CHAPTER TEN

The Overwhelming Fear of Connections

Doctor Remillian Entris: “... but, there is an electrical anomaly that occurs only in debris that has come from an Astrogate. And an easy way to explain it is… to say there is no easy way to explain it.”

Reporter: “That’s so interesting. Can you elaborate on that?”

Doctor Remillian Entris: “No. No, I can’t [laughs] because we’re still figuring it out.”

[transcript end]

Transcript of an interview with one of Gray Raven’s leading scientists, Doctor Entris, courtesy of the Entrillian Guild of Records.

[The same interview that was playing in the Port before the Port Bot broke the news-screen in a fit of synthetic anger.]

– Sixthday, Ril –

[Ril: Covienian slang for 3 in the afternoon)

The horrible sound of metal on metal screeched through the engine room, interrupting a quiet tune that played aimlessly from an ancient Relay.

The intruding, and somewhat terrible sound, came from the stack of engine plates that I tiredly pushed out of engine One’s hollow. They fell haphazardly into the main room as I drew in a breath, wiping my bandaged hand across my forehead.

The steel-grey eyes of Tarik Kepper looked past me to survey the now very naked engine, one bionic arm folded atop her organic one as she studied the metal corpse pensively. Metal fingers tapped against her other arm lightly as she thought, like the Tironian was keeping time to some slow, rhythmic music I couldn't quite hear.

I came to stand beside the weathered Tironian, also studying the engine thoughtfully.

Well, I hoped I looked thoughtful. I wanted to look thoughtful, like I was thinking something like ‘ah yes, now that we’ve finished this job, this means we have to start this next specific job’ –but I had no idea what was going to happen next, so I just pretended to look like I did.

Now that the last of the plates had been unscrewed, the heavy engine cylinder had devolved into skeletal form, which consisted of a tangle of unorganised wires, dripping coolant, and pipes that had been quite unhappily wrenched out of place.

It looked quite unsightly, but inside that tangle lay a dead Lightcore, grey and sickly– like a pale, abandoned egg inside of an old nest.

I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for it.

The glowing, throbbing Lightcore that I had carried up from the Warehouse District a good few days ago, seemed to mock this one from a protective crate beside me and the Tironian.

Tarik turned to me, signing with an appreciative look. “Good work, you do.”

I took a moment to translate it into a more cohesive sentence as Tarik busied herself with taking something small from her pocket.

You did an excellent job.

The old Mechanic gave me a look with one hand still in her coverall pocket. “Are you okay?” she asked in shorthand with her other arm.

I pursed my lips, nodding. “I think so. Maybe, little tired,” I signed.

Almost like she had been waiting to hear those words, the Tironian grinned, and the blue markings on her cheeks contorted under the expression. “Good,” she signed, as she withdrew something from her pocket.

Placing something in my hand delicately, Tarik gave me a few more signs. “Don’t tell the Nefnat.”

I looked down into my open palm, finding a small, shiny packet.

Tarik gestured to my hand as she took an identical packet from her other pocket. Go on, the sign seemed to say.

Tarik opened her bag and went back to looking at the engine, tilting her head as she obviously got lost in her brain, making calculations and silent to-do lists for her troublesome engine.

I looked down at the packet and tore it open gently. I was hit with a strange smell of sweet and salty, reminding me of some of Loose’s forbidden frycakes. Unlike those frycakes, the morsels that lay inside the bag seemed round, misshapen, and happily un-uniform.

Putting one in my mouth hesitantly, I was pleasantly pleased as something crunchy broke apart between my teeth.

I raised my eyebrows as a realisation hit me, and I looked up in excitement.

“Wait– this is snap-korn!” I couldn’t keep myself from beaming. “You know, I actually know what this is?”

The old lady broke off her concentration to look at me, wearing an expression like she had completely forgotten I was standing beside her.

