⮞ Chapter Eighteen: Between Departures Pairing: Jungkook x Reader Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon, Captain!Taehyung, Astronaut!Jimin, Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only Word Count: 21.9k+ Summary: After defeating the Necromonger Lord Marshal, Jungkook Jeon finds himself bound to the throne by the empire’s brutal creed: you keep what you kill. Now the unwilling ruler of a vast army built on conquest and religious fanaticism, he must hold together an empire that does not trust him while a prophecy refuses to release its grip on his fate. As rival commanders and loyal zealots begin to question the Furyan who claimed the crown, the Necromonger empire teeters on the edge of fracture. Meanwhile, Y/N arrives on New Mecca hoping to reclaim some sense of normalcy after surviving the horrors of M6-117, only to be pulled into the unrest surrounding Jungkook and the empire he now commands. With old enemies closing in and the galaxy watching the throne with hungry eyes, both are forced into a brutal struggle for survival in a world where power is taken in blood and victory rarely survives the ashes it leaves behind. Warnings: PTSD, robot parts, chrome parts, anxiety, mental health issues, family drama, life updates from the unluckiest women in the entire universe, this is really tame, hacking, data collection, queen of botany has returned, mentions of war, classism, hatred of the government, c*ncer mentioned several times, near death experience, crime, talks of committing crimes, let me know if i missed anything... A/N: Welcome back everyone! Part of me almost posted a fake update for April Fools but thought that would be way too mean. So, here you go. Hope you enjoy.
prev || masterlist || next
Y/N kept to the farthest corner of the docking bay, tucked into the sort of place architects pretended did not exist once the blueprints had left their desks. Two bulkheads met there at a crooked angle, as though someone had discovered the error halfway through construction and decided it would be easier to endure than to tear half the structure apart. Polymer sealant ran unevenly down the join, once smoothed and painted in an effort to disguise the flaw but exposed again by years of neglect, leaving a pale scar through the tired gray plating. Passing boots had clipped the corner often enough to dull the paint near the floor, where it peeled away in thin, crescent-shaped chips.
Drafts gathered there, along with dust, discarded wrappers, and people who preferred not to be seen. Most eyes passed over the corner without registering anything at all, which was precisely why she had chosen it.
Security lenses hung from the ceiling in careful rows, their small red indicators blinking with steady patience as they rotated through smooth mechanical arcs. They catalogued movement, posture, and time stamps with quiet diligence, convinced of their own thoroughness. According to the station’s system, Y/N had been sitting motionless for nearly an hour, her shoulders slightly hunched, chin lowered, breathing slow and shallow. Every ten minutes, the same grainy footage began again: a woman waiting in a corner with nowhere in particular to be, harmless and forgettable, so visually unremarkable that she might have been replaced by a coat thrown across a crate without anyone thinking twice.
It had taken her less than a minute to arrange the deception.
The station’s firmware was old, though someone still maintained it. Patches had been installed, obsolete protocols replaced, and the most obvious vulnerabilities smoothed over whenever budgets and staffing allowed. The foundations of the system, however, had been built upon assumptions that had not aged well. Cargo hubs like this were designed to accommodate delayed freighters, irritated tourists, and exhausted crews searching for caffeine at impossible hours. They had never been built with predators in mind, much less someone capable of slipping through code as easily as other people slipped through a crowd.
A station like this had never expected to encounter her.
It clung to a trade route that had mattered once, which was enough to keep it alive but not enough to make it modern. The people here distrusted sleek upgrades and systems they could not see working. They preferred buttons that clicked beneath their fingers and levers that moved because a human hand had moved them. Neural ports belonged to richer worlds, the kind that advertised their wealth in chrome, glass, and seamless interfaces. Here, the most intimate piece of technology most residents trusted was a fingerprint scanner that routinely rejected calloused hands and demanded another attempt. They liked knowing that when something happened, it was because they had touched something and made it happen.
Cold crept from the corner behind Y/N, a permanent draft sliding along the floor before climbing the walls in thin, restless currents. It carried the smell of ozone, old coolant, and something faintly metallic beneath it all: the scent of circuitry being pushed harder than it should have been. The station’s systems ran hot because shutting them down was not an option, yet the chill found its way through her clothes all the same.
She folded her arms across her chest, more from habit than discomfort, and tucked her fingers beneath her sleeves. They brushed the induction ports along her wrists, subtle seams hidden beneath the skin and nearly invisible unless someone knew what to look for. Beneath her fingertips, they felt like faint ridges, scars that had never fully flattened and were not quite smooth enough to forget.
There was no decorative chrome or polished plating intended to catch the light and invite admiration. The modifications beneath her skin had never been designed to look impressive. Matte-black subdermals rested close to the bone, conduits threaded quietly through muscle and tissue, and a ghostline travelled up the inside of her spine to the port at the base of her skull. She felt that one most clearly, a steady, patient pressure that never entirely disappeared. Comfort had never figured into its design.
The system existed to keep her alive and useful. It regulated damaged tissue, filtered toxins from her blood, corrected fluctuations in her chemistry, and gathered whatever information might improve her performance on a Nexus mission. Even now, years after she had left NOSA, it continued fulfilling the final purpose written into it. Uncertainty became data. Anxiety became a malfunction to be measured, analyzed, and optimized. Nearby systems opened themselves to her before she had consciously decided to look.
She had received the augments on Aguerra Prime, and the memory rose without permission, heavy with the smell of antiseptic and the glare of painfully bright lights.
Aguerra had been luminous in the way only a capital world dared to be. From orbit, it gleamed beneath them, all deep sapphire oceans and dark continents, with vast storm systems drifting lazily across the surface. Sunlight shattered against the water and scattered into brilliant shards, making the planet seem almost unreal, as though it had been created for spectacle first and survival second.
New Oslo rose from engineered platforms anchored deep within the continental shelf, its foundations sinking into the seabed like the roots of something luminous and stubborn. Towers of glass and composite alloy climbed into the sky above them, their faceted surfaces bending the light with deliberate precision, while transit lines curved between the buildings in smooth, elegant arcs. Capsules glided along magnetic rails without friction or sound, and at dusk, the entire skyline shimmered like circuitry laid across the horizon. By every measure that mattered to the colonies, New Oslo was the most advanced city within reach.
Its streets cleaned themselves, and waste was reduced and repurposed before it had the chance to offend the eye. Neural bands circled wrists as casually as jewelry, quantum infrastructure hummed beneath polished floors, and delivery drones descended from the sky with gentle, apologetic chimes. Along the lower promenades, artificial tides rolled in and out, not because the city needed them, but because someone had decided they were beautiful.
Aguerra Prime did not end where that gleaming skyline did, although its government often behaved as though it did. Beyond the filtration towers that kept New Oslo pristine, settlements scattered along the coasts and across artificial islands. Habitation domes had been bolted onto maintenance platforms, while fishing communities clung to aging industrial rigs that groaned with every change in the weather. Whole neighborhoods crouched beneath the shadows of decommissioned refineries, and as soon as the capital’s shining boundaries fell behind, the air itself seemed to change. It carried the sour tang of runoff and the metallic bite of old radiation drifting inland in slow, invisible waves from the industrial belts.
The filtration systems that made the capital sparkle did not extend outward with the same generosity. In those settlements, the sky sometimes wore a faint, bruise-colored haze, and children coughed in the mornings until they learned not to complain about it. Even within New Oslo’s brilliance, however, the toxicity remained. It was less visible there, carefully monitored and concealed behind immaculate surfaces, but it had never truly disappeared. Aguerra’s oceans had been drilled, mined, and seeded with energy harvesters for generations, and the atmosphere still carried the memory of ambition pushed beyond restraint. Radiation pockets flickered in the higher strata, remnants of old disasters and experimental grids that had promised far more than they could deliver.
Y/N had been young then, young enough to mistake applause for affection and foolish enough, for a little while, to believe that surviving the M6 crash had made her untouchable.
Her image had been draped across government promenades and suspended above transit rails, her face enlarged until strangers could study every manufactured detail. In the approved portraits, her jaw was set and her eyes lifted toward a horizon edited brighter than the real one had ever been. Children wore jackets stitched with her call sign in reflective thread and puffed out their chests as they banked imaginary craft through crowded walkways. Vendors sold miniature replicas of her flight helmet, each programmed to play her pre-launch sign-off on an endless loop.
She smiled for cameras until her cheeks burned and held the expression long after it ceased to feel like her own. She shook hands until her palm ached, posed beside dignitaries whose smiles stretched too wide, and endured the fierce, tearful embraces of strangers thanking her for surviving when no one else on M6 had. They called her a miracle. They called her proof that humanity could endure anything.
No one ever called her lucky, though luck was all she believed it had been: luck, a desperate manual override, and the sound of metal tearing itself apart in a scream that still found its way into her sleep.
Between missions, the schedules would thin and her handlers would stop hovering quite so closely. That was when the silence returned, waiting for her inside the apartment high above the copper plains, where the windows stretched from floor to ceiling and the city glittered like something designed to be admired from a safe distance. The applause faded quickly once the doors closed. Without the cameras, the only sounds were the low hum of climate control and the faint rush of traffic threading through the skyways far below.
She would sit on the edge of her bed in her uniform trousers and a sleeveless undershirt, too tired to change but unwilling to lie down. Sometimes she remained there for long minutes without moving, staring at her hands as though they belonged to someone else.
The first sign had been a blister on her wrist, a small, raised patch she noticed on M6-117 where the skin refused to behave like skin. At first, it resembled another burn, one more injury among dozens. It flattened after a few days, only to return. Its edge split, healed, and split again, always improving just enough to make ignoring it possible. Months after the rescue, it was still there.
A NOSA physician froze a sample and described the cellular behavior as irregular. Another ordered a deeper biopsy, and by the time the results returned, the appointment had been moved from an examination room to a conference room crowded with people who had no medical reason to attend.
Radiation-associated skin cancer.
The diagnosis should have remained between Y/N and her doctors. Instead, Parliament sent legal counsel, NOSA dispatched representatives from risk management, and the Ministry of Public Continuity contributed two communications officers who wanted to discuss how the timing might affect the recovery campaign built around her face.
Until then, the post-M6 radiation reports had relied upon careful phrases: elevated exposure, manageable lifetime risk, survivability within acceptable margins. The same language appeared in public briefings, insurance evaluations, and the legal defense already being assembled in case she died publicly enough to become expensive.
The lesions did not remain confined to her wrist. They spread across the back of her hand, climbed toward her shoulders and the side of her neck, and appeared wherever the damaged shelter had failed to shield her from the worst of the radiation. Surgeons removed what they could, replacing the excised skin with regenerated tissue so cleanly that makeup artists needed only a little corrective pigment before Parliament placed her beneath the cameras again.
“You’re healing beautifully,” one of the specialists told her.
Y/N studied him through the reflection of the diagnostic screen. “Is that because of me, or because you’re throwing half a military budget at my skin?”
He laughed as though she had made a joke, although she had not.
The tremor came later, beginning as a faint vibration in her left hand that was easy enough to conceal as long as she kept her fingers still. Fatigue settled over her soon afterward, though it bore little resemblance to the honest heaviness that followed a long sortie. This was something more insidious, as though someone had quietly reduced the amount of power flowing through her body. Stairs left her winded, and during briefings, she had to concentrate simply to keep a stylus steady between her fingers.
The examinations intended to monitor the skin cancer eventually uncovered damage far beneath it. Her marrow had begun to fail, the radiation-scarred cells reproducing poorly until, little by little, they began reproducing incorrectly. Blood cancer appeared in her medical chart beneath a separate case number, as though granting it an administrative identity of its own could make it unrelated to the first diagnosis.
Chemotherapy took place behind secured doors in private suites far from the public wings of New Oslo’s hospitals. Once the infusions were finished, stylists restored the color to her cheeks before she was permitted to leave, ensuring that she emerged pale but composed. The government continued selling the story of her survival while her own blood slowly turned against her.
“You look tired,” a junior aide told her once.
“Just busy.”
The treatment hollowed her out. Bruises surfaced beneath her skin like spilled ink, and the tremor became increasingly difficult to disguise. During a simulator run, her vision fractured for half a heartbeat, splitting the artificial horizon across the display like cracked glass. She completed the exercise anyway and finished with a score high enough that no one thought to question whether she should still be flying.
By the time the cancer reached her lungs, malignancy was only one part of the damage. Her pulmonary tissue had thickened with scarring and lost much of its elasticity, allowing the radiation she had carried home from M6 to work alongside the poisoned atmosphere of Aguerra Prime. Before long, crossing her apartment left her motionless on the other side, one hand braced against the furniture as she listened to the faint rattle gathering at the bottom of every breath.
Her luxury flat, with its sweeping harbor view and perfectly curated air, became a sealed tank. The government paid for it and called the expense gratitude, while children in the outer districts breathed refinery haze without filtration because their illnesses carried no public-relations risk. Even New Oslo’s clean air was less a public service than a subscription disguised as infrastructure. Residents paid environmental stabilization fees through their rent, employment taxes, transit access, and medical premiums, while beyond the protected capital zones, Viktor Petrov’s companies sold purified water back to communities living beside poisoned oceans.
Aguerra Prime had perfected the business of creating necessity and charging people for survival, and Y/N had simply become one of its most valuable customers.
One evening, rain traced silver threads down the windows as she stood overlooking the harbor. Her hand rested lightly against her chest while she breathed in and out, concentrating on the sound. The rattle had once been faint enough to dismiss as fatigue or the remnants of an infection, but it had persisted too long for denial to remain convincing.
A week later, her lead physician told her, “You can’t stay organic.”
He was older than most of the officials who drifted through her life and considerably less interested in appearances. After removing his glasses, he rubbed the bridge of his nose and studied the diagnostic images suspended between them.
“Your marrow is unstable,” he continued. “Your dermal layers are compromised, and your pulmonary tissue…”
His voice faded, though the scans left little unsaid.
“I’m dying,” Y/N finished.
