Chasma Couriers

Chapter 1: Crate Four

The comms panel crackles twice before the station picks up.

“Atrion Station, this is Chasma Couriers, vessel Calyx, inbound on vector one-one-seven.”

There’s a pause. There’s always a pause.

“Calyx, Atrion Station. State your business.”

“Requesting docking clearance. I have a delivery manifest, four crates, consignment tag sierra-mike-four-four-one-two.”

Another pause. If I had angled the pilot’s chair right, I could have stretched my legs as I wait for them to pull out the paperwork. But this is not the right angle. I’d only get my feet tangled in the electrical cables crammed beneath the nav console.

There’s a pop as the voice comes through too loud for the old speakers to handle. “Clearance granted, bay fourteen. Transmitting approach corridor now.”

The data comes through on the main display. Clean and simple. A slow arc into the station’s rotation. I key it into the autopilot, wait for the confirmation chime, and feel the subtle shift as my ship adjusts course. The starboard monitor flickers in its lower corner. I give it a tap out of habit.

It doesn’t help. In fact, I swear it made the flicker worse.

While the autopilot does its work I sit for a moment and listen to the ship. The Calyx has a particular sound at cruising speed—a low, layered hum that comes up through the floor and into the seat frame, made up of a dozen mechanical voices all talking at once. The approach corridor ticks down on the main display, distance markers counting steadily backward, and through the viewport the station is growing from a point of light into a structure with shape and detail. Like a spinning top on the verge of falling over, it hovers against the empty blackness of space, pinpricks of light scattered across its metal exterior.

I squeeze myself out of the chair and duck into my cabin. I step past the fold-out table where my half-eaten ration bar sits next to a lukewarm mug of coffee. The cabin light has that warm amber cast it always has, turning everything the colour of late afternoon on a world I haven’t been to in years. The bunk bed is scrunched up against the wall, sheets tinted the same yellow as the light. I make a mental note to clean it later. The same mental note I’ve been making for three months.

The cabin’s always been tight. Fitted together like a puzzle. I could stand in the middle and almost touch both walls. One of the joys of being a courier; your cargo enjoys spacious accommodation whilst you feel like a rat in a cage.

But at least it’s my cage.

The cargo hold door sticks halfway, as it does. I lift it on the rail and shoulder it the rest of the way open. The flat, buzzing light of the hold greets me. Six white crates sit in a neat row down the centre, strapped to floor anchors with ratchet webbing. Standard contract goods—machine parts, I think, or fabrication stock. The manifest doesn’t always go into detail and I’ve learned not to care much beyond weight and dimension and legality.

The hold always feels like a different ship. The cabin and cockpit have warmth to them—things chosen, things placed, things worn into familiarity. And, of course, literal warmth. Meanwhile, the hold is pure function. The cold air smells of packing foam and the metallic tang of the sub-deck, where cables and piping run beneath metal grilles along the floor.

I pull the tablet from its hook by the door and start the walkaround. Crate one. Ratchet straps are snug, webbing frayed but holding firm, and the seal strip is unbroken. Nothing to suggest the load moved when it shouldn’t have.

The second and third crates are the same story: straps tight, seals intact, no visible damage. I scan each tag and tick them off, the little beep of confirmation echoing in the metal-walled space.

Crate four.

I stop. The side panel is slightly open. Not much, maybe a centimetre or two. The seal strip has been pushed inward rather than broken outward. I crouch down and run my thumb along the edge. The latch is intact but disengaged, as if someone—or something—worked it open from the outside and then pulled it mostly shut behind them.

I sit back on my heels for a moment. This is the part where a smarter person would just strap it up, deliver as-is, and let the client deal with it. But if the goods are damaged and I didn’t flag it, that’s on me. And if they’re damaged and I did look but said nothing, that’s also on me, just with extra steps.

The joys of being a one-man crew. There’s no one else to defer decisions to—or the blame.

I set the tablet down on the grating, get a grip on the panel edge, and pull it open. Light floods in.

At first I don’t understand what I’m looking at. The crate is packed with foam-cradled components—cylindrical housings, wiring looms, other electrical shit I couldn’t name—but they’ve been pushed aside to make a foam-cushioned gap along the edge. And in that gap, wedged between a turbine housing and the inner wall of the crate, is something alive.

It flinches when the light hits it. Two eyes—bright, vivid amber—stare up at me from a face not remotely human. Black fur covers a protruding muzzle and a skull shaped all wrong, too long at the back and too narrow through the brow. It’s hunched in on itself, knees drawn up, legs bent the wrong way. Four-fingered paws grip its own shins, clasped tight with fear or cold or both.

It’s an Expie. I’ve never seen one in person, only in dock bulletins and the occasional news feed. Genetically engineered workers used for outworld excavations by some company I forget the name of.

It’s smaller than I expected. If it stood up it’d come to maybe my chest, though it shows no intention of standing up. It presses itself further into the corner of the crate. Those orange eyes stay fixed on me, wide and unblinking.

I reach around the edge of the crate and tear the manifest off. I press it against my nose, trying to read and keep my eyes on the creature at the same time. Technical product names and interstellar reference codes, quantities in the hundreds, all vaguely electronic-sounding.

Definitely no Expie, quantity one.

The autopilot chimes softly from the cockpit. Five minutes to docking.

I crouch there in the buzzing light of the cargo hold, one hand still on the crate panel, staring back at the creature cowering in my delivery.

The crowbar hits the first crate with a crack that makes me flinch.

I’m standing at the foot of the ramp with my arms folded, trying to look like a man with nowhere particular to be and nothing particular to worry about. Bay fourteen is a standard berth, scuffed decking, magnetic clamps holding the Calyx in place, the faint industrial perfume of recycled air and hydraulic fluid.

The starhand Atrion sent is a stocky woman with close-cropped hair and a barcode scanner hanging from a lanyard around her neck. She works the crowbar under the first crate’s lid, levering it up in three sharp motions.

I watch her hands. I watch the crate. I watch the open hold behind her where the remaining five sit in their neat row, waiting their turn.

Four crates. She’s only here for four of them. The other two are bound for a separate consignment, different destination. But the four she wants include number four, and number four had something living in it ten minutes ago.

Had. Past tense. Hopefully.

When the autopilot chimed, I’d done the only thing I could think of—I shoved the panel mostly closed, left it exactly as I’d found it, and went back to the cockpit. Strapped in. Watched the station’s docking guide lights pull me into bay fourteen. And spent every second of it thinking about those orange eyes staring up at me from a nest of foam and wiring looms.

The starhand sets the crowbar across the lip of the open crate and leans in, checking components against her scanner. Each one chirps confirmation. She nods to herself, apparently satisfied, and moves to crate two.

I unfold my arms. Fold them again. Lean against the ramp’s hydraulic strut. It’s cold through my jacket.

I don’t know when it got in. That’s what keeps turning over in my head. I picked up the consignment at Torren Relay six days ago. Standard loading procedure—dock crew brought them aboard on a pallet jack, I checked seals and signed off, and they left. I didn’t open anything. The seal strips are there for a reason; if they’re intact when you pick up and intact when you deliver, the chain of custody holds and nobody asks questions.

But that seal strip on crate four wasn’t broken. It was pushed inward. Which means either someone opened it before I loaded—unlikely, since the dock crew would have flagged a broken seal—or something opened it from outside, after it was already in my hold.

Six days. That thing could have been in my cargo hold for six whole days.

The starhand cracks open crate two. More chirping. More nodding.

Where did I stop between Torren and here? Fuel depot at Pott’s Point, four days in. I’d left the hold sealed but the Calyx was docked to their service arm for about nine hours while the tanks filled and I slept. Could it have come aboard then? Pott’s Point is barely more than an automated platform with a vending machine and a toilet. Not the sort of place where Expies roam free.

Before that, though, Torren Relay itself. It supplies mining colonies in the surrounding systems. Busy. Crowded. The kind of station where dock workers and transients and people you don’t ask questions about all share the same corridors. If an Expie was trying to disappear, to tuck itself into a crate bound for anywhere-but-here, Torren would be the place to do it.

But the other thing gnawing at me: I’m not sure it is a stowaway. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been hired to deliver mundane cargo that turned out to be hiding something less mundane. Banned AI processors, restricted pharmaceuticals, components that didn’t match the manifest because the real goods were packed underneath.

It’s one of the quieter realities of courier work—sometimes the client is using you to skip customs. Or avoiding tariffs. And as long as you don’t know, you don’t know. Plausible deniability, the courier’s oldest friend.

Crate three opens. The starhand runs her scanner. Chirps. Nods.

But those things had always been… things. Objects. Contraband with a shelf life and a resale value. Never a living, breathing creature staring up at me with fear in its eyes.

She steps to crate four, positions the crowbar, and hammers it under the lid. The wood—or whatever composite passes for wood these days—groans and pops free. I hold my breath.

She leans in, scanner ready. It chirps once. Twice. She pauses, tilts her head, and reaches into the crate to push something aside.

“Packed this one strange,” she says, not looking at me.

My throat tightens. “How so?”

She gestures into the crate’s interior. “All this space here, along the edge. Like someone shoved everything to one side. See—whole gap there, foam’s all bunched up against the wall.”

The nest. She’s looking at the nest.

“Huh,” I say.

She pokes at the compressed foam with one gloved finger, scratches the back of her head, then straightens up and runs the scanner over the remaining components. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. She checks her readout, scrolls through the list, and gives a short, satisfied nod.

“All present and accounted for. I’ll get the dolly.”

She doesn’t mention the damaged side panel. Doesn’t notice it or doesn’t care. She just marks something on her own tablet and walks off toward the bay’s equipment locker.

I stand there a moment longer, watching her go. Then I look into my cargo hold, where white light buzzes over the two remaining crates—the ones that aren’t hers, the ones staying with me.

It takes her two trips with the dolly to clear out the four consignment crates. I help where expected, keeping my hands busy and my mouth shut. She gives me a receipt chip, I thumb it, she nods and walks off.

Transaction complete.

I climb the ramp back into the hold. The air is the same as always—cold, metallic, faintly chemical. The two remaining crates sit against the port wall, still webbed down to their floor anchors. The spaces where the other four had been are just empty grating now, anchor points exposed like missing teeth.

I hit the lever by the door. The ramp whines, lifts, and folds itself shut with a heavy thunk that rumbles through the deck plates. The bay noise—the hum of station systems, the distant clatter of other work, welding in a workshop in the far corner—it all cuts to silence. Just me and the ship again.

I stand still for a moment and listen. The Calyx’s idle hum. The hiss of air. A faint buzz from the overhead strips. Nothing else.

“Alright,” I say, to no one.

I start with the two remaining crates. I check the seal strips—both intact, unbroken, undisturbed. I press my ear against each one like an idiot, as if I’d hear breathing through composite panelling. Nothing. I check behind them, in the narrow gap between crate and hull. Nothing. I check the corners of the hold, the space behind the door mechanism, the shallow recess where the ramp folds in.

Nothing.

No sign of it.

Maybe it felt it had overstayed its welcome. A hitchhiker hopping from station to station, hiding in one crate before moving on to the next. That would make things a whole lot easier for me.

The cargo hold door sticks on the rail. I lift and shoulder it open—the familiar two-step—and pass through into the cabin. The amber light greets me. The fold-out table, the half-eaten ration bar, the mug of coffee that’s gone from lukewarm to room temperature to whatever comes after that.

It’s a narrow room. There’s the bunk, folded up against one wall. The bench opposite, lid closed over its storage compartment. A little kitchen strip along the back wall. And the closet.

There’s only one place in here where anything larger than a rat could hide.

I step over to the closet and put my hand on the latch. It’s a shallow thing, barely deep enough to hang a few jackets in. I take a deep breath, then pull it open.

My stomach drops.

Not because the Expie is there. It isn’t. But my self-defence pistol is—shoved into the bottom corner, half-buried in a pile of unwashed clothes.

I’d left it on the bench two days ago, I’m almost certain of it. But here it is, wedged behind a crumpled thermal underlayer, grip poking out at an angle.

Maybe I moved it. Maybe I put it there and forgot.

Or maybe something with paws and an affinity for dark cramped spaces moved it for me.

I pick it up, turning it over in my hands. Then I cross the cabin in two steps and lift my pillow. I slide the pistol underneath. Hardly a vault, but it’s the last place that thing—or anyone for that matter—would think to look, I hope. And it’s safe enough. I always store the ammunition separately. Bullets in the bench storage compartment, pistol somewhere else. Mum taught me that when I was twelve, the day she showed me her old service weapon.

The gun lives in one place, the bullets live in another, and they never meet unless you mean it.

I head back to the cargo hold. The door sticks. I lift. I shoulder. The buzzing light, the cold air, and the two crates sitting exactly where I left them.

I’m halfway across the hold when I glance down and stop.

Through the metal grille beneath my feet, in the shallow sub-deck where the cables and piping run, two orange eyes look up at me.

It’s pressed flat underneath the pipes, wedged into the narrow crawlspace between the deck grating and the hull floor. Black fur against black cabling, almost invisible if not for those eyes.

It must have pried up one of the grille sections—they’re bolted, but loosely. It’s watching me with that same wide, unblinking stare from earlier. Its breath fogs in the cold air that pools in the sub-deck.

I’m standing directly over it. My boot is centimetres from its face, separated by a thin strip of metal grid.

We look at each other.

I open my mouth. The reasonable thing to say is something like: You don’t have to stay down there. There’s a cabin. It’s warmer. Basic decency. The kind of thing you’d say to any creature you found shivering in a crawlspace beneath your feet.

But the words stall somewhere between my brain and my tongue, because even if this thing could understand me, the cabin is my cabin. The only one. The ship was built for one person—one bunk, one chair, one mug’s worth of coffee at a time. There is no guest quarters. There is no spare room. The cabin is my bed and my kitchen and my every private square inch that I own in this endless abyss of space.

Then there’s the cockpit, which is just a seat and console—and I doubt this thing has its pilot’s license.

And so that just leaves the hold. Cold, bare, humming with strip light—and awfully spacious.

I close my mouth. The Expie doesn’t move. Its paws are wrapped around a pipe, fingers curled tight. It’s gripping one of the heating conduit returns. Warm, relatively speaking. It chose that one on purpose.

I stand there in the buzzing light of my cargo hold, looking down through the grating at a creature I didn’t ask for, don’t understand, and have absolutely no plan for.

The Calyx hums around us, patient and indifferent, waiting to be told where to go next.

Chapter 2: How much for a life

Three days passed, and I hadn’t seen it since.

Not for lack of evidence. Each night I’d leave a ration bar on the grating near the crates. Unwrapped, because I didn’t know if it could manage the packaging with those paws. Beside it, a small saucepan filled to the brim with water from the cabin tap.

Every time I came back, the bar was gone and the water level had dropped by an inch or two, the surface still and undisturbed, as if it had never been touched at all. No crumbs. No wet prints on the decking. No shed fur. No sign of where it went or how it got there.

I’d crouch by the grating and peer into the sub-deck, but the crawlspace was empty. Just cables and piping and shadow. I checked the corners, the gap behind the remaining crates, the recess where the ramp mechanism folded in. Nothing. For all I knew the thing had figured out how to get inside the walls themselves. Slipped between hull panels into some cavity I didn’t know existed on my own ship. The Calyx was old enough to have secrets I’d never found, and apparently so was whatever was living in it.

I don’t even know why I’m searching for it. At first it was an idle worry that it’d chew up the cables or something, but it seems too smart for that. Maybe now it’s just… curiosity? Been years since I’ve had a guest on board. I’ll admit, some company isn’t unwelcome—even if it is uninvited.

At the same time, the firmness of the gun through my pillow brings some comfort when I try to sleep. It’s there, just in case.

It helped last night. The overhead light dims on a timer—a slow, gradual fade. It’s the one automated system on this ship that works exactly as intended, every single time. The amber glow retreats, and above me, the ceiling comes alive with its quiet theatre. Hundreds of tiny LEDs embedded in the panelling, scattered in a pattern that’s close enough to a real star field to fool the tired eye. 

I never worked out how to turn them off, and at some point I stopped wanting to. They’re not accurate. They don’t correspond to any real constellation. But they make the ceiling feel further away than it is. They make the room feel less like a box.

But as I laid on my bunk that night, counting the stars above, I noticed something. The faintest orange glow, trickling out from between the bars of a vent halfway up the wall. 

There are always lights flickering on and off on a ship. Status indicators and the like. They’re even on the parts you don’t see; need to know during maintenance that the power’s been diverted, that the right pipe is pumping oxygen and the left’s recycling CO2. Sometimes those lights are yellow. Sometimes they’re a shade of amber—not by design, but because the fitting’s old and nobody replaces the diffuser.

Was there always a light in that corner? And I just never paid any attention to it till now? I’d never heard of Expies glowing, but come to think of it, you don’t hear much about them at all.

I’ve taken to listening more carefully. Sitting in the cabin with the fold-out table down and a mug of coffee going cold and just… listening. The ship’s idle hum. The tick of the heating conduit. The occasional creak of the hull adjusting to thermal drift. And sometimes—maybe—the faintest scrape of something shifting its weight in a place I couldn’t see.

Or maybe that was just the ship being old.

I’m halfway through a reheated packet of noodles when the comms panel lights up.

Not the local short-range—the long-range array. The amber indicator pulses, accompanied by a two-tone chime I hear so rarely that it takes me a moment to recognise it. A long-range communication ping. Two-way video feed requested.

I set the chopsticks down and stare at it.

Long-range comms cost more per minute than I make in a day. I’m certainly not paying for it, and nobody I know would burn that kind of money to chat with a courier in the middle of nowhere. Which means whoever’s on the other end has the kind of budget where cost doesn’t register.

I wipe my mouth, cross to the cockpit and drop into the pilot’s chair. The starboard monitor flickers in its corner as I reach for the comms console. I accept the connection.

The screen resolves into a face. Human. Male. Mid-forties, maybe, though the kind of mid-forties that comes with expensive grooming and careful lighting. Dark hair swept back with a precision that suggests product rather than genetics. He’s wearing a charcoal suit over a collarless shirt. His smile arrives half a second before the rest of his expression catches up—the sort of smile you’d find on a man selling you something you didn’t need at a price you couldn’t afford.

“Good evening,” he says. His voice is smooth and unhurried, a voice trained to put people at ease and instead has the opposite effect. “Am I speaking with the owner-operator of the vessel Calyx?”

“You’re speaking to the only person on it.”

The smile widens a fraction. “Wonderful. My name is Garrett Solen. I’m a retrieval coordinator with the Company.”

He says it like that—the Company—capitalised, as if it were the only one that mattered.

“We’re reaching out to all recent outbound delivery vessels from Torren Relay as part of an ongoing recovery effort. I wanted to ask whether you sighted anything unusual about your shipments.”

I lean back in the chair. The leather creaks.

“There’s always something unusual,” I say. “Crates packed wrong, seals that don’t sit flush, manifests with typos. Last month I had a container of drill bits that smelled like cheese. Give me more to go on than that.”

Solen’s smile doesn’t falter. If anything, it settles in, like it’s found a comfortable spot on his face and intends to stay.

“I appreciate the directness. I’ll be blunt, then.” He laces his fingers together on whatever surface is in front of him. “An important Company asset has been misplaced. We’ve exhausted all reasonable lines of inquiry on Torren itself, which leaves only the prospect that it absconded off the station. Likely concealed within outgoing freight.”

I know exactly what he’s talking about. I can feel the knowledge sitting in my gut like a black hole. But I keep my face the way it is and lean forward, resting my elbows on the console edge.

Just play it cool. Treat it like an ordinary carriage contract negotiation.

“Again,” I say, “need to be more specific than ‘company asset.’ That could be anything from a datapad to a forklift.”

Solen’s expression shifts—not much, just a slight tilt of the head, a recalculation behind the eyes. He’s sizing me up. Deciding how much to say.

“One of the Company’s patented Experiments,” he says. “A Sawian.” A pause, calibrated for effect. “Or, as laypeople call them—in breach of our patent, I might add—an Expie.”

I let a beat pass. Then another. Just a man processing new information. Nothing more.

“Don’t you chip all of them?” I say. “Can’t you just track it down?”

“For reasons that are confidential, no, not all units are chipped.” He says units the way you’d say appliances. “This one, as you can surmise, was not.”

“And the Expie,” I say. “Or Sawian. Whatever you want to call him—

“It.“

“Right, it. What does it do, exactly?”

“Also confidential.”

“Right.” I scratch the back of my neck. “Well, if your company’s misplaced a killing machine in my place of work, I’d like to know about it. Wouldn’t want to leave your company liable if something were to happen to me and I wasn’t warned about the risk.”

The smile cools. Not gone—it never quite goes away—but the warmth behind it evaporates like water on a hot engine casing. “Don’t get stroppy with me, kid. There’s an army of lawyers one floor up who’d be happy to clarify the finer points of liability for you.”

Kid? I’ve been flying my own ship through the dead of space for the past decade, and some man in an air-conditioned office on a cosy planet millions of miles away is calling me kid.

“All you need to know is that these Experiments do jobs no human would do. Or aren’t allowed to do. And no, that doesn’t include military application.” The smile flickers back, and his voice resettles into that practised smoothness. “Unsurprisingly, people still enjoy killing people all on their own.”

“Speaking from experience there?”

“Hah.” A short, dry sound. “Very cute.”

I’m not being cute.

“Well,” I say, shifting my weight in the chair. “I think I would’ve noticed a new furry crewmate wandering around. Given it’s just me here.”

“Understandable.” He doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t look unconvinced either. He looks like a man who’s made the same call fifty times today and is working through the script. “I should mention, though, that the Company has put out a sizeable bounty for its safe return.”

“I run a courier service, not a lost-and-found.”

“Fifty thousand credits. Duty free.”

My mouth opens. Then closes. Then opens again, but nothing comes out.

Fifty thousand credits.

I turn the number over in my head, prod it from different angles, try to find the part where it stops being real. That’s more money than I’ve ever laid eyes on. One extra digit more than my prior record, which was a hazard bonus for hauling volatile mining charges through an unstable belt—and even that felt like winning the lottery.

Fifty thousand. I could buy a whole new ship. Modern. Twice the size. Hell, I could pay a crew to fly it. I could have a cabin with a door that doesn’t stick and a starboard monitor that doesn’t flicker and a coffee mug that isn’t the only one on board.

But something doesn’t sit right. A number that big always comes with a question attached.

“Doesn’t your company make them?” I say. “Why pay that much for one when you’ve got thousands?”

Solen’s smile doesn’t change, but for half a second, the smile and the eyes don’t agree.

“This Experiment is… special.”

“Let me guess. Confidential?”

“You catch on quick, Mr Calyx.”

That’s not my name. I don’t correct him because my brain is still circling fifty thousand credits like a ship caught in a gravity well, and correcting the man with the chequebook feels like a low priority.

“Well,” I say, slowly. “Guess I’ll give my cargo another good once-over. Just in case.”

From somewhere behind me—through the cabin, past the fold-out table, beyond the amber light—comes the sound of a door grinding shut. Heavy. Metal on metal. A deep, rumbling thud that I feel through the deck plates and up the soles of my boots.

I twist in the chair, looking over my shoulder toward the cabin. I know that sound. I hear it nearly every day. The cargo hold door hitting the end of its rail.