“Oh.” She patted me on the shoulder strangely, looking slightly confused, but nevertheless pleased. “Well, good for you.” The old woman paused for a moment. “Think of it as a reward, for working so hard.”

Before I could reply, someone else spoke from behind me.

“Oh hurray– she did her job.” Charge came to stand on the other side of Tarik, holding a large black toolbox in both his arms. “Quick, give her a medal.”

Tarik made a guffawing kind of noise.

“Good time, we’ve made,” were her returning signs. “Long time, I worked aboard ships. Never seen a Lightcore replacement, so fast.” She gave Charge a look. “We’re getting better.”

Charge put down his toolbox, wiping his hands on his coveralls. The action only put more grease on his hands, but the purple Secodack didn’t seem to care, or notice. “Well, hallelujah. Maybe we can actually get off this Light-forsaken planet in time.”

Behind Tarik’s back, Charge gave me a look, one that easily translated into 'maybe we can get rid of the maintenance hand earlier than we planned, too'.

I blew out a breath, putting another crunchy morsel into my mouth as I looked at the roof of the engine room, pretending to study a light. Oh gods, why did the purple gremlin hate me so?

The light flickered.

I sighed, and looked away.

Tarik walked to the opposite side of the engine cavity where Charge had been working, the Secodack following, talking about something I didn’t understand, and using big words that had something to do with all the pipes, compression systems, and back up power-lines, or whatever.

In response, Tarik started using a sign dialect I had never seen before. She pointed to different parts of the engine room, using them to indicate different points in her conversation.

Charge switched to this particular sign, too– as calmly and as fluently as someone simply putting on a new hat, not like they were using a whole new language.

Hovering by the entrance, I put more food into my mouth, transfixed on what I couldn’t understand.

After answering what looked to be a particularly tough question, I watched as Charge clawed his way into the engine and perched atop two pipes. His orange eyes met Tarik’s easily; he seemed somewhat excited after his alien conversation with the other engineer, and asked, “So, does that mean we’re ready?”

After a nod from Tarik– and a quick, preparatory breath– Charge reached down into the engine and started unscrewing a ring of metal from the dead, grey Lightcore.

Oh. It looked like they were preparing the Lightcore chamber for the new one.

I put another crunchy thing from the packet into my mouth, and my eyes started to unfocus on what was happening, a sign that I was tired as hell. I hadn’t been sleeping well, lately, and it didn’t help that I had to be up late and wake early.

That’s what I missed about Kovals'. Morning bell was the earliest I would be there, and I would only stay late if I needed the money for the water Vending Units, (which are harder to steal from when you didn’t have a Port Bot to help you trick the inside computing system into letting you have free stuff).

One day, I thought as I ate another snap-korn, I would have enough money to walk up to a Vending Unit, buy something, and then walk away, without thinking about how hard it would be to steal from.

Actually, as I thought about it, Kovals' never paid me for that last day I worked. Granted, I had stolen back something they thought was theirs, but I had worked really hard that day. I deserved those Disks!

I frowned. I really must be tired. Here I was on the border of walking back to Kovals' and asking them to give me the last of my meagre wages.

I sighed, and took another mouthful of snap-korn.

It really did taste fantastic. Why couldn’t crisp’a’snacs taste like this? I think I would have liked that. This was sweet, crunchy, AND salty. Crisp’a’snacs were just sweet and crunchy– if they weren’t stale. I wondered tiredly if crisp’a’snacs were meant to be stale, or if maybe, at some point in history, they had actually been nice to eat…

Tunelessly, someone whistled above me, interrupting my hunger induced pondering.

I turned and looked up at the walkway, seeing Zara lean lazily against the railing. Pale green eyes surveyed the carnage of metal strewn around the room, with something like habitual tiredness. She squinted at a cluster of badly coiled pipes a few metres from me.

“Wow,” she remarked flatly. “It looks horrible in here.”

I gestured behind me. “They’re just taking the Lightcore out, now.”

