I enter the medbay by choice.
The doorway is open to the corridor, one side of the frame scuffed where the wheeled chair caught the weld and Nix kicked the panel straight. The taped brace diagram hangs from the cabinet door, fluttering in the draft from the scrubbers. The stainless counter has been cleared of salvage scrap, holding only Rhett’s slate, a basin of clean water, fresh wrap, and three medication cartridges set apart in a deliberate row.
My left hand shakes against the armrest of the chair.
It is no longer the thin twitch from yesterday. The tremor runs from my collarbone down through my knuckles, a cold, continuous spasm that jerks my fingers open whenever I try to close a fist. The composite brace rattles against the footplate where my right leg rests straight beneath the wool blanket. Tavi’s steel shim took the destructive shear out of the joint, but the socket is hot and swollen, and the SpineLock hums along my cervical vertebrae with an erratic, prickly charge.
The last trace of the Core tranquilizer burned out hours ago. Without Cradle maintenance suppressants to dampen the rebound, my autonomic nervous system is firing in raw, unbuffered spikes.
Behind the bulkheads, the Drifting Truth vibrates with the slow sub-light burn. No Fold jump today. No jump until Rhett stops reading my vitals like a hull-stress alert.
Rhett stands by the rolling cart, sleeves pushed past his elbows, dark hair tied back with a strip of linen. The shallow cut on his temple from the docking run has faded under a smear of sterile film. A mug of cold chicory sits untouched near his slate.
He catches me staring at the cartridges.
“Not sedatives,” Rhett says, his voice dry and level. He points to the first without touching it. “Electrolyte wash. Hydration with ideas above its station.” He taps the second. “Anti-nausea. Oral dose. We only look at an injector if you start losing fluids faster than you can swallow.” He touches the third. “Neuro-buffer. Fringe salvage. Not clean enough to use without monitoring, which is why ORIN and I spent two hours running the curve.”
“I did not run the curve,” ORIN’s voice comes through the small ceiling speaker, crackling faintly with low-bandwidth static. “I pointed out that the compound’s stabilizer buffer was pharmacologically arrogant.”
Rhett looks up at the grille. “That’s arguing.”
“It is a technical critique.”
Nix’s boots stick out from beneath the secondary diagnostic station by the wall. Their voice drifts up from the open deck plates, muffled and metallic: “It was arrogant. I liked it.”
Rhett points at the exposed conduit. “You’re here for tool clearance, not to back up ORIN’s vocabulary.”
“I contain multitudes,” Nix calls back.
“You contain conductive grease.”
“Also multitudes.”
The exchange should ease the knot behind my ribs. It almost does, until the console chirps twice as Rhett switches on the diagnostic line.
Two high, clean tones.
My nervous system folds backward five years: a warning chime before a dosing latch clicks open in the Ward; a tonal marker before containment clamps energize; a room preparing itself before the asset inside has agreed to be touched.
My left hand jerks violently. The chair’s wheel skids against the deck plates with a sharp metallic screech.
The medbay goes dead still.
Rhett freezes with his stylus half an inch above the screen. Nix stops wrenching under the console. ORIN drops from the speaker, leaving only a thin, warm prickle in my neural port.
Arya stands at my left knee, both hands resting flat on the blanket over my lap. Her spent fever strip is tucked into her pocket like salvage. Her dark eyes move from the cot to the three cartridges on the counter, then up to my face.
She lifts her right hand and signs: Wait.
“I’m waiting,” I whisper.
Thane stands at the threshold, shoulder resting lightly against the doorframe, keeping the corridor clear.
I look at the cot. Narrow, metal-framed, the patched blanket waiting.
My fingers claw into the armrest, trying to crush the tremor into the metal.
Rhett keeps his voice low. “You can stay in the chair, Kaelin.”
“No.”
The cot is the point. If I let the room dictate where I can be, the Cradle still owns the geometry.
“I’m transferring,” I say.
Arya’s fingers tighten on the wool.
Rhett looks at her, then back at me. “She stays until we check the brace contacts. Once the diagnostic leads go on, Nix takes her to the mess for fifteen minutes.”
My SpineLock sparks. A cold, jagged flare of current races up my spine.
“No.”
The word cuts through the room.
Rhett raises both hands, palms flat and empty. “We talk through every step before anything touches the casing.”
“You don’t take her out of the room.”
“Nobody is taking her,” Thane says from the doorway, gravel-rough and solid.
Nix slides out from beneath the console, sitting up on the deck plates and wiping conductive gel from their fingers. “Mess door stays pinned open. Line of sight down the whole central passage if we angle the bench. She can see your cot from the galley table. She comes back the second we clear the tools.”
“When it’s safe,” I say, the words tasting of old procedure.
Rhett meets my gaze. “When tools stop flying.”
My mouth closes.
“That’s the reason,” he says quietly. “Not because she’s in the way. Not because you’re doing something wrong. But if the SpineLock misfires while Nix has steel drivers near that casing, I don’t want Arya inside the throw pattern.”