But it sounds so much more terrifying when you aren’t the one closing it.

“Everything alright?” Solen’s voice comes from the screen behind me, sounding almost genuinely worried.

I turn back to the monitor. “Nothing. Door just slammed. Ship’s old, things rattle.”

“I thought you worked alone.”

“I do. Automated doors are on the fritz.” I gesture vaguely at the cockpit around me. “Old ship. Falling apart. You know how it is.”

A man with a suit that rich does not know how it is. Solen studies me through the screen. The smile is still there, but it’s thinned, pulled taut. I can’t tell if he’s convinced. I can’t tell if it matters.

“Just… be cautious, Mr. Calyx.” Solen leans forward slightly, and for the first time the smile drops. What’s underneath isn’t menace, exactly. It’s something stranger. Clinical. “They may not be trained killers, but these Experiments are… resourceful. Too much hope can make anything unpredictable.”

“I’ll… keep that in mind.”

“Do.” The smile returns, like a door closing. “Safe travels.”

The screen goes dark. The cockpit is quiet. Just the hum of the ship and the flicker of the starboard monitor and the sound of my own breathing.

I sit there for a long moment, staring at the dead screen.

Fifty thousand credits.

I stand up and move through to the cabin. The amber light falls across the fold-out table, the cold noodles, the mug with its ring of dried coffee. Everything the same as I left it.

That thing isn’t my problem. But it is a problem. A stowaway of unknown temperament living in my walls, eating my rations, and now opening and closing doors on a ship it doesn’t belong on. Handing it over wouldn’t just make the problem disappear. It would make the problem disappear and replace it with fifty thousand credits. I’d be ridding myself of a logistical nightmare and upgrading my entire life in one fell swoop.

I reach the bunk and lift the pillow.

The gun is gone.

I stand there with the pillow in my hand, staring at the bare mattress. The slight depression where the pistol had been, the outline of it still pressed into the thin foam. Gone.

The door. That sound—the cargo hold door slamming. It had been hiding. Somewhere in the cabin. Close enough to hear every word. Close enough to hear the bounty, the price on its head, and the careful way I said I’ll give my cargo another good once-over.

And then it took the gun and ran.

I put the pillow down carefully, as if that still matters, and turn toward the kitchen strip. My eyes land on the knife block. Three knives. I pull the largest—a serrated utility blade—and move to the cargo hold door.

It’s closed. Not stuck halfway, not jammed on its rail—fully closed, pulled all the way shut from the other side.

My free hand grips the handle. The quiet on the other side of the door is the loudest thing on the ship.

Come on. Come on, just open it.

I lift the door on its rail and slide it open. Slowly. Six inches. A foot. Enough to get my head through.

The flat, buzzing light of the cargo hold spills into the gap. Cold air rolls over my face. I lean through, knife held low by my hip, and look.

It’s right there.

Not under the grating. Not behind the crates. Not in the walls. It’s curled in the nearest corner of the hold, pressed into the junction where the hull meets the deck, no more than five metres from the door. Its knees are drawn up, arms wrapped around them, black fur blending into the shadow of the corner.

And in its paws, barely visible against the dark fur, the unmistakable shape of my pistol.

It looks up at me. Those orange eyes. Wide. Wet.

A moment of perfect stillness. The hold hums. The light buzzes. Neither of us moves.

Then the Expie lifts the gun, opens its mouth, and shoves the barrel between its teeth.

“Wait—”

Click.

The sound is small and sharp and absolute. An empty chamber. The Expie flinches as if it’s been struck, a strangled gasp escaping around the barrel, high-pitched and animal and broken.

Click.

Another pull. Another empty snap. Its whole body convulses with the effort and the failure, a whimper rising from somewhere deep in its chest, thin and keening.

Click.

The third one comes with a sound I haven’t heard before—a wail, muffled by the gun barrel, choked and desperate and utterly hopeless. Its eyes are squeezed shut, tears cutting dark lines through the fur on its muzzle, and it keeps pulling, keeps pulling—

Click. Click.

—until the trigger is just making the same dead sound over and over and the creature’s arms are shaking so badly it can barely keep its grip.

The gun lives in one place, the bullets live in another, and they never meet unless you mean it. A habit so old it’s practically instinct.

I’ve never been so grateful for a habit in all my life.

The gun slips from the Expie’s paws and clatters onto the grating. It falls sideways against the wall, curling in on itself, and the sound it makes—it isn’t a scream, it isn’t words, it’s just grief, raw and shapeless, pouring out of something that has reached the very bottom of what it could endure and found there was still further to fall.

I’m standing in the doorway with a kitchen knife in my hand, watching a creature try to kill itself with my unloaded gun because it heard me consider selling it back to the people who owned it.

The knife suddenly feels obscene. I set it down on the grating, carefully, and straighten back up.

The Expie is still curled against the wall, shaking. The kind of shaking that comes from somewhere deeper than cold. Its paws are over its face, pressed hard against its muzzle, and the sounds coming through them are thick and ragged—great, heaving sobs that wrack its narrow frame and echo off the bare walls of the cargo hold.

I’ve cried like that. Once. Hard enough that my ribs ached and my throat went raw and I stopped making words and just made sounds. I was seventeen. I remember the floor I’d been sitting on, and that nobody came.

If this Expie is feeling even half of what I felt that night—

I don’t think; I just move. Six steps on the metal grating. The Expie hears me coming and presses itself harder into the corner, a fresh whimper escaping through its fingers, its whole body bracing for whatever comes next.

I lower myself down beside it.

No, not it—him.

I settle my back against the hull wall, close enough that my shoulder almost touches his fur.

For a moment I just sit there. The hold buzzes above us. The cold air pools around us. The Calyx hums its patient, indifferent hum.

Then I reach over, gently pull the creature toward me, and wrap my arms around him.

He goes rigid. Every muscle locked. For one long second it’s like holding a bundle of wire and fear.

Then something gives way.

He collapses into me—all at once, completely—and buries his face against my chest. The sobs come harder, shaking us both, his paws gripping fistfuls of my jacket, and I hold on and say nothing. I just hold on.

The Calyx drifts through the black, carrying us both, going nowhere in particular.

Chapter 3: Two Plates

I wake up shivering. My arms aren’t used to being exposed to filtered air blowing onto them all night.

Once the sobbing finally stopped, I left the Expie where he lay, gently picked up the discarded pistol, and returned it to under my pillow. There’s nowhere else to hide it. If he wants to find it again, he will.

But I returned with my closet’s worth of jackets. All three of them. And the one I was wearing for good measure. He can bundle up, tear them into strips to build a nest, or whatever he wanted to do.

But now that I’m waking up—the hair on my arms standing on end, a horrible chill spreading down to my toes—I realise I should have kept at least one.

I run my hands under the hot water from the sink until I stop shaking. Then as quietly as I can, I pull open the cargo door and peek my head out. The Expie is still curled up in the corner, wearing an oversized jacket that comes down to his knees. He chose the light-grey one; the others cushion the metal floor. His little chest slowly rises and falls.

It could have ended so differently.

I close the door and leave him to sleep.

Beside the kitchen strip, I crouch down and push an off-shade panel in the wall. That little segment pops out, and tucked inside is a blue electronic cooler box from the last century. That’s not being facetious. I had to perform some surgery on the power supply and solder on a docking port compatible with my not-quite century-old ship.

A blatant electrical hazard, but thankfully I don’t touch it often. It houses all the semi-fresh ingredients I save for a special occasion that never comes. Me and my wallet can never find an excuse to ditch the ol’ reliable ration bar.

Until now.

If the Expie is anything like me, he’ll be dreaming of real food after having suffered a few days of nothing but those bars. And I still remember how to cook. Vaguely.

After tapping the cooler to make sure it isn’t carrying a current, I throw it open like a treasure chest. It’s packed tight: a bundle of spring onions, a vacuum-sealed bag of diced ham, space-frog cheese and a carton of long-life eggs. Beneath those a fat bulb of fennel and a tray of button mushrooms starting to sweat against the plastic. And more buried beneath.

I start tearing through the ingredients. There’s even a zip-lock bag of imitation chicken thighs I had forgotten about, probably still safe to eat. A grand feast takes shape in mind—of everything, cooked to perfection. I can feel a grin spreading over my face.

Which is wiped out with a sudden, crushing thought.

What the hell does an Expie eat?

Are they carnivores? Herbivores? Both? They really don’t teach you the important things in pilot school. And I can’t quite nudge the poor lad awake and get him to point at the ingredients he likes.

Just keep it simple, stupid. Everything in the galaxy eats eggs, right?

An omelette it is.

Burner on. Pan oiled. I hover my hand above until heat spreads through my palm. I crack the first egg on the rim of the pan, and it sizzles the moment it hits the oil. Second egg, third, fourth—I line them up in a row along the counter’s edge and work through them like a factory line, each shell split and dumped and tossed aside. Four eggs. I stare at the pan. He’s skin and bone under that fur. Six eggs. I crack two more.

Fork in, scramble the yolks, tilt the pan, let it spread. I reach for the mushrooms—hand hovering over the punnet—and stop. Carnivore? Herbivore? Don’t know. I pull my hand back. The omelette bubbles. I grab the ham, peel the vacuum seal—and stop again. What if pork sends an Expie into anaphylactic shock?

Plain it is. Plain is safe. Plain is universal.

I fold the omelette, one clean motion, the way mum showed me. Perfectly imperfect. Then I pause, hand already reaching for the plates, and glance back at the cooler.

Salt and pepper. Everything in the galaxy likes salt and pepper.

A few twists of each. The surface of the omelette glistens. I cut it down the middle with the spatula—one half slightly larger than the other—and slide the bigger portion onto the plate I already have out.

The second plate. Where’s the second plate?

I haven’t needed two plates since I bought this ship. I crouch down and pull open the storage bench, pushing aside a tangled charging cable, a rolled-up star chart I’ve never used, loose bullets and a tin of engine sealant that has no business being in here. There—wedged at the back, behind a rag I’d forgotten about. The plate has a thin film of dust and something sticky on one edge that I choose not to investigate.

I hold it under the tap. The sink is, as always, barely wide enough for a bowl, and the plate is wider than a bowl. The rim clangs against the wall. I tilt it, scrub it with my thumb, clang it again. Good enough.

I carry the fold-out table across the cabin and set it up beside the bunk, adjusting the legs until it sits level—or close enough. The bunk becomes my seat. The bench opposite stays free for him.

Two plates. Two portions. He gets the bigger one. The warm, buttery smell of fresh eggs cuts through the stale recycled air of the ship, and for a moment the cabin almost feels like somewhere a person might actually want to be.

I move to the cargo hold door. Hand on the handle. The familiar two-step: lift, slide. I ease it open, just enough to lean through.

He’s stirring. Still bundled in the oversized grey jacket, the hem pooling around his drawn-up knees. It’s strange seeing him in a colour other than black and orange. And speaking of orange, I hadn’t noticed how strange his tail is until now. The tip splits into distinct strands like the leafy crown of a pineapple, ending in the same shade of orange as his eyes.

As his tail swishes, his snout lifts. The nostrils twitch—once, twice, rapid little pulses, the tip of his muzzle tracking the air the way a compass needle finds north. Then his eyes snap open and land directly on me.

He’s on his feet before I can blink. Upright, rigid, back against the hull, orange eyes wide and locked on mine. The jacket hangs off him like a tent.

“It’s okay,” I say, both hands open, palms out. “It’s okay. You’re fine.”

He doesn’t move. His breathing is fast and shallow, his paws half-raised in front of his chest, digits spread. Ready to bolt, though there’s nowhere to bolt to.

“I made—” I start, then hesitate. How well can he understand? Solen had talked about them like equipment—units, it. Though this Expie clearly understood some of that conversation yesterday, is he capable of parsing a whole sentence? “I made food. Breakfast. Well, it’s not technically breakfast, but…”

He stares at me. The slightest tilt of the head.

Right. Pantomime it is.

I point at myself. Then I mime scooping something into my mouth, chewing with exaggerated jaw movements. I point at him. I point toward the cabin behind me, where the smell is coming from. I mime eating again. I beckon with one hand, a slow come-here gesture.

He watches all of this without expression.

I do it again. Point at him. Point at the cabin. Scooping motion. Chewing. I even rub my stomach for good measure, the universal sign for food good, please trust me.

Something shifts in his posture. Not relaxation exactly. More like the first stage of an engine winding down. His weight moves forward off the wall, just slightly. His nostrils twitch again, processing the smell curling through the open doorway.

I step back, clearing the threshold, and gesture him through with an open arm.

He comes. One step. Two. Digitigrade feet on the metal grating, almost silent. He slows as he nears me, then ducks through the doorway—he doesn’t need to, he’s shorter than me, but he does it anyway. The instinct of someone used to making themselves small.

He sees the table. Two plates. The omelette, golden and glistening under the amber light.

He stops.

His whole body goes stiff in a way that’s different from the fearful stillness of the cargo hold. This is something else. His eyes move from one plate to the other, then to the bench, then to me, then back to the food. I can see the calculation happening behind those orange eyes—the desperate want and the refusal to believe it.

“Sit,” I say, gently, pointing to the bench. “That one’s yours.”

He doesn’t sit. He stands there, looking at the plate like it might vanish if he blinks.

I circle around him—giving him space—and lower myself onto the bunk. I pick up my fork and hold it loosely, not eating yet. Just showing him the shape of the thing. See? Normal. Safe. Two people sitting down to a meal.

After a long moment, he moves. He lowers himself onto the very edge of the bench with slow, careful precision. The oversized jacket bunches up around his hips. His tail curls around one side. His gaze stays fixed on the plate, or on the table, or on his own paws resting in his lap. But every few seconds those orange eyes flick up—quick glances that take in my face, my hands, the space between us—and then dart away again.

He slowly lifts his arm, wiggling it until my jacket sleeve slips back and his paw peeks from the hem. He picks up the fork. Four-digits close around it with an easy grip. No fumbling. No awkwardness. He holds it the way I hold it. Better, even.

He separates a small piece of omelette from the edge. A tiny piece, almost surgical. The fork hovers halfway to his mouth. His eyes flick to me again—that same searching look, trying to read something in my face, trying to find the catch, the angle, the moment where this turns into something else.

Then he eats it.

For half a second, nothing. The piece disappears past his muzzle and he chews once, twice—

His eyes light up. Not figuratively. The orange dims and then flares brighter, pupils dilating wide, and his ears—the rear-facing ones I can’t see from here—must do something, because his whole head shifts. His posture changes. His shoulders drop. The grip on his fork tightens.

He takes a second bite. A third. The fourth isn’t a bite so much as a shovel, half the omelette folded over the fork and crammed past his teeth, cheeks bulging, a small involuntary sound escaping from somewhere in his throat—not a word, just a noise of pure, uncomplicated relief.

I haven’t even touched mine.

He’s through his half in thirty seconds flat. The fork scrapes against the empty plate with a sound that makes us both wince. He freezes, clutching the fork, staring at the bare ceramic like he can’t quite believe it’s gone.

I let out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Well,” I say, cutting into my own omelette, “if you’re that hungry, you can have mine too.”

It’s a throwaway line. A quip to fill the silence, aimed at no one in particular—the kind of thing you say to yourself when you’ve been alone on a ship for far too long.

“Please.”

My fork clatters against the plate.

I jerk upright on the bunk. He flinches—violently—and the bench screeches against the floor as he throws himself backward, shoulders slamming against the cabin wall. The fork tumbles from his paws. His eyes are wide, fixed on mine, every muscle coiled.

Silence. The amber light hums. My heart hammers somewhere behind my ribs.

“You—” I swallow. “You can talk?“

His back is pressed flat against the wall, paws raised defensively, but there’s something else in his expression now. Not fear. His brow shifts, the fur bunching between his eyes, and his head tilts a fraction.

“Y-yeah?” he says. His voice is quiet, a little rough, as if it hasn’t been used in a while—but clear. Unmistakably clear. The single word carries an inflection I recognise immediately.

The tone of someone who thinks the answer is obvious.

I stare at him.

He stares at me.

“So when I was—” I gesture frantically at the doorway, the cargo hold, the space between us. “When I was just… pointing and miming and rubbing my stomach like an idiot. You didn’t think to mention that?”

He blinks. The tension leaves his shoulders, replaced by something that looks almost—offended?

“I didn’t know what you were doing.” His voice rises an octave. “It was… kind of weird.”

I open my mouth. And close it.

Great job, genius. Truly outstanding first contact protocol. This is why you’ll never be an interspecies diplomat.

I exhale slowly, pinching the bridge of my nose, and slide my plate across the table toward him.

“Just eat the omelette.”

Chapter 4: Melt

Twenty-two hours and ten minutes.

The ETA blinks at me from the nav display, white digits against the dark backdrop of the route map. Kiren Station. One day early.

I tap the console and pull up the trajectory log. Sure enough, there it is. A slipstream confluence right where the charts said there wouldn’t be one for another week—and I caught it clean. The Calyx rode it like a leaf on a river, burning barely any fuel for six hours of travel that should have taken twelve. I’ll take it. Early means first pick of the berths, fewer questions at the docking queue, maybe even a premium on the delivery if the client’s feeling generous.

They never are, but a man can dream.

I swipe away from the nav screen and pull up the status array. Hull integrity, nominal. Atmo cycling, nominal. Fuel reserves, sixty-three percent portside, sixty-one starboard. Heating conduits running within tolerance. Port thruster output steady. Starboard thruster—

“What’s that?”

I nearly launch out of the chair.

One hand catches the armrest, the other slaps the console hard enough to dismiss whatever screen I’d been looking at. I twist around.

The Expie is standing at the edge of the cockpit entrance, only half of his body visible past the cabin wall. He’s still swimming in my grey jacket. One paw rests on the frame, the other hangs at his side, and his orange eyes are fixed on the screen.

I let out a breath. “You… can’t just do that.” I’m not used to hearing another voice on board. “Make a sound first. Knock on something. Cough. Anything.”

His gaze shifts to me. His head tilts.

“I did make a sound. I asked a question.”

Not a hint of sarcasm.

I swivel the chair back toward the console. “It’s the main ship computer,” I say, pulling the status array back up with a tap. “Lets me see all the parts of the ship and check that they’re working as they should. Engine output, fuel pressure, life support, hull temperature—if something breaks, this is where I’ll find out about it.”

“Ooo.” I can feel him leaning forward behind me, though I don’t hear him move. “Can you fly it from there?”

“Yeah. Well”—I pat the console—”most of the time these days it’s all automated. Ship follows the route I set and adjusts on its own. But”—I tap the recessed housing on the left armrest, and a joystick folds up on a mechanical arm—”I’ve got this if I ever want to take over manual controls. Emergency manoeuvres, tricky docking approaches, that sort of thing.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“Less than you’d think. More than I’d like.”

I fold the joystick back down and glance over my shoulder. He’s stepped fully into the cockpit now—both feet on the deck, tail swaying in a slow arc. The overhead lights catch the orange of his eyes and the matching tips of his tail. He’s looking at the console the way a child looks at an aquarium.

I turn back to the screens and cycle through them. “This one’s the atmospheric processor. See the bars? That’s oxygen concentration in each section of the ship. All green, all fine. If one drops below the threshold—” I tap the lower boundary line, “—the system increases flow from the reserve tanks automatically.”

I flick to the next screen. “Hull temperature. Ship’s skin runs cold because space is cold, obviously, but if it gets too cold on any section, it means the thermal insulation is degrading, and that’s bad. All nominal here.”

Next. “Heating conduits. These run through the walls and under the deck. Helps keep the interior liveable.” I pause. He’d know. He’d been wrapped around one.

I glance over my shoulder again. He’s closer now—leaning forward on his toes, his multi-jointed legs giving him an odd birdlike poise. His eyes track each screen transition without blinking. I’ve never seen anything so focused that wasn’t a targeting computer.

“This one’s the fuel system.” I bring up the propulsion overview. Twin diagrams of the port and starboard fuel lines, pressure readings, flow rates, thruster output. “Both engines draw from separate tanks through separate lines. Redundancy. If one side fails, the other can—”

“That one’s higher.”

“What?”

He’s pointing. One paw extended, a single digit aimed at the pressure readout on the portside fuel line. I look at where he’s pointing, then at the starboard equivalent.

He’s right. Port is reading 3.2 PSI above starboard. I’d noticed the discrepancy last month and chalked it up to sensor drift. The numbers were within acceptable tolerance.

“Just a minor variance,” I say. “Sensors get a bit wonky on older ships. Nothing to—”

“It’s not sensor drift.”

He says it simply, without challenge. The tone of someone stating something self-evident.

“The portside flow rate is lower, see?” He jabs his paw at the left side of the interface. “It has the same fuel pressure at the tank outlet, but it loses velocity by the time it reaches the engine. So it’s not sensor error. Something’s blocking it along the way.”

I turn fully in the chair to look at him. He’s still pointing at the screen, completely unbothered by the weight of what he’s just said.

“Ice crystals,” he says. “Ice crystals in the portside pipes, sticking to the edges. Fuel is still getting through but it needs to push past the buildup, and that makes the pressure higher upstream but the actual throughput lower.”

He lowers his paw and takes a breath. “Maybe the anti-ice coating on the pipes is wearing out. And because the portside pipes run closer to the outer hull, it gets colder first.”

Silence.

The status screen blinks patiently. The numbers sit exactly where they’ve always sat—the same ones I’ve been looking at for months without seeing what he just saw in five seconds.

He’s right. He’s absolutely, unequivocally right. I can trace the logic backwards now that he’s laid it out: port pipes running against the colder hull section, the gradual ice accumulation, the flow restriction masquerading as sensor noise. But whenever I dock at a heated station the ice melts so there’s no evidence left to diagnose. It explains the slight asymmetry in thruster output. It explains why the port tank always runs half a percent lower despite identical burn rates.

“How…” I start. I swallow. “How do you know that?”

He blinks at me. The orange flickers.

“I mean…” One shoulder rises and falls beneath the oversized jacket. “It was kind of obvious.”

I stare at him. He stares back.

There’s no smugness in his expression. No pride, no performance. He genuinely doesn’t understand why I’m reacting this way. To him, reading a fuel pressure differential and diagnosing ice crystal formation from a status screen is as unremarkable as breathing.

And his attention has already moved on. Those orange eyes sweep the cockpit, cataloguing, until they land on the far corner.

“Ooo, what’s that?”

He crosses the cockpit in three light steps and stops in front of the starboard monitor. The one that’s been flickering since before I can remember. Right now it’s doing its usual dance: half a frame of static, a flash of the external camera feed, then back to jittering noise. Over and over. An eternal, maddening cycle.

He leans in close, muzzle almost touching the screen. The light paints his black fur in strobing white.

“An insurance liability,” I say.

He tilts his head, ears shifting beneath the fur.

Right. Fluid dynamics, no problem. Jokes, beyond comprehension.

“What remains of my starboard monitor,” I say. “It’s been like that for… honestly, don’t remember when it started.”

“Have you tried hitting it?”

“Too many times to count.”

He hums. A low, thoughtful rumble. His eyes narrow at the screen, tracking the rhythm of the flicker.

Then he rears back and slaps his paw flat against the monitor with a crack that makes me wince.

The screen flashes—a single, brilliant frame of the starboard external camera, crystal clear for one glorious instant. Then it dissolves back to its familiar, mocking flicker.

