I’ve got it.” They head for the corridor, then pause beside my chair. “Wanna see?”
The question lands strangely. Not want to help. Not only can you fix it.
Wanna see.
I look at them. They shrug, suddenly too casual. “It’s a coolant burp—low stakes. Good pipes. Bad seal. Just ship anatomy.”
Ship anatomy.
My fingers tighten on the wheel.
Rhett says, “Absolutely not if she’s—”
“I didn’t ask you, Fixer.”
Arya signs fixer at him sternly.
Rhett looks betrayed. “Weaponized language. Wonderful.”
Nix keeps their gaze on me. “You can say no.”
No would be reasonable. No would keep me in the mess, with broth and blanket and signs and the open door. But the ship has been under my skin since the mainframe. I’ve felt her wrong. Felt engines where lungs should be, stabilizers where hips should be, heat lines under ribs. If I don’t learn what she sounds like from the outside, my nerves will keep inventing her from the inside.
“I want to see,” I say.
The words cost more than expected. Nix nods once. No smile this time.
Thane moves behind the chair. “I’ll push.”
“I can.”
“Not over corridor seams.”
I hate that he’s right. I also hate how little victory there is in exhausting myself across a doorway just to prove a point no one asked me to prove.
I release the wheel—a small surrender.
The chair rolls out of the mess with Thane’s hands on the grips and Arya walking beside me, one hand on the blanket edge. Rhett follows because he has decided that worrying is a form of locomotion. Nix leads us down a side corridor that smells more strongly of coolant and hot insulation.
The secondary line sits behind a waist-high access panel near the service junction. Nix opens it with a tool from their belt. The panel resists. They swear at it under their breath. It opens.
Inside: pipes, clamps, patched insulation, a pressure gauge with a cracked face, and a small seal that has begun to spit vapor in thin bursts.
Pff. Pause. Pff.
“See?” Nix says. “Dramatic but not clever.”
The vapor curls pale in the corridor light. It smells sharp, mineral-sweet.
My body loosens by one degree. A sound with a source. A problem with edges.
Nix crouches and points without touching the line. “Secondary coolant return. Runs warm after engine cooling because someone, not naming names, flew us through an industrial corpse and scraped half the port stabilizers.”
“Emotionally cosmetic,” ORIN says.
Nix points at the ceiling speaker. “You are banned from remembering my words.”
“I archive all evidence.”
“Rude.”
I look at the seal. “Clamp’s uneven.”
Nix glances back at me. I regret speaking immediately. But they only nod. “Yeah. Old repair. Works until it doesn’t.”
“The left bracket’s pulling harder than the right.”
“Also yes.”
“You need to release pressure before adjusting, or the seal’ll tear.”
Nix’s smile grows slowly. “There she is.”
I go still. Nix sees the wrongness land.
Their expression shifts fast. “Not like that. I mean—” They gesture at the pipe, then at me, frustrated with language. “The part of you that sees how things fit.”
The part of me that sees how things fit. Not an asset or a weapon. Not even useful, though the word waits nearby with its old teeth.
A part.
I look back at the pipe.
“Quarter-turn release,” I say. “Then reseat the bracket. The gasket is warped but not split.”
Nix crouches into the work. “Rhett, hand me the small driver.”
Rhett looks offended. “I’m medical.”
“You have hands.”
“So do you.”
“Mine are busy being brilliant.”
He hands them the driver. Thane remains behind the chair. Quiet. Present. Arya watches the vapor with fierce concentration, then signs something I don’t know.
“What?” I ask.
She repeats it.
Nix glances up. “Careful-hot.”
Arya points at the pipe, then at Nix. Careful-hot.
Nix gives her a little salute with the driver. “Noted.”
The repair takes six minutes.
No alarms. No collapse. No blood.
Nix releases pressure. The vapor sighs down. They reseat the bracket, tighten one side, then the other, check the gauge, swear once because the gauge needle sticks, tap it, and gets a better reading.