He met her eyes and nodded once. “The environmental load on this planet isn’t forgiving. Not even in New Oslo.” He gestured vaguely toward the skyline beyond the window, all shining towers and filtered light. “Relocating to an inner colony might help. Cleaner atmospheres. Lower radiation baselines. But that would mean—”
“Resigning.”
“Yes.”
Her gaze fell to her hands. The tremor had grown too severe to conceal, even when she pressed them flat against her thighs.
“And if I don’t?”
The physician held her eyes steadily. “Then we replace what we can.”
So they did.
Synthetic matrices were introduced to reinforce her marrow, engineered to withstand the radiation decay that had ruined her own cells. Damaged dermal layers gave way to tissue capable of tolerating toxins far beyond civilian limits, while microscopic filtration augments were threaded throughout her respiratory system, tiny scrubbers processing the air before it reached the fragile alveoli she had left. Along her spine, the ghostline formed the architecture holding everything together, a quiet motherboard coordinating immune responses, regulating synthetic organs, and managing the chrome now woven through her body.
When she woke, the first thing she noticed was the air.
It entered her lungs without resistance, clean, cool, and effortless. For one fragile moment, she imagined they had moved her off-world, somewhere far beyond Aguerra Prime’s salted toxins and invisible ghosts of radiation. The sensation was almost alpine, crystalline enough that she could believe the air had passed through snow and stone before reaching her.
Then she smelled the acid rain.
Its trace lingered faintly in the room, mingling with antiseptic, wet copper, and the metallic edge of burnt ozone. The scent tugged loose a familiar memory of storms rolling over New Oslo, rain threading down the glass walls of her apartment while the city glittered beyond in perfect, orderly lines. Aguerra Prime had always smelled that way if one paid attention long enough: clean on the surface and rotting somewhere deeper.
Y/N opened her eyes. Ceiling panels glowed above her in steady white grids, too bright and evenly spaced to be mistaken for anything natural. Without meaning to, she began to count them.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The habit had followed her since childhood, staying with her through turbulence during training flights, long medical scans, and the endless waiting that accompanied both. Counting gave her mind something simple to hold before panic could find somewhere to settle.
Her body felt distant, as though it belonged to someone else and she had only just been handed the instructions.
The ports had gone in cleanly. She remembered the pressure more clearly than the pain: the steady weight of hands keeping her still, the low murmur of surgeons speaking in calm, measured tones, and the strange indignity of hearing herself discussed as though she were a piece of equipment being recalibrated. When they threaded the ghostline down her back, the sensation had resembled lightning forced through a narrow channel, something violent compelled to behave.
“Beautiful placement,” someone had said.
“Textbook.”
She had wanted to ask which chapter she belonged in.
When Y/N lifted her hand, it rose without hesitation. The movement was smooth and controlled, almost unnervingly precise. Her fingers flexed one by one, every joint bending cleanly without lag, tremor, or any trace of the weakness that had crept into her tendons over the previous months.
The shaking was gone.
In its place lingered a slight stiffness at the farthest edge of every movement, not enough to hinder her, but enough to remind her that the motion no longer belonged entirely to muscle and instinct. The sensation was subtle, though she understood immediately that she would always feel it.
She turned her hand beneath the light and watched the glow move across her knuckles. She had expected seams, faint surgical lines, or some quiet betrayal of the machinery beneath her skin. There was nothing. Her hand appeared pale, unbroken, and perfectly human at a glance.
Mostly chrome inside now, she thought, and nearly smiled.
A nurse leaned into view beside the bed. She was young and professional, though doing a poor job of pretending she was not staring a little too closely.
“How are you feeling?” she asked with the careful brightness medical staff learned early. “Any dizziness or disorientation?”
Y/N drew in a measured breath. Air moved through her lungs without resistance, and the faint rattle that had once waited at the bottom of her chest was gone. Breathing felt so clean and effortless that she almost distrusted it.
“I feel,” she said, pausing to test the truth of the answer, “expensive.”
The nurse blinked, surprise breaking through her composure before a short laugh escaped. “That’s one way to put it.”
Her gaze flicked toward the closed door. After a moment’s hesitation, she lowered her voice.
“They’re very pleased.”
No explanation was necessary. Parliament had never been especially concerned with Y/N’s comfort, and the nurse seemed to understand that well enough not to argue.
The meeting returned to her in fragments: a long conference table whose polished surface reflected the faces of people who rarely looked directly at her, the legal adviser’s pen moving constantly across a tablet, and the careful silence that followed every sentence, as though each word required approval before another could be spoken.
“Your condition,” one member of Parliament had begun, folding his hands before him as if he were delivering condolences, “presents complications.”
“My condition?” Y/N had slid her trembling hands beneath her thighs so no one could see them shake. “I have cancer.”
“Yes,” another official replied quickly, smoothing one immaculate cuff. “But you must understand the broader implications.”
Medicine had all but vanished from the discussion after that. Wrongful death entered the conversation early and refused to leave, while NOSA representatives in pristine uniforms exchanged tight glances and cost projections appeared across the wall display. The final numbers were large enough to make one of the junior aides swallow visibly.
Reinforced marrow structures. Synthetic dermal matrices resistant to radiation decay. Pulmonary filtration systems integrated along neural pathways.
The procedure was extraordinarily expensive, but still cheaper than scandal. Cheaper than allowing a decorated pilot to collapse during a live broadcast while half the colonies watched.
“You understand,” one official had eventually said, leaning forward with his fingers steepled beneath his chin, “this is an investment.”
Y/N met his gaze without blinking. “In what?”
He smiled, though the expression never reached his eyes. “Continuity.”
No one spoke the rest aloud. No one said that without the chrome she would likely be dead before thirty, nor did anyone acknowledge that New Oslo’s brilliance had done nothing to protect her from the damage its world inflicted upon the people living there.
From orbit, Aguerra Prime shimmered like something pristine, a water world threaded with light. New Oslo rose from engineered foundations as a monument to human ambition, its filtration towers cutting clean lines through the skyline while transit capsules whispered along magnetic rails and sunlight shattered across the ocean like broken glass. Beneath all that beauty, however, radiation still lingered in the bones of the planet. Acid rain fell in patient rhythms, and toxic air drifted beyond the reach of the filtration grids to settle over the outer settlements, where budgets were thinner and the sky sometimes carried a faint, bruise-colored haze.
Even inside her government-funded apartment, with its sweeping windows, curated climate control, and harbor view designed for maximum effect, Y/N had felt her lungs tightening over time. Her body had quietly lost ground while the city continued shining around her, indifferent and immaculate.
Now, beneath the hospital lights, she flexed her fingers again and felt a faint hum beneath her skin as the systems aligned. Her subdermals synchronized while the ghostline along her spine passed signals with quiet efficiency, coordinating the machinery woven through her body as though it had always belonged there.
A small price, they had called it. A small price to preserve one of their best pilots, to prevent embarrassment, to maintain continuity. A small price because none of them had been asked to pay it with their own flesh.
She turned her head against the pillow and let the room sharpen around her. “I’ll never be who I was,” she murmured, not realizing she had spoken aloud.
The nurse paused while adjusting one of the monitors. “You’ll be better,” she said gently. “Stronger.”
Y/N released a slow breath but did not answer.
By the time she was cleared to leave the hospital and return to the elevated promenades of New Oslo, she walked like someone learning to inhabit a borrowed body. Every step landed with exact control. Her balance corrected itself before she consciously felt it shift, and her pace remained even without effort—too even, too precise.
Far below the city, the ocean glittered beneath artificial tides that rose and fell in measured patterns against the harbor walls. The air carried the crisp, filtered clarity the capital prided itself upon, clean only because enormous machines labored without rest to keep it that way.
Children darted along the promenade, their bright jackets flashing in the afternoon light. Several wore her call sign stitched across their chests in reflective thread, the letters catching the sun as they ran. Their laughter travelled easily across the harbor, sharp and carefree, the kind of noise made by people who had not yet learned to measure risk.
One boy broke away from the group and skidded to a stop directly in front of her, his shoes squealing against the smooth walkway. He came so close that he nearly collided with her knees before staring up with wide eyes and pointing proudly at the emblem on his jacket.
“Are you really her?”
Y/N crouched until they were level. The movement came easily, her balance adjusting without the small stumble that had once followed any sudden change in position.
“Depends,” she said lightly. “Who do you think I am?”
“The pilot from M6,” he whispered, as though the words themselves carried weight.
Her smile appeared easily enough for anyone watching, though she could feel the careful placement behind it, the way she arranged the expression exactly where it belonged. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s me.”
His face lit up. A moment later, his mother hurried toward them from several steps away, mortification written plainly across her face.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, reaching for his shoulder. “He gets excited whenever he sees the uniform.”
“It’s fine.” Y/N rose smoothly to her feet. “He’s enthusiastic.”
The boy continued studying her face, apparently comparing it to the posters hanging throughout the city. “Are you going back up?”
The question was simple enough, yet it settled heavily in the space between them. Y/N paused only a moment before answering.
“Yes.”
That was all he needed. He grinned and ran back toward the others, his jacket flashing in the sunlight before the moving crowd swallowed him. Y/N remained where she was, watching until she could no longer distinguish him among the bright coats and passing bodies.
For a moment, she wondered which of those children might someday find themselves beneath hospital lights, breathing air pushed through filters while the faint ghost of acid rain lingered in a sterile room. She wondered how many already did in the outer settlements, far beyond the shining towers and generous budgets that kept the capital polished. None of them would be called an investment. They would simply be expected to survive.
The additional upgrades NOSA installed—what one engineer had jokingly called the bells and whistles—did not announce themselves all at once. Her reflexes sharpened by degrees, and her thoughts accelerated whenever a situation demanded more than an ordinary mind could give. Inside a NOSA craft, she could descend farther into the system than most pilots could tolerate, slipping through layers of code and machinery until the boundary between woman and vessel blurred into something nearly seamless.
In a cockpit, she was unstoppable. On the ground, however, she became something else entirely: an asset to be managed, directed, and positioned wherever the cameras required her. Parliament smiled through press briefings while she stood precisely where they told her to stand, a living advertisement for survival, technological achievement, and institutional generosity.
The chrome inside her body would not prove its true worth until much later, after she had left NOSA, abandoned Aguerra Prime, and allowed the meetings with sympathetic officials to fade into memory.
The underground offered none of New Oslo’s polish. There was no neon glamour, no gleaming chrome, and no effort to make desperation look fashionable. It survived in the narrow spaces between legitimate businesses, beneath transit hubs, behind unmarked doors, and inside bars where the lighting remained low enough to blur the edges of every face. The air carried a constant mixture of sweat, stale alcohol, overheated electronics, and the quiet tension of people determined not to appear interested in anyone else’s business.
Tables were fashioned from dented metal, booths had been repaired with tape and mismatched strips of vinyl, and music played loudly enough to frustrate recording devices and force people to lean close whenever they spoke. Credentials meant almost nothing down there. Code mattered. Access mattered. Information mattered.
Data could pass through three systems before a freighter finished clearing its dock. A favor owed in one port might be repaid weeks later on another world, and there were always people willing to pay—sometimes very well—for a system to glance the other way at precisely the right moment.
Y/N found herself doing things she could not have imagined only a few years earlier. She altered cargo manifests by a line or two, delayed customs inspections long enough for shipments to pass unnoticed, and folded surveillance loops into live networks so cleanly that the systems themselves never registered the interruption. The work paid well, and in back rooms illuminated by flickering fluorescent strips, clients slid credit sticks across scratched metal tables with hands that tried not to tremble.
“You’re sure this won’t come back on me?” one man asked, tapping the stick nervously before finally releasing it.
“If it does,” Y/N said, “you won’t know about it.”
He swallowed. “That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
Most clients knew better than to ask how she accomplished what they paid her to do. When curiosity pushed someone too far, she merely tilted her head and reminded them, “You’re paying for the result,” which usually ended the conversation.
What she never explained was how the process felt: the world dividing into separate layers as her eyelids lowered halfway, the physical room dimming while something far brighter unfolded beneath it. Standing in the forgotten corner of the docking bay, she allowed that second world to surface.
The station had begun slipping into its nightly dim cycle. Overhead lights softened toward a programmable twilight intended to imitate dusk and coax tired bodies toward rest. Edges blurred beneath the fading illumination as shadows gathered beneath cargo crates, around the rows of plastic seats bolted to the floor, and along the neglected seams of the terminal walls. The clerk behind the counter became little more than a silhouette framed by a dull glow, while voices lowered without anyone appearing to notice the change.
Y/N let her eyelids dip halfway, and the station bloomed into color. Civilian communications drifted between personal devices in soft blue arcs. Customs traffic pulsed green as data passed from node to node through the station network, while docked freighters flashed yellow during authentication handshakes, each exchange brief and bright as a spark.
Even the holo-ads above the clerk’s desk shed their cheerful disguises. Beneath the smiling animations, small, persistent AI routines reached toward nearby implants and personal devices, quietly harvesting preference data with the intrusive patience of neighbors listening through thin walls. Y/N nudged one of them with a thought, and the routine stuttered, rerouted its query in mild confusion, then stabilized.
“Easy,” she murmured.
A man several seats away leaned forward. “Sorry?” he asked. “Were you talking to me?”
She did not look up. “No.”
“Oh.” He scratched his cheek awkwardly. “Right. Sorry.”
He settled back into his seat, and the moment dissolved into the terminal’s low background murmur.
The dim lighting was meant to protect circadian rhythms, though it also made the maintenance nodes hidden behind decorative wall panels easier to distinguish. Two marked themselves automatically as her gaze moved across the room, quiet indicators hovering at the edge of her peripheral display for later use.
Her attention settled upon the nearest security camera, its red diode blinking with mechanical patience. Within her overlay, the device unfolded into structure: permissions stacked like lattices, firmware routines moving through predictable cycles, and cached footage waiting quietly to be overwritten.
She entered carefully.
The live feed gave way to an earlier recording of her standing in the same corner with her posture unchanged. Perfect repetition would draw attention, so she disturbed the loop with a handful of minor imperfections: a subtle shift of weight every few minutes, a loose strand of hair brushing her cheek, and the faint rise and fall of breathing as the station lighting deepened toward artificial dusk.