“Solid attempt,” I say.

He doesn’t respond. He’s already moving—swinging himself around the side of the monitor housing. His tail curls around the power conduit below, gripping it as naturally as a hand on a railing, taking his weight as he leans out at an angle.

His paws find the seam where the monitor’s rear panel meets the housing frame, claws slotting into the gaps between the metal segments. He braces, digs in, and pulls.

The back plate comes free with a screech of metal. He swings backward, catches himself with his tail like a pendulum, and finds the deck again. The panel clatters between us.

I’m half out of my chair, one hand extended uselessly. “What are you doing?”

He’s already peering into the exposed guts of the monitor. “Maybe something else needs to be smacked.”

“Just… be careful.” That monitor might be broken, but it’s my broken monitor, and the last thing I need is a well-meaning gremlin turning a cosmetic issue into a structural one.

He ignores me entirely. He drops to his back on the deck and slides under the monitor housing. The jacket pools around him like a grey puddle.

I lean forward in the chair, watching him. His eyes are open wide in the darkness. And now that I’m looking, I notice it. The orange isn’t just reflecting the cockpit light—it’s producing its own. A soft, amber luminescence that catches on the interior surfaces of the conduit, throwing faint light across components that haven’t seen light in years.

Those eyes do glow. That wasn’t a status indicator in my cabin vent that night.

“Ooo,” he says, muffled by the housing. “I think I see it. Got any sealant?”

“What?” I’m still swiping through status screens on the main console—force of habit, something to do with my hands while a creature I found in my cargo hold performs open-heart surgery on my ship. “Oh, it’s in the bench storage—the cabin. But what are you doing?”

He’s already sliding out from under the housing, jacket riding up to his chest, tail sweeping the deck as he rolls to his feet. He pads toward the cabin, head held high, snout pointed upward, nostrils twitching rapid-fire, like he’s trying to locate the sealant by smell alone.

I watch him go. Then I turn back to the console and—

A two-tone chime.

The long-range indicator pulses amber. Again. That same indicator, that same sound that preceded Garrett Solen and his fifty-thousand-credit gut punch.

My hand hovers over the reject key. But the display reads differently this time. Not a live connection request. A recorded message. Audio only. Still costs a quarter-tank of fuel for one of these, so the sender isn’t hard to guess.

I glance at the cabin. The Expie is out of sight.

I pull the headset from its hook beside the console and settle it over my ears, muffling Calyx’s ambient hum. Whatever this message says, it stays between me and the speaker.

I tap accept.

“Hiiiii!“

I pull the headset half an inch from my ear.

“This is Kathy, executive assistant to Mr Solen. How are you today? Well, I guess you can’t answer that because this is a recording, haha—anyway!“

Her voice is bright. Aggressively bright. The kind of bright that comes with youth and an employer who hasn’t yet crushed it out of them.

“Mr Solen just wanted to check in, make sure everything’s alright with the little E-X-P-I-E problem—whatever that means. He says hi, hopes you’re doing well, and…oh, right—“

A rustle of papers. Or a tablet being fumbled. Hard to tell through compression artefacts.

“He forgot to mention last time—if your search turns up empty, just pass the message along at the next port, and we’ll stop chasing you. You can leave a message with any Company-affiliated station clerk and it’ll get routed to his desk. Okay? Okay. Safe travels, happy flying, bye-bye!“

Static hiss fills the headset before the system cuts to silence.

I sit with the headset on, staring at the dead indicator light.

Chasing.

Interesting choice of word. Don’t mind the occasional conversation in the dead of space—even with a man like Solen. But chasing implies something else. Something with momentum. Something that doesn’t stop when you’d like it to.

How badly do they want this Expie back?

Oh, right. Fifty thousand credits badly.

“I found the bullets!”

The shout comes from the cabin—bright, triumphant, utterly devoid of self-awareness. It takes me a long moment to process.

“What!?“

I’m out of the chair, headset torn off my head as the wire pulls taut.

The Expie appears in the cabin doorway, framed by amber light. In one paw he holds the tin of engine sealant, and in the other, cupped in his palm like a child holding marbles, a loose handful of brass-jacketed rounds.

“You know”—he gives his hand a little shake—”the bang-bang things.” The bullets click against each other. “I thought you ran out or something. I can load them for you if you’d like—”

“No-no, that’s quite alright!” I take a step forward, hands raised, but stop myself as he tenses, his wide eyes peering up at mine.

Don’t grab. Don’t lunge. He’s not a threat, he’s not dangerous, he’s just… holding the things he tried to kill himself with yesterday. “That… you probably shouldn’t… oh, the starboard monitor! Can you fix it?”

His attention shifts instantly—bullets forgotten, sealant remembered—eyes flicking back toward the strobing screen. “I think so.”

He’s already moving past me. He drops to his back again and slides under the housing, the sealant tin clutched to his chest. His voice comes muffled. “There’s a micro-fracture in the coolant, where the conduit feeds power to the display board. It’s probably from thermal cycling, you know, hot and cold, cold and hot. Coolant leaks out, the board overheats. Might just need a patch-up.”

I’m almost verging closer to being upset. I genuinely hate—in the most irrational, ego-bruised way possible—that someone who’s been on my ship for ten days knows more about it than I do after ten years.

From under the housing comes the sound of the sealant being pried open. I lean down. He’s got the tin balanced on his chest, one paw dipped in, the black sealant coating his pink paw pad in thick, glistening streaks. He reaches up into the conduit’s interior, one eye closed. The tip of his tongue—pink, small—pokes out between his teeth as he works. His free paw steadies him against an interior strut while the sealant-covered one presses, smooths, holds. His ears twitch with each minute adjustment.

I watch.

The starboard monitor dies.

Not a flicker. It simply goes the way old televisions used to, the image collapsing to a single bright point in the centre before winking out entirely.

He’s killed it.

Well, he tried. At least there’s one less flashing light to distract me in here.

But seconds later the screen erupts back to life. Not flickering or strobing. A clean, solid image fills the display from edge to edge—the external starboard camera feed, rendered in a clarity I’d forgotten was possible. The distant dots of stars, steady and unmoving. The faint blue glow of the starboard thruster wash bleeding along the Calyx’s flank, set against the black of space.

I’d forgotten how beautiful she looks on that side.

“Did I do it?”

He’s still on his back, looking up at me from the floor, sealant smeared across his paw and a spot on his muzzle where he must have scratched an itch.

“You…” I look at the monitor. Back at him. “Yeah. You did it.”

My one and only employee of the month.

He grins—the corners of his mouth pull back, teeth visible—and his tail thumps against the deck plating behind him.

He lies there for a moment, basking in it.

Then, he holds up his other paw. The one without the sealant. The bullets are still in it, cradled against his palm, five rounds glinting under the cockpit light.

His grin fades into something uncertain. He turns the bullets over with his thumb, watching them catch the light.

“Why do you keep them apart?” he asks, quieter now. “The gun and these.”

I lower myself back into the pilot’s chair. The leather creaks beneath me. I look at the bullets in his paw, then at his face. Those orange eyes search mine, looking for the catch. The angle. The moment where things turn.

“My mum taught me that. She had an old service weapon from her navy days. And the rule was: the gun lives in one place, the bullets live in another, and they never meet unless you mean it.”

The cockpit hums around us. The starboard monitor displays its crisp, unwavering image. The Expie lies still on the deck, the bullets resting in his open palm.

“Oh…”

The sound is small. Almost a breath. His eyes drop to the ammunition, then drift somewhere else. Somewhere past the hull. Past the ship. Past anything I can see.

“Is that why… I didn’t…”

“Yeah.” I lean forward in the chair, arms resting on my knees, and meet his gaze when it comes back to me. I smile, gently. “You didn’t mean it.”

He looks at me for a long time. The orange glows steady. Just steady.

He closes his paw around the bullets, and pulls them against his chest.

The Calyx carries us forward, one day early, putting millions of miles between us and whatever we’re leaving behind.

The cabin thermostat lives behind a tiny hinged panel beside the bunk—a design choice that made sense to an engineer who never had to sleep in here. I reach over without getting up, flip it open with my thumbnail, and nudge the dial three degrees to the right. The heating conduits in the wall tick and groan as they adjust. Sounds like the Calyx stretching in her sleep.

I should’ve done that last night.

The cabin light fades right on cue, and the ceiling stars simulate a planet-side night that I haven’t witnessed in years.

“What’s the place?”

I turn my head. The Expie is sitting on the bench across from me, legs drawn up, my grey jacket still swallowing him whole. His eyes catch the ceiling lights and reflect them back.

“What place?” I ask.

“The one on the screen.” He gestures toward the cockpit. “With the big numbers counting down.”

“Kiren Station.” I shift on the bunk, settling onto my back, hands folded across my chest. “Trading post. Mid-range. Not fancy, not a dump. Somewhere in between.”

“Why are we going there?”

“Because someone’s paying me to bring them two crates.” I lift one hand and point lazily toward the cargo hold. “Like the one you were sleeping in. They want their drill bits and Kiren is where they want them. That’s the job. Pick up, drop off, get paid.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Processing.

“What happens then?”

“Then I see if anyone at Kiren has cargo that needs moving elsewhere. Pick up new crates, plot a new route, repeat until I die or the ship does—whatever comes first.”

I pause, trying to read his eyes. They’re just watching me. “It’s a brief stop,” I add. “A few hours, maybe. Nothing to worry about.”

In the dim light I can see his posture shift. A subtle drawing-in, shoulders rounding, tail curling tighter against his hip. The instinct of making himself smaller.

But then his head lifts. Those orange eyes find me in the dark, and there’s a flicker behind them—not fear. The same excitement he had in the cockpit.

“Can I fly the docking?”

I push up onto one elbow. “What?”

“The docking approach. Can I do it?”

“I mean, there’s not much to do after setting the autopilot—”

“Not the autopilot—I wanna fly the manual controls.” His voice has an energy to it now. “Can I? Please?”

The word no is already forming in my mouth. Of course he can’t. Docking approaches aren’t a game. One miscalculation and you’re punching through someone else’s berth wall and venting their atmosphere into the black. My insurance premiums are already criminal, and the policy definitely doesn’t cover unregistered genetic experiments piloting the ship into a space station.

But.

He diagnosed ice crystal formation from a pressure readout. He traced a micro-fracture in a coolant seal in the dark—with one less finger than me.

If his mechanical knowledge of the ship extends to flying it…

“We’ll see.”

His tail thumps against the bench. Once. Twice. Then he seems to catch himself and pulls it back under control, but the damage is done. I saw it.

I’m going to regret this.

I lower myself back onto the bunk. The false stars drift above me. They’re static, but in my peripheral vision they almost seem to move. The heating conduits have settled into their new rhythm, warmth spreading through the walls like a slow exhale.

I’m exhausted. It hits all at once, a heaviness rolling through my limbs, settling behind my eyes.

It doesn’t make sense. I haven’t done anything physically demanding. Sat in a chair. Made an omelette. Watched someone else fix my ship.

But as I lie here, cataloguing the last few days, I understand.

The adrenaline. Not a spike—just a low, constant hum running beneath everything since the moment I peered into that crate. A readiness for something to go wrong. My body running at three-quarter throttle, burning up fuel it didn’t have, and now…

Now I’ve stopped.

The cabin is warm. The Expie is sitting six feet away, quiet and fed and wearing my jacket. The starboard monitor works. Nobody is trying to die.

And my body has decided that’s enough for one day.

The stars blur and double above me. I should say goodnight. I should—

Movement. A dark shape rising from the bench. The faintest whisper of feet on thin carpet. Then the cargo hold door—the lift, the slide—but so careful the sound barely registers.

“No-no.” My voice comes out thick. I push myself up on one elbow again—an effort that costs more than it should. “You’re not sleeping out there in the cold.”

He freezes. The door is open maybe four inches, a line of sterile white light creeping into the cabin. He looks back at me over his shoulder, his eyes two orange coins in the half-darkness.

“I’m just… grabbing my bed.”

His bed. The pile of creased, donated jackets that comprise the entirety of his worldly possessions.

“Right.” I settle back down. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

He slips through the gap—silent, liquid—and disappears into the hold. The cold air that bleeds through prickles against my face before the door slides most of the way shut behind him.

I stare at the ceiling. The stars stare back.

Should I offer the bunk? He’s been sleeping in a box or on metal grating for a week. The bunk isn’t generous, but it’s a mattress, and a mattress is…

No. I’m not wholly selfless. The honesty of that doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should. This cabin wasn’t built for two, but he’s half my size, and the carpet, thin as it is, is warmer than bare hull. That has to count for something.

The warmth is settling in properly now, a cocoon of heated air that makes the bunk feel less like a shelf and more like something approaching comfort.

My thoughts drift. Then they harden at the edges.

I’ve taken him into my care. Whether I consciously chose it or not—whether it was the moment I wrapped my arms around him, or the moment I slid my omelette across the table, or the moment I said we’ll see instead of no—somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, a decision was made.

And I don’t know the first thing about what comes next.

What does he want? Where was he going when he crawled into my hold? What was he running from?

What did they do to him?

I have to ask. But not tonight. When we’re both alert. When the conversation can bear the weight of the answers to come.

My eyes close. The stars vanish. The Calyx hums.

I don’t hear him come back in.

Chapter 5: Light Touches

The comms panel crackles twice before the station picks up.

“Kiren Station, this is Chasma Couriers, vessel Calyx, inbound on vector zero-eight-three.”

There’s a pause. There’s always a pause.

“Calyx, Kiren Station. State your business.”

“Requesting docking clearance. Two-crate delivery, consignment tag sierra-mike-four-four-two-one.”

I’m not in the pilot’s chair. I’m standing beside it, arms folded, weight shifting between my feet.

The Expie is in the chair—my chair—his legs folded beneath him to give himself enough height to see over the console. He’s too small to be buckled in; it’s fine, there’s usually no need to buckle in for docking approaches—but still it makes me nervous. The grey jacket has been pushed up to his elbows, and his right paw is wrapped around the manual joystick, thumb tracing slow circles over the grip cap. Not gripping it. Stroking it. The way you’d run your fingers over a guitar before playing.

The joystick hasn’t deployed yet. He’s just… shoved his paw through the folding cover plate and forced the flaps back.

“Clearance granted, Calyx. Bay nine. Transmitting approach corridor now.”

The approach fills the main display, a gentle descent arc curving into the station’s rotational plane. Simple. Clean. I key it into the nav system but leave the autopilot disengaged. The confirmation tone is different without automation—a single flat note instead of the usual double chime.

Calyx waits.

I tap the recessed housing. The joystick folds up on its mechanical arm, the Expie’s paw still squeezed around the grip. His other paw finds the two throttle levers on the left armrest, settling into position with an ease that makes my stomach tighten.

“Alright,” I say. “Just slow and steady. Follow the corridor markers on the main display. See those blue chevrons? Stay between them. Throttle at quarter for the outer approach, then ease down to an eighth once we pass the bay threshold. No sudden inputs. Calyx responds to light touches, she’s not as heavy as she looks. And keep an eye on the—”

“So humans get scared too.”

“What?”

He’s not looking at me. His eyes are fixed on the viewport, on the slowly growing structure of Kiren Station. A squat, industrial drum, or maybe a kiln. Less elegant than Atrion—more bolts and scaffolding than architecture—more jutting metal to snag a ship on.

“I’m not scared,” I say.

“Your voice is doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where it goes up at the end and you talk faster.” He adjusts his grip on the joystick. “You’re scared I’ll do something bad.”

“I’ve never let someone else fly my ship before. I’m being careful. There’s a difference.”

He nods slowly, one ear shifting beneath the fur. His tail sways behind the chair in a low arc.

“I was scared you’d do something bad too,” he says. “When you first found me.”

The words land softly, almost offhandedly. The way he delivers most things.

It hits harder than he realises.

I take a step back from the chair. “Alright,” I say, my voice quieter. “She’s all yours.”

He pushes the throttle forward. The Calyx responds with a low surge of acceleration that I feel through the soles of my boots. The station begins to grow in the viewport, its surface details sharpening; docking bay numbers stencilled in faded yellow, the slow blink of navigational beacons along the outer ring.

He’s smooth. The joystick inputs are small, millimetre adjustments, barely visible. The Calyx tracks the corridor chevrons without wavering, her nose aligned dead centre. When a crosswind from the station’s venting system nudges us two degrees starboard, he corrects before I even register the drift. One motion. Back on line.

The throttle eases down as we enter the outer approach zone. I watch his paw on the lever. He doesn’t jerk it, or step it down in increments, but rolls it back in a single motion, matching the deceleration curve on the display as if he’s reading it by feel rather than sight. The engine drops in pitch. The vibration through the deck softens.

I find myself uncrossing my arms.

He’s good.

The bay threshold approaches. He brings the throttle down to an eighth, and the Calyx glides through the invisible boundary where the station’s artificial gravity begins to tug at the hull. The transition is seamless. He doesn’t fight the sudden shift. He lets the station pull us in and adjusts the vertical trim to match.

I exhale. My shoulders drop.

Bay nine opens ahead of us, lit in cold blue from the interior guide lights. The landing pad is visible at the base, a flat grey rectangle marked with alignment crosses. Distance markers on the display count backwards. Five hundred metres. four-fifty. Four hundred.

“Is this it?”

I blink. “What do you mean?”

His orange eyes flick from the viewport to me and back. “This. The docking. There’s nothing to dodge, nothing to go around. Just…” He gestures at the viewport with his chin. “A straight line.”

“That’s a good thing,” I say. “Believe me, you want docking to be simple. Simple means nothing’s gone wrong.”

“But I’m just going where the line says to go. Is it always this… boring?”

He controls the Calyx like a veteran pilot but talks as if he’s never set foot in a cockpit. Nothing about this Expie makes sense. “Were you expecting a dogfight? Shipping’s a boring job.”

A pause.

His eyes flare. The amber glow catches the console lights.

“Hold on to something.”

“Hold on to wh—”

He jerks the joystick hard left.

The Calyx heaves. The viewport becomes a smear of motion—bay walls, guide lights, the grey rectangle of the landing pad, all of it spinning past in a blur of colour as the ship rotates on its axis. At the same instant his left paw shoves the throttle into reverse, and the spin tightens into something violent and precise.

I’m thrown sideways. My hip catches the edge of the console and I grab for a ceiling strut—fingers grazing it before I’m slammed against the starboard wall, air driven out of me. The cockpit wheels around me, the station exterior and bay interior alternating in the viewport like the drum of a washing machine.

A sound tears out of him—half-laugh, half-gasp—pure adrenaline.

He hauls the joystick the opposite direction and the spin reverses. My weight shifts, my boots lose the deck, and for one horrible instant I’m airborne in my own cockpit. Then gravity returns and dumps me against the port bulkhead. Through the viewport the docking bay is a cylinder of blurred light, the guide beacons streaking into continuous rings.

The comms panel screams to life. “Calyx, what the hell is happening out there!?”

I can’t answer. The Expie pulls the joystick into another spin—tighter this time, faster, a perfect rotation that shouldn’t be possible this close to a station wall. I catch a glimpse of him through the centrifugal haze; his black fur is swept back from his skull, flattened by the momentum, and the corners of his mouth pull wide, teeth and gums visible. His entire tail is twisted around the base of the captain’s chair, clenched down to hold him in place.

He’s lost in it. Feral. Experiencing something he’s never experienced before—and unable to stop.

The second the momentum reverses, I push off the wall and lunge. My hand finds his joystick arm. My fingers clamp down, nails digging in through the jacket sleeve. He’s stronger than he looks. I brace my knee against the chair base and pry his paw off the grip.

“Get, off!”

“W-wait—”

I shove him—hard. He tumbles sideways out of the chair, hitting the deck with a thud and a yelp as I throw myself into the seat. The joystick finds my hand and I centre it. The Calyx shudders, groans, and the spin bleeds off in sickening increments—one rotation, half, a quarter—until the viewport settles and the docking bay stops moving.

The ship drifts. Slightly off-axis, slightly nose-down, but stable. The landing pad sits below us, still centred.

My stomach churns. The cockpit smells of hot metal and stressed gyroscopes.

“Calyx! Come in, Calyx!”

I grab the comms. My hand is shaking. “Calyx here.” Swallow. “Had—had an issue with the autopilot. Got stuck—joystick got stuck, but I’m back in control and moving to land.”

A long exhale from the other side. “Copy that, Calyx. Take it slow. Bay nine is still yours.”

“Copy. Taking it slow. Calyx out.”

I release the comms key and let my head fall forward against the console. The cool metal presses against my forehead. My pulse throbs in my temples. My stomach performs one final roll and settles into a low, persistent nausea.

I turn my head to glare at him.

The cockpit is empty.

No Expie. No grey jacket. Just the faint scuff marks on the deck where he scrambled away and the lingering ghost of his feral laugh ringing in my ears.

I sit there for a long moment, staring at the vacant space beside the chair.

Then I straighten up, align the Calyx with the landing pad, and bring her down—slow, steady, boring. The way docking is supposed to be.

The starhand at Kiren is a tall man who looks like he was born holding a clipboard. He works the crowbar under the first crate’s lid, three sharp motions, same as every starhand at every station I’ve ever docked at. They must teach it somewhere.

I’m standing at the foot of the ramp, wincing as I try to fold my arms. I’ve got no clue what a broken rib feels like, but this could be close.

The lid pops free. He leans in, scanner ready.

He stops.

“What the hell happened to these?”

I try to project the same casual indifference I always do during handovers. It isn’t going well. I keep shifting on the spot trying to find whichever pose is least painful. I limp forward and peer into the crate.

I’ve delivered hundreds of these consignments. They’re always packed the same way. Neatly stacked, largest components at the bottom, smallest on top, every exposed corner cushioned by rivers of expansion foam.

This one looks like a crate that survived an engine explosion.

Drill assemblies, mounting brackets, precision-cut housing plates—all tangled together in a knot of metal and shredded foam. Pieces that should be sitting flat wedged diagonally, foam that should be filling gaps torn into strips. Like a snapshot of space debris caught mid-tumble, frozen in place the moment the spinning stopped.

The spinning.

I close my eyes. Behind them, the cockpit wheels.

The starhand is already levering open the second crate. The lid comes off and he doesn’t even bother with the scanner. He just looks inside, shakes his head, then looks at me.

“Half.”

“Half?”

“Fifty percent of the contract value. That’s the most I can authorise.”

“Nothing’s broken,” I say, stepping closer to the crate. I reach in and extract the bore guide, holding it up. “No cracks, see? It’s all just… shuffled around. Everything’s here and intact.”

“Everything’s here that I can see,” he says. “And nothing’s broken that I can see. But I’m not about to run diagnostics on two crates of mining equipment in a docking bay, am I?” He taps the tablet against his thigh. “Could be fine. Could be destined for the scrapyard. I don’t know, and neither do you.”

“Then get your team to check it.”

“Happy to.” He flips the tablet back around, taps twice, and reads from the screen. “Operations can catalogue and inspect within five business days. You’re welcome to wait for the assessment. If everything checks out, you’ll receive full payment minus a handling surcharge.” He looks up. “Or you take fifty percent now and we’re done.”

Five business days. Five days sitting in bay nine, burning through docking fees while delivering nothing, earning nothing, going nowhere. Daily rates at a mid-station like Kiren would eat through what little margin I have and then some.