Tarik poked her head out of the engine cavity, steel eyes searching for who had spoken.

She gave Zara a somewhat toothless grin. “But Lightcore replacement– in record time!” Her signs held so much excitement, they were hard to read. “Maintenance hand really sped things up!”

Still leaning against the railing, Zara gestured to me lazily.

“She’s eating snap-korns.”

Tarik turned to me as I chose the wrong moment to stuff another piece of food into my mouth.

She looked back up to Zara. “She’s on break.”

As Tarik disappeared again, the lithe medic pushed herself from the railing with a quiet chuckle and slid down a ladder, not bothering with the stairs at the end of the walkway.

That’s what I liked about the engine room. There were so many ways to get down to the floor level. Obviously, there were stairways at each end of the room, but there were also ladders in between them, and even– although I’m pretty sure this isn’t what it was for– a pole that could be slid down in a hurry next to the sync-box.

Turning my attention back to the engine as Zara thudded onto the ground, Charge struggled to pull the Lightcore free from its cage.

“I don’t know what we’re gonna do with this,” he said aloud as he strained to grasp the engine heart. “It’s not good for anything, anymore.”

He grabbed the cylindrical core and finally pulled it free.

Zara came to watch beside me, folding her arms. “Guess we could sneak it into Aster’s room as another desk ornament?”

Charge dropped out from the engine, careful to not drop the core. He pushed some of his dark hair from his eyes and back behind his long ears. “Are you kidding? We can’t top the Lysok flower replica.”

For some reason, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the dead Lightcore as the merchants talked.

“What happened to it?” I asked, stepping closer as Charge unscrewed a cap from the end. I realised I hadn’t even thought about why these merchants needed a new Lightcore to begin with.

Charge stepped out of the engine cavity, looking up without his normal amount of sourness. “Overcharged and blew itself to hell,” he explained, twisting it over in his hands. “On the inside, at least.”

He tossed it to me, and I caught it.

It seemed so cold.

It seemed too cold.

“What… happened?” I asked. “How can a Lightcore… overcharge?”

All three merchants exchanged a glance in answer to my question, and I found that mildly unsettling.

“Well…” Zara started with a sigh, rubbing the back of her head. “Ever heard of a Great Sine?”

The look of horror on my face must have been enough for the medic to not explain further.

“Well, I… I’ve heard the stories,” I said breathlessly.

Charge, who was now kneeling on the ground as he dug through his toolbox, looked up through a messy tangle of hair, and gestured with a wrench in his hand.

“Think of a huge lizard with wings, that floats around in space and preys on the energy that Neburays harvest from the Photonic dust–” He scratched his face with the edge of the tool in his hand. “That's a byproduct from beta-class stars, actually– which is a complex biochemical chain reaction that took me weeks to understand.” He went back to digging through his toolbox. “Anyway, they can go months in Deep Space. And I mean Deep Space– that part of the Kosmoverse where all the nasty things live...”

Charge took a breath, and started laying out a straight row of tools I assumed he needed for the next step in the Lightcore replacement. He straightened one implement, and kept on talking.

“From the North Sectors to Entrillia we were having trouble with engine Two, but when we got a commission to repossess some missing shipments of Kerrelian batteries– which are an energy source that requires a specific type of unstable ore– which is actually something Great Sines need for their process of exaggerated crypsis–”

Next to me, Zara sighed.

Loudly.

“Can’t you just tell a story without spewing out every known detail about the Kosmoverse?”

Charge dropped his hands from where he was straightening a nasty-looking pipe-bending implement.

He gave the Avaiyyatian an offended look. “I was getting there.”

Zara gestured to me. “Does it look like she cares about Kerrelian batteries? Look at her face. She doesn’t understand a single word you just said.”

I looked from the Secodack to Zara. “Well, actually I–”

“I told you I was getting there,” Charge protested. “I was just giving some context.”

“Yeah, Hyper– you’ll finally get there, and we’ll all be dead.”