Once the footage looked sufficiently human, she allowed the connection to settle and withdrew without slamming any doors behind her. Her shoulders loosened only after the final trace of the link had faded.
In the softened light, she almost resembled the person she had once been. The jagged scar along her jaw blurred into shadow, its uneven edge swallowed by the dimness, while the raised map of damaged skin across her ribs remained concealed beneath fabric and half-light. Darkness possessed a certain kindness. Details that daylight insisted upon recording simply disappeared, allowing survival to pass for ordinary.
The air in the bay tasted faintly of coolant and old metal, threaded with the artificial sweetness of the holo-ads above the clerk’s desk. Boots scraped against tile. Fabric rustled. Voices rose and fell in tired waves as passengers surrendered themselves to the slow patience of waiting.
Inside the network, however, nothing softened.
Her internal systems catalogued every detail with clinical honesty. Sudden increases in sound triggered latency alerts. Her cortisol levels climbed beyond baseline projections, and whenever the terminal crossed a certain decibel threshold, threat-detection routines flared to life. Amber warnings gathered at the edge of her vision like impatient fireflies.
Trauma had rewritten her internal code more efficiently than any surgeon ever could.
Across the docking bay, a cargo hauler locked into its berth with a deep metallic clang. The sound rolled through the terminal, its vibration travelling through the floor and entering her bones before her mind finished identifying the source. Her pupils constricted, her pulse struck hard against her throat, and the amber warnings brightened.
Y/N swallowed and forced her breathing to slow. “Relax,” she muttered, quietly enough to pass for a cough. “Just metal.”
Her fingers were already tapping against her arm in the old familiar rhythm—tap, tap-tap—before she consciously noticed the movement. She had spent years trying to break the habit and had never entirely succeeded. Pressing her opposite hand over her forearm did little to stop it. The motion continued beneath her palm, insistent and familiar, like someone knocking from inside a sealed hatch.
No one else reacted. A man two seats away yawned loudly and stretched his legs into the aisle, while nearby, a couple argued in low, irritated voices about baggage weight and airline fees. Somewhere behind her, a damaged suitcase wheel squeaked at uneven intervals. The world continued moving around her, entirely unimpressed by the brief panic still tightening her chest.
Two more people.
The thought appeared beside a small counter she had grafted onto the boarding queue in her overlay. While everyone else watched the physical line inch toward the clerk’s desk, Y/N had slipped into the surface layers of the station’s system. She had not gone deep because there was no need. Passenger manifests, seat assignments, and basic biometric flags sat close enough to the surface that accessing them felt less like breaking into a vault than opening a drawer someone had neglected to lock.
The entries refreshed at steady intervals: Marla Ionescu, agricultural liaison; Rafiq Jansen, cargo specialist; an unnamed infant flagged for assistance but carrying no risk markers; two customs officers transferring posts. Every one of them appeared ordinary.
The clerk’s desk sat beneath a cluster of holo-ads trying far too hard to look cheerful in the dim terminal. One offered discounted berths to Helion relief workers willing to surrender a year of medical and purchasing data, while another advertised occupation-resistant seed stock under licensing terms that granted the manufacturer permanent rights to every viable second-generation crop. A third invited investors to purchase fractional ownership in irrigation districts that still contained mass graves.
The station had even added a humanitarian-recovery surcharge to every Helion ticket. Apparently, compassion required an administrative fee.
Elsewhere in the display, off-world cigars promised real smoke and real nostalgia, while a resort planet rotated lazily beneath lettering describing its beaches as untouched. Its oceans were so perfectly blue that they looked less like water than a promise someone had paid to manufacture. Between the advertisements, customs reminders blinked with a bureaucratic optimism no one in the terminal seemed to share.
Y/N’s overlay stripped away the polish and revealed the ads for what they were: prediction engines dressed in cheerful colors, their algorithms brushing against nearby devices and implants while quietly measuring disposable income, private anxieties, and the impulses most likely to become purchases. Curiosity drew her farther into one of them, and she followed a thin thread of data until the system’s assessment of her unfolded across her vision.
Transient. Moderate risk of non-compliance.
A quiet snort escaped her. “Moderate risk,” she murmured. “You have no idea.”
“Sorry?” someone nearby asked.
Y/N blinked and dimmed the overlay, allowing the physical room to sharpen around her again. A woman sat across from her, perhaps in her mid-forties, wearing a travel-worn jacket with frayed cuffs. Her blonde hair had been twisted into a practical knot that looked as though it had survived several long days without being redone. She was thin, blue-eyed, and attractive in an ordinary, forgettable way. Something about her face seemed familiar, though Y/N had long ago stopped trusting that sensation. After enough stations, cities, and crowded terminals, faces began borrowing from one another. Blonde women especially blurred together in her memory, each resembling someone she had once passed and never expected to see again.
“You say something?” the woman asked, squinting slightly.
Y/N tugged her sleeve lower over the seam at her wrist, concealing the faint ridge beneath the skin. “No. Sorry. Just reading.”
The woman glanced pointedly at Y/N’s empty hands. “Must be good. You smiled.”
“Guess I found something funny.”
“Lucky you.” She shifted the bag at her feet, its worn strap squeaking softly against the floor. “All I’ve got is delay notices and a headache.”
Y/N let her gaze drift toward the departure board. To everyone else, it was little more than flickering letters and constantly changing departure times. Through her overlay, it unraveled into backend requests, customs holds, berth assignments, and dock allocations, a tangled knot of logistics working very hard to appear orderly.
“Freighter traffic’s heavy tonight,” she said absently. “Customs is backed up at the outer ring, so they’re moving two officers over to clear it.”
The woman frowned. “How do you know that?”
Half a second stretched longer than it should have.
“I read,” Y/N said again, more softly this time.
The woman examined her with greater care, her eyes lingering briefly on the pale line of scar tissue along Y/N’s jaw. “You from here?”
“No.” Y/N curled her fingers loosely into her palm. “Just passing through.”
“Mm.” The woman nodded as though placing the answer somewhere private. “Everybody’s passing through somewhere.”
Near the vending kiosks, a child dropped a metal cup. The sharp crack rang across the terminal, and amber warnings flared at the edge of Y/N’s vision. Her breath stalled halfway into her lungs. The muscles along her shoulders and spine tightened before she could stop them, bracing for an impact that never came, while her fingers resumed their old rhythm against her arm.
Tap-tap.
The woman noticed. “You okay?” she asked, leaning forward.
“Yeah.” Y/N forced her shoulders to loosen, releasing the tension one muscle at a time. “I just don’t like loud noises.”
“Who does?” A sympathetic half-smile touched the woman’s mouth. “Last time I flew, a cargo crate slipped during unloading. Sounded like the whole sky was falling. Nearly jumped out of my boots.”
A quiet breath escaped Y/N, almost a laugh. “I believe it.”
The woman glanced toward the corner Y/N had chosen. “You look like you’re freezing over there. It’s warmer by the vents.”
Y/N’s eyes flicked instinctively toward the nearest security camera. The loop still held perfectly. Her ghost-self remained in the corner, breathing at regular intervals and shifting just enough to appear natural.
“I like corners,” she said.
The woman studied her for another moment before giving a slow, understanding nod. “Yeah. I get that.”
Silence settled comfortably between them and lasted until the woman adjusted her bag and added, with studied casualness, “If anyone bothers you, let me know. I bite.”
That drew a genuine smile from Y/N. “I’ll remember that.”
A boarding chime drifted through the docking bay, soft and almost pleasant despite the faint metallic edge it left at the back of her tongue. Conversations faltered, and several heads turned automatically toward the speakers. Somewhere nearby, a child laughed, mistaking the sound for music.
Within Y/N’s overlay, confirmation signals pulsed green as two more passengers checked in. Clean acknowledgements. Efficient system handshakes. The small counter at the edge of her vision climbed without ceremony.
Fourteen ahead of her.
She exhaled slowly through her nose, steady and controlled, the way she had learned to breathe whenever the world began to feel too sharp. Time behaved strangely in places like this. Minutes stretched thin and fragile before snapping without warning, and station terminals offered no sunrise or sunset by which to measure them. There were only dimming lights and boarding chimes pretending to mark something natural.
The docking bay possessed a quiet pulse of its own. Footsteps tapped uneven rhythms across the tile, while low conversations rose and fell as travelers filled the empty spaces between departures. Beneath it all, machinery hummed with the steady sound of something alive but only half awake. In the forgiving half-light, the scars along Y/N’s jaw and ribs softened into shadow, their edges fading in a way they never did beneath full daylight.
Another boarding chime passed through the bay.
Twelve ahead.
Her awareness drifted away from the room, not outward through her eyes but inward and sideways, following the ghostline along her spine like a second nervous system. The station unfolded beneath her attention as she pressed lightly against its boundaries, the way a child might test the walls of an unfamiliar room. She sensed bulkheads layered in polymer and steel, signal repeaters humming quietly in their brackets, and routers blinking with patient mechanical regularity inside narrow housings.
Three decks below, a maintenance bot rolled through a service corridor that probably smelled of lubricant and damp metal. Its pathing algorithm stalled at a cracked tile and began recalculating in stubborn loops. The indicator in Y/N’s overlay flickered red, green, and red again.
“Come on,” she muttered.
The man beside her shifted, his jacket whispering as he turned his head. “Sorry?”
Y/N blinked and let the deeper layers recede until the physical world settled back into focus. “Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”
He offered a small, uncertain smile before lowering his gaze to the scuffed toes of his boots, studying them with sudden concentration as though they might provide clearer answers than she ever would.
Somewhere deeper in the station, a restricted customs channel flickered open. One of the transferring officers yawned, the movement registering as a clumsy spike in his biometric feed.
Fatigue elevated. Hydration borderline.
His heart rate dipped and rebounded as he scratched beneath the stiff collar of his uniform. “Should’ve taken the morning shift,” he muttered, unaware that the complaint carried far beyond the little booth where he stood.
Farther out, a freighter captain was arguing with port authority over docking fees. The exchange reached Y/N as overlapping fragments of audio and raw signal noise, jagged spikes of irritation cutting through the station’s steadier traffic.
“That’s not what we agreed,” the captain snapped. “You said twelve hundred.”
“That was before the surcharge,” port authority replied, flat and unhurried. “Fuel variance.”
“You people invent variance to screw decent crews over.”
“We need to keep the lights on, Captain Erin.”
The captain exhaled hard enough to make her microphone clip. “Three hours. I’ve got status reports to file before I even think about refueling.”
“We’ll meet in the petrol hallway,” port authority replied dryly. “You can collect your check when you’re done. What time will that be?”
“Three hours,” Captain Erin repeated through clenched teeth. “Try not to invent anything else before then.”
The channel closed, and her irritation flattened into background noise.
The station liked to imagine itself orderly, all numbered berths, tidy schedules, and protocols stacked neatly one atop another. Beneath that surface, it felt more like a hive. Threads crossed and tangled. Transactions opened and closed. Lives brushed past one another without ever truly meeting, while every voice and biometric spike became another vibration in a web that never stopped moving.
Y/N could have tugged any one of those threads. She could have nudged a manifest slightly out of alignment, rerouted a payment, or shifted a decimal point quietly enough to alter the shape of someone’s month. Transfer orders could be delayed, biometric scans marked for additional review, or a door made to fail at precisely the wrong moment. Her fingers twitched faintly at her sides, but she left the threads untouched and only watched.
Her reflection shimmered in a dark wall panel nearby, warped by scratches across its surface and the terminal’s low light. Dull eyes, hollowed cheeks, and a face that might once have belonged to someone who laughed too loudly and stayed too long in places that were too bright stared back at her. Y/N tilted her head and studied herself as she might have studied a stranger.
“I look like shit,” she murmured.
The reflection offered no argument.
A family of four approached the nearby counter, and two infants, red-faced and bundled in station-issued quilts the color of overboiled oatmeal, began crying in unison. Their voices cut through the bay in sharp, uneven waves, high and relentless enough to lock Y/N’s shoulders before she could stop them. The sound did not remain in her ears but pressed deeper, burrowing into the places her internal systems monitored too closely.
Amber warnings flickered at the edges of her vision as her pulse climbed, her breathing tightened, and her pupils widened beyond comfortable thresholds. For half a heartbeat, something else attempted to surface: white lights, antiseptic, and a voice far too calm.
Her auditory filter narrowed before she could form a command. The implants registered the crying as a disruption to performance and sanded away its sharpest frequencies without asking whether she wanted the babies muted. The noise changed from knives into pressure, still loud and present, but survivable.
At the counter, the father stabbed at his datapad with increasing frustration, his jaw clenched tightly enough to make the muscle jump along his cheek.
“Why is this thing always…” He slapped the side of the device with his palm. “Come on. Come on.”
The datapad broadcast its distress in messy digital bursts: timeouts, dropped pings, and authentication loops folding in upon themselves. Outdated firmware. Missed updates. To Y/N, it felt like static brushing the edge of her awareness.
On impulse, she reached out. The handshake between the datapad and customs server slipped neatly into her grasp, allowing her to redirect the exchange through a cleaner route she had mapped earlier, remove a redundant verification step, and smooth the packet flow.
The lag vanished. Fields filled rapidly across the man’s screen, green confirmations cascading down the display.
He blinked. “Oh.”
His thumb hovered before pressing carefully. “There. Got it.” Relief entered his voice as he looked toward his wife. “See? I told you it’d work.”
She did not answer. Bent over the infant against her shoulder, she rocked gently and whispered into the child’s hair.
“You’re okay. Mama’s here. Shh, sweetheart. It’s just noise. Just noise.”
Y/N looked away.
Cold had crept higher along her legs, patient and deliberate, slipping beneath the cuffs of her trousers and settling behind her knees. She shifted her weight, her boots scraping lightly across the scuffed polymer floor, where pale streaks marked the paths of cargo crates dragged in hurried lines. Long, shallow burns cut through the cheap material, etched there by other people’s urgency. The marks overlapped in messy patterns, some fresh and chalky, others darkened by age and ground-in grime.