But fifty percent barely covers fuel for the trip from Torren Relay.

Barely.

“Fine,” I say. “Fifty percent.”

The starhand produces a receipt chip. I thumb it without looking at the amount. He pockets his tablet and signals to a dock worker waiting by the equipment locker. The worker appears with a heavy-duty dolly, and together they begin the process of wheeling the first crate down the ramp.

I don’t help.

I stand at the top of the ramp with my arms folded, watching them wrestle the tangled, foam-gutted crates onto the dolly one at a time. The starhand doesn’t comment on my lack of assistance. He’s done this enough times to know what a displeased courier looks like, and he’s smart enough not to poke one.

The second crate clears the hold. The dolly squeaks across bay nine’s decking. The ramp whines shut behind me. The bay noise cuts off.

Silence. I’m alone with an empty cargo hold. No crates, no consignment, no evidence that this trip was ever worth making.

Fifty percent. My jaw tightens.

I turn on my heel and trace the metal grille beneath my feet, searching for orange eyes in the sub-deck.

“Where the hell are you?”

My voice is tight. Controlled. Only just. But then I close my eyes and all I can see is that little shit on the cockpit chair, trembling as a hundred credits tumble out of my ship and drift into the dead of space.

“Do you have any idea how much that little stunt just cost me?”

My bundle of jackets are still at the corner of the cargo hold, piled into what passes as a bed. I stop for a second. He didn’t move them into my cabin last night like he said he would. He slept out in the cold all alone?

That thought is quickly swallowed by bubbling anger.

“Half pay. Fifty percent. You think a small ship like this has that kind of margin to burn?”

Nothing under the grilles. I grip the cabin door—lift, slide—and barge in. The amber light greets me. The fold-out table is still flat against the wall. The bunk is empty, sheets rumpled. The bench sits closed and undisturbed.

“Fifty percent barely covers the fuel to get here.”

And it’s not even enough for full tanks. Kiren is far from other stations. Get bad luck at the freight board, gamble on the wrong contract, and I could run dry before I arrive—drifting through space until I starve.

My entire body shudders.

I pull open the first thing in reach—the bench lid. Way too small for him. There’s nothing but the charging cable and star chart and the space where the bullets used to be. I let it drop shut with a bang. “And now you’re hiding. Money is this ship’s lifeblood—stupid spins don’t fill her tanks!”

I check behind the bunk. I check the narrow gap between the kitchen strip and the wall. I glance into the cockpit.

Nothing.

“I let you fly my ship.” I’m pacing now, two steps one way, two steps back—that’s all the cabin allows. “I trusted you. I thought—” My fist clenches. “You asked me for one thing, one thing, and I said yes, and you repay me by doing spins in a docking bay and turning my cargo into mulch.”

The closet.

My hand closes around the latch.

“Half the delivery fee—gone. Because you were bored.”

I pull it open.

He’s pressed into the corner, knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped over his head, paws gripping the back of his own skull. The grey jacket has ridden up around his shoulders, bunched and twisted. He’s shaking. Not the subtle shiver of cold, but a full-body tremor that runs through him in waves.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—”

The words come out in a single unbroken stream, each one tumbling into the next without pause or breath. His voice is high and tight, a pitch I haven’t heard from him before—thin, cracked, stripped of the quiet confidence that diagnosed ice crystals and fixed a monitor with nothing more than a pawful of sealant.

“I didn’t mean it, didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, I’m s-sorry—”

His claws dig into the fur at the back of his neck. He presses harder into the corner, shoulders hunched, making himself as small as the closet will allow. His tail is wrapped so tight around his ankles that the orange tips have gone pale, and between his words a growl crawls out of his throat—the sound of an animal warning you to stay away.

He’s not apologising to me.

He’s bracing.

The anger drains out of me so fast it leaves a hollow space behind my ribs. I’ve never seen this posture before—not on a human, not even on an animal—but it’s so raw and primal that it’s unmistakable. The posture of a creature who knows exactly what comes after a mistake. The flinch before the blow.

I crouch down. Slowly. My knees pop against the cabin floor. I rest my forearms on my thighs and take a slow breath.

“Hey.” Quiet. “Stop. Look at me.”

He doesn’t look. The trembling continues. His claws stay locked behind his skull.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

A whimper escapes between the apologies—a small, involuntary sound that has no words in it at all.

I stay exactly where I am, crouched in front of the open closet, and I wait until the stream of sorrys begins to stutter and break apart, each one arriving a little further from the last, like an engine running out of fuel.

“I don’t need an apology.” I keep my voice low. “I just want you to promise me that you won’t do it again.”

The trembling slows. His arms loosen, just a fraction, enough for one orange eye to peer out from behind his elbow. It’s wet. The amber glow refracts through the moisture, casting a faint, unsteady light against the closet wall.

“That’s…” His voice is barely a whisper. “…all you want?”

I nod. “You did something wrong, and it hurt me. So I need you to promise you won’t do it again. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

He stares at me from behind his arm, searching my face, scanning for the lie, the angle, the moment where the pain arrives. I hold still and let him look.

His arms come down. Slowly, like lowering a drawbridge. His paws settle in his lap, and his gaze drops to them.

“Oh.” A breath. “I… won’t do it again.”

“Do you promise?”

A slow nod. His eyes meet mine. “I promise. And, and I’m sorry.”

“I know.” I reach up and grip the closet door frame, pulling myself to my feet. “Now get out of there and wipe those tears.” I step back, giving him room. “You’re a crewmate, not a stowaway. And crewmates don’t hide in the closet.”

He sits there for a moment longer, processing the word. Crewmate. His tail slowly unwraps from his ankles. Colour returns to the orange tips.

He unfolds himself from the corner with none of his usual fluidity. Stiff, tentative, like a creature remembering how its limbs work. He ducks through the closet door and stands in the cabin, the oversized jacket hanging off one shoulder. He drags a paw across his muzzle, smearing the wetness into his fur.

“Take a moment,” I say. “Give your heart a sec to calm down. I’ll be in the cockpit. Just got to make a quick call.”

The Expie nods silently. I crouch and pat his shoulder, then slip around the wall and into the cockpit. I lower myself onto the seat and press the headset over my ears.

“Kiren Station, this is Calyx, bay nine. I need to pass a message along.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “To a… Garrett Solen. Is there someone there who can pass it on to him?”

A long pause. Muffled voices in the background. A second of static.

“That’be me.” A voice unlike the other Kiren controller responds, gruff and slurred. “What’da want him to know?”

“It’s about his missing… parcel.” I clear my throat. “Checked the whole ship from tip to tail. Twice. No sign of it.”

A smack of the lips. Papers being rustled. “Mhm. I’ll let’im know.”

I toss the headset back into its holder and spin my chair around. The Expie is hovering by the door. The fur around his eyes is still wet, but he’s no longer trembling.

“How do you feel?” I ask.

“A little better… I think.” His voice is soft but steady.

“That means you’ve pulled ahead of me on the recovery front.” I pat my stomach. “Still feel like I’m about to throw up.”

He giggles, then catches himself. “Sorry. Again.”

“No more sorrys. It’s done, okay?

“Okay.” He looks down. “And, and, I made a promise—and I’ve only ever broken a promise once.”

Not the most reassuring thing to hear, but I’ll take it. Curiosity tugs at me, though. “What was the promise?”

“That…” His voice is small. “That we’d escape. Together.”

As always, it lands softly, offhandedly. Delivered as a simple fact. Yet it churns in the pit of my stomach.

“Do you have another one of these that needs fixing?”

The Expie wanders over to my starboard monitor, entirely oblivious to the gut punch he just gave me. Already bounced back from the closet, it seems. Or it’s a mask—an innocent one—of pretending to be unaffected. A learned response from his past, maybe.

“Uh… no,” I say, collecting my thoughts. “Nothing as obvious as the monitor. But feel free to look for something. Much prefer you fixing things to breaking them.”

“I didn’t break anything.” He meets my eyes, then glances away. “Anything that’s part of the ship, I mean.”

Anything that I can see.

He stares at the image on the starboard monitor, the caution lines of the docking bay stretching out around the Calyx. He taps his paw on the edge of the screen as if weighing a thought. Then, a tilt of the head. His eyes find mine. The faintest flicker.

“I knew it was wrong,” he says. “But when the thought popped into my head, I couldn’t stop. It just felt… incredible.“

I believe him. He’s not a kid with a shiny new toy. He’s a prisoner getting his first real taste of freedom. The freedom to make choices—good or bad—by himself, for himself.

I just wish he had asked. We could have unloaded the cargo and found a nice, quiet patch of space to do barrel rolls until my stomach called it quits.

“And, you gotta admit…”

There’s a fragile, tentative edge to his voice. Testing the waters.

“…it was a cool trick, wasn’t it?”

I stare at him.

He stares back. One ear twitches beneath the fur.

“Right,” I say. “Just for that, next time I make omelettes, you’re getting the smaller half.”

His eyes blow wide. He sniffs. “You’re so cruel to me…”

A thin smile spreading across his muzzle says otherwise.

Chapter 6: Something Cool

The outbound freight board is a relic. Not a charming one. The kind that belongs in a museum behind glass, with a plaque reading “We used to do it like this.” Mechanical panels flip in vertical columns, each one clacking as it cycles through destination, cargo size, and payout figures. The sound fills this corner of Kiren Station like a hundred tiny jaws snapping shut in sequence.

I lean against the wall opposite, one boot flat against the metal behind me, datapad in hand. My thumb taps the edge of the screen. Not on anything. Just tapping.

The board cycles. Torren, single crate, biological samples, hazard surcharge. Payout: barely worth warming up the engines. Next. Atrion, bulk silicate, fourteen tonnes. Too heavy for the Calyx by a factor of three. Next. Outrim Depot Gamma, machine parts, express delivery, decent money—but Gamma is seventeen days in the wrong direction, and seventeen days of fuel to get there would swallow the fee whole.

I need several contracts. Not one good one. Several. And they all need to point the same way. Stack the cargo hold, plot the route, hit each stop and come out the other end with enough to cover Kiren’s docking fees, the fuel I burned getting here, and the fifty percent I left on the table.

The board doesn’t care what I need. It flips through its listings with mechanical indifference. Clack. Clack. Clack.

No luck. Not right now, anyway. Boards like these refresh every hour as new requests filter in from the network. I’ll walk around, stretch the ache out of my ribs, and circle back.

I push off the wall and pocket the datapad.

A whisper slides into my right ear.

“Can you hear me?“

I don’t flinch. The earpiece is snug enough that I’d forgotten it was there, but the voice is unmistakable. Small. Close.

Conspiratorial.

“You know you don’t need to whisper, right?” I whisper back. “No one else can hear you.”

“But it feels like you’re a secret spy. And I’m giving you a secret mission.“

I want to respond with a groan. But I let it go. The smile wins. “Alright, HQ, what are my orders?”

“Ooo, HQ. I like that. Oh, and your orders…” He draws the word out, savouring it. “…if you dare to accept… is to bring me back something cool.“

“And this will protect our station from enemy threats?”

“Threats?” A beat. “Oh, yeah—definitely.“

“Mhm. I’ll see what I can do, HQ.”

“Over and out.” A click that isn’t really a click, just the sound of him making one with his mouth.

I want to laugh. A familiar emptiness in my chest stops me.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget. He sounds so light—so untouched—and for a moment I almost believe he is. Then I’m back in the cargo hold watching him shove the barrel between his teeth and pull the trigger over and over.

I keep trying to make sense of it. But it’s like there’s a crack in the hull, and I’m tracing it, looking for where the damage started—only to find it goes all the way back to the factory floor. He was built to work and die.

And somehow, right now, he sounds like the happiest person I’ve ever met.

The corridor opens in stages. First the ceiling rises; the low industrial ductwork gives way to exposed brickwork that arches overhead in broad, uneven courses. Real brick—russet and amber, the mortar between them rough and hand-smeared.

Next, the walls shift from metal to brick. I run my fingertips along it as I walk. It’s warm. Residual heat from the kiln process, maybe, baked into the bones of the station itself.

That explains the shape I saw on approach. Kiren isn’t built like a station; it’s built like a furnace. Somewhere nearby, on one of the moons or asteroid belts, there must be clay deposits worth mining. Easier to fire and stack than to fabricate composite panels out here, I suppose. The result is a station that feels like an old market town hung in the vacuum of space.

I turn a corner. The noise reaches me before the crowd does. Voices layered over voices, the clatter of goods being handled, the hiss and spit of something cooking on open heat.

The corridor widens one final time and spills me out into a square.

It’s packed.

Market stalls crowd the open space, crammed together wherever there’s room and in several places where there isn’t. Canopies of mismatched tarp and corrugated sheet, strung between lamp posts and bolted to the brickwork with heavy rivets. Beneath them, vendors hawk everything from ration packs to engine components to clothing. Smoke rises from grates set into the floor—exhaust vents, probably—but the food stalls have colonised them, positioning their grills directly over the rising heat. Meat sizzles. Oil pops. The air is thick with flavour.

Yet one thing pushes it into sensory overload: neon. Strips of it, tubes of it, hand-bent signs in colours that fight each other for dominance. Pink against green against red against blue, all of it reflecting off the wet floor in long, rippling streaks.

It’s loud and grimy and alive in a way that the sterile corridors behind me aren’t. I wade in.

The crowd is dense enough that movement becomes negotiation—shoulder angles, half-steps, the constant micro-calculations of navigating around people who won’t yield. I keep my head up and my hands close to my pockets.

Someone slams into my shoulder.

Not a brush. Not a graze. A solid impact that wrenches me sideways. I catch my balance and turn.

“Watch it.”

The man doesn’t stop. I get the back of his head—a bowler cap, and a thin trickle of cigarette smoke curling upward from his right hand, caught in the neon and turned pink. He rounds a stall and disappears.

I roll my shoulder. It aches. The same side as my bruised ribs, naturally. I watch the space where he vanished for a moment longer, patting my pockets. Nothing’s missing.

Just keep moving. Never worth picking a fight in these places.

Three stalls deeper into the market, a woman with scaled skin and vertical pupils—some outer colony adaptation I’ve never encountered before—steps into my path, holding up a glass vial filled with something luminescent and green.

“Metabolic enhancer,” she says. Her voice clicks between syllables. “Fifty percent off. You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

“Then—”

“Not tired enough to drink that.”

She shrugs and pivots to the next passerby. I move past as she clicks out her next pitch.

“Reproductive enhancer. Fifty percent off. Perfect for the missus.”

The market thins toward the edges of the square, where the stalls become more scavenged, more improvised. Plastic crates stacked as display shelves. Goods laid out on blankets over the wet floor. The neon doesn’t reach as far here; the light is dimmer, from overhead lamps that buzz and flicker.

And there, tucked between a repair kiosk with its shutters half-down and a food cart that’s seen better decades, is a small stall.

Four dress-racks, arranged in a loose semicircle. Red, blue, yellow, and one that might have been white before the station air got to it. Clothes hang from them in no particular logic: jackets beside scarves beside trousers beside what I hope is a fake beard. Off-brand labels, mismatched sizes, sleeves that don’t match bodies, colours that don’t match anything.

I almost walk past.

But something catches my eye. Tucked between a too-large raincoat and a faded jumpsuit, half-hidden by the garments pressing in on either side.

I reach out and push the raincoat aside. And for one long moment, I can only stare at it.

It’s perfect.

The board hasn’t changed much. A few listings have cycled off, but nothing new has taken their place. The same mechanical panels flip and clack, shuffling the same inadequate offerings in their endless vertical dance.

I shift my weight and adjust the plastic bag in my left hand. It’s yellowed with age, the kind of bag that’s been reused so many times it’s gone soft and no longer crinkles.

The contents swing gently against my thigh. Light. Carefully folded by the kind old woman who owned the stall. She was more prosthetic than skin. Her metal fingers typed the price into a vintage cash register—one probably older than her. She asked if it was a present for my son.

In a manner of speaking, I said.

The corridor is busier now. A handful of other couriers have gathered in the same stretch of wall space, sharing a universal look of weariness, forced to stare at a noisy board instead of sleep, hoping it’ll put food on the table.

I recognise one of them. Not by name—by hat. The bowler cap, perched on a head that’s taller than mine by a good four inches. The same bastard who slammed into me. His coat is long, charcoal-coloured, hanging past his knees in a way that’s meant to look effortless but probably took three mirrors to get right. Cigarette smoke curls from his right hand, flattening against the low ceiling before the ventilation drags it sideways.

He’s got the wannabe tough-guy look down pat, complete with bumping into people and not apologising. Good for him. Doesn’t look like much of a courier, so what’s a man like him doing at a freight board?

He doesn’t look at me. I stop looking at him. We both look at the board.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

The panels cycle.

And then, three lines flip simultaneously. Top to bottom, in quick succession, the mechanical tiles snapping into place with three eerily similar entries that I first think is a glitch.

LINDENFIELD — 6 — ASAP — MKT

LINDENFIELD — 3 — ASAP — MKT

LINDENFIELD — 2 — ASAP — MKT

Eleven crates. Same destination. All available. All paying market rate.

I glance sideways. The other couriers have noticed. Datapads are rising. Thumbs are moving. The man in the bowler cap hasn’t moved yet—his cigarette hand is still at his side.

No time to waste.

I pull the datapad from my pocket and tap into the freight acceptance portal. The listings are already populating—weight brackets, origin bays, consignment tags. No time to check the contents. Weight is all that matters. Six crates at—I scan the figures—manageable. Three more, manageable. Two more, tight but doable.

I accept all three. One tap, two taps, three. Confirmation chimes stack on top of each other.

Bay nine. Ship callsign: Calyx. Cargo hold door: open and available for loading.

I key it in, thumbprint the dispatch authorisation, and pocket the datapad before the cigarette reaches the bowler cap man’s lips.

It’s nice to have good luck for a change.

I push off the wall and turn toward the docking corridor, the plastic bag swinging at my side. Three steps in, I tap the earpiece.

“Hey.”

A pause. Then, whispered: “Agent reporting in.“

“At ease, HQ. Listen—I’ve got cargo incoming. Workers are going to wheel some crates into the hold. I need you to open the bay ramp for them.”

“People?” The whisper drops lower. “Coming inside the ship?“

“They won’t come further than the hold. Just stay in the cockpit with the door shut until I’m back. Ten minutes.”

Silence. Then: “Okay.“

“Good. You know how to open it?”

“I know every bit of the cargo hold by heart.“

“Try not to sound so proud about that.”

I let the earpiece settle and keep walking. The market noise fades behind me as the corridor narrows again—brick giving way to metal, neon giving way to flat industrial strip lighting. The transition is abrupt. The corridor stretches ahead of me, punctuated by heavy warehouse doors on either side.

I let my thoughts drift to the route. Lindenfield. It loops us back toward the inner belt. Which means heading toward—

My stride falters.

Torren Relay. It’s one station before Torren Relay. Where I picked up crate four. Where whatever the Expie was running from began.

Shit. I should have asked him. Should have mentioned the destination before I locked in the contracts. Should have…

“Hey,” I say.

“Mm?“

“Quick question.”

“Yeah?“

I’m passing the plastic bag between my hands, figuring out how to word this. But I can’t—not like this. He’s alone on my ship, knows how to fly it, and if he panics…

No. What am I saying? He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.

“You still there?” he asks.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Is something wrong?“

“No, it’s just…” I reach for something, the first thing that comes to mind. “Did you sleep in the cargo hold last night?”

A beat. Slightly too long.

“No.“

“Then why were your jackets out there this morning?”

“They’re not my jackets. They’re yours.“

“You know what I mean. You went to grab them last night but they were still there in the morning—exact same spot.”

Another pause. Longer this time. I can almost hear him arranging his answer.

“I moved them out this morning. To make room. In your cabin.“

He’s not a very good liar. But I let it go. If he’s more comfortable sleeping out there, alone, so be it. The fur must keep him warm.

The industrial section is all long, identical corridors, as if the architect couldn’t draw without using a grid line. A grey sea of metal walls, roller doors, and the occasional forklift parked against the bulkhead. It’s quiet here, not a worker in sight. Must be a weekend; hard to keep track of the days in space. The market noise is gone entirely, replaced by the low hum of station infrastructure—air cycling, power conduits, the distant clank of automated cargo movers coming from the guts of the station.

Convex mirrors hang at each junction, bolted to the edges of warehouse doors—the kind meant for forklift operators to check blind corners. They stretch the corridor behind me into a warped tunnel.

I pass the first mirror without thinking. The second, I glance at out of habit.

The third, I look properly.

A shape. Fifty metres back. Long coat. Brim of a hat pulled low.

I keep walking. My pace doesn’t change. But my eyes stay on the next mirror as it approaches, another disc bolted to a junction corner, ten metres ahead.

I reach it. I look.

He’s there. Same distance. Same pace. Hands in his coat pockets. Head down. Following.

Could be nothing. Could be a courier headed to the same bay cluster.

Could be something with momentum. Something that doesn’t stop when you’d like it to.

I take the next left. Down another metal hallway. And then I take the next left again. A u-turn. If he follows, it’s not coincidence.

Twenty steps. Thirty. I reach the next mirror.

He’s still behind me.

Think, think. The company might not have been convinced when I reported in, so they sent a private eye to tail me. That could be it—if the man wasn’t so blatantly obvious. He’s not even trying to be subtle. Why?

I quicken my pace—not running, not yet. The plastic bag jostles against my thigh. The corridor ahead is straight. Long. No turn for ages. The same warehouses and factories, but the walls shift from metal to brick. I don’t remember this stretch from the walk over.

Shit—which way to the ship bays?

It takes too long to reach the next mirror.

He’s closer.

I take a right this time. The corridor is identical—roller doors, strip lighting and faded red. No crowds. No cover. Just brickwork and distance and the growing sweat on my forehead.

Another mirror. The gap is shrinking.

The earpiece chirps. “There’s a guy outside with a big trolley thing. Should I—“

“Listen to me.” My voice comes out low and fast. “I think I’m being followed.”

Silence.

“What?“

“He’s been behind me since the freight board.”

“No…” The whisper cracks, pitches upward into something ragged. “They found me, they found me, they—“

“Hey.” I force calm into my voice. “Breathe. I need you to breathe.”

“But if they—“

“I don’t know who it is. Could be a mugger. Could be unrelated. I just need you to stay put, prime the engines, and watch the starboard camera. Can you do that for me?”

A shaky breath. Then another. No words.

I need to give him options—a way out. “If they try to get into the cabin, you punch the throttle. Everything not bolted down gets thrown out the back.”

“And leave you behind? I—”

“They don’t give a shit about me—you’re the one they’re after. So if you’ve got no other choice… you save yourself. Understand?”

A long, agonising pause.

“No.”

It’s whispered, his voice shaking. And yet it lands firm.

“Can’t leave you.” His words warp around his whimpers. “Not again.”

“You haven’t left me—and I haven’t left you. This is just in case, okay? We need to be ready to go, and the co-pilot always primes the engines.”

A sniff.

“Okay.“

“I’ll be there soon. Promise.”

“Please.” Barely a whisper. The earpiece goes quiet.

I reach the next mirror. My eyes scan the glass for the distorted shape behind me. He’s closer. His right arm extended.

He’s drawn a gun.

The bang comes before I finish the thought.