Zara added after a moment, as if it needed to be clarified, “... from... old age.”

Charge rose from where he knelt. “Well, excuse me, but some of us happen to like details–”

I took a step back towards the engine, holding the Lightcore in both hands as I watched the two merchants argue distantly.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to see that Tarik was trying to get my attention.

For a moment, I wondered why she hadn't just said my name, but then my eyes flicked down to the scars on her throat for a second. I thought back to when Zara told me not to ask about them, yesterday– and how, predictably enough, the urge to ask about them had doubled.

Tarik looked up briefly to the roof of the engine room, gesturing to it. “Beasts, of the Void: Great Sines.” She pointed to the Lightcore in my hands. “Project electrical fields, Great Sines do. We got caught in one–why? Great Sine, guarding a nest of batteries we were trying to find.”

I looked down at the core in my hands.

“It was protecting them, then?” I asked aloud, and Tarik nodded.

I noticed that the argument had stopped.

Charge threw his hands up. “UGH– Tarik! You ruined the best part–”

“You, busy,” Tarik responded with a dismissive wave.

Charge let out a huff of indignation and picked up the tools he had been laying out, and Tarik popped back into the cramped engine space.

I looked back at the core.

Examining it again, I found the grey surface more than slightly disturbing.

“So, if this ship” –I looked around the engine room– “got caught in a Great Sine’s electrical field…” My eyes wandered over the open fuel-well to engine One. “Then how come you guys still have the first core?”

When I looked back at Charge he had several wires in his hands, and was trying to re-attach all of them to the cap he had taken from the old Lightcore.

“Well, although engine One and engine Two are usually linked– they have to be, to function,” –Charge gestured absently at the sync-box– “Tarik managed to ‘sabotage’ our sync-box before it overcharged the second core.”

The sync-box in question reminded me of of a small Power Relay, but it seemed to have been recently fixed– if the new strips of metal at its centre were anything to go by.

Charge went back to work. “Only reason we’re still alive, I guess,” he said without the enthusiasm that those words normally should possess.

I dimly saw Tarik’s signs beside him. “Sabotage? No, no, no– I performed an emergency force-stop.”

Charge waved the old lady off. “You tore the bloody power lines out, Rik–”

Again, I looked down at the grey, glassy core in both of my hands.

Something didn’t feel quite right.

“So, this is dead?” I asked, looking up at the two Mechanics. “Are you sure there’s no power… left in here?”

Tarik shook her head.

“No power,” she confirmed. “Huge electrical surge, it would need, to power on again.”

I shifted my feet, becoming aware of a hot feeling in my bones.

No. No, something wasn’t quite right at all.

I tried to stay casual– tried to be calm.

Key word being ‘tried.’

I leveled out my voice to sound as un-panicky as I could.

“So… what would happen if it did get powered back on again?”

Zara looked at me. Her eyes studied me with a deceivingly tired glare as they flicked down to the core in my hands, but she remained silent.

Charge laughed from within the engine cavity. “Blow us all to the bloody gates of Eth, of course. What do you think would happen?”

“Well, what’s gonna happen to it, now?” I met his eyes as I looked up from the core.

Charge shrugged, turning back to his work. “I don’t know, we’ll throw it into the hangar bin. It doesn’t matter– that thing is dead. Nothing around here is gonna power it back on again.”

For some reason, his words didn’t reassure me, only because I had heard them before.

About two months ago. Right before I got fired from Dels' workshop.

“Is there something wrong?”

I looked up, almost forgetting for a split second that Zara was watching me.

She gestured to the Lightcore.

“You wanna keep holding that, or something?”

I looked down.

I had been clutching the Lightcore to my chest as I was thinking. I held it out for her quickly. “No, no– I don’t want to keep holding it.”

Taking it, the medic whistled to get Tarik’s attention. Zara gestured to the dead Lightcore in her hand. It was a question.

Wordlessly, Tarik nodded, and Zara left.