Her overlay resolved the floor into more than a simple surface. Pressure sensors blinked faintly beneath the plating in orderly grids, maintenance conduits threaded below like veins carrying power and data, and the station’s circulation system moved in steady cycles farther beneath them. Pumps beat with a slow mechanical rhythm that never stopped.
For a moment, she imagined kneeling and pressing her palm against the floor, feeling that pulse travel through metal and polymer until it matched the one in her chest. She resisted the impulse and raised her gaze toward the nearest security camera instead.
The network opened readily beneath her attention. Docking schedules streamed past in crisp columns, while cargo inventories listed crates too ordinary to invite notice: industrial filters, agricultural tools, packaged protein, and spare relay parts. Security sweeps advanced with bureaucratic confidence, each completed pass stamped with a bright green check as though the system believed itself incapable of error.
Three corridors away, a patrol drone drifted through an intersection, its lens rotating in slow arcs that appeared almost bored. Y/N nudged its route half a meter to the left, barely enough to qualify as a correction. Later, it would glance toward the wrong doorway, and perhaps that glance would matter.
Captain Erin would be in that corridor collecting her payment. Perhaps she would need a moment to breathe, or lose her temper and prefer not to have a camera recording it. Y/N understood that kind of frustration. She had argued over sums that barely covered fuel before and accepted far worse jobs than hauling freight.
Somewhere in the station’s archives, dozens of versions of her already existed: shoulders hunched, eyes guarded, the small flinch whenever metal struck metal. Every image had been archived, timestamped, and filed beneath nothing worth flagging. When she opened the footage, she found herself from a hundred different angles, waiting beside kiosks, passing through corridors, and moving beneath security lenses without ever looking directly at them—breathing, enduring, and trying not to be remembered.
“Real subtle,” she murmured.
The man beside her coughed politely. “Sorry. Are you speaking to me?”
Y/N blinked and let the archive sink into the background. “No. Bad habit.”
He nodded, uneasy but too tired to press the matter. His fingers rubbed thoughtfully along his jaw, as though he could not decide whether he needed a shave or an entirely different life.
With careful precision, Y/N began salting the archive. Tiny corruptions spread through weeks of footage, and compression artifacts blossomed over frames where her face should have been clear. Metadata shifted quietly. Her recorded height changed by a few centimeters, her weight by a few kilos, and her heat signature drifted a degree warmer or cooler depending upon the angle. None of the alterations was significant enough to invite scrutiny, but together they made certainty impossible.
The line crept forward by slow inches. The mother from earlier glanced back over her shoulder, sleeplessness rimming her eyes alongside something that looked suspiciously like apology. When their gazes met, neither offered the automatic smile strangers usually exchanged. There was only recognition between them, a brief acknowledgment of shared strain and the private labor of surviving it.
Y/N gave her a small nod. The woman’s mouth twitched with tired gratitude before she turned back to her children and resumed rocking gently on her heels, murmuring soft nonsense into the narrow space between their small bodies. The rhythm was low and steady, like rain tapping against thin metal.
Y/N watched with more than her eyes. An overlay settled across the family automatically, heat signatures blooming in muted oranges and golds, brightest where the babies burned hot with distress. Cheap station-issued wearables pulsed weakly against the public network, broadcasting health metrics and location pings with dull consistency, while the father’s datapad continued transmitting quiet battery updates as its charge slipped from ninety-three percent to ninety-two.
He glanced up and caught her watching. “Sorry about the noise,” he said, shifting one of the babies higher against his hip. The smile he offered was thin and apologetic, stretched tightly across exhaustion. “They don’t like the pressure changes.”
“It’s okay,” Y/N replied. “It’s a lot of light.”
A tired half-laugh rasped at the back of his throat. “You get used to it, I guess.”
“Do you?” she asked, almost too quietly to hear.
The question seemed to catch him off guard. He hesitated before giving a loose, resigned shrug, as though the answer had stopped mattering somewhere along the way. “You have to sometimes.”
Behind the counter, the clerk adjusted her glasses and tapped briskly at the console. “One moment,” she said in a smooth, practiced voice. “I just need to verify.”
Both babies began screaming at once.
The docking bay seemed to contract around Y/N. Overhead lights sharpened into something too bright and too white, while defensive subroutines surged through her neural interface before she consciously thought to restrain them. Copper flooded the back of her tongue, phantom and metallic. She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and resumed counting beneath her breath.
Four. Five. Six.
Her attention fixed upon the ceiling panels. One recessed light flickered slightly dimmer than the rest, while another carried a faint electrical hum that fell out of rhythm with those around it. Small imperfections. Harmless things.
The ventilation near the counter increased by a fraction. Y/N saw the command receipt flash at the edge of her vision only after the fans had already responded, her implants acting without her to release a soft layer of white noise into the bay. It spread steadily through the space, mechanical and even, like distant rain striking the outer hull of a ship. The crying lost its sharpest edge. It remained loud and unavoidable, but the sound had changed from knives into pressure.
Her vitals began to settle. Her heart rate slowed, and the stress markers receded.
The father bounced one infant awkwardly, jostling the quilt around its small body. “I swear they’re not usually like this,” he said to no one in particular, offering a helpless grin. “They’re angels. Mostly.”
The clerk did not look up. “Travel can be overstimulating,” she replied, her voice polished smooth by repetition. “You’re almost through.”
The mother’s cheeks had flushed deep red, and damp strands of hair clung to her temples. Her gaze found Y/N’s again, her lips forming a silent apology across the narrow space between them.
Y/N shook her head once. “It’s okay.”
The gentleness in her own voice surprised her more than the noise had. The woman’s eyes lingered briefly upon the faint scar along Y/N’s jaw before drifting toward the permanent shadows beneath her eyes. There was no fear in the look, only quiet curiosity, the kind of attention someone might offer a wounded animal that had wandered close but had not yet decided whether to flee.
At last, the clerk’s hands came to rest. “You’re all set,” she said, sliding the documents across the counter. “Gate C. Straight down and left.”
The father gathered their bags, his palms flaring bright red with effort and nerves in Y/N’s thermal overlay. The babies’ cries began breaking into ragged hiccups as the family moved away, their outrage gradually exhausting itself.
Y/N reached after them almost idly, her awareness brushing the station network like a fingertip trailing across still water. The corridor lighting ahead warmed by half a shade, its harsh white softening almost imperceptibly toward something closer to late afternoon than interrogation. The floor panels followed, their sterile blue fading into muted amber until the long passage felt less like a tunnel and more like somewhere human beings might breathe.
The father stepped into the gentler light without ever knowing it had been arranged for him. His wife’s whisper faded as they moved farther down the corridor, and behind them, the babies’ cries dwindled into the tired sputter of lungs that had spent all their outrage.
Only one traveler remained between Y/N and the counter. He wore a security jacket that appeared to have belonged to someone broader, its shoulders sagging whenever he moved. Exhaustion clung to him like damp wool as he argued quietly with the clerk, his collar sitting crooked in a way that suggested he had been too tired to notice it for several hours.
In Y/N’s augmented view, the insignia on his shoulder pulsed faintly. An embedded NFC chip broadcast his clearance credentials to the surrounding systems, its encryption shimmering so thinly that she almost felt embarrassed for whoever had installed it. The protocols were old, outdated, and hardly more secure than a handwritten pass left beneath a door.
“I’m cleared,” he insisted, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I was cleared last cycle. You can check. I’m not trying to cut anything.”
“I’m checking,” the clerk replied evenly, her fingers moving across the polymer keys with steady patience. “Just give it a second. The system’s a little behind.”
“It’s always a little behind.” Irritation frayed the edges of his voice. “You’d think with what they charge us…”
Y/N had already stopped listening. Without moving her head, she catalogued the exits. Three main corridors branched away from the docking bay, wide and deliberately neutral as they swallowed travelers in steady streams. Along the far wall, an emergency ladder shaft hid behind a composite panel whose seam was just slightly too clean to disappear completely. Two maintenance ducts ran low along the opposite side, partially concealed by stacked cargo bins and large enough for someone willing to crawl through scraped knuckles and torn sleeves.
A patrol drone traced a slow arc across her internal map. She noted the blind points in its rotation and stored them quietly in memory.
Her thumb drifted toward the inside of her wrist, rubbing absently at the place where the skin thinned over the induction ports beneath the synthetic dermis. It was a small, nearly unconscious gesture, like checking a watch that was no longer there, and beneath the pressure, her heartbeat fluttered.
“Ma’am?” The officer leaned toward the clerk with forced charm that slid harmlessly off the counter. “I’ve got another shift in three hours. I’d like to maybe sleep?”
The clerk gave him a tight smile worn smooth by repetition. “I understand.”
“You don’t,” he replied, though not unkindly. “But I appreciate the effort.”
Y/N pressed her thumb a little harder against her wrist and allowed the faintest filament of attention to brush the insignia on his jacket. His clearance unfolded around him inside her overlay: mid-tier access, Weapons Locker B, detention sublevel. The permissions arranged themselves like a pale halo only she could see, rungs upon a ladder that did not reach nearly as high as he probably wished.
The clerk’s console chimed.
“You’re good,” she said, sliding his card across the counter with a plastic whisper.
Tension drained from his shoulders. “Thanks. Yeah.”
The rest tangled into something that might have been a curse before fading beneath his breath. He shuffled away with his back rounded, and his token pinged green at the checkpoint as the system completed its authentication.
Y/N’s gaze fell toward the colored strip embedded in the floor. It resembled a painted river guiding travelers through the docking bay: blue for berths, green for food, yellow for services, and red for restricted access. Even under the dimmed evening lights, the colors glowed with cheerful certainty, as though direction could always be simple.
Her overlay revealed how little of it was. Blue fractured into berth-allocation trees, occupancy thresholds, and waitlists nested inside other waitlists. Green branched into vendor contracts, supply chains, and licensing disputes buried several layers deep. Yellow opened into sanitation reports, inspection schedules, and minor violations quietly fined and forgotten. Red spread beneath everything like veins under skin, revealing clearance hierarchies, compartmentalized access, and chains of authority stacked carefully enough to appear solid, though they thinned noticeably the farther back she followed them.
She traced those paths the way someone might study emergency exits in a crowded theater. She did not expect to use them, but she needed to know where they led.
The scanner chimed again, and a pale wash of green rolled across the counter as the officer’s clearance finalized through multiple subsystems. The handshake passed into the ledger and then into the archive, settling into the permanent record with quiet bureaucratic satisfaction.
Something in Y/N’s chest loosened, though not nearly enough. She knew with uncomfortable clarity that if the screaming had lasted much longer, she might have snapped. The dampeners might have gone dark. The lights might have died. Every door in the bay might have locked while the entire room held its breath and waited for the noise to stop.
She possessed that kind of reach now. Most of her understood how dangerous it was, while the rest had wanted nothing more than quiet.
For one brief and treacherous moment, the image sharpened in her mind: the docking bay falling into darkness, conversations severed mid-word, and doors sealing with metallic finality while people stood frozen in confusion and, inevitably, fear.
Her pulse skipped, but Y/N drew a slow breath into her lungs and forced the thought back down.
The last traveler ahead of her leaned against the counter as though the surface belonged to him, his broad forearms resting easily along its edge. His strength had not been cultivated for display but built through repetition, through years of lifting things that resisted being lifted. Her peripheral overlay identified him with polite efficiency—freelance engineer, contract labor, short-term dock access, clearance tier three—but in person, he looked more like a miner who had never quite managed to scrub the grit from his hands.
His clothes had been repaired with practical care, mismatched thread chosen for strength rather than appearance. None of the patches attempted to disguise themselves. They simply acknowledged that fabric failed and, when it did, you fixed it yourself. Something moved steadily in his jaw, either gum or caffeine leaf, the rhythm easy and unhurried while his biosigns remained stable.
Blood sugar slightly elevated. Hydration acceptable.
Y/N had not been searching for any of it. Most of the information leaked freely from cheap wearables and poorly shielded devices. People broadcast enormous portions of themselves without ever realizing it.
The engineer carried himself like someone accustomed to systems failing and already prepared to argue them back into working order. When his eyes flicked toward her, the glance registered in her threat model as a brief spike: male, larger frame, probable advantage in mass. Y/N folded inward by instinct, narrowing her shoulders and lowering her chin even as her awareness widened around him.
The docking bay breathed on around them. Vents sighed overhead with the weary rhythm of lungs approaching the end of a shift, while distant thrusters whispered as ships settled deeper into their berths, soft but persistent, like wind pressing against metal. A cargo cart rattled across a seam in the floor, its vibration translating into a clean waveform across her internal display. Farther inside the station, a docking collar sealed with a dull, resonant thud that rolled through the structure like a mechanical heartbeat.
Structural readings skimmed automatically across her vision: hull strain steady, pressure stable, no microfractures along the docking ring, and no unusual stress patterns in the support beams.
An automated announcement drifted across the bay. “Shuttle two-one-six to Sol Five now boarding at Gate C.”
The voice was neutral and polished smooth by repetition, as though the system had spoken the sentence so often that it had ceased to mean anything. Its source node revealed itself almost immediately, a municipal speech engine running outdated heuristics with emotional modeling locked stiffly into routine. Y/N slipped through its permissions long enough to glance around. Voice-modulation sliders remained frozen at calm-neutral, and emotional variance had been confined to the narrow range administrators considered appropriate for public announcements. In the background, an escalation routine waited patiently for emergencies that rarely occurred, like a digital throat preparing itself to say evacuation.
Time stretched thin as the line shifted forward. The engineer completed his transaction with a satisfied grunt.
“See?” he said, flashing the clerk a grin that revealed a chipped tooth and faint stains from whatever he had been chewing. “Told you it would clear.”
“It usually does,” the clerk replied, sounding thoroughly unimpressed.
He adjusted the strap of his pack and stepped aside. His eyes met Y/N’s briefly. “You’re up,” he said, his voice roughened by recycled air and long hours. “They don’t bite. Much.”