Brickwork explodes to my left. Dust and clay peppers my face, and a hole appears in the wall not six inches from my head. The sound is enormous in the narrow corridor—a flat, percussive crack that bounces off every surface and hits me twice.

I run.

The plastic bag swings wild as I sprint. My boots slam the deck. His footfalls join mine, a second rhythm behind me, gaining. Another shot. The bullet sparks off a roller door to my right, a flash of orange and a metallic scream.

Left. Right. The corridors blur. I’m zig-zagging between junctions, taking every turn I can. My ribs scream at me to stop. My shirt catches on something—a protruding bolt—and yanks against my chest. I wrench it free and keep running.

Another turn. Ahead on my right—a roller door, pulled up to chest height, warm orange spilling out beneath. My back scrapes the bottom edge of the door as I tumble through onto my hands and knees.

The air hits me like a wall—hot, dry, thick with powdered minerals and smoke. I scramble to my feet and take it in.

The factory is a single long, dark chamber. An industrial kiln occupies the centre like an altar, its midsection wrapped in panels of foggy, heat-thickened glass. Flame dances within—a molten, shifting orange that pulses and breathes. Conveyor belts feed into it from the left, raw clay shapes disappearing into a mouth of heat.

Beyond the kiln’s reach, pitch-black. Automated. No workers.

No witnesses.

I circle the kiln. The heat presses against my skin as I pass the glass panels—intense, oppressive, the kind that makes you squint. The hiss of burning clay fills my ears. I come around to the output side. The belt continues. Bricks emerge finished, fired, glowing faintly at their edges, riding the conveyor down until they vanish into a tunnel cut through the floor.

I press myself against the kiln’s housing, crouched beneath the glass, my back to the burning metal. The belt of fresh bricks rolls past at face height.

The kiln’s fire shifts. The shadows change.

Through the foggy glass, the orange light casts everything in flickering silhouette—walls, machinery, even the wet clay shapes riding the belts. The shadows stretch and shrink with every breath of the flame.

And there—at the edge of the light’s reach—a new shadow.

It moves. Slow. Deliberate. Sliding along the wall, one arm extended, the blunt end of a gun.

The bowler cap is unmistakable, even in negative.

I press harder against the kiln. The metal burns through my shirt.

The shadow moves along the factory’s side, circling the kiln the same direction I came, coming ever closer.

I have seconds.

Options. Lunge when he rounds the corner. But I don’t know his weight, don’t know his training. One mistake means a bullet in my gut at point-blank range.

The conveyor belt clicks beside me. Bricks roll past.

My fingers close around the nearest one and I rip my hand back with a hiss. The pain is instant and searing—the surface hot enough to brand. Of course it’s hot. Of course it is.

The shadow grows. He’s rounding the kiln’s curve. Ten metres. Eight.

I look into the plastic bag. A half-second of hesitation. Then I reach in. My fingers find the folded fabric inside, soft and thick. I lift it out as quietly as I can and wrap it around my hand in a clumsy bundle.

Three metres. His shadow stretches tall as he nears the kiln’s light, the gun trained straight ahead.

I grab the brick.

The heat seeps through the fabric instantly, a deep, building burn. I grip it tight, raise it above my shoulder, and wait.

The shadow merges with the kiln’s edge.

He rounds the corner.

I swing.

The brick connects the side of his head. The gun goes off—a blinding flash and deafening bang, bouncing off every surface of the factory. Pain tears through my ears. Something sparks off metal nearby, and a ricochet whizzes past.

Then, darkness. The muzzle flash leaves a green smear across my vision. A piercing squeal swallows every other sound.

I blink.

The orange light returns in increments. The kiln still burns. The conveyor still moves.

The man is on the ground.

He’s sprawled face-down, the bowler cap knocked two feet away, the gun loosely tangled in fingers that aren’t gripping anything. A dark pool is forming beneath his head, seeping into the grooves of the brickwork floor. It catches the kiln-light and turns the colour of rust.

There’s a burning in my palm. I look at the brick in my hand. The corner is darker than the rest. Wet. Slick.

I drop it. It hits the floor with a dull thud and rolls once before settling. The grey fabric follows, pooling beside my boot, scorched and crumpled.

I killed him.

The thought arrives not as revelation but as fact, flat and absolute. I swung a brick at a man’s head and the man is dead.

My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking. The ringing in my ears won’t stop and there’s a wetness on the side of my face that might be blood or might be sweat and I can’t bring myself to check.

I can only stare at him. Flames dance at the edge of my vision while shadows flicker across his body, growing and shrinking, making it look like he’s breathing.

He’s not.

Why? Why did this happen? I’ve never… I’ve never—

The earpiece crackles, barely audible through the ringing in my ears.

“They’re wheeling in another set of crates. Where are you?” A pause. “Did… did you get away?“

I swallow. My throat clicks. The roaring flame almost devours my voice.

“Yeah, I’m…” The words come out wrong. Too thin. Forced. “I’m fine.”

A sigh of relief, then a nervous chuckle. “I told you, didn’t I? You’re like a secret spy—but a real one!“

My lips squeeze tight. I don’t know what to say.

“But, um…” His voice drops. “There’s still a lot of people walking in and out of the hold. Are you sure they’re all safe?“

I can picture him in the cockpit, paws on his knees, tail tucked around his ankles, orange eyes glued to the starboard monitor, desperately hoping the next human to step into frame will be me.

I want to say yes. I want to reassure him it’s safe. That’s what he needs to hear.

But I just don’t know.

“Stay put. I’ll be right there.”

I crouch down. My knees don’t want to bend. Every joint has locked with adrenaline. The kiln roars behind me, but the heat isn’t enough to stop me from shivering.

I can’t rest. Three gunshots in an otherwise dead district. Someone must have heard. And what if there were cameras? It was self-defence, but there’ll still be an investigation. They’ll search the Calyx and find the Expie, and someone less stupid than me won’t think twice about telling the company for an easy fifty thousand credits.

And who’s to say the dead man at my feet wasn’t already on their payroll?

As my breaths break into a wheeze, I reach for the grey fabric on the floor. My fingers close around it. It’s warm from the brick, specks of ash and clay rubbing between my fingers. I fold it against my chest.

Then I run like hell.

Chapter 7: Pressure

The docking corridors blur past. Overhead signs count down in stencilled yellow—fifteen, fourteen, thirteen—each one a checkpoint as I sprint through. My ribs scream. My lungs scream louder. Folded clothes are crushed against my chest, held like I’m carrying something fragile through a meteor storm.

Twelve, Eleven, Ten.

Strip lighting stutters above me. People in high-vis coveralls turn to stare as I tear past. The edges of everything have gone soft.

I round the final corner and there she is.

The Calyx, her ramp extended, hold doors wide open, white light escaping her interior. A faint blue glow bleeds beneath her flanks—engines primed, idling, heat shimmer distorting the surrounding air. A dock worker retreats with an empty dolly, wheels squeaking, and inside the hold I see them: crates, freshly delivered, arranged in two uneven rows down the centre. All eleven of them, waiting.

“I see you!“

The earpiece nearly splits my skull. His voice is pure relief, cracked and breathless and loud enough that the dock worker glances in my direction.

“Get on, quick quick quick!“

I don’t need telling twice. My boots hit the ramp and my legs almost give out—my right foot skids sideways. I catch myself on the ramp’s edge rail and haul my body upward. One step, two step, three. The hold swallows me.

The crates are arranged in a rough approximation of order, but none of them are strapped down. The delivery crews never do that. That’s the courier’s job.

I should strap them. I know I should. It’s the very first thing they teach you. Day one, hour one, of pilot certification: unsecured cargo in transit is a death sentence looking for a signature. Every crate a projectile, every turn a trigger.

But there’s no chance I’m waiting around. Not with a dead man cooling on a factory floor three districts behind me—his blood pooling in the kiln-light.

Unsecured cargo is the least of my worries. And it’s a manageable worry: a smooth departure, no sudden inputs, and once we’re clear we can drift in Kiren’s orbit and spend all the time we need webbing everything down. Slow, steady and boring—the way shipping is supposed to be.

The way everything is supposed to be.

I take a step toward the cabin door—

A whistle. Sharp. Behind me.

I spin.

Two men are crossing the bay floor, twenty metres out and closing. They’re dressed identically: short-sleeve button-downs with Kiren’s logo embroidered on their chest pockets.

Station officials. The universal look.

God damn it. A customs check. Of all the moments in all the stations in all the galaxy, it just had to be now.

The one on the right is tall and thin, the kind of build that makes shirts hang like they’re still on the rack. His colleague is shorter but wider, with a beard and beefy arms that strain his short sleeves. An x-ray scanner hangs from a lanyard around his neck. Both have clipboards in hand—actual clipboards, the kind with paper that curls at the edges. Either Kiren is decades behind on requisitions, or they just like the look of it.

I wipe sweat from my face with the back of my hand. My breathing is ragged, too fast—probably look like a drug smuggler mid-breakdown. I force my shoulders down and unclench my jaw. Breathe through the nose. Project calm. Project boredom. Project anything other than I just killed a man with a brick and I need to leave immediately.

“No no no—”

The Expie’s voice in my ear, small and shattered.

“—it’s them. It’s them! We gotta go.“

I toss the clothes into the corner of the hold and face the approaching men, speaking through clenched teeth. “It’s just customs. Standard check of the cargo. That’s it.”

“It’s not customs—it’s them.“

The men are ten metres out now. The thin one raises a hand in greeting.

I raise a hand in response. “Just shut up and let me deal with them.”

“We gotta go, please!“

“Running from a customs check”—I force the words through a smile aimed at the officials—”is going to draw a lot more attention and make things so much worse. Believe me.”

“You don’t get it—they’ll kill you!“

They’re too close now. I can’t respond without drawing attention. All I can do is keep the mic open, let the Expie hear for himself that it’s routine.

The pair stop at the base of the ramp. “Afternoon.” The thin one’s voice is clipped, efficient. “Kiren Station control, compliance division.” He taps the embroidered pocket with his pen. “We noted an anomaly in the booking system: three consignors, eleven crates, a single dispatch window. Quite a large haul for a small-hull vessel.” He flips to the next page of his clipboard. “Just checking the goods match the manifest and duties are settled. Standard. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

My voice comes out steadier than I feel. Muscle memory. I’ve done this dance before; different stations, different faces, same script.

“They’re lying.” The Expie’s voice is a fractured whisper. “Lying lying lying.“

“Anything to declare ahead of time?” the thin man asks. “Hazardous materials, biological samples, live cargo?”

Aside from the Expie, I don’t even know what I’ve agreed to ship. I accepted those contracts blind. For all I know there’s a crate of military-grade explosives three metres behind me.

“No, sir.”

“Listen to me.” His breathing is rapid, shallow. I can hear each tiny gasp through the earpiece. “They always look like this. They wear the same clothes as each other and run through their stupid lists. Every day, the same thing.“

The thin man slips to the next page on his clipboard. His bearded colleague isn’t even looking at his. He’s looking at me.

“Let’s get this done.” The thin man clicks his pen. “Corporate identifier?”

“Chasma Couriers.”

“Number of crew?”

“One.”

“Any passengers?”

“I ship cargo, not people.”

“Zero, then.” He doesn’t write it down. “Vessel callsign?”

“Calyx.”

“Spelling?”

“Get back from the door.“

“Cee, uh…” The Expie’s voice in my ear tangles with my own. “Charlie-alfa-lima-yankee-expie.”

His pen pauses mid-letter. “What was that last one?”

“X-ray.”

“Right. Destination?”

“Get back,” the Expie repeats. His voice has changed. Something has hardened beneath the fear. “Get clear of the door.“

Two voices, two conversations, one skull. The thin man is watching me, pen hovering over the page, waiting for an answer I don’t have room to form. I take a half-step backward, into the hold. My boot finds the grating.

“Sir? Destination?”

“You close the door. I’ll start the take-off.“

The words knock the air out of me. I turn to my side and hiss into the earpiece. “Don’t you dare. Kill the engines—now.”

“Everything alright, sir?”

I turn back. The thin man’s pen has left the page. His head is tilted.

“What’s da’matter?” His bearded colleague speaks for the first time, voice low and slurred. “Talkin’ to yourself?”

“I’m just…” The words come out too slow. “Talking to the co-pilot.” I point at my earpiece.

The bearded man squints. A gruff sound escapes his throat—half laugh, half scoff. “On your crew o’one?”

Something breaks inside my chest. Not a rib. Something worse. I make a sound that’s meant to be a laugh. It comes out wrong, a strangled, stuttering thing that convinces no one, least of all me.

“Forgot to count myself.”

The thin man exchanges a glance with his colleague. A shrug.

It’s just a little slip up. It doesn’t matter. They care about the cargo, not the crew. It doesn’t mat—

“They know.” The Expie’s whisper is barely a breath. “They won’t leave. Get ready.“

“Stop!” I turn and snarl into the earpiece. “Listen to me—this is under control. But if you do this, we are fucked. You hear me? Fucked.“

The customs officials say something but I’m no longer listening. I’m waiting, teeth clenched, for the Expie’s response and nothing else.

But somehow I already know: he’s made up his mind. And nothing I do will change what’s about to happen.

I’m powerless.

An almost forgotten feeling. The last time, I was seventeen. No matter how hard I screamed and cried, nothing would change. Mum would die. And I would be alone.

Here it is again. That same feeling. The one that dragged itself across many hopeless months. But this time, it’s condensed to little more than a second.

The bay is quiet. The thin man’s pen touches the page. The bearded man shifts his weight, and the untouched scanner sways against his chest.

My earpiece crackles.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But I’m not losing you too.”

The engines roar—a full-throated, deck-shaking surge of power. The floor lurches. My knees buckle and I’m down—palms slapping the grating, metal biting into my skin.

The ramp between the two men begins to rise away, the hydraulics groaning as the ship lifts off the landing pad. The thin man stumbles backward, clipboard falling from his grip. The bearded one grabs for the ramp’s edge rail—

The Calyx pushes forward. The acceleration is merciless. I brace one foot against the grate and fight to keep from sliding toward the open bay doors.

“Da’hell are you doing?! Stop!”

The bearded man’s voice, swallowed by the engine howl. His fingers slip from the edge rail. A ten-foot drop, a scream of pain. Then a screech of metal. I look up in time to see the nearest crate begin to slide. It picks up speed with horrifying ease, riding the smooth grating toward the open door.

I leap sideways. My shoulder hits the ground as the crate rushes past, clips the edge of the door and tips. It rolls down the ramp and impacts the bay below with a sound like a hull breach. Metal components burst across the hangar bay in a spray of grey blood.

The Calyx is accelerating. The rumble builds through the deck, through my knees, through my teeth. The hold is a deathtrap. Ten crates twitch with each minute correction of the ship’s trajectory, testing their freedom.

I key the earpiece. “Slow down!” My voice cracks. “Slow the fuck down!“

No response. Or I can’t hear it over the engines—an ear-splitting roar you never experience within a sealed hull.

But the hull isn’t sealed. And in moments we’ll reach the limits of the station’s artificial atmosphere. And then—

Hands and knees, fingers hooked into the grating for grip, dragging myself to the starboard wall. The bay door lever is there—above the crumpled clothes, a red handle recessed into the hull. Three metres away. Two.

The ship surges. The trajectory shifts. I’m flung up, my back slamming against the wall, the impact driving the air from my lungs.

But my hand finds the lever behind my shoulder. My wrist bends wrong and my fingers twist around the metal and I pull.

A hydraulic groan. The bay doors shudder, two massive panels folding shut. Through the narrowing gap the station exterior slides past, guide beacons streaking. The boundary is approaching fast. If those doors aren’t sealed before we cross it—

A metal shriek from deeper in the hold. Another crate has broken free. It slides across the grating, picking up speed, angled directly at the starboard rear wall.

Directly at me.

I try to push off the wall, but g-forces pin me—an invisible vice crushing me into the hull. My boots slip on the grating. I twist and shove and manage to throw my upper body sideways—

The crate hits the wall with an explosive bang that I feel in my bones.

My right foot doesn’t clear it.

The bottom of the crate catches my ankle—pins it to the hull with the weight of everything inside. For one fraction of a second there’s no pain. Just pressure. The mechanical fact of something being where it shouldn’t be.

Then the pain arrives.

It comes like an orange sun—total, blinding, erasing everything. My scream fills the hold, bounces off the closing bay doors, and disappears into the engines’ roar. My hands claw at the grating beneath me. My vision tunnels to a single point of light.

The bay doors seal shut with a final, heavy thunk. The wind cuts out. The roar softens to a hum.

The Calyx carries us forward, leaving Kiren Station behind.

I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything except agony, and the cold metal grating pressing against my cheek, and the distant, tinny sound of a voice in my ear asking if I’m okay.

Asking it over and over.

Asking it like a prayer.

Chapter 8: Reckoning

Fragments. Disconnected. A transmission cutting in and out.

Being dragged. The grating beneath his back, each ridge catching his shirt, metal teeth biting into his spine. Small hands—paws—gripping his wrists, straining, the sound of effort through clenched teeth. Breathing. Not his own. Close. Rapid. Desperate. Punctuated by whimpers that might have been words.

Something being wrapped around his ankle. Tight, tight, tighter. A sound like tearing fabric. Cargo webbing, the ratcheting click of it being pulled taut.

Then something squeezing around his arm. Warm fur brushing across his neck. Paw pads pressing in, tapping to the beat of his heart.

Then, nothing. A long, formless nothing that swallows him whole.

The nebula persists. Warm and empty, a cocoon of grey static that softens every thought before it fully forms. He’s aware of being somewhere, but the where keeps slipping.

The Calyx rumbles around him—a vibration he knows in his marrow. She’s moving. She’s decided on a heading, all by herself.

Time passes. Or seems to. The fog swallows it whole, stretches and compresses it until measurement becomes meaningless. Minutes could be hours. Hours could be days, or nothing at all. Almost every sense is buried beneath that soft, humming grey, packed in wool, reduced to the barest suggestion of itself.

Almost.

One thing cuts through.

Eggs. The smell of eggs cooking in oil.

My eyes open.

The ceiling. My ceiling. The amber light running the length of the cabin.

The bunk. I’m in my bunk.

But something’s wrong. Very wrong.

My right leg is raised at an angle that lifts my hip from the bed. I follow the line of it upward with bleary eyes. A yellow bedsheet has been knotted around the ceiling grate, forming a crude sling that holds my leg from the knee down. Further up, cargo webbing from the hold wraps my shin in tight, overlapping bands, cinched above the ankle.

And higher still, around the ankle itself, grey composite panels, cracked into rough halves, positioned on either side of my foot and bound in place with more webbing. Splints. The edges are jagged. The binding work is uneven. Built by paws that have never built one before.

Cold seeps in two distinct patches, pressed against my skin in the gaps between the webbing. I crane my neck to look. On one side, a vacuum-sealed bag of diced ham, its surface beaded with condensation. On the other, the zip-lock bag of imitation chicken thighs I’d forgotten existed. Both repurposed as ice packs.

The Calyx rumbles. The sizzle from the kitchen strip is louder now. Oil popping, something being turned. I know that smell, but a single whiff turns my stomach.

I want to empty my guts all over my bed. I don’t know why. But I’m caught in that wretched middle ground—desperate to be sick and get it over with, the body refusing to cooperate.

But the strangest thing… stranger than the splint… stranger than the frozen poultry strapped to my leg:

Nothing hurts.

It should hurt. The memory is still fresh, white-hot, total. The crate hadn’t just hit my ankle. It had crushed it. I’d felt it give way, not a clean snap, but a splintering, a crumbling.

I wiggle my toes, just barely. A millimetre of movement.

The sensation travels up my leg. Things being loose that shouldn’t be loose. A grinding, like gravel shifting beneath the skin.

But no pain. Not even a flicker.

My head swims. The fog clings to the edges of my thoughts. Warm mead flows through my veins, and the nerves are too drunk to care.

I try to think. The fog resists.

I have a medkit buried behind the junk in my bench storage. Came with the ship. Might have over-the-counter painkillers that expired a decade ago. But even if I swallowed the entire packet, it would barely numb a sprained ankle, let alone whatever the hell this is. I only know it’s catastrophic because I remember it being catastrophic.

I might never walk again.

The thought lands flat, without impact. The fog won’t let it sting.

“You’re awake!”

The voice comes from the kitchen strip. Small. Bright. Weightless.

“Don’t try to sit up. It took me so long to get that sling right.”

Pure and innocent. Oblivious to the harm he’s caused.

Something ignites in my chest. Heat. Different to the heat in my veins; this is raw and searing. I’m lying here with a shattered ankle because of him. Him.

All because he couldn’t listen. I begged him—begged—and he apologised and did it anyway.

And he didn’t just crush my ankle. He fled from a customs check. I’m a wanted man. A dead man on a dead ship with a dead leg.

All because he was scared.

“I’m making omelettes.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “They don’t look as good as yours, but they should taste the same, I think. The fold was… tricky.”

I stare at the ceiling. My jaw is clenched so tight my molars ache.

I don’t know what to say. What is there to say? That the station has a vessel callsign for a pilot who fled a customs check at full burn, breaking a crate and bearded man in the process? That Kiren will file a report and that report will reach every relay and patrol between here and the inner belt?

“Oh, and before you worry,” he says, “I checked the status screens an hour ago. The ship’s all good.”

He’s acting as if I’m lying sick in bed with nothing worse than a cold.

The heat coils tighter. I need to say something. I need him to understand what he’s done. I need—

A clank. Plates knocking together. The near-silent pad of feet crossing the cabin floor. He’s close now. I can feel his presence at the edge of the bunk, the air shifting, a warmth that isn’t the heater.

I glance down.

The fold-out table is in front of the bunk, already deployed, legs adjusted. And now two plates appear on its surface. The omelettes are tripled over on themselves like creased laundry. And he forgot the salt and pepper.

A pause.

Then, the scrape of ceramic. The plates grind across the table’s surface as the Expie slides the larger omelette—the one with more mass, more folds—from his side to mine.

I stare at it.

I need to say something. The anger is right there. A speech forming in the back of my skull about consequences and trust and how he’s ruined my life.

“Can I ask you something?” I don’t even look at him.

“About the omelettes?”

“About what you did, back at Kiren. Do you…” My mouth opens before the question forms. Whatever’s pumping in my veins keeps my brain at half-throttle.

I swallow, then try again. “Do you know… do you understand… what you’ve done?”

“I saved you.”

It takes so long to process those words. Even longer to process his tone. It’s a simple fact to him. He thinks those customs officials were there to kill me—and he’d happily break my other ankle to do it again.

There’s a cramp in my wrist. I look down. My hands are clenched, white-knuckled and trembling.

I breathe. Slow and deep. It takes so much effort. I try to relax my hands, but my brain’s no longer in control of my body.

I’m powerless.

I threw away money, security, safety, my only chance for a better life, to help a stranger that isn’t even human. And this is what I get.

Fucked doesn’t even begin to describe it.

“Let me tell you what you’ve done.” I force my neck to turn to him. “Exactly what you’ve done.” I need to look him in the eyes.

He’s on the bench, exactly where he sat the first time. But the grey jacket, the oversized thing that swallowed him whole, is gone. Replaced by…

I close my eyes. I can’t look at it.