Although I was thankful that I didn’t have to hold the Lightcore anymore, I wondered at the exchange.

So much of the merchant's interactions were silent, spoken through eyes and fingertips and not with sounds or lips. It could have been that Zara was asking whether or not to throw the Lightcore away, and Tarik said yes, or maybe I was deceived, and they were asking each other about something else entirely…

I wish I could just understand people, but all I got were vague feelings about what they were thinking or feeling, and nothing as concrete as being able to answer an unspoken question…

That sign language that Charge and Tarik had been using– was that from a different planet? People? It didn’t seem like Standard Motion, but some signs looked similar.

I wondered if they could teach me–

“Hey!” I heard Charge shout behind me. “Command to Corporal Obvious?”

I snapped out of my daze, unaware that I had even zoned out.

I turned to where Charge and Tarik looked at me with expectant expressions on both their faces.

“Sorry. What was that?”

“Do you know how to power off an incinerator?” asked Charge, using the tone of someone who had already said those words, and was angry he was having to say them again. He had the new Lightcore in his hands.

“The... what?” I asked.

Tarik held out her hand for the core, signing in shorthand with her other free arm. “You. Go and show– how to power off.”

“Why do I have to show her how to–” Charge's protests were silenced with one look from Tarik. The older woman eyed her second engineer with one, steel-grey eye that held no room for compromise.

Charge’s ears went back, but he handed Tarik the core, stomping past me towards the stairway at the far end of the wall.

Unsure of what exactly I was doing, I hurriedly followed the angry Secodack up the metal steps.

“Sorry, why are we…” I trailed off, glancing at a few warning or hazard posters on the wall that I hadn’t noticed before. “Why are you powering off the incinerator?”

At the top, the Secodack turned to the end of the engine room walk-way and reached up onto his tiptoes to reach a heavy looking wheel in the center of the door that was there.

I looked behind me to the exit that lead down into the hold, turning back to Charge and feeling somewhat excited that I was going to see more of the ship.

“The ship has to be powered off before we can put the second Lightcore in,” he said over his shoulder, turning the wheel once. The door swung open with a loud creak. “The incinerator and some of the Nav Units in the cockpit have to be done manually.”

Stepping through the metal door, we passed another two doors on either side of what I could only call a small hallway.

The Secodack continued under his breath, pretending that the words were out of my hearing. “If you were actually listening, I wouldn’t have to show you, but here we are.”

The hallway quickly ran out, and I followed Charge into a large room. I blinked, rubbing my eyes– the light was different in this room.

Hang the light, everything was different in this room.

I couldn’t force myself to listen to what Charge was saying: the space we had entered held every single inch of my small, selective, attention span.

In the middle of the room was a large wooden table, with two long benches lining each edge. There was a window at either side of the room, now displaying the drab grey of the Liskian hangar around us, but in flight, I imagined they would display various dust-filled landscapes as the transport hurtled through Deep Space.

At the back of the room stood a shelf filled with books, boxes, and other odd trinkets. On the top, I saw a kind of Stellascope, collecting dust as it stared out across the room at me with a strange and condemning, solitary eye.

I didn’t like it.

What I did like was that in place of the normal, oppressive, white lights that most ships or hangars had, this room had warm, orange bulbs on thick black wires, strung up from one edge of the room to the other in criss-cross fashion. It wasn’t even the oppressive neon-yellow light of Lisk– it was more orange, and blissfully less overwhelming.

Huh. Different.

I saw one more door, past what looked to be something soft made for sitting on, situated next to the other window. Above the door was a stairway leading up into yet another level of the ship, but unlike the one below– that disappeared immediately into the next floor– this one wrapped around the top of the room in a balcony kind of way, and then over the small hallway I had come from, before disappearing into either side of the ship down more, darkened hallways.

I stepped towards the door I had noticed, where it appeared faded green words had been labeled about twenty years ago. Although the words were in frustratingly similar Alphon script, it was the symbol next to it that actually held my attention.