The corner of her mouth twitched before she could stop it. “Good to know.”
She approached the counter with the wary care one might offer an animal capable of biting despite assurances to the contrary. The clerk did not look up at first. His eyes carried the flat glaze of someone who should have clocked out an hour earlier and now operated entirely upon habit.
Within Y/N’s overlay, his workstation unfolded into layers: customs database, transit-authority uplink, biometric-verification suite. The firewall threw up bright warnings that looked more like intimidation than defense.
It would not slow her.
“Name,” he said.
Her own answer sounded distant and controlled. “Elizabeth Sargento.”
The chip embedded in her card woke as soon as it neared the scanner, broadcasting encrypted credentials toward the reader. Before its pale eye had fully illuminated, Y/N was already inside the handshake, following the exchange like a shadow. The system opened for her the way doors did when they believed someone else had pushed them.
Her file loaded without resistance.
Elizabeth Sargento. Independent contractor. Birthplace archived and partially scrubbed.
Her travel history appeared plausible and thoroughly unremarkable, broken by the small inconsistencies that made a life look real: missed connections, short-term rentals, and one bounced payment corrected within twenty-four hours. She had seeded those details months ago with care. Nothing too clean. Nothing memorable.
After M6-117, her real face had been everywhere—news feeds, emergency bulletins, and endless replay loops of the moment they pulled her from the wreckage, eyes unfocused and a thermal blanket wrapped tightly around her body, unable to warm whatever had already changed inside.
Survivor. Victim. Miracle.
The words had followed her for years, clinging like wet clothing she could never entirely peel away. Fragments of the coverage remained scattered throughout the public net in neglected archives, cached articles no one had bothered to delete, and scraped data resting quietly upon forgotten mirror sites. Thumbnails still held her face caught mid-blink, mouth half open and eyes far too bright.
She found them within seconds. Cross-references slipped gently out of alignment beneath her attention, facial-recognition weighting leaning toward the thousands of other women who shared roughly the same cheekbones, jawline, and build. Automated crawlers lost confidence, and the search results drifted apart.
Invisible suited her better.
“Purpose of visit,” the clerk asked, already typing.
“Layover. Shuttle flight two-one-six to Helion Prime.”
Her voice remained even, and both hands rested flat against the counter, its worn surface cool beneath her palms. A few steps away, the engineer lingered while adjusting the strap of his pack, as though he could not decide whether to leave or attempt conversation. The change in his weight registered through the pressure grid before her eyes caught it, the floor translating his presence into faint gradients across her internal display.
“You heading out far?” he asked, his chewing slowing briefly.
“Far enough,” Y/N replied without turning.
A small laugh escaped him. “Fair.”
“Duration,” the clerk prompted.
“Eighteen hours.”
“ID.”
Y/N slid the card across the counter. Its edges were worn enough to suggest years of use, while the lamination bore a faint scuff where a thumb might naturally rest. None of it was accidental. She had studied thousands of scanned identification cards, cataloguing the subtle damage left behind by real hands and habitual use before recreating those patterns with painstaking care.
The scanner washed the card in pale light. Inside the machine, a laser skimmed the embedded chip while the biometric suite queued automatically, measuring her thermal profile, pulse rhythm, microexpressions, and pupil dilation. Y/N met the process halfway. Her internal systems cooled her skin by a fraction of a degree, eased her pulse down by two beats per minute, and relaxed the small muscles around her mouth and eyes into practiced neutrality.
The model saw precisely what it expected to see: a tired traveler.
As the data packet moved toward the central node for confirmation, Y/N slipped quietly into its wake, riding the signal without disturbing it. In the brief pause while the system considered her, memory surfaced.
Leaving M6-117 had not felt triumphant once the adrenaline faded. It had felt loud.
The engines roared with enough force to vibrate through bone and settle into her marrow like a second pulse. The deck thrummed beneath her boots, while medical crates stood strapped along the walls with webbing pulled tight around metal hooks. Their labels shouted MEDICAL, TRIAGE, and RECONSTRUCTIVE EQUIPMENT in thick block letters, and the air inside the ship was heavy with scorched circuitry, antiseptic wipes, burned insulation, and sharp alcohol.
No one wanted to look back at the planet shrinking beneath them, but Y/N stood at the viewport anyway.
M6-117 receded into a bruised crescent against the darkness. Her reflection hovered faintly across the glass, superimposed over the curve of the dying world. Ash streaked her face, and her eyes were wide in a way that suggested they had forgotten how to narrow against light. For a long moment, she did not recognize the woman staring back at her.
A thought passed through her mind, strange, quiet, and absolute: the woman in the glass was already someone else.
Her crew found her there, rigid and silent, hands hanging uselessly at her sides. She collapsed before she could explain why she had not moved. Hands caught her before she struck the deck, someone swore softly, and another voice murmured, “Easy, easy,” in the tone people used with frightened animals rather than decorated pilots who had just walked away from a destroyed ship.
“You’re safe,” Hoseok told her, his fingers pressed against her throat as he counted her pulse. “You’re safe now.”
The feeling lasted about as long as the news cycle.
On the journey back to Aguerra Prime, she needed no locks in order to hide. The Starfire carried relief the way other ships carried cargo, stacked too high and barely secured. It rattled through corridors, clattered against mess tins, and spilled from people’s mouths in laughter louder than necessary. If they were loud enough, they were alive enough. That seemed to be the unspoken agreement.
In the galley, reheated rations steamed in thin trays that smelled faintly of salt and recycled protein. Warm, stale air clung to the metal walls and refused to leave. Zimmermann dragged over a crate stamped MEDICAL, turned it onto its side, and declared it a table before sending a worn playing card skimming across the surface with theatrical flourish.
“Blackjack,” he announced, flicking another card toward Koah. “Because statistically speaking, we deserve better odds.”
“Statistically speaking,” Koah replied without looking up, “you’re terrible at counting.”
Zimmermann flashed a grin bright enough to challenge the dull galley lights. “That’s why I deal fast.”
He tapped the edge of the crate and made a point of ignoring the word beneath his elbow, as though acknowledging MEDICAL too clearly might transform it into something inevitable.
Val occupied the far end of the bench, shoulders curved inward as she stared into nothing. Her eyes were rimmed red in a way that had little to do with sleep. Space reached some people slowly, wave after quiet wave. She wiped her face with the heel of her palm and pretended the dampness came from the heat in the room, and no one called attention to it. Relief appeared in different shapes. Laughter was one. Silence was another.
They gave Y/N back her old bunk. When she had still been assigned to the Starfire full-time, the narrow room had belonged to her and Val, an arrangement owed less to preference than practicality. Two women aboard meant two bunks stacked close together, a locker that stuck unless it was pulled at exactly the right angle, and a wall panel that hummed faintly out of rhythm with the rest of the ship. The air always smelled the same: detergent, warm metal, and the trace of a cologne Val insisted she did not wear.
With Hoseok checking on her every day, Y/N saw more of him than anyone else.
“Drink,” he insisted, pressing a warm container into her hands. His hair was rumpled from a long shift, and his expression hovered somewhere between clinical focus and something softer he worked hard to conceal. “You need something in you.”
She accepted the container because arguing required more strength than she possessed.
“It’s just broth,” he added quickly, lingering as though she might still refuse.
Y/N drank because it was easier than making him ask again.
During the day, the others drifted in whenever their schedules allowed, appearing and disappearing through the bunkroom like uneasy satellites. Zimmermann perched on the edge of her mattress and played blackjack against the metal locker, narrating every card with exaggerated drama as though they were seated in a smoke-filled gambling den rather than a cramped berth that still smelled faintly of antiseptic.
“You bust again,” he told her once, peering at her with theatrical suspicion, “and I’m going to assume sabotage.”
“I’m terrible at cards,” she replied, her voice rough but steady.
“No,” he corrected, his tone softening. “You’re distracted.”
Koah had no interest in the cards. He dragged a supply crate upright, leaned back against the wall, and stretched his boots in front of him as though he had nowhere else to be. Conversation came naturally with him. They did not speak about the crash or the wreckage, only about small things that did not matter, which meant they mattered more than anything else.
“The hydroponics unit’s acting up again,” Koah said one afternoon, as though lettuce ranked among the galaxy’s greatest emergencies. “If it wipes another crop, I’m defecting.”
“You don’t even like lettuce,” Y/N murmured from the bunk.
“That’s not the point.”
From there, the conversation wandered wherever it pleased, moving from weather patterns over Aguerra Prime to the stray cat someone had spotted months earlier near the loading bay, thin, defiant, and somehow still alive. Eventually, they found themselves wondering whether coffee tasted different once a person was no longer afraid of dying.
Val, when she was not quietly unraveling in the washroom, preferred to talk about Hoseok.
“Well,” she would begin, trying very hard to sound casual, “he stayed after his shift yesterday. Just to… you know. Make sure everything was all right.”
“Mm,” Y/N would reply, a faint smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.
“And he brought me tea,” Val added once, as though tea were a grand romantic gesture rather than hot water and leaves. “Who does that?”
“Someone who likes you,” Y/N said, and she meant it.
When Hoseok was not adjusting medication or checking sutures with steady hands, he spoke about Aguerra Prime as though it were a place that might still be repaired.
“They rebuilt the east promenade,” he told her one afternoon, sitting on the edge of her bunk with his hands loosely clasped between his knees. “New filtration towers. They’re supposed to cut particulate levels by fifteen percent.”
“Fifteen,” she repeated, her eyes half closed.
“It’s something.”
He always made it sound as though something might be enough.
Jimin came whenever he could, though command meant his time no longer belonged entirely to him. Reports, debriefings, and endless calls with NOSA and Parliament consumed most of his days, along with the demands of everyone who believed they had a claim upon what had happened. Even so, whenever he stepped into the bunkroom, the air shifted in a way Y/N could feel before she looked up.
“Move,” he told Zimmermann once, nudging him aside with easy authority. “I outrank you.”
“Barely,” Zimmermann muttered, though he moved without argument.
Jimin settled onto the bunk beside her and looked at her in a way no one else did, not as a survivor, a patient, or a liability.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
They did not share blood, but that had never mattered. Jimin Park was her brother in every way that counted. Arwa and Osman had made room for him long before either of them understood how permanent chosen family could become. He knew how to make her smile without pushing too hard, when silence needed filling, and when it should be left alone.
“You’re scaring them,” he told her once, half smiling.
“Cool.”
“I mean it.” His voice softened. “You get that look.”
“What look?”
“Like you’re already somewhere else.”
She had no answer for him.
When the lights dimmed and the engines settled into their long-haul rhythm, the Starfire stopped feeling like a machine and began to seem almost alive. Vibrations smoothed into a steady pulse through the hull, like some enormous animal breathing around them, while laughter drifted down the corridor and gradually softened into low conversation.
Y/N remained awake on her bunk, staring at the narrow ceiling while sleep refused to come. Eventually, she slipped out of bed and padded down the corridor in her socks. The metal floor was cool beneath her feet, and the cargo bay beyond carried an even sharper chill. Its air was thick with the smell of sealed containers, machine oil, and materials that made no effort to pretend they were anything other than what they were.
It had always been her favorite place on the ship.
Between crates stamped MEDICAL, RATIONS, and RECONSTRUCTIVE EQUIPMENT, she found the narrow gap she remembered and folded herself into it. Drawing her knees against her chest, she pressed her back into the hard metal corners and let the cold seep through the thin fabric of her clothes. The sensation was sharp and grounding in a way soft voices and careful reassurances never managed.
One of Jimin’s NOSA-issued tablets had come with her from the bunkroom. He was careful about many things, but passwords were not among them. Consistency mattered more to him than creativity, and it took Y/N only seconds to gain access. The interface opened quietly beneath her touch, and she moved through it with practiced patience, slipping past his personal logs and into the Starfire’s operational layer until the manifest appeared.
There she was, listed beneath recovered personnel.
Y/N cross-checked the internal log against the official flight directory and discovered that, for six hours, the system had been carrying one additional unit of unclassified freight. NOSA had not yet updated the directory, and in a bleak sort of way, the designation fit. She had not belonged to the Starfire’s full-time crew for nearly a year; her assignment had ended when she left to assist Director Stroud on work initially described as temporary. Now, returning from M6-117, the ship recognized her as cargo without a category.
She watched the discrepancy sit quietly on the screen. No alerts appeared, and no frantic messages arrived from oversight. There was only an empty space where a human being should have been, and no one came looking closely enough to notice it.
Around her, the Starfire hummed with the quiet mechanical life ships often seemed to possess. Down the corridor, Val laughed at something Hoseok had said, while Zimmermann’s voice rose in theatrical outrage over another lost hand of cards. Jimin’s footsteps passed the cargo bay once, purposeful and distracted, before fading into the distance. Y/N rested her forehead against the cool metal of a crate marked RECONSTRUCTIVE EQUIPMENT and released a slow breath.
That was the first moment she truly understood how easy it might be to disappear.
“Ma’am?”
The clerk’s voice split the memory cleanly in half, and the docking bay rushed back into focus. Y/N blinked.
“Sorry?”
“Just confirming.” He tapped the screen with a fingernail that had seen better days. “Sargento, Elizabeth. Layover to Helion Prime.”
“That’s right.”
Nearby, the engineer cleared his throat softly, seemingly reluctant to interrupt but equally unwilling to leave her standing in silence.
“Helion’s hot this time of cycle,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Bring light clothes.”
She glanced toward him, the overhead lighting catching the chipped edge of one tooth. “I will.”
He gave a satisfied nod and moved down the corridor, disappearing into the warmer light beyond the docking bay.
The clerk’s console pinged, and Y/N felt the signal before she saw it: a verification request pushing upstream through the network, deeper than the routine scan. A randomized identity cross-check.
With careful precision, she introduced a delay into the queue. The station’s load balancer responded immediately, blind and obedient, diverting her request toward a secondary processing node running older software and a cheaper threat model. The reroute unfolded across her overlay in real time, threads peeling away from the main hub and slipping into older architecture, where the pathways were dustier and the algorithms less curious.