I had it. I had the whole thing mapped out—every word and consequence, laid end to end like bricks. A wall he couldn’t climb over, to make him understand no, you didn’t save me, and now we’re both fucked because of you. This is all your fault. All, your, fault…

“Is everything okay?”

His voice is so soft, and still I flinch. I force my eyes open and the words crumple out. “It’s your… your…”

His head tilts, his ears shifting beneath…

Beneath a hood.

“You’re…” The word comes out cracked. “You’re wearing…”

He looks down at himself, as if remembering.

“Oh, yeah!” One paw plucks at the fabric, and his ears perk beneath the hood. “It was near where you… you know.” He gestures vaguely. “On the floor. By the crate.”

The grey hoodie I bought at the market. Extra-extra small. I didn’t even know they made them that small.

And still, it’s slightly too big for him. The sleeves swallow half his paws, and the hem falls past his hips. But the hood? The hood fits. It sits snug around his head, cupping the shape of his skull, held in place by fur and the subtle ridges of his ears. It frames his face. Frames his eyes.

“I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” he says. “Get me something, I mean.” He lowers his gaze; the orange softens. “No one’s ever given me anything.”

The hood around his head is scorched the same colour as his fur, a wide, irregular stain that bleeds outward from the centre. Ash and heat damage, the ghost of a fired brick.

And, camouflaged against the black, a thin streak of red, cutting it in two. I still see him there, lying in the kiln-light.

It almost looks intentional. A design choice.

A few reddish-brown specks stick to the edges of the scorch mark. I stretch out my right arm, as far as the sling lets me reach. He hesitates for a second, then leans his head forward. My palm brushes off those tiny specks, trying to avoid the blood.

My brain can barely shape the shortest, simplest question:

“Do you… like it?”

“I love it.”

His voice trips over itself.

“Really, really love it. I’ve never had clothes that… well, fit. And, and, whatever this is—”

He pulls the strings with both paws, and the hood closes around his face, covering his eyes, only the tip of his snout poking free.

“—it’s like, wearing a hat without a hat, you know?” His voice comes out muffled, the hood cupping his muzzle. Then he reaches his paws inside and pulls it loose again, revealing his eyes. “It’s… cool.”

Cool, he says. Cool.

Mission accomplished.

I stare at him. His eyes are glowing.

A cramp in my wrist. I look back to my hands. The right is loose, but the left is still clenched tight enough to make my whole arm tremble. It refuses to relax. I use my other hand and clasp those stubborn fingers, prying them loose.

I glance at him; he’s silently watching.

He didn’t do it because he was bored. He didn’t do it for the thrill, for the rush, to test the limits of what he could get away with.

He did it because he was terrified. For himself, and for me.

I’m not losing you too.

I look at the omelette. Over-folded. Imperfect. The bigger half, pushed towards me.

“It…” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. Rougher. “It looks great on you.”

The orange flares. His tail swishes once, twice, then the strands at its tip fan wide.

He catches himself and straightens on the bench, suddenly firm. “And, um, before you worry, I got the route keyed in. The place listed on the crates. Lint… Lind….” He scrunches his muzzle. “Lint-something. The long word.”

“Lindenfield.”

“That one.” He nods quickly. “I had to run between the hold and the cockpit four times before I got all the letters right. Oh, and there’s a fuel depot on the way. I found it on the charts.”

Right. Fuel. We didn’t refuel at Kiren. Somehow, we didn’t find the time. Calyx’s tanks must be hovering somewhere between concerning and pray.

He picks the edge of his sleeve. “It’s still quite a ways, the depot. The ship’s at quarter speed. To stop the boxes from…” His gaze drops. His paws knot together in his lap. “Maybe… you can teach me how to secure them? The strap things. In the hold.”

I look at the ceiling. The sling holds my leg steady, the makeshift splint cradling the ruin of my ankle in frozen ham and chicken thighs.

“Don’t know if we’ll get the chance to deliver them,” I say. “But we may as well try.” Don’t have much choice. Calyx is an addict with an expensive habit. “Besides, better to strap them down before they break the other ankle.”

“I think it’s more shattered than broken.”

“Thanks. Is that better, or worse?”

“Um.” He glances away; his ears twitch beneath the hood. “Worse. Much worse.”

Great.

“I need another sleep.” The wooziness is getting worse, and my stomach wants out.

He raises one paw. “Before that…”

He points at me. Then he mimes scooping something into his mouth: exaggerated, theatrical, cheeks puffing out. He chews with enormous jaw movements, then rubs his stomach in wide circles, eyes squeezing shut with satisfaction.

The exact routine. He memorised every detail.

A sound comes out of me. Halfway between a laugh and a groan. It rattles my chest and sends a dull ache through my ribs.

The edges of his muzzle pull back until they crease, his teeth and gums visible.

Another rare smile. Somehow, it feels even warmer from the inside of a hoodie.

I pick up my fork.

Chapter 9: Contraband

“Quarter turn. Then pull it towards you.”

The ratchet clicks—a satisfying staccato fills the hold. The Expie is perched on top of the crate, both paws working the strap tensioner. The webbing tightens in increments across the crate’s lid, biting into the composite. He gives it one final pull, tests it with a tug, and looks at me.

“Good?”

“Good. Now loop the excess under the anchor point and tie it off.”

He drops to his stomach and leans over the edge of the crate, threading the loose strap through the deck anchor with his paws inverted. The knot he ties isn’t one I recognise. Some improvised thing with three loops and a twist that looks like it was invented on the spot. He yanks it. It holds.

He hops down and lands without a sound.

“Next one?”

I shift my weight against the hold’s portside wall and point with the end of my crutch. “That one. Same deal. Two straps, cross pattern.”

He’s already moving, pulling a fresh length of webbing from the spool bolted to the bulkhead. His hood bounces with each step, the sleeves pushed up past his wrists. It’s a concession he needs to redo every few minutes.

I watch him work from the corner of the hold, seated, my back propped against the hull. My right leg is extended in front of me, elevated on a small stack of pillows. The makeshift splint is still there, but the thawed chicken and ham have since been replaced by frozen ration packs. He swaps them out on a schedule only he knows.

The crutch leans against the wall beside me. He’d built it while I was asleep: a length of deck grating bent into a rough T-shape at the top, the crossbar padded with strips of bedsheet wound tight and sealed with cargo tape. The whole thing creaks when I put weight on it, and the grating bites into my armpit.

But it holds. It holds because he tested it. I know because claw marks are gouged into the padding where he hung from the crossbar to check.

The Expie threads the first strap over the crate and ducks beneath to catch it on the other side. I hear the ratchet click. Then his voice, muffled from behind the crate.

“Is the cross pattern an X or a plus?”

“X.”

“Thought so.”

A few more clicks. I lean my head back against the wall and let my eyes drift half-shut.

I slept for… I don’t know how long. Hours. Could be a full day. I haven’t looked at a clock. Part of me doesn’t want to know.

But I’m still so tired. The fog has thinned since I woke, but it’s still there; my thoughts arrive a half-beat slower than they should. My tongue is thick. And the leg? Still numb. That same eerie absence that makes me want to reach down and check if the foot is still attached.

It is. I’ve checked twice.

“I’ve got to ask,” I say. “Do all Expies know as much as you?”

His hooded head pops up from behind the crate. “I don’t know anything about crates. I’m just listening to you.”

“Not the crates—the medical stuff. The splint, the cold packs, the…” I gesture vaguely at my leg. “All of it.”

“Oh.” He ducks back down. The ratchet resumes. “Yeah, all of us. First aid, emergency triage, a few procedures. It’s part of our standard training.”

Standard training. As if learning to set broken bones is no different from being taught to tie a shoe. “And the piloting? The mechanical knowledge? Also standard?”

The ratchet stops.

A pause. Long enough that I open my eyes and look.

He’s standing beside the crate, one paw resting on the webbing, the other hanging at his side.

“Um. No.” His gaze has dropped to the deck. “At least, not one I’ve met. Just me… and my friend.”

“They taught only the two of you?”

“Not taught.” He picks at a loose thread on the strap. “More… forced.”

He goes to the second strap, feeding it diagonally across the crate’s surface, threading it through the opposite anchor. The ratchet clicks. Slower this time. Measured.

Calyx’s engines hum through the deck plates beneath me. She’s cruising at one-eighth speed. Slow enough that the crates won’t shift if she hiccups.

He finishes the strap and tests both with a sharp pull. Then he moves to the next crate without being told, dragging a fresh length of webbing behind him.

“The facility I was at,” he says, not looking at me, focused on the spool, “we were moved there. It was much smaller. A lot less of us.”

He feeds the strap over the crate and crouches to catch the end.

“And it got smaller and smaller.”

The ratchet clicks once. Twice.

“They took a pair every few days. Into the elevator. Not one pair came back. We’d count heads at lights-on, and the number just… slowly shrunk.”

He ties the first strap off and pulls the second from the spool. His movements haven’t changed. But his tail goes limp behind him.

“Then one day, it was our turn.”

I hold my breath.

“They took us into the elevator. Blindfolded us. Separated us.” He loops the webbing across the crate, muscle memory taking over. “They did something to my head. I was awake for some of it, I think, but it’s… patchy. Just lights. Sounds. Pressure.”

The ratchet clicks.

“And when I woke up, I just… knew.”

He pulls the strap tight, then ties the knot. The same three-loop thing. He moves to the next crate.

“They stopped taking us after that. We were the last pair. We were happy.” A faint, bitter emphasis on the word. “But then they did a lot of tests. To make sure we knew. To make sure it stuck.”

He crouches, threading webbing. His hood slips forward and he pushes it back with one paw.

“It was never in an actual ship. They took us into the elevator again, this time to the lowest floor. A special room, they called it. There was a cockpit console, with a throttle, joystick, all the readouts, pilot and co-pilot chairs—but no viewport. Just a mirror where it should have been, so they could watch us from the other side.”

The ratchet clicks once.

“We’d have to press the right buttons and answer the questions they shouted over the mic. And if we got one wrong—”

He mimes a jolt with his whole body. A sharp, full-torso flinch. His fur bristles along his neck.

“—we’d get zapped.”

The strip lighting hums.

When he finally laid his paws on a real joystick, in a real cockpit, with a real viewport, he went feral. He was trained for a moment that was never supposed to come.

“We rarely got any wrong.” He pulls the ratchet tight with a sharp click. “So sometimes they zapped us just because.”

Bastards. Build a creature, pour knowledge into its skull, then punish it. What kind of operation needs pilots who’ve never seen the stars?

Unless the point was never the pilot. The point was the method. And the Expie—both of them—were proof it worked.

He finishes the crate and stands back to inspect his work. Four straps, two per crate, all tight, all anchored. He runs his paw along the nearest strap and nods to himself.

I watch him for a moment. The hood frames his face, scorched and stained. The sleeves have slid back over his paws again. He doesn’t fix them.

“And your friend.” I keep my voice even. “Is he the one you… left behind?”

He doesn’t answer. His paw stays on the strap. His body doesn’t move.

“What happened to him?”

The Expie shrugs. A small, loose motion. Shoulders up, shoulders down.

“Is he…” Still alive?

I can’t ask that. It would be cruel. Would he even know?

But I know. I know how hard the company is hunting this one. Fifty thousand credits and maybe armed men in bowler hats. You don’t spend that kind of time, money and effort chasing a runaway if you’ve got a spare back at the factory.

We both say nothing.

Then he turns on his heel and counts the strapped crates with a pointed finger. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—

“That’s the ninth crate.” He hops up on top of it in a fluid motion, surveying the hold like a foreman. His chest puffs out. “But, um… I think we’re one short.”

“Yeah. It fell out of the hold when we took off.”

“Oh.” His snout quivers. The edges of his mouth twitch downward and then reset. “I hope it fell on their heads.”

Christ. I’ve already got one confirmed death on my hands, and a customs official who fell ten feet off a ramp and may well be the second. Don’t need a third.

“That just leaves…” He turns on his perch, and his gaze travels over his shoulder to the starboard rear wall. His tail flicks once, then tucks close to his leg. “Crate ten.”

I don’t follow his gaze. I chose this corner deliberately. The nine strapped crates form a wall between me and whatever’s hiding on the other side—a barricade of webbing and composite that blocks view of the starboard rear.

But alas.

I reach for the crutch. Before my fingers find it, the Expie is already off the crate and beside me, a blur of grey hoodie and black fur. He grabs the datapad from its holder on the wall and tucks it under one arm, then ducks under my left side and presses his shoulder into my ribs.

“Careful,” he says. “Slow.”

I grip the crutch with my right hand and lean a fraction of my weight onto him. His shoulder is bony but firm. He adjusts his stance to match my centre of gravity without being told.

We hobble around the bend of crates together. One step, pause. Two steps, pause. The grating creaks beneath the crutch. My right foot hovers above the deck, the splinted ankle swinging with each motion, the gravel grinding beneath the skin. Still no pain. Just the queasy knowledge that everything below my shin is fucked.

Then I see it.

Crate ten, wedged against the starboard hull, still beneath the bay door lever where it slammed. The metal frame remains, but the composite panels have cracked or burst. Its contents sprawl across the deck like a debris field.

But something’s wrong. Yes, there’s the glint of metallic widgets and cylindrical housings, bore fittings and parts too convoluted to name. That’s all there. That’s fine.

It’s what’s also there that stops me.

“What the hell?”

The floor looks like the aftermath of a vehicle ploughing into a pharmacy. Pills of every shape dot the deck like colourful crumbs. Blister packs lie scattered among the metal parts, their foil blending with the steel around them. Dozens of ampules litter the grating, most cracked open, their contents streaked across the deck in thin, iridescent ribbons.

And then, the syringes. A minefield of them, scattered across the debris at every angle, needles pointed up and exposed.

I grasp for the datapad without looking. The Expie lets me take it. I bring up the delivery contracts, scroll past the first two consignments and find the third—the two-crate listing. I tap into the manifest for crate ten.

Bore guides. Mounting brackets. Precision-cut alignment plates. Words I don’t know but intrinsically recognise as mechanical, not medical. The manifest doesn’t mention a single pill, a single ampule, a single syringe.

The strewn metal parts, they match the manifest. But they were packing material. Camouflage. A top layer of legitimate hardware hiding the real payload underneath.

I was being used as a mule. Restricted pharmaceuticals. Likely some narcotics in the mix, too. Someone packed this knowing a small-hull courier with no scanning equipment would accept a two-crate contract, fly it to Lindenfield, and deliver it none the wiser.

Great. Add drug smuggler to the list. My rap sheet’s becoming a novella.

I lower the datapad. The Expie is already stepping into the debris.

“Ooo, another one.”

He leaps over a cluster of shattered glass and my entire body spasms—those bare pink paws a single misstep away from an exposed needle. But he weaves between the hazards with the ease of someone crossing stepping stones in a shallow stream.

He stops beside an uncracked ampule, a small glass cylinder filled with clear liquid, resting upright against a bent piece of angle-iron. He crouches and picks it up, turning it between his paws. The liquid catches the light.

“What is it?”

“Fentanyl.”

He holds it toward me like a boy presenting a found treasure.

The name rings a bell. Some kind of hard drug, not the party kind—but I’m a pilot, not a pharmacist.

“I was worried we’d run out before we got to Lindenfield,” he says, tucking the ampule carefully into the front pocket of his hoodie, “but this should be more than enough.”

Run out? What is he—

The realisation hits like a crate to the leg. The hold tilts. My grip on the crutch falters and I catch myself against the nearest crate, the webbing cutting into my palm.

The persistent nausea. The way my thoughts arrive half a beat too late. And most telling of all: the complete and utter lack of pain.

“You’ve been injecting me with fentanyl?!”

“Yep. What else would I use?” According to his voice, an obvious problem met with an obvious solution. “Fent’s good. You’d be in crippling pain without it.”

“But—but—” The words pile up against my teeth. Ignoring the obvious issue—that he stuck a needle in my arm while I was unconscious and pumped me full of a substance he found on the floor of a cargo hold because he learned medicine in a facility where consent doesn’t exist—the fact this drug is restricted means one thing:

“Isn’t it… really dangerous?”

“Yeah!” Way too enthusiastic. His tail swishes. “A milligram too much and you won’t be able to breathe.”

My lungs seize. He doesn’t even blink.

“So I was careful.” He holds his paws apart, about a centimetre’s gap between his thumb and forefinger. “Enough to numb, but not enough to paralyse your airways.”

Don’t need the drug to do that. My airways are paralysed just fine after hearing that.

I stare at him. He stares back. The ampule of fentanyl sits in his hoodie pocket, the glass rim poking out like a pen.

“Great, wonderful, thanks.” I fling my arms up, nearly losing my balance before catching the crutch. “Anything else you’d like to stick in me while you’re at it?”

His head tilts. One ear shifts beneath the hood.

“You’re doing the voice thing again.”

The cockpit hums.

I’m in the pilot’s chair, right leg propped on the console’s lower housing where a kick panel used to be. The splint rests against the metal, cushioned by a folded towel the Expie wedged in while I wasn’t paying attention.

The Calyx is old. I’ve cursed her age more times than I can count. But right now, sitting here with a shattered ankle, I’ve never been more grateful for it. Newer models went all-in on foot pedals: yaw control, secondary thrust vectoring, the works. Greater range of motion, the brochures said. Revolutionary ergonomics.

What they didn’t mention was that if you can’t use your feet, you can’t fly the ship.

The Calyx doesn’t care about my feet. It was designed in an era when engineers assumed the pilot might be drunk, injured, or both.

Bless them.

The nav display glows in front of me. The route stretches in a thin white line from our current position to a waypoint marker labelled Harlow Depot, the nearest fuel stop in this corridor.

ETA: 07d 02h 00m 14s

The fourteen flicks to thirteen. Thirteen to twelve. Each second slowly peels away. We’ve been crawling since Kiren. But now that every last crate is strapped, webbed, and anchored to the deck—

“We can go fast now?”

Subdued excitement. He’s standing to my left, the crutch held loosely in both paws. He’s been twirling it absently, the padded crossbar rotating in lazy circles like a baton.

He hasn’t dropped it yet. I’m waiting.

“We either go faster,” I say. “or we reach Lindenfield sometime around the heat death of the universe. Minus a few minutes if we catch a tailwind.”

“There’s no wind in space.”

“It’s a… never mind.” I gesture at the left armrest. Two throttle levers sit recessed in their housings, side by side, currently pulled back to the first notch. “Would you like to do the honours?”

The twirling stops. His eyes widen. He looks at the throttles, then at me, then at the throttles again.

I expect him to lean over from where he’s standing. Reach across, push the levers forward; a simple, practical motion.

Instead, the crutch clatters to the deck.

He jumps.

Both feet leave the ground and he lands square on my lap—a hooded projectile of fur driving the air out of me in a single wheeze. His tail curls over my left arm. His back presses against my chest. He settles in like he’s done this a thousand times, adjusting his weight with small, precise shifts until he’s comfortable.

Until he’s comfortable.

“R-really?” I grip the armrests. “I don’t think you should be putting more pressure on… on any part of me, actually.” How much does an Expie weigh? It’s hard to tell when said Expie has been dosing you with fentanyl. He could be sitting on my shattered ankle right now and I’d have to visually check to confirm.

“Relax.” He doesn’t look back. His paws find the throttle grips, fingers—digits, whatever they are—curling around the rubber. “You can’t feel it anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem.”

He doesn’t seem bothered. He’s already somewhere else. He flicks his head back and the hood falls from his head. His ears, free from their prison, twitch as though pinpointing the sound of the engines. His tail grips tight around my arm.

He’s staring through the viewport at the starfield ahead with an intensity I recognise. It’s the same look he had when he read the fuel pressure differential. When he fixed the starboard monitor. When he did spins in a docking bay.

Hyperfocus. The superpower kind. I have the can’t-keep-your-cabin-clean kind.

His paws tighten on the throttles. The push is smooth, feeding power to both engines in perfect symmetry. The Calyx responds like she’s been waiting for it. The rumble deepens. The vibration climbs through the deck. Stars in the viewport stretch a fraction.

The ETA on the nav display shivers. The seven flickers. Dissolves. Rebuilds.

The throttles reach their stops. The Expie holds them there for a breath, then releases. The engines level off into a steady, full-throated hum.

The ETA stabilises.

00d 17h 20m 33s

He lets out a long breath. His whole body softens against my chest, and his tail uncurls from my arm and sways once. A lazy, satisfied arc.

Slow doesn’t suit him. I guess that makes sense; he’s a double fugitive now.

“Where was that smoothness back at Kiren?” I ask.

He turns to look at me over his shoulder. “I told you to close the doors.”

“Still not going to apologise?”

“Nope.”

The radio crackles.

My whole body locks, jostling the Expie forward. Static hisses from the overhead speaker, followed by a clipped, bored voice cycling through its script.

“All patrols, advisory. Suspected smuggler vessel at Outrim Gamma. Shots fired on patrol cruiser Dawnridge. Still at large. Exercise caution in sector seven-seven-niner.“

The voice cuts out. Static returns, then silence.

I exhale.

The outer rim stations share a single broadcast channel for their advisories. It’s useful, in theory—anomalous weather events, pirate sightings, the rare cosmofauna. In practice, ninety percent of it is station patrols telling each other how bad they are at their jobs. Ships they lost. Suspects they failed to apprehend. I never paid much attention.

Until now.

Now every crackle makes my teeth clench. Every burst of static carries the phantom shape of my ship’s callsign, read out live to hundreds of active patrols across the belt. Chasma Couriers. Calyx. Wanted for fleeing a customs inspection, destruction of station property, and while you’re at it, smashing a guy’s head in with a brick.

The radio crackles. I flinch again.

“Advisory update. Individual wanted for questioning regarding a series of arson attacks across Meridian district. Last seen boarding a vessel from Atrion Station, callsign November Echo. All patrols in adjacent sectors, be advised.“

Silence.

Not me. Not us.

My shoulders drop half an inch.

The Expie twists further in my lap, looking up at me. “If you’re so worried about it, why not disconnect the transponder?”

Ah. Of course he knows what a transponder is. Of course he does. The black box somewhere deep in Calyx’s hull, broadcasting our callsign and position to every ship and station within range. A digital name tag stitched to our chests.

But this is where intelligence and wisdom part ways.

“Three reasons,” I say. “One: transponders work without power for over a month. You can pull the plug, rip out the wires, blow the whole ship apart, and it’ll still keep broadcasting on its battery.”

He opens his mouth. I keep going.

“Two: the only stations that’ll let you dock without an active transponder are no stations we want to be at.”

His mouth closes.

“And three—” I hold up three fingers, then point them at the nav display, at the clean white line of our shipping route. “Nothing screams I’m doing something very illegal more than following a commercial corridor with your transponder dark. You may as well paint the hull red and write ARREST ME on the cargo doors. It’d draw ten times the attention we already have.”

He considers for a moment. His ears shift.

“What attention?” He gestures at the speakers. “Were you the arsonist?”

I wish. Something tells me they’ll forget about that guy long before they forget about me.

The radio crackles a third time. A different voice this time, female, slightly nasal.

“All patrols near Kiren, be advised—“

We both go still.

I don’t breathe. The Expie’s tail freezes mid-sway, hovering in the air behind the armrest. I can feel his muscles lock against my chest.

“—suspected pirate activity in the region. Multiple vessels without transponders detected on far-field radars in sectors four through seven. Caution advised. Report all unidentified contacts to Kiren Station on priority channel.“

The transmission ends. Static. Then nothing.