Throw pattern.
Practical. Ugly. True.
Arya looks at the scatter of drivers on Nix’s mat, then down at my left arm where the shivering has worked into my shoulder.
She lifts her hands and signs firmly at herself: Stay.
Rhett crouches down, keeping two full paces of clearance between himself and the chair. “I know, Arya.”
She stares at him, unblinking.
“You aren’t medicine,” he says softly. “You get to wait where it’s safe, and you get to come back when you want.”
The words land like cold iron. My field bristles, a stray static charge making a metal cup on the counter rattle once against the stainless steel.
Arya turns to me, her small face solemn, and signs slowly: Here. Wait. Return.
My throat works against the nausea. “You’ll come back.”
She nods once, decisive.
“Okay,” I say.
Getting from the chair to the cot takes three people and four minutes.
Thane wedges the left wheel with his boot from the threshold. Rhett stands near the cot rail—close enough to catch a dead drop, far enough that his body doesn’t crowd my line of movement. Nix steadies the right frame.
I stand on my bare left foot.
The brace takes weight on the right side, hesitates, and slips.
Pain detonates along the outer rim of my hip, white and sharp. The SpineLock clenches along my thoracic plates, the cybernetic channel seizing as it tries to force the limb into rigid alignment.
No.
I lock my jaw and haul my weight across the gap. My bare left foot finds the deck plates, solid and real, while my right leg drags behind like a dead strut. The taped ribs pull savagely beneath the dark shirt.
I drop onto the edge of the cot. The frame rings under the impact.
Arya sets her scrap cards neatly on the blanket beside my thigh: Here. Wait. Return. Then warm center, face-down near the pillow.
She reaches out, touches two fingers to my patched cuff, and turns toward the corridor with Nix. At the service junction, Arya pauses, looks back into the medbay, and signs once into the gap: Here.
Then she pulls back to the galley table.
The medbay feels empty, but the air is clearer.
Rhett waits until my breathing drops from ragged to rhythmic. “Water first. Oral. You hold the pouch.”
“Fine.”
“Worst word in triage.”
“Stop asking for it, then.”
He sets the sealed pouch on the cot. My fingers close around the nozzle on the third attempt, the tremor jerking the plastic tube against my teeth. The water is cold and tastes faintly of mineral salts. It hits my stomach like lead, nausea rolling up my throat in a sour wave.
Rhett watches my jaw set. “Pause.”
A pause is not a command. It is space to breathe.
I hold the pouch still, waiting for the heave to pass.
ORIN’s voice arrives quietly through the neural link: “Neural load climbing. Autonomic rebound accelerating. Field bleed at fourteen percent of threshold.”
“I see the telemetry,” Rhett says, speaking to both of us.
Then the withdrawal breaks through the floor of my skull.
It doesn’t build. It strikes like an open circuit: my spine arches off the cot, the ports along my lower vertebrae flashing hot beneath my skin. My teeth click shut on the inside of my cheek, filling my mouth with the sharp copper taste of blood. The water pouch flies from my grip, slapping the bulkhead and spilling across the deck plates.
The room shears into overlapping layers.
White tile. Amber light.
A dosing tray sliding into a slot. Rhett’s stainless counter. Vire’s flat voice under ORIN’s signal, saying Asset viable, while current crawls through my ribs.
My field detonates outward.
“Down,” ORIN says in my ear.
The command word hits the old conditioning like a live hammer.
My body tries to execute three contradictory directives at once: drop, brace, engage, freeze. The SpineLock misfires violently down the right channel. The composite brace kicks against the cot rail with a deafening crack.
Pressure explodes across the medbay.
The tool tray flips into the air. A clamp ricochets off the overhead locker; adhesive wrap bursts open and unspools across the deck plates. A small steel driver catches Rhett across the upper cheekbone, slicing a thin line through the skin before clattering against the far bulkhead.
Blood beads along his cheek.
I freeze, the breath tearing out of my throat in a ragged gasp.
My field collapses instantly, the overhead light tubes flickering as the load drops.
“I—”
“Hold,” Rhett says.
The word cracks across the room, hard and sharp.
I flinch, my entire body locking rigid—waiting for the strike, the shock-baton, the restraint harness slamming down over my collarbones.
Rhett wipes the smear of blood from his cheek with the back of his wrist like it’s stray condensation. He doesn’t raise his hands. He doesn’t reach for an injector.
“I mean hold your position,” he says, dropping his voice into quiet, level territory. “Keep still so you don't wrench that hip again. We aren’t analyzing fault while your nervous system is in mid-strike.”
Hold your position. Physical stability, not submission.
Thane has taken one step inside the room, hands open at his sides, boots planted wide. “Rhett.”
“Surface cut,” Rhett says, not looking away from my face. “We’re fine.”
“Worst word in triage,” I rasp, the shivering shaking my ribs so hard my vision vibrates.