I pointed to it. “What is that?”

The Secodack paused, halfway up the stairs above the door. “What’s what?” he asked, looking below to where I pointed. He turned back at me, an eyebrow raised. “The Green Room?”

“Green room…” I repeated, looking back at Charge. “Can I see it?”

I expected him to be upset at the interruption from his task, but he only looked confused. “You wanna see the Green Room?”

I nodded.

He turned to step back up the stairs.

“No.”

I looked at the door, pouting as my eyes traced the weird symbol. It appeared to be a plant of some kind, but it almost looked like a medical symbol.

Charge was already at the top of the stairs, and was in the process of disappearing into a hallway to his right.

I hurried up the stairs, skipping steps like I would on the service ramps. “Is that where you guys smuggle stuff?”

Charge scoffed, finding the statement amusing as we entered a dark corridor. “We’re not smugglers, you idiot. We’re Freelance Merchants.”

I made a face. I didn’t know if I believed him.

We passed a few identical looking doors with large wheels in their centres, and walked for a little while before we encountered something I really didn’t have a word for.

In between the walls of the metal corridor, an entire workshop seemed to have been accidently spilled on the ground.

Crates filled with glowing vials sat in haphazard rows on a shelf that lined one wall, and tools and parts of just about every description lined the inside of at least half a dozen toolboxes. Cords, wires and pipes spilled out in coils from under a thick and heavy, metal bench, that appeared to have been welded straight onto the wall of the ship.

I stepped over a coil of bright green cord. “What happened to your hallway?” I asked, a yellow glowing vial catching my eye at the top of the shelf. It bubbled as I looked at it.

“What happened to it?” repeated Charge, turning to glance at me balefully as he continued to walk. “Something amazing,” he answered, as he turned back around.

“Just– don’t touch anything,” the Secodack muttered. “It's all… very delicate.”

I bit my tongue, staring at a small Bot-looking device under the bench. It had one eye torn out and one leg missing, and seemed to be made completely out of kitchen utensils, or things that resembled them, at least.

It was just too much. My curiosity couldn’t take the non-existent invitation.

I paused in the chaotic hallway, leaning down and poking the small Bot’s solitary eye. It was smooth, and cold, and fascinating. Was it made out of glass? No, it felt more like a polyplast of some kind…

Under the gentle touch of my finger, the eye fell out of the faceplate, hanging on a solitary wire as it swung back and forth.

Charge looked back, wondering why I had stopped. He saw the swinging eye with my hand guiltily poised above it. His intake of breath sounded accusatory, angry, and panicked, all at the same time.

“I said don’t touch anything!” Charge rushed back towards the bench, and I hid my hand behind my back like the action could save me. The anger I expected the Secodack to have was replaced with an intense amount of panic, instead.

He dropped to his knees, picking up the eye and placing it back in the faceplate.

In a nanosecond, the quick fix failed, and the head of the kitchen-utensil-Bot fell to the side with a soft snap. It hung there limply, swinging gently from a thick, grey cord.

I took a step back, hands going out as if I could will the head back on. “Ohh, I’m so sorry– I’m–oh, that looks bad–”

I fell silent as Charge’s rusty-orange eyes turned to me, slowly.

I felt unsafe.

Especially around all this loose, potentially sharp, metal.

I snapped my mouth shut with a loud pop, straightening and turning to face the end of the hallway. I tucked both of my hands under my arms decidedly. “Got it, no-no touching. I’ll… I’ll follow you.”

Charge stood, and walked silently ahead.

As followed behind him, all I could feel was anger, but he remained quiet.

I winced.

It was almost worse.

At the end of the passageway we entered a room that almost mimicked the large engine room, below. But instead of a Light engine, it had a barrel-like machine, set sideways at about chest height in the wall.