Great. Pirates. Because we were running low on things to worry about.

“Ooo!”

His tail whips back and the feathered tip catches me square across the face.

“Ow.”

I don’t know why I said that. I can’t feel it.

He spins on my lap, eyes bright, paws gripping my collar. “We can unplug the transponder and blend in with the pirates.” The conspiratorial whisper is back. “Be secret spies.“

“Did you forget the first thing I said? Transponders still work without power for—”

“You dropped a big list! I didn’t know I’d be tested on it.”

My hands hover at my sides. The urge is almost overwhelming—to give him one gentle shake and say zap.

The thought catches in my throat. My hands lower. God, that’s so evil. But so tempting. Resist the intrusive thoughts.

The speakers buzz.

A two-tone chime fills the cockpit. The long-range indicator on the comms panel pulses amber.

That same amber chime.

The Expie sees the light before I can cover it with my hand.

“A call?” His voice is quiet, small; the spy game is over. “Is it—”

“Don’t know who it is until I accept.” I reach for the headset on its hook. My fingers hover over it.

It’s almost certainly them. No one else is dropping three digits to call me on the regular.

He doesn’t move. His eyes have gone flat. Dull. His paws release my collar and pull up the hood, tucking his head into it, then pulling the straps to hide as much of his face as possible. The orange of his eyes peeks from inside, lighting the edges of his snout.

“Should I hide?”

“No, stay. It’s a recording, not a live feed. They can’t see you, can’t hear you. And at this point, you may as well listen for yourself.”

He doesn’t react.

“You ready?”

A deep breath. His ribs expand against mine. He sinks back into my chest, and his paws find my forearms and rest there, claws squeezing through my sleeves. His head tucks under my chin, the top of his hood brushing the underside of my jaw. I feel his ear-things twitch along my neck, small flutters, like an unsteady heartbeat.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Ready.”

I press accept.

“Hiiiiiiii!“

Both relief and irritation hit at once. Not Solen. Just—

“Kathy, executive assistant to Mr Solen. Hi again!“

The Expie looks up at me, brow creased. “Is something wrong with her?”

“Mr Solen just wanted me to give you a quick call and remind you about that five—“

A pause. Then, under her breath, barely above a whisper: “one-two-three-four—“

“—fifty thousand credit reward! He says it’s still on the table for the, quote, ‘you know what.’” She giggles. “So mysterious.“

The Expie jolts upright. His paws tighten on my forearms with a sharpness that cuts through the fentanyl haze. He knows. He’s not stupid. He can connect a fifty-thousand-credit bounty to himself without a diagram.

“Oh, and one other thing—“

A rustle. Papers, or a tablet being fumbled. You pay out the ass to send a recording and still get shit compression quality. The artefacts chew through her consonants.

“Mr Solen just wanted to say how impressed he is. He said—hang on, let me read this exactly—” More rustling. She coughs, and her voice deepens. “‘Tell him I had no idea his ship was capable of autonomous launch sequencing. Quite the upgrade.’ And then he did a little laugh. You know the one.“

The cockpit is silent.

I don’t know it. But I can imagine it.

“Anyway, that’s the message. Talk soon. Bye-bye!“

The indicator goes dark. The chime dies. The static fades.

Solen knows. He absolutely, unequivocally knows.

But he sure is indirect about it. Autonomous launch sequencing. That doesn’t even come standard with the newer models; it’s locked behind a yearly two-grand subscription. And no courier’s paying to outsource their already limited skill-set to a computer.

No, what the Calyx does have is an Expie in the cockpit who punched the throttle while the pilot was standing on the ramp. I’m almost impressed by Solen’s ability to say I know you have him, you little shit, without actually saying it. And then to deliver it through his airhead assistant, because he couldn’t be stuffed to call me himself and berate me for being an idiot.

I guess news did reach the patrols. Yet nothing on the radio. No callsign. No advisory. Must have been broadcast while I was unconscious. While the Expie was strapping frozen chicken thighs to my ankle.

Something’s off, though. Can’t pinpoint what. Either I’ve been out for ages, or…

…or the haze is simply getting to me. I’m overthinking. Already got enough to be worried about.

The Expie hasn’t moved. He’s still pressed against me, rigid, his paws locked around my forearms. My nerves may be numb, but even I can feel the faint tremble against my chest.

“Um. Fifty thousand.” His voice comes out thin. “Is that… a lot of money?”

As casual as I can manage. “Nah, not really.” I wave one hand, loose and dismissive. “Few dozen crates’ worth. Maybe two, three months’ work, tops.”

“I can tell when you’re lying.”

My hand stops mid-wave. “What?”

“Your voice does the other thing.”

“The other—” I frown. “What other thing? What does my voice do?”

He shifts on my lap, turning just enough to look at me over his shoulder, still peeking at me through his half-closed hood. The orange is back—just enough to make out his expression in the shade of the hood.

“I lied,” he says. “Your voice doesn’t do anything when you’re lying.”

His muzzle stretches. Slow. Deliberate. The corners pull back, showing the edges of his teeth. Unlike his grins, this one has a devious edge to it.

A smirk.

“But you didn’t deny lying. Meaning you admit to it.”

He sticks his tongue out at me. Held there for exactly long enough to make his point, then retracted behind closed teeth.

Cheeky little bastard.

I stare at him. He stares back. The smirk holds.

But beneath the fentanyl, beneath the shattered ankle and the dead man and the fifty-thousand-credit bounty—somewhere in the smouldering wreckage of my life—another thing cracks.

Not a bone this time. Smaller. I’ve been holding it shut for too long.

I laugh.

It hurts. It shouldn’t. But it hurts in a place the drugs can’t reach. The sound that comes out is rough and far too loud for the cockpit, loud enough to make the Expie’s fur shoot upright.

He grins, properly this time, the full display, gums and all. His tail thumps against my arm—once, twice, three times—before he catches himself and tucks it away.

The Calyx is as stoic as ever, though; girl’s never had a sense of humour. She carries us forward in silent judgement. Seventeen hours, fourteen minutes, and counting down.

Chapter 10: Fifty thousand credits

Something warm.

I surface from sleep slowly, pulled up by a sensation I can’t place. My arm has slipped off the edge of the bunk, dangling in the open air. Fingers trail downwards.

They’re touching something. Soft. Warm. A gentle rise and fall beneath my fingertips.

One eye cracks open. I don’t remember falling asleep. The cabin is dark, still dotted with its constellation overhead. My leg rests atop the pillow usually reserved for my head. My ankle is still numb, but also slick from the condensation of two lukewarm ice packs.

I shift, carefully, and peer over the edge of the bunk.

He’s there. Curled on the floor beside me, the hoodie still wrapped around him, nestled in a heap of creased jackets.

My jackets.

They form a rough nest against the base of the bunk. His back rests against the frame, close enough that my hanging arm had found him in sleep. His tail is wrapped around his ankles, and his muzzle is tucked tight against his chest. One paw loosely grips the hoodie strings.

That’s where he chose to sleep.

I watch him breathe. The faint glow of his eyes is shuttered behind closed lids, the barest amber warmth bleeding through.

Fifty thousand credits.

The number surfaces, and for the first time since Solen said it, it feels small. Abstract. A figure on a screen.

It’s nothing compared to this.

I pull my arm back onto the bunk. Settle into the mattress. And close my eyes.

The Calyx carries us on, steady and sure.

Chapter 11: Snowglobe

The burn starts in the centre of my ankle and crawls outward. Beneath the splint and refreshed ice packs, the wreckage of my joint is waking up.

The Expie crouches beside the chair, hoodie around his head. He wraps a strip of cargo webbing around my right bicep, then pulls it snug with both paws. His tongue pokes from the corner of his mouth.

“Five minutes to Harlow Depot.” I point at the nav display with my left hand. The white line has almost consumed itself; our blip sits on the doorstep of the waypoint marker. “Should have a visual soon.”

He doesn’t look up. One paw holds my arm steady while the other flicks the soft underside of my elbow—tap-tap-tap against the skin. “So are these different to stations?”

“Take a station. Make it flat. Shrink it by ninety-nine percent. Chuck in a few fuel pumps and an automated grocer if you’re lucky.” I flex my elbow for him. “That’s a depot. The sort of place where two ships docked at the same time counts as rush hour.”

“Hm.” He rotates my arm a few degrees. Taps again. Frowns. “Your veins are so hard to find.”

I watch the ceiling. “How much longer do I have to put up with feeling half-asleep?”

“Another day or two. Maybe three.” He reaches behind him without looking and retrieves the syringe from the console shelf. It’s already uncapped, the needle exposed. “The worst of the pain should be gone by then. Clench your hand.”

I close my fist. The tourniquet bites.

“There you are,” he murmurs.

“Pain’s not too bad right now. Noticeable, but manageable.”

“Give it another hour, and you’d swallow one of these ampules whole to make it go away.”

There’s no drama in the way he says it. Just certainty. He’s watched what pain does and knows exactly where the threshold between bearable and agony lives.

He holds the glass ampule between two paw-pads, the clear liquid catching the console light. The needle punctures the rubber seal, and the syringe begins to fill.

“So if two people at a depot is a lot,” he says, still watching the syringe, “how do they keep running?” One digit flicks the barrel of the syringe—tink, tink, tink.

I force myself to look away. “These places aren’t for making money.”

“Who looks after them, then?”

“They either belong to some mining op wanting to offload excess fuel the stations won’t buy…” I focus on the viewport. Stars. Entirely unremarkable. I fixate on a cluster near the upper left corner and keep my eyes there. “…or some eccentric millionaire who needed an excuse for an art project in space.”

“Art project?”

“No two ever look the same.” I keep my voice level. Conversational. Absolutely not thinking about needles. “One bloke out past Atrion built his from decommissioned escape pods, and another—”

The prick slides in.

I flinch. Can’t help it. A sharp, clean sting in the crook of my elbow—replaced by a slow, cool pressure as the plunger depresses.

My jaw clenches. I watch the stars. “How do you… how do you know how much to use?”

His paw holds my arm perfectly still. “Same dose they gave me.” The plunger reaches its stop. He holds it there. “That was borderline… but you’re bigger, so.”

He withdraws the needle in a single smooth motion and presses a scrap of torn bedsheet against the puncture site. His paw holds it firm.

The cockpit hums. Neither of us speak.

“All done.”

He releases the pressure and peels the fabric away. A single bead of red wells up.

I already feel it. The faintest warmth spreading from my punctured vein, a whisper of what’s to come. In minutes the burn in my ankle will soften, and the edges of my thoughts will blur.

I’ve read the label on one of those ampules. No surprise it tells you not to operate heavy machinery.

I reach for the crutch propped against the console housing and lever myself up, flinching as something in my ankle grinds and shifts. The grating creaks beneath the makeshift crossbar. “Probably best you handle the landing.”

He’s already in motion, pulling himself up the side of the pilot’s chair and sliding into the seat before the cushion has a chance to spring back.

“No spins.” I say, slowly pacing to the cabin doorway. “Don’t think my guts could handle it this time.”

“…Fine.”

The nav display counts down. Two minutes. Calyx adjusts her heading, a smooth, gentle correction.

“There,” he says.

Through the viewport, at first, nothing. The same starfield. The same black. Then, a shape. Faint. Catching light from a source I can’t see, phasing into existence.

The first thing I register is the grass.

Green. Actual green. A rectangle of it, neat once, spread across the inner platform in tufts that follow no grid: some cropped short, others wild. Stone paths split the grass into smaller plots—irregular slabs fitted together in a pattern that’s more mosaic than pavement, their surfaces darkened with moisture and the faintest film of moss.

Lampposts dot the pathways—wrought iron, curved at the top, each capped with a frosted globe that emits a warm, steady glow. The sole source of light. A wooden bench sits between two of the lampposts, facing inward toward the grass. And another bench, a few yards down, facing into the blackness of space.

And rising from the grass, a building.

It looks like a country train station: one platform, pitched timber roof, pale stone walls. Arched windows line the front, glass clouded but intact. Above the entrance, a clock face, hands frozen at a time that means nothing out here. Hanging baskets bracket the doorframe, ivy long since overgrown, crawling down the stonework.

There are no tracks. No platform edge. Just a doorway that opens onto grass and then, the vacuum of space.

The whole thing is almost convincing.

Almost.

Because beneath it all, visible through the gaps where the grass has thinned and the stone paths end, the flat metal platform persists. The rivets and industrial grey. The faint shimmer along the edge, marking the force field boundary. The blue-hulled cruiser already there, its engines connected to fuel tubes rising from the grass like giant iron worms.

Someone built a memory of a place that exists a thousand light-years from here and set it down on a steel plate in the dark. A suburb in a bottle, built by someone who missed home.

The Expie leans forward in the chair. His paws slide from the control column and press flat against the console, then rise to the viewport. His hood falls back. His breath fogs the glass.

“Wow.”

The word is barely a whisper. His nose is nearly touching the viewport. The warm light from the depot filters through his fur, a silvery film coating the black.

“Is this… is this what it looks like on a planet?”

I lean against the doorframe. My left shoulder takes my weight. The crutch creaks.

The grass. The stone. The lampposts casting warm circles onto paths that lead nowhere. Something tugs at the base of my skull. Rain on concrete. A sky that went on forever.

It was so long ago.

“You’re asking the wrong guy.”

The depot drifts closer. The Calyx eases toward it, guided by her automated systems. She drifts past a circle of red beacons—the spot occupied by the other fuel-hungry visitor—toward another patch of grass marked by amber beacons. The grass sways, actually sways, in whatever artificial breeze the force field permits.

The Expie doesn’t move from the glass. His breath keeps fogging and clearing, fogging and clearing.

“It’s beautiful,” he says.

I watch his reflection in the glass. The light across his face. The scorch mark on his hood. The orange in his eyes.

“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”

The ramp touches grass. Actual grass. It sinks into the soft soil with a sound like a sigh.

The Expie is tucked under my left arm, his shoulder pressed into my ribs, one paw gripping the back of my pants. The crutch takes the right side. Between the two of them, I manage something that almost resembles walking.

We descend together. One step. Two. The ramp’s corrugated surface gives way to earth, and the air changes. Warm. Damp. It carries the ghost of something vegetal, and beneath that a faint mineral sweetness that might be soil or might be moss or might be nothing more than my drugged brain inventing memories it wants to have.

Beyond the rustling grass, there’s a melody of chirping insects. Or sound piped through speakers I can’t see, threaded into the air alongside the artificial atmosphere. A dusk chorus for a place where dusk never ends.

Past the lampposts and stone paths, the force field shimmers. On this side: warmth, colour, the soft amber glow of wrought-iron lamps casting pools onto wet stone. On the other side: nothing. Black so black it swallows depth perception. The grass runs right up to the boundary and simply stops, each blade trembling at the threshold of forever.

My crutch finds the grass and sinks. An inch, maybe less, but enough that each step requires a tug, a soft thuck as the crossbar pulls free of the turf.

“Okay,” I say. “Head back to the cockpit. I’ll need you to—

The weight vanishes from my left side.

The Expie ducks out from under my arm and takes three bounding steps into the grass. He stops. Looks down at his feet. His toes—black against green—spread wide, gripping the turf.

Then he jumps.

Both feet leave the ground. He lands and the grass cushions him and he jumps again, higher, paws outstretched, hood bouncing. The third jump is less jump and more launch—a full-bodied, tail-streaming leap that carries him a good metre before he crashes down into a thick tuft and stumbles onto all fours.

He doesn’t get up. His paws press into the soil. He grabs a fistful of grass and holds it to his nose, inhales, then looks back at me with eyes so wide they catch every lamppost in the vicinity.

“What… are you doing?”

“I want to explore.”

He’s already scanning the stone paths, the benches, the building with its frozen clock. His tail sweeps the grass behind him in broad, eager arcs. One ear rotates toward the sound of the other ship’s fuel pumps.

“Not while someone else is here.”

“But—”

“They’ll be finished before us.” I nod toward the blue-hulled cruiser on the far side of the platform. “Once they leave, the whole place is yours.”

His mouth opens. I watch the argument form, the way his paws tighten in the grass, desperate to stay.

No words come.

His shoulders drop. His gaze falls to the turf between his paws.

“Fine…”

He says it to the grass. Then he stands, brushes soil from his knees, and pads past me. I look over my shoulder, watching him climb back up the ramp, into the grey, lifeless hold.

The bench is cold beneath me, but the air isn’t. The lamppost above casts a circle of amber onto the wet stone at my feet. Past the light, the grass runs to the edge of the force field. And stops.

No stars from this angle. No depth. Just the void, sitting politely on the other side of a shimmer, close enough to touch.

The fuel lines hum. Two thick hoses snake from a hatch disguised as a garden bed and feed into Calyx’s underbelly. The readout on the pump console—a brass-faced gauge set into a wooden post—ticks upward fraction by fraction. The credit counter beside it ticks downward at roughly the same pace.

Two hours, give or take. That’s what the pump estimated when I plugged in. Two hours to fill an almost-empty tank to just over half-empty. Can’t afford any more at the mark-up this place charges.

I should go back. Keep the Expie company. He’s in the cockpit, probably pressed against the viewport, watching the grass sway through the glass. All because I told him he couldn’t stand in it. The guilt of that sits somewhere in my chest.

But the fentanyl has wrapped it in cotton wool. Warmth spreads outward from the crook of my elbow, flooding my veins with something sterile and sweet. It isn’t quite happiness. Nothing so honest. The ankle is a rumour. The dead man on the factory floor is a photograph in a file. Even the fifty-thousand-credit noose around my neck has loosened to a silk scarf.

My butt stays planted on the bench.

Maybe it’s the drug making me too lazy to move. Maybe it’s that I needed to see something other than a grey hull or metal station for once. It reminds me of home—or rather, the idea of home. The texture of it. The feeling of air that doesn’t taste recycled.

And, if I’m being honest, it’s nice to have a moment to myself. I’ve spent however many years rattling around inside that ship alone, talking to no one, answering to no one. And now there’s a small furry person in there who memorises my mannerisms and sticks needles in my arm while I sleep.

The chirping insects, real or fake, pulse in the warm air. I close my eyes.

“Hey, howdy!”

I jolt upright, my right hand grabbing for the crutch before my brain catches up. A woman’s voice. Bright. Friendly. Coming from behind me.

I twist on the bench and look over my shoulder.

She’s standing beneath the train station archway, one hand raised in a wave, the other hooked into the pocket of a battered flight jacket. Scrappy describes her well; wiry build, unkempt curly hair, and a posture like she’s ready to sprint or just finished sprinting. The lamplight catches the edge of a grin.

I raise my hand. Slowly. Half a wave. I’ve acknowledged you and that’s the extent of my social obligation.

“Mind if I join you?”

A shrug. Then I realise she’s twenty metres away and can’t read a shrug in lamplight. “If you want. Nothing much to see this way, though.” I gesture vaguely at the black.

“Just nice to see another person.” She’s already moving, her boots clicking on the stone path, hands swinging at her sides. “And I don’t know—think the aesthetic here’s got me in a good mood.”

Wonderful. Type A. The sort who lands at an empty, wide-open depot and decides the best place to sit is one metre from the only other soul present. The barest kindness I can afford is shifting the crutch beside me an inch closer to my hip to make room.

She sits down. Crosses one leg over the other. Her jacket creaks. She fumbles in her pocket and produces a lighter, a scratched metal thing that she flicks thrice before it lights.

“Want a cig?”

“Not for me, thanks.”

She pulls a cigarette from a crumpled soft-pack in her breast pocket and slots it between her lips. She lights it, then uses it as a pointer, jabbing it toward my leg, the splinted mess of webbing stretched out above the grass.

“Damn, looks bad.”

“Yeah. Took a nasty fall.”

She draws once, a deep committed pull, and then immediately waves a second cigarette in front of my hand, materialised from the pack like a magic trick. I hold up my palm and push it away. She shrugs and tucks it behind her ear.

“Cool ship.” She twirls the lit cigarette between two fingers, the ember tracing a lazy circle around the Calyx. Smoke curls upward through the lamplight, catching the amber and turning gold. “Kestrel-class. Model ten, maybe—from Ubisphere’s heyday.”

“Not quite. Two generations earlier.”

“Damn.” She leans back, appraising. “Kept her looking sleek for that long?”

A sound escapes me, not quite a laugh. “Can’t afford to let things fall apart.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. That’s a classic hauler. No bells and whistles—pure function. Don’t build ’em like that anymore.”

She knows her ships, at least. I can’t tell if the enthusiasm is genuine or if the fentanyl is casting everything in amber. The last time I heard someone this excited about the old girl was the bloke who sold her to me.

“So.” She leans forward, elbows on her knees. “Come here often?”

I shake my head. “First time.”

“Really? Got the vibe this was your regular seat or something.”

She pauses, as if it’s my turn to ask a question. I let the silence hold.

“As for me,” she says, “not usually ’round these parts. Feels like I lucked out finding this beaut.” She tilts the lit cigarette toward me again. I wave it off.

“What’re you hauling all the way out here anyhoo?” she asks. “Anything cool?”

“Usual shit. Mining components, drill bits.” Some illicit drugs. “You?”

She grins. “Come on, mate—she look like a hauler to you?”

I shift around properly. It takes effort with my useless leg, but eventually her ship comes into view, sitting at the far side of the platform.

The hull needs another paint job. The light blue is peeling in patches, exposing grey primer beneath. Other sections are scorched black in patterns that suggest blast damage rather than carelessness. She’s about the same size as Calyx, similar slender hull, but her bow is flanked by two sets of laser turrets—three above the viewport and three on her underside.

“Pretty serious firepower for a small-hull.” I turn back. “You work security? Station patrol?”

“Mmm.” She tilts her head side to side. “Not quite.”

She stands. Takes one more drag—her third at most—and flicks the cigarette toward the force field. It phases through the boundary and drifts into the void, a tiny ember trailing a thread of smoke that thins to nothing. For a moment it could’ve been mistaken for a star.

“I’m the kind of gal that causes trouble for them.”

“So, what—a pirate?” I laugh. Don’t know why it’s so funny. Something about the absurdity; a pirate on a park bench, next to a lamppost, surrounded by tended grass. I blame the fent.

She doesn’t laugh.

“That’s a pretty good guess.” She’s still standing, hands in her jacket pockets, shoulders squared. The grin is gone. What’s left isn’t hostile. More honest.

“Random question.” She rocks on her heels. “Little birdy told me a small-hull would be in the area, carrying something precious. Kestrel-class, model ten—or eight. Know where I can find it?”

The warmth in my veins turns sour. The amber tint over everything flickers—and just for a heartbeat, the world is cold and sharp.

“Not here.” My voice comes out level. “No one here but me.”

“Calyx is a pretty name, you know.”

She reaches behind the bench and tears off the tip of a vine crawling up the backrest. She holds it up, turning it between her fingers. It has a single green leaf, shaped like a teardrop.

“Got something to do with the leaves on a flower.” She plucks the leaf and lets it fall. It spirals to the wet stone and settles there, small and bright against the grey. “You don’t strike me as the delicate sort, though.”

“Neither do you.” My hand tightens around the crutch’s crossbar. “It’s the name of my mum’s old ship.”

She pauses. The idle energy drains from her posture. She looks at me with narrowed eyes, trying to read whether that was sincere. Her jaw works around something she doesn’t say.