The secondary node accepted her file without hesitation, and a soft chime confirmed her clearance.
The identity would never survive a true forensic sweep. A determined investigation could dismantle it layer by layer, exposing fractures in the metadata and the synthetic seams woven through the origin trail she had constructed. Docking registries rarely paid for that degree of scrutiny, however, particularly on stations where overnight traffic kept the lights on. Fees were processed, beds were filled, and people were moved along.
The clerk barely looked at her. He did not ask her to raise her chin or order a secondary scan to map her bone structure and compare the scars on her face against archived footage. His gaze passed over her with the indifference of someone glancing at a menu already committed to memory. He did not linger upon the pale lines crossing her skin because he did not care.
A few quick keystrokes produced another flash of green. Somewhere inside the desk, a small printer chirped and fed out a thin, flexible token threaded with circuitry, its access permissions braided through the polymer like veins.
A leash disguised as convenience.
While it formed, Y/N slipped briefly into the printer’s firmware and skimmed the credentials being embedded: Station Fourteen-Bee, berth access, nutrient dispensers at tier two, sanitation-credit allocation, emergency oxygen billed separately, and medical privacy not included.
The token slid across the counter.
“Everything looks in order,” the clerk said, tapping his screen without ceremony. “Station Fourteen-Bee. Boarding’s already started, so you’ll want to head down.”
Y/N took the token and nodded. “Thank you.”
The broad-shouldered engineer gave her one final, assessing glance as she stepped aside. “Safe travels,” he said, a little awkwardly, as though the phrase carried more weight than he had intended.
“Thank you.”
The clerk turned toward the remaining line and raised his voice. “Next!”
A blue strip embedded in the floor guided Y/N away from the docking bay as the corridor narrowed, funneling passengers into single-file movement. Through her augmented vision, the strip resolved into a chain of RFID tags placed at regular intervals. She read them passively as she walked, mapping the route without once consulting the overhead signs.
Ahead of her, the engineer moved with an easy, rolling gait, his token already tucked away. “Coffee first,” he muttered, scratching the back of his neck. “Then sleep.”
The words sounded less like a plan than a negotiation with exhaustion.
Y/N’s awareness brushed across him once more, not invasively, but with the lightest contact, the way someone might trail a hand through tall grass simply to feel how it bent. Fine reddish dust clung to his boots, its color and texture consistent with a high-iron asteroid field, and had been ground so deeply into the treads that even the station scrubbers had failed to remove it. Shallow abrasions marked his knuckles, the sort earned from tightening bolts inside cramped maintenance shafts or hauling equipment through service tunnels too narrow for comfort. Manual labor, then, rather than fighting.
His heart rate remained steady, without any sudden surge of cortisol, and every metric her systems tracked classified him as a low threat. She kept her distance anyway. Low threat did not mean harmless; it only meant unlikely, and people behind her made her uneasy while those ahead of her were not much better.
The corridor drew them into its narrow throat beneath overhead panels humming with a faint electrical whisper. Her awareness spread effortlessly along the walls and ceiling, counting cameras placed at eight-meter intervals and identifying two small blind spots where replacement panels had never been recalibrated. Near the junction ahead, a sanitation drone rested with its sensor mast folded down like the head of a sleeping animal, its brushed-aluminum shell reflecting the corridor in warped slivers of light.
Y/N brushed lightly against its system and found the battery at sixty-two percent, the cleaning reservoir half full, and its patrol routine scheduled to resume in nine minutes.
Beyond the drone, a sign pulsed in soft blue lettering: OVERNIGHT BERTHS — FOURTEEN-BEE. The corridor widened beneath it and opened into a smaller hub where vending units lined one wall. Their displays had dimmed to a patient glow in low-power mode, while payment modules whispered idle handshake requests into the air, hopeful, automatic, and forever waiting to be noticed. The whole place smelled faintly of disinfectant and warm plastic, the scent of temporary lives.
Her hand drifted toward the inner pocket of her jacket, where her personal comm rested. Through the fabric, her thumb pressed lightly against it, and the device recognized her touch signature immediately, waking into silent standby like a held breath.
Not now, she told herself. Get behind a door. Get a lock.
Her thoughts ignored the instruction and slipped sideways instead, returning to a place she never spoke about aloud.
Back to the convict.
Fragments of his voice still lived somewhere inside her internal audio cache, recorded without permission by implants that had archived everything during those months. She had intended to purge them and meant to erase every trace, but the system had been thorough. It preserved the screams, the howl of wind tearing through fractured metal, and the sharp crack of gunfire echoing through stone corridors. Through all of it, his voice remained unnervingly clear.
It’s not me you should be afraid of.
The memory surfaced with such precision that it might have been live audio. For a fraction of a second, her threat-detection suite misfired and flagged an anomaly inside a dim alcove ahead, where two light strips had burned out and never been replaced. Shadows gathered there, thick and motionless.
Y/N slowed without breaking stride and sent a subtle pulse through the corridor’s environmental mesh, requesting an infrared sweep, pressure-grid check, and electromagnetic variance. The results returned lazily enough to be insulting: dead bulbs, deferred maintenance, heat signatures limited to her and the engineer, and pressure readings consistent with two bodies and a sanitation drone waiting to resume patrol.
Nothing was there, yet her pulse jumped as though something had brushed the back of her neck.
You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?
The words passed through her thoughts so smoothly that her body reacted before her mind could separate memory from the present. They did not feel remembered. They felt whispered directly into her ear by someone standing close behind her.
Y/N stopped, her boots squealing faintly against the polished floor. It was a small and ordinary sound, yet it seemed far too loud inside the narrow corridor.
The engineer took two more steps before noticing the silence behind him. His pace slowed, and when he turned, his brow creased at the sight of her standing motionless in the center of the hall. One hand drifted toward his pocket, not toward a weapon but toward the token he had been issued, as though identification might offer a kind of armor.
“You all right, miss?” he asked.
The question was neutral, though caution threaded beneath it. Within Y/N’s overlay, his outline flickered while her systems performed their quiet assessment. There was no aggressive lean, no surge of adrenaline, and no tightening through the shoulders to suggest he was preparing to act. Her heart still hammered hard enough for the implant to classify the rhythm as anomalous. An amber warning bloomed patiently at the edge of her vision, and although she muted it before it could escalate, the sensation remained, pressing against her like an old bruise.
Y/N forced the muscles around her eyes to loosen and released the tension from her jaw. A slight adjustment in her vocal modulator smoothed the tremor climbing through her throat.
“Just tired,” she said, though the words came out thinner than she intended.
The engineer watched her a moment longer than comfort allowed, his jaw working slowly around whatever he had tucked into his cheek. His expression belonged to someone deciding whether to offer help or leave a stranger alone with her problems.
“Yeah,” he said at last, exhaling through his nose. “Join the club.”
One corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile, before his shoulders settled into their loose rhythm again and he continued down the corridor.
A slow breath escaped Y/N’s lungs. The alcove remained dark ahead of her, the two dead light strips staring down like empty sockets. On impulse, she entered the lighting system and nudged the maintenance priority upward by two levels, not enough to trigger an emergency service call or drag an irritated technician away from a break, only enough to ensure the bulbs would be replaced during the next scheduled cycle.
She did not like blind corners.
Only after the change had settled into the queue did the rest of her breath leave her chest. She shook her head once, sharp and instinctive, like someone trying to clear water from an ear.
Not now. Not here.
The berth wing unfolded around her as she walked, its systems revealing themselves in layers whenever her attention brushed across them. Door locks blinked at regular intervals while exchanging encrypted pings with the local controller. Through the thin walls, occupancy sensors cast faint amber halos around sleeping figures and restless bodies shifting in narrow beds. Emergency exits glowed dull red in her overlay, each connected to an independent power cell with a thirty-minute reserve—long enough to save some people, though not everyone.
Fire-suppression nozzles dotted the ceiling. Pressure remained stable, the foam mixture sat within acceptable limits, and air moved steadily through the overhead ducts while filtration units labored at eighty-seven percent efficiency.
Ahead of her, the engineer reached his berth and held his token against the reader. The panel flashed green before sliding aside with a soft whisper. At the threshold, he paused and glanced back over his shoulder.
“You sure you’re good?” he asked, his voice quieter now.
Y/N met his eyes. “I’m good.”
He studied her for half a heartbeat before giving a small nod. “All right. Get some sleep.”
The door sealed behind him, and without another person occupying the space, the corridor seemed to narrow.
Y/N continued along the blue strip embedded in the floor. It ran through the hall like a river of polite instruction, guiding travelers toward rows of overnight berths that promised rest whether anyone actually slept or not. Fourteen-Bee waited halfway down the line.
She held her token over the reader. The lock chimed with a small, almost civilized sound and disengaged, its bolts withdrawing with such quiet precision that the mechanism seemed apologetic.
Still, she did not enter.
Her attention moved through the surrounding systems instead, searching for which doors defaulted to manual during a blackout, which sealed automatically under panic protocols, and which locks depended entirely upon central authentication rather than storing credentials locally. The answers surfaced easily. Door Fourteen-A retained a local cache with a six-hour fallback, while Fourteen-C relied completely upon the central uplink and would die with it. At the far bend, an emergency latch waited behind composite housing that would crack under sufficient force.
Her awareness followed the route to the nearest maintenance shaft, three turns down the corridor. It hid behind a false wall panel marked PLUMBING ACCESS in cheerful, rounded lettering that tried far too hard to make infrastructure appear friendly. Y/N pulled the access code into memory and skimmed the seal log. It had been opened twice in the past month, both times for routine inspections, with no anomalies recorded.
The map settled into place inside her mind, stored the way someone might fold a blueprint and slip it into the lining of a jacket, a hidden diagram pressed flat against bone. Only after she knew how to escape did she begin moving again, her boots tapping softly against the deck until their rhythm nearly matched her pulse.
She needed to call Jimin and tell him where she was. His name did not cut through her thoughts with the violence of certain memories, but it tugged all the same, a tether looped somewhere around her ribs and anchored just left of her spine. Within her interface, his contact ID glowed inside a private channel marked trusted priority. She had encrypted it herself, layering rolling keys and passive intrusion detection so densely that the precautions bordered upon paranoia.
He had teased her about it once.
“You treat my voice like classified material,” he had said, his laughter warm and unguarded through the comm.
“I just don’t want anybody bothering us,” she had answered.
The settlement money kept her afloat, NOSA’s sterile apology paired with the Aguerra Prime Parliament’s carefully measured silence. Credits moved through official channels, tidy and respectable on paper, their guilt scrubbed clean by committees, signatures, and carefully worded liability agreements. She had traced the transfers once, following the money upstream into committee accounts where budgets shifted like water across polished floors. Some officials hesitated before approving the disbursement, their biometrics betraying brief spikes of irritation or unease, while others signed without reading, their bodies registering perfect calm.
Money never returned time or gave missed calls back.
There had been a time when Y/N was the reliable one. College came first, followed by a doctorate earned through stubborn concentration and sleepless nights. She graduated at the top of her flight class and built a career with one of the most powerful exploration organizations in the galaxy. Back then, credentials had been armor, and doors opened before she reached for them. Now, the only armor she trusted was information.
The corridor curved gently beneath lights that pulsed with a soft, artificial rhythm. She slowed and pressed her fingertips briefly against her temple as the interface flickered beneath Jimin’s contact. Old recordings brushed against the present like static leaking through a damaged signal: wind scraping across sand and screams flattened into digital ghosts.
Around her, the station continued with steady indifference. Vents exhaled warm air in slow cycles, and somewhere deeper in the berth wing, a door opened and closed with a mechanical sigh. A faint laugh escaped through one of the thin walls before the ventilation swallowed it.
At the corridor’s end, the blue guidance strip faded into ordinary flooring. The entrance to her berth curved from the wall ahead, marked 14-B in plain white characters that tried very hard to appear welcoming. A narrow slot beside the door waited for her token, while a small camera lens stared outward from above it without blinking.
Y/N stopped before the lens. Her awareness rose before her hand did and brushed lightly against the camera’s system, revealing a consumer-grade optic with active but shallow facial recognition. It had been designed to check active warrants and flagged identities, not comb through years of archived media, and its feed routed only to the berth wing’s local server rather than central command.
She slipped quietly into the buffer and watched herself through the camera’s eye. It saw a tired, unremarkable woman and knew nothing of the weight she carried or the things she remembered. It recorded only posture, angles, and contrast. Her shoulders curved slightly forward, as though gravity had taken a personal interest in her spine, while her gaze remained lowered without appearing evasive. She looked merely weary, the way travelers did after destinations stopped carrying much meaning.
Y/N lowered the contrast by two percent, the digital equivalent of drawing a sheer curtain across a window. A faint compression artifact appeared along her jaw, subtle enough to escape casual notice but persistent enough to soften the details. Anyone reviewing the footage later would find the scars blurred just beyond the point of clean extraction.
She tilted her head and examined the altered image for another moment before withdrawing. The buffer closed quietly behind her.
A reflective strip along the opposite wall caught only part of her face. Shadow swallowed one eye, while the dim red safety lighting sharpened her cheekbone and allowed the rest of her features to dissolve into gray. Low light possessed its own quiet kindness. It softened hard edges, eased harsher lines, and made everything appear less raw than it truly was.
Y/N released a slow breath and drew the token from her pocket. The slot accepted it with a soft chirp, followed by a wash of green light, and the door opened with a restrained mechanical sigh, as though it lacked the energy to protest.
The berth beyond had been stripped to essentials, the idea of shelter pared almost to bone. A bunk folded from the wall when she touched the activation pad, its metal joints moving with quiet precision. The mattress was thin but serviceable, wrapped in fabric that had endured too many travelers and too many disinfectant wipes.
A small stainless-steel sink occupied one corner, its surface dulled by years of hurried rinses. Above it hung a reinforced mirror coated in a faint layer of fog, softening detail and discouraging vanity and voyeurism in equal measure. Recycled air sighed from the ceiling vent at steady intervals, and her overlay placed the filters at seventy-two percent efficiency. Disinfectant hung sharply in the room, though beneath it lingered something older: sweat scrubbed away without ever being entirely erased.