There were other boxes stacked up in there as well, but they were all empty, and a few storage cupboards had steel latches on them. I spotted two large machines sitting at the back, their bulk taking up most of the free space as they hummed quietly.

“This is the Rec room,” Charge announced, gesturing around the small space. “Rec standing for 'Recycle room', not 'recreation'.”

I looked around, eyes tracing things I had never seen before. “Oh.”

“Here.” Charge went to the barrel-like unit and slid open a large hatch. A small cloud of ashes came out, like a wisp of smoke.

He coughed, making the ash cloud worse. “This is where we put the clumsy maintenance hands,” he choked out, rubbing his eyes.

I bent down to look into it, and he slammed it shut.

“It’s ashy, but it disposes of the bodies,” he said, looking up at me without a lick of emotion on his face.

Of course, I knew he was joking; but a small part of my brain gave the notion just a little more thought than it should have.

I swallowed uncomfortably, nodding once.

“Noted.”

I made a mental note to never be left alone with the Secodack. Ever again.

Charge beckoned me to a panel on the wall. It held a few buttons, and a lever. He pointed to it.

“This’ll power it down. Pull down the lever while pressing the two top buttons. If that doesn’t work, then use the power cord behind it to disconnect power from the panel. Once you’re done, go meet Tarik in the engine room.”

He turned to leave.

“Wait–” I stopped him, still hovering by the panel, and Charge leaned back into the room.

“You’re going to leave me here?” I asked. He was going to leave me alone with all this sensitive equipment? He was supposed to think I was an idiot. Something wasn’t adding up.

Charge leaned forward. “It's an incinerator. Don’t touch anything you’re not supposed to, and everything will be fine.”

He left, and I heard his words echo down the narrow passageway.

“Scriking mechscrubbers.”

I heard his small footsteps echo away, and I was left alone in the small room. I made sure he was gone before turning to the panel, whispering under my breath,

“Stupid Secodack.”

He didn’t even know for sure that I was a mechscrubber. And what was so bad if I was? What was so bad about mechscrubbers? True, it was the lowest paying and crappiest job you could find in a port city or town, but at least it wasn’t… wasn’t…

Well, I wasn’t sure what was worse. But I was sure I would think of something, one day.

I pulled the lever down heavily, pressing the top two buttons on the panel as I was instructed.

Instantly, I felt the room lose all power.

I breathed in, standing in the dim room as my thoughts settled restlessly in the dark. Breathing out, I frowned as I tilted my head to the side. Something was still bothering me, like a restless thought nagging at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t quite shape it. As soon as it became tangible enough to feel, it would drift away, formless, but worried– like a flickering star you could only see from the corner of your eye…

I shook myself angrily. I was probably just hungry.

Satisfied with my completed task, I turned back into the passageway and made my way back the way I had come. I paused in the hallway that held the small jungle of cords and wires, and looked at the Bot. I stared into its dead eye, finding its expression to be, strangely enough, angry.

Kneeling down, my hands went out to right the crooked head.

I stopped, turning my head away as I shut my eyes.

“No, Evren. Don’t do that– bad idea. Bad idea.”

My mismatched boots found their way easily back down into the crewroom with the cool string lights. At the bottom of the stairs, I rocked back and forth on the steps.

No one was around. I was alone.

I stepped off the stairs, looking at the door Charge wouldn’t let me into. I squinted, then pressed my ear up to it, trying to feel into the metal…

… and I heard nothing.

I frowned and pushed away from the door, disappointed. “Dumb door,” I whispered, looking around the room again.

I noticed a few things I hadn't before, like that there was another light source, and a huge glassless window on the other side of the hallway that led to the engine room.

I took a few steps towards it, seeing a few benches, and a fridge, marking the other room as a kitchen. Small noises could be heard from someone moving just out of view.

Forgetting for a moment that I was supposed to be somewhere else, I walked further into the room, curious to look at the kitchen, and absently brushed my hands against the wooden table.

I froze.