The sound stops. The ship’s hum changes by a thread.
I feel it through the chair, not under my skin. Through metal. Through wheels. Through the floor.
Outside me. I breathe.
ORIN says softly in the port, “You distinguished external vibration from internal field response.”
I swallow. “Yes.”
He doesn’t make it a lesson.
Nix closes the panel. “Congratulations. You survived low-stakes maintenance.”
“Did I help?”
They look at me like the question annoys them. “Yes.” The word is blunt enough to be safe. Then they add, “You also didn’t hijack the ship with your nervous system, which I personally appreciate.”
Rhett mutters, “Very moving.”
Arya signs spark at Nix.
Nix’s grin returns.
On the way back to the mess, the corridor feels one degree less impossible.
The junction. The pipe tree. The sign that says IF LOST, YELL. The mess doorway with its chipped paint. The medbay behind us. The open doors that aren’t open mouths, no matter what my body thinks.
By the time we return, my arms are shaking from holding myself upright in the chair. My stomach’s worse. Sweat has chilled under my shirt. The pain in my leg has turned deep and nauseating.
Rhett sees all of it.
“Back to medbay,” he says.
I expect myself to refuse. Instead, I look at Arya. She is rearranging the sign cards on the mess table again, adding careful lines to one with Nix’s marker.
“What is that?” I ask.
She holds it up. A rough drawing of the access panel. Vapor line. Small diagonal mark for danger. Then the sign she used.
Careful-hot.
A ship word. A new piece of the map.
I nod. “Good.”
Her eyes brighten for half a second.
Worth it, some stupid part of me thinks.
The return to medbay is quieter.
Thane pushes the chair. Rhett walks beside us with one hand hovering near the back but not touching. Nix remains at the junction, already talking to ORIN about diagnostic isolation and bandwidth throttles. Arya brings the sign cards with her, clutched against her chest like tools.
When we reach the medbay, the cot looks less like a trap than it did before.
Still a bed. Still medical. Still too many old associations.
But also amber light. Open door. Chair corpse. Water shelf. A cabinet Arya has raided. A room we left and returned to.
That matters. I don’t know how much.
Rhett helps by not helping until I ask, with one sharp nod that feels like losing and surviving at the same time. His hands are steady under my elbow and shoulder, brief, careful, gone as soon as I’m balanced. Thane braces the chair. Arya watches his hands. ORIN monitors without commentary.
I get onto the cot. Pain blooms so hard that my vision goes spotty. The tremor becomes full-body for three breaths.
Rhett’s voice drops. “Temperature swing?”
“Cold.”
“Skin?”
“Crawling.”
“Nausea?”
“Yes.”
“Sound?”
I close my eyes. The ship hum is the ship hum. The monitor tone is not Vire. The chair creak is a chair.
“Current.”
Rhett exhales. “Good.”
I’m shaking, sweating, nauseous, exhausted by a walk shorter than some Cradle corridors, and he says good because sound stayed where it belonged.
Maybe that is what recovery is here. Not better. Located.
Arya climbs onto the cot beside me once Rhett finishes checking that she won’t dislodge anything critical. She spreads the sign cards over the blanket between us. Not all. Just a few.
She hesitates before placing the last one down. Then sets it near my hand. I look at it for a long time.
Two circles over the sternum—a name I don’t know how to wear.
Outside the medbay, Thane speaks low to Rhett. Nix’s voice crackles over a speaker and cuts out, then returns, annoyed. ORIN’s signal warms behind my ear, thin but present. The Drifting Truth hums around us, uneven and patched and stubbornly alive.
The ship hasn’t become safe. It has only become named.
Names. Routes.
A pipe that’s careful-hot. A place where lost people are apparently allowed to yell. Arya’s hand slides into my sleeve.
I don’t sleep, but I close my eyes and listen to the ship from the outside of my skin.