Temporary lives always left residue. No solvent removed it completely.
Y/N stepped inside and allowed the door to slide shut behind her. Habit carried her through the berth’s systems before she consciously thought to check them. The lock sealed with a magnetic hold strong enough for privacy but not force, while the ventilation fed into a shared duct serving six adjoining rooms. Beneath the bunk, a panic button connected directly to station security with an estimated response time of thirty seconds, and overhead, fire-suppression nozzles waited with their foam pressurized and ready.
The latch settled into place with a small, decisive click, and her shoulders lowered by a fraction.
Y/N leaned against the door and closed her eyes. The station’s hum filtered through the thin walls, low and constant, like an engine idling somewhere far away. Footsteps passed outside as dull vibrations beneath her boots, while a faulty light strip buzzed faintly nearby as it warmed. There was no screaming and no beating of wings, only the ordinary mechanical noises of a station settling into its artificial night.
Her hand slipped into her pocket and returned with the comm. Pale light washed across her face when the screen woke, and for a moment, her implants layered a facial-mapping grid over her reflection, tracking micro-tremors, measuring asymmetry, and analyzing the stress patterns along her scar tissue.
She shut the overlay down. Data would not help with this.
Her thumb moved through the contact list until Jimin’s name appeared. Nearly eleven months had passed since their last call, though that was not the same as silence. Messages had accumulated in both directions, even if hers were usually little more than brief acknowledgements sent hours or days too late. Jimin had forwarded photographs of Hana and Riker, while Uma sent recordings from the marine facility: enormous mouths opening through black water, translucent reef predators turning beneath research lights, and creatures she insisted were beautiful because they could kill someone before that person had finished becoming afraid.
Y/N had saved everything and answered almost nothing.
Jimin’s contact card opened automatically, presenting the last transmission, encryption integrity, and residential-node verification. Her implants began comparing his network signature against known spoofing patterns before she asked them to, but she stopped the process almost immediately. Data would not help with this either.
Her thumb hovered over the call icon. The berth was locked, the camera had been looped, and the shared ventilation duct carried no active microphones. Even so, calling Jimin felt more dangerous than passing through customs beneath a false name. Her pulse began to rise, and the ghostline responded before she could restrain it, bringing up respiration guidance, initiating cortisol suppression, and sending a mild vagal stimulus beneath her sternum in an attempt to turn fear into usable calm.
She shut that down too.
“Tighten the fuck up,” she whispered, and placed the call.
The signal crossed the station relay and entered long-range transit beneath layers of rotating encryption. Her implants followed automatically, searching for listeners, archive traps, government intercepts, and the faint proprietary signature NOSA still buried inside civilian communication hardware.
The call rang once, then twice, and with every tone, the berth seemed to grow smaller around her. At last, the line opened.
“Hello?”
Jimin sounded asleep. Y/N’s throat closed before she could answer, and by the time he spoke again, wakefulness had sharpened his voice.
“Who is this?”
She could still end the call. The packet trail would dissolve, and Elizabeth Sargento would remain a passenger no one cared enough to remember.
“It’s me.”
Fabric shifted hard enough to strike the receiver.
“Y/N?”
He said her name as though he had found something he had spent months teaching himself not to expect.
She closed her eyes. “Hey, Chim.”
A breath left him, caught somewhere between anger and relief. “Jesus Christ.”
“Wrong family.”
“Don’t joke yet.” His voice had thickened. “I need at least thirty seconds before you start acting like disappearing for almost a year is funny.”
“I didn’t disappear. Just been off the map for a bit.”
The words struck cleanly because he did not raise his voice. Y/N sat on the edge of the bunk, and the mattress shifted beneath her weight while her implants dutifully recorded the pressure change, the room’s acoustics, and the temperature of the metal beneath her thighs—anything except the sentence she did not know how to answer.
“I’m sorry.”
Jimin went quiet. She could picture him sitting upright in the dark, his hair falling into his face and one hand pressed over his eyes while he decided whether anger or relief deserved his attention first.
“Are you safe?” he asked at last.
“Yes.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Are you eating?”
“Technically.”
A door opened on his side of the connection, followed by soft footsteps crossing the floor.
“Is that her?” Uma’s voice came faintly through the receiver.
Jimin answered away from the comm. “Yeah.”
“Put her on visual.”
“No,” Y/N said immediately.
Uma drew closer. “I didn’t ask you.”
Despite herself, Y/N smiled.
A visual request appeared in her interface. Her implants immediately prepared corrective exposure and subtle facial smoothing, but she canceled both adjustments before accepting. Jimin appeared first, seated at the edge of his bed in an old shirt. He looked older than the last time she had seen him in person, though not in any way a camera could measure cleanly. His face had settled. The softness remained, but command no longer sat behind it as a constant strain.
Uma leaned into view beside him, her blonde hair loose over one shoulder. She studied Y/N in silence for three full seconds.
“You look like shit,” she said.
“The camera isn’t doing me any favors.”
Uma’s eyes narrowed while Jimin rubbed a hand over his face.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“A station.”
“That narrows the galaxy.”
“Good.”
Uma folded her arms. “Why are you calling now?”
Y/N lowered her gaze to her hands. “Because I’m leaving.”
Jimin’s expression changed immediately. “For where?”
“Helion Prime.”
The name stilled both of them. News from the Helion System had been impossible to avoid: the Necromonger withdrawal, the provisional government, damaged cities, agricultural collapse, and refugee counts revised upward each day. No one had produced a verified explanation for why the Armada departed so suddenly.
Jimin leaned closer to the screen. “Why?”
“Namjoon called.”
Recognition moved across his face. “The imam from M6.”
“Acting Chancellor now.”
“And Helion asked one of its own to come home,” Uma said.
Y/N’s jaw tightened.
Uma lowered herself onto the bed beside Jimin. “You saw them two years ago, didn’t you?”
Y/N nodded. “Before everything got worse.”
She did not clarify whether she meant Helion or herself.
Namjoon’s request opened in her memory: his exhausted face over a secure connection, Samara crossing behind him with a medical ledger tucked beneath one arm, and Dae older than Y/N remembered, pretending not to listen from the edge of the room.
The first planting had failed. The occupation destroyed seed reserves, burned agricultural relays, ruptured desalination lines, and collapsed the distribution systems linking the outer farms to New Mecca. Soil surrounding the landing zones carried heavy metals and compounds no Helion agronomist recognized, while the surviving corporations had already begun purchasing water claims from desperate districts.
Namjoon had not asked her to save the planet. He had only asked whether she could help keep people fed through the next season.
“He needs someone to rebuild the food systems,” she said. “They lost too many local specialists during the invasion.”
She knew the old Helion cultivars: salt-tolerant grains grown along Five’s docking settlements, root crops that survived Prime’s dry basins, and greenhouse strains developed through the university before seed licensing became more profitable than public distribution. More importantly, she knew which systems had been designed for elegance and which had been built by people who expected machinery to fail.
Namjoon had not called an outside consultant. He had called someone who knew what Helion soil looked like beneath the maps.
“Apparently his standards dropped,” she said with a halfhearted shrug.
“No,” Uma cut in. “He called the best botanist he knows.”
Y/N looked away. Her doctorate had once occupied an elegant line beneath her name in government profiles: Doctor of Botany, specializing in xenoflora adaptation, soil-plant systems, and hostile-environment cultivation. Parliament had always preferred photographs of her in a flight suit, though. Plants did not sell heroism as cleanly.
“Quinn sent the nutritional package,” Jimin added.
Y/N looked back at him. “How do you know?”
“Because she called me after you requested six years of crew biochemistry models without explaining why.”
Uma made a quiet sound that might have been a laugh, but Jimin continued before Y/N could defend herself.
“Quinn sent crop-linked deficiency projections, biochemical monitoring protocols, ration-transition models, and the diagnostic architecture for the support drones. Koah is trying to get NOSA to release twelve of them without attaching a commercial operations contract.”
“They’ll attach one.”
“Quinn said the same thing.”
Y/N could imagine it perfectly: Quinn’s deadpan expression and Koah adoring every sharp word.
“Tell her thank you.”
“You tell her.”
“I will.”
Jimin watched her for a moment, and the promise settled between them with the weight of something that had become too familiar.
Uma leaned closer to the screen. “Val said you haven’t called her.”
“I sent something.” Y/N rolled her eyes. “She’s pregnant. I don’t want to bother her with my shit.”
“You sent a medical-grade air purifier with no return address.”
“Hobi knew it was me.”
Y/N looked toward the berth wall, but Jimin’s voice softened before she could retreat any farther.
“They’re having a girl,” he said. “They’re calling her Jane.”
Before she could answer, a small brown-haired figure appeared behind Uma. Riker climbed onto the bed in sleep clothes printed with bright marine predators and wedged himself between his parents with the solemn determination of a child who had never doubted he belonged there. At four, he had Uma’s fearless curiosity and Jimin’s face. Hana favored her mother more strongly, though her eyes were dark like Jimin’s and her hair had deepened over the years until it was nearly black.
“Who’s that?” Riker asked.
Uma turned the screen toward him. “Auntie Frenchie.”
He studied Y/N with grave concentration before offering a simple, “Hey.”
She swallowed. “Hey, little dude. How are you?”
“I have a dead plant. Hana says I killed it.”
“Maybe.” Y/N nodded thoughtfully. “Your daddy told me he thinks you overwatered it.”
Riker considered the accusation without offense. “Can you fix it?”
“Send me a picture.”
He nodded as though assigning her an important professional task, then crawled away. A moment later, Hana appeared in the doorway, taller than she had been in the last photograph Y/N had saved. She was nine now, old enough to understand absence and still young enough to believe it might be corrected if everyone tried hard enough.
“You finally called,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Are you coming home soon?”
Y/N glanced toward Jimin, but he did not rescue her. “I don’t know.”
Hana nodded carefully, trying to carry the disappointment with more maturity than any nine-year-old should have needed. “Okay. But you should.”
“I’ll try.”
She accepted the answer because children still believed trying and doing lived somewhere near each other. Uma kissed the top of her head and sent both children back to bed, waiting until their footsteps faded before turning toward the screen again.
“Helion’s unstable,” Jimin said. “Do Arwa and Osman know where you’re going?”
“Not exactly.” Y/N huffed. “I was going to call Arwa for her birthday if I had time.”
He exhaled. “They’re going to murder you.”
“They’ve had thirty years to try.”
“Arwa will succeed eventually.”
The thought of them hurt differently from everything else. Arwa and Osman had raised Y/N from the age of four, long before she possessed memories worth preserving. Her biological parents existed only in photographs and stories told so gently that they had never become entirely real. The Prescotts were not substitutes for anyone. They were her mother and father, whatever the documents said.
“I’ll call them after I land,” she said.
Jimin’s expression made it clear he had heard that promise before. Y/N lowered her eyes, and her implants immediately began sorting the statement against memory, emotional response, and projected stress trajectory. She shut the analysis down before it could finish.
Uma caught the slight change in her gaze. “Those things doing too much again?”
“They always do too much.”
“When was your last maintenance?”
Y/N did not answer quickly enough.
Jimin groaned. “Y/N.”
“They’re functioning.”
His face tightened. “Come stay with us after Helion.”
“I can’t.”
For several seconds, none of them spoke. The silence was not empty; it was crowded with everything already said and every promise Y/N still could not bring herself to make.
Jimin finally broke it. “I love you.”
Her throat tightened.
Uma’s voice joined his. “We all do. Even when you make it difficult.”
Y/N looked beyond them into the dim bedroom, where the edge of a child’s blanket remained visible in the doorway. Clothes had been folded imperfectly upon a chair, and a cup sat abandoned on the nightstand. All the ordinary disorder of a life continued there without waiting for her to recover enough to participate in it.
“I love you too.”
“Call when you land,” Jimin said.
“I will.” She nodded. “Or send a message. I’m not sure. I’ll let you know I made it in okay.”
They lingered for another moment before the connection ended. Instinct took over the instant Jimin’s face disappeared. Y/N traced the terminated session, searched for residual listeners and delayed handshake attempts, and watched the rotating encryption keys dissolve into static. The disconnect was clean.
Without his voice filling the berth, the room seemed larger and much emptier. The station’s hum returned in full: air rushing steadily through the vents, pipes ticking softly as their temperature shifted, and a distant door cycling open and closed like a mechanical yawn.
Y/N pushed herself upright and restored the berth camera to its ordinary feed. The temporary loop vanished from the local buffer, while the twelve-minute audio-suppression flag cleared from the logs without leaving a footprint or any reason for someone to rewind.
Her token chimed against the door, which opened without hesitation. Beyond it, the corridor had dimmed into its red-eye cycle, artificial night pooling low along the floor and thinning toward the ceiling. Y/N stepped out and followed the blue guidance strip toward Dock C, her boots making soft, measured sounds against the deck.
At the far end of the corridor waited the shuttle bound for Helion Prime. It was sleek and compact, built for efficiency rather than comfort, and overhead lights travelled across its hull in pale ribbons, bending over the metal as though the craft were already in motion.
As Y/N approached, her awareness spread outward one final time. The shuttle’s telemetry drifted through the public maintenance band, offering engine-core temperatures, cryo-array diagnostics, structural-stress readings, and clean microfracture scans. Everything remained comfortably within tolerance, but she listened deeper anyway.
The cryosleep system ran on triple redundancy, with independent power backups nested inside one another. Thermal regulators held to a narrow variance, while the manual override remained restricted to cockpit access. Y/N memorized the override route before boarding.
The cabin was narrow and utilitarian, its molded plastic seats bolted into tidy rows and padded with material designed to endure rather than comfort. Disinfectant and reheated protein lingered in the air, the familiar smell of travel stripped down to function.
Several passengers had already taken their seats. A woman in a tailored suit stared at her comm with blank concentration, her lips moving faintly as she read, while a teenager with bright, defiant hair tapped an impatient rhythm against one armrest, one heel bouncing restlessly against the floor. Nearby, an elderly man adjusted his collar twice before leaning back as though even sitting required negotiation. None of them looked at Y/N for more than a second.