Rhett looks at me. For a second, beneath the blood and the ruined tray, his mouth twitches.
“See?” he says softly. “You’re learning the dialect.”
Another spasm folds me forward. My hands claw into the blanket. The field tries to leap again, but ORIN’s voice drops into the neural channel, steady and measured:
“Kaelin. Signal. Field. Cost.”
The anchor.
Signal: withdrawal spike, SpineLock feedback, the sound of the scrubbers, pain in the cracked ribs.
Field: blue static under the skin, teeth aching, the locker latch trembling.
Cost: Rhett bleeding, the brace torquing out of alignment, Arya sitting in the mess waiting for the noise to stop.
I drag the charge inward, forcing it back down through the ports until the locker latch goes still.
Rhett presses a clean gauze square to his cheek. “Neuro-buffer. It’s an oral dose, Kaelin. I open it, you take it, or you tell me no and we wait this out with water.”
The shivering is too violent to hold the dispenser. Rhett sees my hand locking against the sheet. He sets the small dispenser into a paper cup and places it on the cot near my left knee.
“I can hold the cup,” he says. “You bring your mouth to the rim. You control the tilt.”
I swallow the copper taste in my mouth. “Okay.”
He lifts the cup, keeping his forearm steady against the cot rail. I lean forward, ribs pulling like torn wire, and catch the rim between my lips. He waits until I nod before tipping the fluid across my tongue.
It tastes of cold iron and bitter kelp, numbing the back of my throat on contact.
For two seconds, my body screams poison. The field flares hot beneath my collarbone—
“Current,” Rhett says beside my ear, calm and grounded. “Look at the deck. Dark shirt. Amber light. You’re on the Truth.”
I stare at my bare left foot on the deck plates.
Current.
The compound hits the jagged edges of the SpineLock feedback. It isn’t a cure, and it doesn’t drop a black shutter over my consciousness like Somnolex. It feels like wrapping rough, live wires in heavy wool: the sharpest convulsions dull into a deep, grinding ache; the SpineLock stops kicking my hip outward; the trembling in my arm slows to a manageable twitch.
The cost arrives behind it: crushing, heavy exhaustion.
My eyelids sink.
“No,” I whisper, panic clawing at the fog. “No blackout.”
“It isn’t a blackout,” Rhett says, lowering the paper cup. “It’s four days of adrenaline leaving an empty tank.”
“ORIN,” I rasp.
“His assessment is accurate,” ORIN responds in the neural line. “Metabolic exhaustion is the primary driver. Neural load is declining naturally.”
“Don’t know the difference.”
“I do,” ORIN says.
The words settle into the marrow of my bones.
Light footsteps scuff the deck outside, and Arya slips into the medbay. She walks straight to the cot, her bare feet silent on the steel, her dark eyes cataloging the blood on Rhett’s cheek and the scattered tools on the deck.
She looks at Rhett and signs: Fixer. Blood. Careless.
Rhett sighs, taping a small square of dressing over his cheekbone. “Everyone’s a critic aboard this scrap heap.”
Arya climbs onto the cot, moving with careful precision around my bad right leg. She tucks her knees beneath the blanket, settles against my left side, and slides her small fingers into the cuff of my dark shirt.
Her weight is warm and solid.
Nix gestures from the doorway with a thin manual alignment wrench. “The lower clamp on the brace shifted three millimeters during that kick. If I don’t tighten the secondary band, the shim will shear when you try to stand tomorrow.”
I tense.
Rhett looks at me. “External work only. Nix stays on the deck, tools stay visible, no neural interfaces, no diagnostic probes. Two turns of a manual wrench. You say stop, they drop the tool.”
I look at Nix. They hold the wrench up by the shaft, showing both empty palms.
“Two turns,” I say.
Nix drops to one knee by the foot of the cot, keeping their elbows clear of the frame. “Two turns. Calling them out. One.”
A dull metallic click sounds as the wrench engages the lower bolt. Pressure bites into my outer calf, tight and firm, but the joint stabilizes.
“Two,” Nix says, pulling the wrench clear and setting it on the deck. “Clamp secured.”
Nix backs out of the room, giving Thane a nod as they head back toward the mess.
The medbay settles.
Rhett slides down against the bulkhead near the cabinet, sitting on the deck plates with his knees pulled up, his slate resting across his shins. Thane remains at the threshold, an unmoving shadow between the room and the corridor.
ORIN begins the five-minute marker in my neural port: tick... tick... tick.
A steady, artificial cadence that asks for nothing.
My eyes fall shut.
The old terror tries to rise—the reflex of going under where someone can touch you, change you, take you apart. But the ship keeps humming beneath my back. Arya’s fingers stay hooked in my sleeve. Rhett’s quiet breathing stays grounded on the floor two paces away.
I drift into sleep.
It is not a chemical shutdown. It is a slow, shallow tide that leaves the room in place.