Then she reaches into the breast pocket, pulls out another cigarette, lights it. The flame catches on the first try. She takes a slow, drawn-out drag, letting the smoke leak from the corner of her mouth.

“Anyway.” Her voice has shifted. Lower. Practical. “Got no beef with you, and not about to fight a cripple. Just hand it over and we’ll both be on our way.”

“How much are they paying you?”

She glances sideways. “Sixty-k.”

Wow. I’m getting short-changed.

“You thinkin’ of making a better offer?” she asks.

“Yeah. Here’s one.” I meet her eyes. The fentanyl is a warm blanket over everything, but some things cut through. Things you feel in your marrow. “You touch a hair on him, I’ll find you. Doesn’t matter how far you run. And next time I won’t be on a crutch.”

Her eyebrows rise. The cigarette hovers.

“Him?“

The sound of a pistol being cocked.

We both flinch and turn.

He’s standing ten feet away, in the middle of the grass, nowhere near the ship, my pistol held in both paws. His hood is up, his ears pressed flat beneath, and his eyes are incandescent, two points of orange burning from inside the shadow of the fabric.

“Get away from him.”

His voice is steady, but the barrel wavers from the tremor running through his body. It’s the same gun he shoved between his teeth. The same gun he knows keeps its bullets separate.

This time, he loaded it.

The cigarette drops from her mouth. It hits the stone path and rolls.

She’s staring at him. Not the gun—him. Her expression is shock, not fear.

“It’s…” She takes a half-step back. Her boot crushes the fallen cigarette. “It’s you.”

The Expie blinks. The gun doesn’t lower.

Her mouth moves, but no words come out. She just balls her fists and looks at him, blinking, as if dots are being forcibly joined in her skull. I swear she’s trembling as much as the Expie.

Then her limbs come unstuck, and she swings her arms down at nothing.

“Fuck this.”

She kicks the bench—sends my crutch rattling—and spins on her heel. She paces three steps toward the building, then turns back and paces again, her boots slapping the stone. The Expie tracks her with the pistol, the barrel following each turn.

“Those corporate cunts.” She’s not talking to us anymore. “Making it sound like you’ve got stolen tech—some prototype hardware they need back.”

Well, technically not wrong.

“And you’re the same one, aren’t you?” She stops pacing and points at the Expie.

“Same?” The gun dips half an inch.

“‘Course you are. Boss moved heaven and hell to get you out—and here I am, ’bout to hand you back like a dumbass.”

Boss?

The Expie’s eyes widen. This means something to him.

“Fuck me. Boss’d kill me, and I’d deserve it.” She turns and stomps toward her ship, dragging both hands down her face. “I’m done. You two best make yourself scarce, stat.

Long strides, fists balled at her sides. The grass flattens beneath her boots and springs back in her wake.

“Wait!” The crutch bites into the turf as I haul myself upright, the crossbar groaning under my weight. “Wait—”

“Nah, man.” She doesn’t slow down. She’s halfway across the grass. “Get gone. Others won’t think twice ’bout taking him from you.”

I hobble after her. One lurching step, then another. The crutch sinks into the soil and I wrench it free and swing it forward and sink it again. Each step threatens to topple me.

“We need help,” I shout after her. “And you owe it to him—and your boss.”

It’s one hell of a bluff. I’ve got no idea who her boss is, or why a crew of pirates saw fit to get tangled up in an Expie’s escape. But there must be a reason.

She stops.

Her back is to me. Her shoulders rise and fall with a single deep breath. Then she turns around. Slow. Deliberate.

She already has another cigarette lit between her lips. When she managed that, I have no idea.

“In exchange,” I say, catching my breath, leaning hard on the crutch, “I do have a better offer for you.”

“You really gonna barter with me?” She gestures past my shoulder at the Expie, who has lowered the gun and now looks as confused as she does. “After that?”

I take a breath. I’ve got only one thing of interest to a pirate. The manifest won’t miss it. And neither will the scumbag who packed it into a crate of bore guides.

“Do you want to buy some drugs?”

Chapter 12: Cosmic Karma

“You sure you don’t want a cig?”

“How many times do I have to say no?”

“I’ll try one!”

“No you won’t.”

The pirate scoffs. “Killjoy.”

She’s crouched in the debris field of crate ten, cigarette pinched between her lips, sorting through the wreckage. Exposed needles don’t seem to bother her. She picks through the scattered packets and ampules, turning each one to catch the strip light, then sorting them into two piles on a cleared patch of grating:

Sellable and fucked.

Only ten minutes ago she was sizing me up as a target. Now? She’s doing inventory on my floor.

I lean against the portside wall. “Any fent and anti-inflammatories, we’re keeping.”

“Aye aye, captain.”

The Expie sits on a strapped crate nearby, legs swinging idly, hood up, the pistol resting in his lap. He hasn’t let go of it since the grass.

He’s earned it.

The pirate holds an ampule up to the light, squints, then places it on the sellable pile with a satisfied click. She mutters something under her breath—numbers, maybe a running tally—then moves to the next.

“Hope you don’t think this is a purely financial exchange,” I say. “I need information.”

“Music to my ears. Info’s cheap.” She doesn’t look up. Her fingers close around a blister pack, flip it, and press each bubble to check the foil seals. “Name’s Myra, by the way.” The blister pack joins the good pile. “Shoot.”

“First, how did you find me?”

“I didn’t.” She holds a syringe with a needle bent into a right angle up to her eyes, then tosses it into the fucked pile. “Imagine little ol’ me, minding my business, having a cheeky cig or two—”

Two?

“—while waiting for the ol’ gal to fill her tank. Then I check the scanner and see the name of that ship with the sixty-k price tag sitting literally on top of me.” She chuckles to herself. “Damn near had a heart attack.”

Cosmic karma is still conspiring against me, I see. And speaking of conspiracies—

“There was nothing about me on the advisory channel. No callsign, no description. Not a word.” I shift my weight against the hull. “So where did you get it?”

She stops sorting and looks at me over her shoulder. The cigarette bobs. “You serious?”

“Dead serious.”

She laughs, a short, sharp bark that echoes off the bare hull. “You think corpo fucks air their dirty laundry on an open channel? Tell everyone and their bloody nan they lost some tech worth more than a corvette?

“So, what, they’re using morse code?” My turn to laugh. I don’t know why. The image of some hunched-over corporate executive in a charcoal suit tapping out dots and dashes on a brass key hits me and I can’t stop.

Man, fent just makes everything hilarious.

She watches me with a mix of pity and amusement, then taps the ash from her cigarette onto the grating. “Ever heard of something called spread spectrum?”

“Ooo! I have!”

The Expie’s paw shoots up, the pistol momentarily forgotten. He bounces on the crate, hood bobbing, whole body vibrating with the urgency of someone who’d waited their entire life to be asked this question.

Myra gestures at him with the cigarette. “Floor’s yours, little man.”

He straightens.

“So normally a radio signal transmits on a single frequency, but that’s super easy to find. Anyone scanning that band can pick it up.” His paws move as he talks, sketching invisible wavelengths in the air. “But with spread spectrum, you take your signal and spread it out biiiig and wide.” He stretches his arm out as far as he can and draws a fat, almost flat bump. “So if anyone tunes in, it just sounds like background noise—but if you know the spreading code, you can de-spread the signal.”

He takes a breath.

“Which means you can pull the whole message out of what sounds like nothing, and no one else even knows it’s there.”

He finishes. His tail swishes once.

Myra slow-claps. Three deliberate beats, cigarette wedged between her fingers.

“Gold star for you.” She reaches into her breast pocket and produces a second cigarette. “Have a—”

I smack it out of her hand. It tumbles end over end and vanishes through the grating.

“Hey! Those aren’t free, you know!”

But my mind’s already drifting. Something’s caught in my throat that’s neither smoke nor fent.

Spread spectrum. I never heard the term. Never knew such a concept existed. But somehow I know the feel of it. The ritual. I close my eyes and try to picture how it all fits together—but fent smothers the thoughts in oil, making everything sticky and slow.

“Hey.” Myra’s voice. “You still in there?”

I blink. I’m still in the hold. Strip lights and medical debris.

“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Spread spectrum, whatever. How’s that help me?”

She watches me for a beat too long, then lets it go. “Most cockpit systems can do it out of the box.” She tosses a cracked ampule onto the fucked pile. “Even your eighth-gen Kestrel can handle it. Hardware’s all there. Just needs the right input.”

The pieces are coming together. “So all we need is the frequency band—”

“Fourteen-forty to fourteen-ninety megahertz.”

“—and the spreading code.”

“Way ahead of you.”

She holds out a datapad—my datapad. Lifted while I was zoned out. I snatch it from her. The screen shows plain text. Binary. Row after row of ones and zeroes, scrolling well past the bottom of the display.

I thumb downward. It keeps going.

“Changes every Monday,” Myra says. “You shift the digits to the right depending on what Monday of the month it is. First Monday, shift by one. Second Monday, two places, and so on.”

“Simple rotation.”

“Simple enough that a pirate can manage it after six drinks.” She taps her temple.

I stare at the binary. The screen’s glow catches the edges of my fingers.

“And this is the company’s channel?” I shake my head before she answers. “No, they’d want plausible deniability. Some arm’s-length cesspit they can drop a message in and walk away.” I look up. “So it’s a pirate hangout.”

“Most of them prefer the term ne’er-do-well.” She fishes a fresh cigarette from the pack but doesn’t light it—just rolls it between her fingers. “But yeah. Ninety-nine percent of what comes through is shit-talking, drunken threats, and someone explaining in graphic detail what they plan to do to all our mothers.” She shrugs. “No hierarchy. A real free-for-all.”

The cigarette stops rolling.

“But the one percent…” She points the unlit end at me. “When someone speaks prim-and-proper, full sentences, no slang, like they’re reading from words with a letterhead, you know you’ve got a corpo on the line with some dirty work.” She slots the cigarette behind her ear. “And everyone puckers up and listens, because it’s always, always, for a good price.”

Fan-fucking-tastic.

The company didn’t sic station patrols on me. They sic’d every pirate in the outer rim—activated by a number with enough zeroes to make ethics evaporate.

But something doesn’t track.

They could have had me blacklisted from every station between here and the inner belt. A single report from Kiren would cascade through the relay network. Patrols would do the dirty work for free. Standard procedure. No bounties. No risk.

“Why risk using pirates at all?” I ask. “Do they want him back alive or what?”

Myra’s expression shifts. The peppiness drains. “Well.” She picks her words. “Him being a living creature wasn’t specified—just that it was ‘exceedingly volatile.'” She makes air-quotes with her fingers. “But yeah, they were very specific about the how. Disable the engines, no centre-mass hull damage, board and extract.” She meets my eyes. “And if anyone damaged the tech, they’d find the bounty on their head next.”

They think the Expie is explosive? That helps, strangely enough. Pirates might refrain from shooting first, asking questions later.

But they’re still pirates. “And the company trusts drunken, chain-smoking criminals to carry out a surgical spec-op?”

“Seriously?” She slips the cigarette from behind her ear into her breast pocket. “Look at mister monk over here, taking the moral high ground while high on fent.”

“Functional. Functional on fent. Now answer the question.”

“Didn’t say it was a smart idea, did I?” She folds her arms. “Likely this was something the corpos couldn’t hand to the patrols.”

Or more likely, something they couldn’t risk being public. Pirates don’t file reports. Pirates don’t ask questions. Pirates don’t sit down with the terrified Expie and ask how he ended up on a fugitive’s ship.

Pirates just take the money and forget.

Myra dusts her hands together and surveys the two piles on the grating. The sellable pile is respectable; a small mound of intact ampules, sealed blister packs, and a handful of syringes still in their sterile wrapping.

“A good haul here.” She does a quick mental count, lips moving. “At least a thousand, might reach one-point-five with the right buyers. Could’ve hit three-k if everything were intact.” She nudges a cracked ampule with her boot. “Shame.”

Over a thousand. From debris on my floor. More than I’ve ever pulled from a single crate.

I’m in the wrong line of work.

“One last question,” I say. “Your boss. The one who helped get him out.” I nod toward the Expie. “How? And why?”

Myra’s jaw tightens. She looks at me, then at the Expie—who has gone very still on his crate, the pistol in his lap, orange eyes fixed on her from inside his hood.

“That one,” she says, “you’ll have to ask the boss yourself. Not in the habit of putting words in his mouth.”

“You weren’t involved?”

“He called in a favour.” She shrugs. “Wanted my old ship. Basically a scrapper, loss leader I’d been meaning to strip for parts. Told me I wouldn’t be getting it back.” She sniffs. “He was right.”

She crouches and starts loading the good pile into an empty section of cargo webbing, bundling it up. “Anyway, what else do you want for all these? Probably goes without saying, but I don’t carry one-k on hand.”

“Calyx needs a full tank of fuel.”

“Done. I’ll top up payment at the pump on my way out.”

“Two, need to get in touch with your boss.” If he’s helped once before—whoever he is, whatever his reasons—he’s my best shot for help again.

Myra straightens. She blows air through her teeth. “You’re out of luck there. He runs a short-range band near Torren. Low power, tight beam.” She cinches the webbing bundle and tucks it under one arm. “I’m heading up that way myself, but it’ll be weeks before I’m in range. And I suspect you two sure as hell won’t be going anywhere near—”

The flinch is involuntary. A twitch in my shoulders that I fail to suppress.

We are. Lindenfield is one station before Torren Relay. Same corridor. The delivery route ends there. The crates in the hold are addressed there.

But the Expie doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know where Lindenfield is, only that it’s the word on the crates. He doesn’t know how close it sits to the place he escaped from. That every light-year from here brings him closer to the thing he’s running from.

Now’s not the time.

“Let’s say, for whatever reason, we end up in the neighbourhood. How do we reach him?”

Myra studies me. Her eyes narrow a fraction.

“Sixteen-twelve megahertz. It’s a numbers station. You know, automated, repeating. You’ll figure it out.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Just remember spread spectrums.”

She adjusts the bundle under her arm and surveys the hold one last time—the strapped crates, the splint on my leg. She shakes her head.

“Anything else?” she asks. “Starting to feel like I’m getting the better end of this deal, and I didn’t even need to rob you for it.”

She isn’t getting the better end. She saw the Expie on the grass and crumbled. She’s not the first. And that kind of softness isn’t something you come back from. If she’s fool enough to let it show, I’m fool enough to use it.

“Throw off the scent,” I say. “Feed some bullshit to your pirate party channel. Wrong heading,wrong sector—whatever buys us time.”

She tongues t he inside of her cheek. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“And when you get back to Torren, put in a good word to your boss.”

She shuts her eyes for a full beat, then blinks herself back. “I mean, I can, but—”

“Actually—”

We both flinch.

The Expie is no longer on the crate. He’s standing on the floor three feet away. I have no idea when he moved.

His eyes flick between me and Myra. The pistol hangs at his side. He lifts his chin, and the hood shifts back just enough to show the full glow of his eyes.

“There is something else we could use.” He holds up one paw, then extends a second digit beside the first. “Two things, actually.”

Seems I’m not the only one exploiting her softness.

“I can’t believe she said yes to both of them.”

“What can I say?” I shift my weight on the crutch, steadying myself against the archway. “You’ve got eyes people can’t say no to.”

He turns. The orange catches the lamplight. “Does that include you?”

“Stop asking questions.”

His muzzle twitches. He tries, and fails, to hide the edges of his teeth.

Inside the train station, the illusion holds. Wooden benches line the far wall. A noticeboard hangs beside the entrance, bare except for a single yellowed card pinned in the centre: a timetable for destinations that don’t exist. The clock faces inside, too. Overgrown tendrils creep along the lintel, reaching for the frozen hands above.

They read ten past three. Always ten past three.

The only thing missing is the tracks. Just the arched opening framing the grass, the lampposts, the shimmer of the force field beyond—and Myra’s ship, fuel lines detached, running lights cycling to white.

She lifts. The landing gear folds upwards and the hull rises, pressing the grass flat in a widening circle. The lampposts sway. The ivy shudders. The ship hovers, a blue silhouette backlit by the amber glow.

The Expie ducks out from under my arm and hops up onto the low stone ledge beneath the arch. He sits with his legs dangling and watches.

“How did you know, by the way?”

He looks up at me. “Know what?”

“To come out with the gun.”

“Oh.” He picks at a loose thread on his sleeve. “I checked the radar. Her ship didn’t have a transponder. Which sort of screamed I’m doing something very illegal.”

Right. Of course it did. It might have been wise of me to take that basic precautionary step. Check the radar. Note the absent transponder. Connect the dots before the dots connected themselves to my neck.

Can I keep blaming the fent? I’ve been blaming the fent for everything else.

Myra’s engines flare, and she pushes upward. The force field ripples as she passes through—a distortion like a stone dropped in a pond. Then the boundary settles. The ship shrinks against the black, her engine trail a thin white thread that slowly thins and thins… until she’s gone.

The grass straightens. Lampposts settle. Fake insects fill the silence. Chirps rise and fall in a rhythm someone programmed to feel natural.

He’s still staring at the space where Myra’s ship was.

“Would you have shot her?” I ask. “If she didn’t back down?”

He doesn’t answer right away. His paws grip the stone ledge, fingers curling over the edge.

“I… don’t know. I didn’t want to.” He takes a long breath. “I’ve never killed someone before.”

He leans sideways, his head coming to rest against my hip. The top of his hood presses into my side. His fur brushes down my arm.

“Have you?”

The question is so quiet I almost miss it. Almost. But it lands where it hurts, somewhere the fentanyl doesn’t reach.

My mouth opens. The answer is right there. Simple. One syllable.

“N—”

It gets that far. Then dies in my throat. What’s left is my mouth, open, saying nothing.

Do I give him another lie? Another careful omission? Add it to the pile, alongside where we’re heading and how irreversibly fucked we are. The pile is already heavy enough to weigh down the hull. One more lie won’t make a difference.

Or do I just… tell him the truth?

I take a breath. Deep. Slow. It fills my lungs and sits there, held while the fake evening hums around us.

I can feel his gaze against my side, those orange eyes tilted upward, waiting. Patient. He doesn’t push. He never pushes.

“Back at Kiren,” I say, “I told you someone was following me.”

He listens, his body still.

“He tried to kill me.” My voice is quieter than I want it to be. “He shot at me. Missed my head by…” I hold my thumb and forefinger apart.

A distant lamppost flickers. I stare through the archway at the grass.

“I found a brick. Hid until he came into view. Then swung. Hit him in the head. Broke his skull, and now he’s dead.”

He says nothing.

“It was him or me. There wasn’t a choice.” I point at his head. “And that red mark on your hood? It’s blood. His blood. I killed a man because I was trying to protect you. That’s all it took.”

He grabs the strings of his hoodie, but doesn’t pull. Doesn’t blink.

“If we keep running, he won’t be the last. I know he won’t be.” There’s a ringing in my ears and a pain in my chest. “Either we kill again, or we die. That’s it. And all this?”

I gesture downward—at the splint, the webbing, the ruin of my ankle. At him. With a sweep of the crutch, at the void on the other side of the force field.

“All this started with me looking into a crate, finding amber eyes staring back. Now look at me: a drug-addled killer with a leg that’ll never heal, hunted by every pirate this side of Torren, stuck with a hauler that should’ve been decommissioned fifty-fucking-years ago.”

My chest is tight. My throat is raw. The speech I couldn’t give him from the bunk—the one about consequences and trust—it found another way out. Mutated.

He’s pulled away from my side.

I watch him move. Ten small steps across the stone floor of the railway house, bare paws silent. He reaches the far wall and turns around to face me, his back against the pale stone.

Then he slides.

His shoulders drag down the wall, the hoodie catching on the rough mortar, pulling the hood askew. His legs give out and he folds, knees drawing up to his chest, arms wrapping around them. He makes himself as small as he can.

“I’ve ruined your life.”

I stare at him. My mouth is still open from the last word I said. No new ones come.

“It’s…” His head drops, his muzzle pressing into his knees. “…all my fault.”

It starts in his chest—a shudder that runs through his whole body. A hitched breath, sharp and wet, catches in his throat and comes out wrong.

He sobs.

His whole body shakes until the hood falls forward over his eyes and his paws clench into the fabric at his knees. The sound coming out of him is so ragged and broken.

I drag myself closer. The crutch groans. My left knee takes my weight, and my right leg extends behind me, the splint scraping the stone floor.

I’m beside him now, half kneeling, close enough to feel him shaking.

I should say something.

I should know what to say.

The words that were flooding out thirty seconds ago have dried up. The same uselessness I felt on the bunk. That same paralysis. Wanting so desperately to fix something that can’t be fixed.

So I just kneel there, watching him cry, feeling the ache in my chest and the warm, drugged nothing in my ankle. Powerless.

His sobs slow. Not because he’s calming down. Because he’s running out of air. Gasping has replaced his breaths, and his body shudders with every exhale. He lifts his head and the hood falls back. His eyes are wet and dim, the orange muted like fading embers. Tears darken the fur along his muzzle.

“Leave me here.”

“What?”

“Leave me here and go.” The words come out between hiccups, barely held together. His paws press flat against the stone, bracing himself to the spot. “Tell them—” A sob swallows the sentence. “Tell them where to find me. They’ll leave you alone. You’ll get a second chance.”

“No.” Automatic. “No, no, I’m not leaving you.”

“I’ve only made things worse.”

“Look at me—no you haven’t. You’re the one who deserves a second chance here, not me.”

“Everything you said, every single thing, it’s all… all because of me.” His voice cracks on me. His paws curl against the stone.

I shift closer, the crutch clattering to the floor. “Back at Kiren, you saved me.”

A sob catches into a hiccup. “Huh?”

“You were right.”

It’s so obvious now. Painfully obvious.

If the customs officials were legitimate, it wouldn’t matter what the company wanted. Kiren would have filed a report. My callsign would have been broadcast on the advisory frequency within the hour. A routine report for a routine runner.

But there was nothing.

And Solen’s message. Autonomous launch sequencing. That isn’t the sterile language of a station report. He said the ship launched itself. He knew I was on the ramp. He knew the Expie was in the cockpit. He knew the sequence, the detail—the how.

Solen knew because someone at the base of that ramp told him directly.

They weren’t customs. And I didn’t believe him. I blamed him.

He’s still crying, but the sobs have softened to hiccups. His paws are limp. His eyes are closed, lids swollen, the fur beneath slick and dark.

I wrap my arms around him.

He stiffens. He’s so used to being grabbed that he’s learned to brace. His body freezes for a long moment.

Then, his head finds the crook of my neck. His paws grip the front of my shirt, claws pricking through the fabric. I pull him closer, tighter, until his ribs press against mine and I feel every cut and scar hidden beneath the fur.

My cheek rests against his. Wet fur and warmth touches my skin.

“I won’t abandon you.” My voice is rough and hurts to use. “If anyone tries to find you, hurt you, take you—” I swallow. “I’ll kill them.”

His claws tighten in my shirt. The fake crickets chirp.

“But—”

“I promise.”

Silence. His breathing slows. The hiccups soften to tremors, then to stillness. His paws loosen their grip, but don’t let go.

I hold him there, on the stone floor of a train station that goes nowhere. I’d hold him until morning if I could. But here at Harlow, dawn never comes.