She chose a seat beside the wall and buckled herself in. The harness tightened automatically across her chest, paused to recalibrate against her weight, and gave one final tug before settling into place. Somewhere inside the shuttle, a data packet logged the adjustment and folded it quietly into the passenger manifest.
Y/N shifted beneath the restraint. The curved hull pressed against one shoulder, while the harness crossed her collarbone at an angle that promised a bruise later.
Soon, she told herself.
Cryosleep still terrified her.
Her implant registered the fear before she had fully named it. Her pulse quickened, her breathing thinned, and a tremor gathered in her hands. At the edge of her vision, a diagnostic window opened and arranged its argument in neat, obedient columns: the cryopod failure rate across the last ten million cycles was statistically negligible, the historical anomaly rate was 0.000003 percent, and this vessel’s maintenance record was clean.
The numbers reduced failure to dust and rounded anomalies into fractions so small they barely seemed to exist. Fear did not answer to decimals, though, and no graph had ever reasoned anyone out of remembering.
The images came anyway. Alarms screamed beneath red strobe lights, not the polite amber warnings used for turbulence but the violent kind that burned themselves into the eye and left ghosts behind the lids. Gravity pitched sideways before vanishing altogether, as though the floor had been pulled away without warning. Beyond the viewport, stars spun wrong and stretched into frantic white scars across the dark.
Most vivid of all was the moment when everyone in the cockpit understood that something had broken beyond recovery. No one said it aloud. Naming it would have made it real, and reality had already become unbearable enough.
Y/N’s jaw tightened.
If Shields had not been such a selfish bastard, none of it would have happened. She would not have developed cancer. Bindi, with her quick laugh and ink-stained fingers, would not have died. Deku would not have been left to bury forty passengers before being eaten alive, and Peter would not have died screaming for more light. Jungkook would have been delivered to prison, while Namjoon and his boys reached New Mecca together and intact.
Instead, only Namjoon and Leo survived that journey.
Jungkook had survived too, though she had never truly doubted he would make it out. Not him. Not those strange silver eyes.
She had reconstructed the failure cascade once in simulation, watching the disaster unfold through clean and indifferent code. Numbers drifted toward a threshold before tipping past it like a glass nudged too close to the edge of a table. Shields’ reroute altered the gravitational-load calculations, wake turbulence compounded, shield harmonics destabilized, and a microfracture widened through the port stabilizer until catastrophic failure became inevitable.
In simulation, it appeared almost elegant, a chain reaction reduced to a quiet ballet of bad decisions. Reality had been screaming, heat, and the smell of ionized air.
Shields’ face rose with the memory. He had looked confident, almost amused, his hands buried in systems he treated like toys. She remembered the lazy tilt of his head when she brought him the data and the smile that followed. Her fingers tightened around the harness until her knuckles paled beneath the cabin lights.
She was glad Shields had died in the crash.
The thought arrived cleanly and without hesitation. Something darker moved beneath it, though it was not guilt so much as the uncomfortable awareness of how uncomplicated the relief felt, how absolute.
The cabin lights dimmed as the pre-launch sequence advanced, the change subtle but deliberate enough to alter the mood. A soft chime travelled through the rows, delicate as porcelain tapped by a fingernail. Beneath her boots, the engine hum deepened and sent a steady vibration through the floor and into her bones.
Another machine. Another launch.
Her implant registered the response immediately, flagging elevated aggression markers and a rapid rise in adrenaline. The warning flared like a match dragged across rough stone, and a mitigation protocol appeared at the edge of her vision. She dismissed it before it could begin.
“Jesus,” she muttered, pressing her palm flat against her thigh as though she could force the heat beneath her skin to settle.
Across the aisle, the elderly man glanced over, his eyebrows lifting. “You all right?”
His voice carried the soft creases of age and something that sounded like genuine concern.
“Fine,” Y/N replied automatically. “I just don’t like takeoff.”
He grimaced in sympathy, deepening the lines around his mouth. “Feels like the universe grabbing you by the collar and giving you a shake.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
Apparently satisfied, he nodded and leaned back, folding his hands over his stomach.
The anger drained from her as quickly as it had flared, leaving something heavier behind. It settled low in her gut, thick and sour, like sediment at the bottom of a glass.
That was not who she used to be.
There had been a time when launch chimes made her grin, when the first tremor of ignition felt like promise rather than warning. She used to press her face close to observation glass and watch the engine burn carve bright lines through the dark, delighted by the sheer violence of it: the thrust settling into her ribs, acceleration pinning her into the seat, and the unmistakable certainty that she was going somewhere no one had gone before.
Now, she only braced.
A service drone drifted down the aisle, humming softly between the rows. Its chassis had been polished to a friendly sheen, every edge rounded and softened so it would not appear threatening beneath the dim cabin lights. A menu unfolded above it in pale floating text, the characters moving through gentle animations intended to soothe nervous passengers.
Y/N pinged the machine lightly as it approached, more from habit than suspicion. Its routing map was standard, the battery stable, and its passenger analytics limited to ticket verification and dietary flags. The personality routines were shallow, built around polite inflection, conflict de-escalation, and only the most minimal emotional modelling.
“Good evening,” the drone said in a voice tuned to careful neutrality. “Would you like to review nutrient selections before cryo preparation?”
She nearly waved it away, but the emptiness in her stomach made her reconsider. “Something warm. Dense. Low sugar.”
“Of course.” The menu shifted smoothly. “Protein broth with fortified grain and a supplemental mineral blend?”
“That’s fine.”
The drone dipped in a slight approximation of a bow and glided farther down the aisle. When it returned several minutes later, a compartment opened in its chassis and extended a small tray. Steam rose in thin strands from a narrow bowl, carrying the bland but clean smell of salt, synthetic herbs, and the faint metallic edge of reconstituted protein.
Y/N accepted it and unfolded the table attached to the seat ahead of her, the plastic hinge clicking softly into place. Across the aisle, the elderly man leaned toward her as she lifted the spoon.
“Better than the slop they served on the Taurus runs.”
“That bad?”
A quiet laugh escaped him. “Lost five pounds in three days. Thought I’d disappear before we even reached orbit.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
She ate slowly while harnesses clicked and tightened throughout the cabin, ratcheting into place with small mechanical sighs. Passengers shifted and settled as conversation faded into murmurs. Somewhere behind her, someone laughed too loudly, the sound bright and brittle with nerves, before cutting it off as though embarrassed to have let anyone hear.
Another chime passed through the cabin.
“Attention, passengers,” the automated voice said, smooth and perfectly neutral. “Please finish your meals and proceed to your assigned cryosleep pods. Preparation will begin shortly.”
Her heart rate jumped before the announcement ended. The shuttle’s internal layout unfolded automatically across her peripheral vision, the cabin dissolving beneath a faint wireframe overlay while the hull traced itself in thin lines of light. The cryo bay sat midship, eight pods arranged in each row, with environmental controls running along the ceiling spine and emergency-ejection protocols tied to pilot override and AI consensus.
Her gaze followed the route from her assigned pod to the nearest manual-release latch while the calculations assembled themselves without effort: three-point-eight seconds to override the thermal lock, six-point-two to force the lid manually, assuming full motor control after thaw.
She closed the model.
Across the aisle, the teenager stood and stretched theatrically, lifting both arms as though preparing to board a long-haul bus rather than surrender himself to suspended animation.
“Here we go,” he muttered. “Icebox time.”
“You’ll be fine,” the elderly man told him mildly.
“Yeah?” The boy smirked. “You volunteering to switch pods if mine glitches?”
The old man chuckled. “I’ve had my turn with malfunctioning machinery. I’ll pass.”
Y/N rose with the other passengers but remained beside her seat long enough for the first cluster to move ahead. The elderly man braced one hand against the armrest and pushed himself upright, his joints protesting in a series of soft clicks.
“Here we go,” he said, as casually as though announcing a trip to the market rather than engineered winter.
“See you on the other side,” Y/N replied.
He gave her a sidelong look, one eyebrow lifting. “Hope so.”
The wink that followed carried less humor than experience, the gesture of someone who had boarded enough vessels to understand that hope always travelled as a stowaway.
He shuffled into the aisle, and Y/N followed once the row had cleared. The line toward the cryo bay moved quietly, neither hurried nor hesitant. Passengers flexed their fingers, adjusted their sleeves, and checked tokens they had already checked twice. A shared understanding hung between them: they were about to surrender their bodies to machines and trust that the world would still exist when they woke.
The passage narrowed as it approached the bay, and cold air drifted outward to meet them, carrying the metallic tang of coolant from somewhere deeper inside the shuttle. As she walked, Y/N brushed lightly against the lighting system and increased the illumination around her by a fraction. The adjustment was almost imperceptible, just enough to keep shadows from gathering too densely at the edges of her vision and corners from resembling places where something might be waiting.
No one noticed.
The pod-bay doors slid apart with a soft hydraulic sigh, releasing a thin current of refrigerated air. Beyond them, rows of cryo units waited in polished silence, their sleek composite shells trimmed in frost silver. The lids stood raised, and their interiors glowed with a muted sterile blue that felt less like comfort than preparation. Status lights pulsed along their sides in identical rhythms, every signal precise and every promise the same.
Cold brushed Y/N’s face and entered her lungs with the sharp clarity of mountain air. Her implant synchronized automatically with the shuttle’s cryo array, and data bloomed at the edge of her vision: projected thaw time, metabolic-suppression curves, neural-preservation thresholds, and cellular-repair probabilities. A hundred small reassurances arranged themselves into clean, obedient mathematics.
She dismissed them with a flick of thought. Numbers were not the problem.
At the edge of her awareness, Helion Prime turned slowly in miniature, its blue-green oceans divided by pale scars and its equatorial agricultural bands clinging stubbornly to life despite everything done to them. She held onto that image instead: soil she might help mend, systems she could coax back into balance, and roots forcing their way through ash because they had no other choice.
“Pod assignments are displayed above each unit,” the shuttle AI said gently, its voice pitched low enough not to startle anyone already tense.
Elizabeth Sargento glowed above one pod in crisp blue lettering. The name hung there, tidy and forgettable, a label for a body that had carried others.
Y/N moved toward it.
The lid stood open, patient and indifferent, while the resting surface shimmered faintly as embedded heaters adjusted to the ambient temperature and prepared for her weight. She stopped just short of the threshold and swept the room one final time.
Cameras rested high in the corners, standard optical lenses with thermal backup and nothing more sophisticated than ticket verification. Override panels sat recessed behind frosted shields at waist height, clearly marked and intended for crew rather than passengers. The primary coolant feed ran along the ceiling like a polished silver vein, branching toward each pod through insulated lines that vanished into the walls. Emergency-release levers remained accessible from both inside and out, while backup power cells waited beneath the floor plating, sealed and redundant.
Everything was exactly where it should be, and Helion Prime was waiting.
Y/N shrugged out of her jacket, her fingers steady upon the zipper despite the pressure tightening across her chest. The fabric slid free with a soft whisper, and habit guided her hands as she aligned the sleeves, straightened the collar, smoothed the creases, and folded it neatly into the storage compartment beneath the pod. The locker sealed with a faint magnetic click.
Two units down, the teenager with the bright hair hovered before his pod, staring into it as though he expected the machine to speak first.
“Ever done this before?” he muttered, mostly to himself.
The elderly man was already easing into his unit with a quiet grunt. “Couple hundred times. You’ll wake up, or you won’t. No sense worrying about it now.”
The teenager blinked at him. “That’s not comforting.”
“Sorry to bust your balls,” the old man replied as he adjusted his shoulders against the cradle.
A faint smile tugged at Y/N’s mouth before she turned back to her own pod and lowered herself inside. Cold met her first, biting sharply along her spine and shoulder blades and pulling a hitch from her breath. The internal heaters responded immediately, and the material beneath her softened with a low hum as micro-actuators shifted below the shell, moulding the cradle around her frame.
Gentle pressure settled along her sides, beneath her knees, and behind her neck. It did not feel like restraint so much as the machine arranging itself to hold her.
Above her, the lid began to descend.
Y/N kept her eyes open but refused to watch the seam of light narrow or the reflection of her face curve across the transparent shell as it darkened. Instead, she fixed her attention upon the status text moving through her implant.
Systems nominal. Sedation sequence priming. Neural dampening calibrated. Wake destination: Helion Prime.
A soft hiss threaded through the pod as the temperature began its careful descent. The air sharpened with the clean bite of coolant while her implant completed one final handshake with the cryo controller, confirming integrity across every neural port along her spine.
Her pulse jumped once.
She flexed her fingers against the padded lining, testing her range of motion. Fabric dragged lightly across her skin, and the sensation anchored her, proof that some measure of control still belonged to her.
The lid sealed with a muted, final click.
Darkness did not fall all at once. It eased inward as the internal lights dimmed to preservation levels. Coolant whispered beyond the shell, a distant rush like wind moving through metal ribs, while a faint mist feathered into the pod, the sedation vapor almost invisible in the low light.
Y/N exhaled slowly. “Better not fucking crash.”
The words carried a thin edge of humor, and her breath fogged briefly in the cooling air before vanishing. Her implant logged the remark as non-operational commentary.
Neural dampening initiated.
Her thoughts began to stretch at the edges. Time loosened its grip, and the sharp corners of awareness softened one by one. Helion Prime remained in her mind’s eye, red-orange, scarred, and stubborn, and she held onto it as the cold deepened, her pulse slowed, and sensation withdrew in careful layers.
She held it like a promise made only to herself.
The numbers dissolved, and winter took her.
Taglist: @fancypeacepersona @ssbb-22 @mar-lo-pap @sathom013 @kimyishin @ttanniett @sweetvoidstuff @keiarajm @sathom013 @miniesjams32 @haru-jiminn @rg2108 @darklove2020 @cravingforbangtan @pjmlylyn @svnk1ssd @impossiblecopoaffire