Sounds rose in my mind, like someone had turned on a Relay in my thoughts– the sounds morphed into voices, and the voices, they morphed into words.

I blinked, looking at my hand.

I lifted it off the wood, and the sounds stopped.

Examining my palm, I looked back at the table, curiously. “What…” I said, stooping down to look at the grain of the wood. “Is this… like the Warehouse District…?”

My intense curiosity possessed my hand like an evil spirit, and I pressed it back onto the wood.

The words morphed into sentences, and I shut my eyes, trying to concentrate on them, trying to understand their meanings, their tones.

“–because it’s not your decision! So stop arguing about it, for Eth’s sake!” I heard the captain’s voice shout, but then it bled into Zara’s tired tone, as she evidently told a story. “–came at me from behind, you know? Knocked me out cold– bloody Nefnat knew I was already wounded–” And then there was Xander’s amused voice, booming across the wood silently, “Yes, but not just the lemons, but the grain, too! It was a true tragedy!”

Charge’s voice, Sevus’s voice, Aster’s voice– one by one, the Passerine’s words bled into each other as they talked about trivial and important topics alike around the table, things like family back home, drastic port fares, boxes that had come untied in the hold, and even an apology for somebody’s forgotten life day… I pressed my entire palm into the table, becoming more curious.

How much could I really hear?

“–it’s not your fault, okay? I don’t care what they say. I believe you. I’ll always believe you…”

The last voice came from a gentle, soothing tone, and at first, it was hard to place because of it. But after a moment, I realised that it was captain Rigg, talking to someone else, at some other point in time.

I lifted my hand off the table, blinking.

An overwhelmingly gross surge of pure guilt swept up from my gut and into my throat.

I felt like I had just invaded an unspoken barrier of privacy! I took a step back from the table, wiping my hands on my shirt. They were sweaty and hot, and my right hand started to ache painfully under its bandages.

I put my hands atop my head. Ew… ew. Ew. EW– THAT FELT WEIRD. OH YUCK– WHAT DID I JUST DO– Oh yuck, oh yuck, oh yuck, oh yuck–

“Oh.” Someone behind me quietly interrupted my panic episode. “I didn’t expect to see you in here.”

I spun around, now facing the window into the other room, and I found I was looking into a well lit kitchen, and at the tall Nefnat.

Of course Sevus would be in the kitchen. I felt dumb for not thinking of that sooner.

Sevus looked to be in the middle of stirring something rigorously on a large steel table in the middle of the kitchen– that must have been the noise I had heard earlier. I looked around, seeing the door to the kitchen on my left. It had one of those swinging doors that didn’t reach the roof or the ground; one of them had fallen off, and been replaced with something else that matched its height and width, but not its colour.

My hands fell from atop my head, and I put them into my pockets awkwardly as I looked at the Nefnat. I cleared my throat.

Did he see me? Did he know what I just did? I should say something.

I opened my mouth, trying to speak, but all that happened is that I started to hyper focus on how sweaty my hand was.

“Hi. I…” I breathed out, blinking. “Incinerator. I was powering off the incinerator. Lightcore… F-for the Lightcore replacement.”

Nodding slowly, the cook seemed like he already knew that.

“That sounds about right,” he said quietly, and went back to whisking his bowl of batter.

Glancing back at the door to the engine room, I hesitantly walked up to the large cut-out in the wall.

You need to say something, a voice told me quietly. About the bread.

I swallowed, pretending to look around the kitchen as I tried to push the thought of Sevus being Scelirian out of my head. I rested my hands on the bench that separated the kitchen and the crew room.

“So…” I started, looking back at Sevus. “How do you power off the kitchen?”

Sevus looked up. His clean, light blue sweater was a hilarious contrast to the thoroughly stained apron he wore.

“It gets powered off with the rest of the ship– when they turn the engines off.”

I nodded suddenly, looking up at the roof. “Riiiiight. Yeah. I knew that.”

I thought back to what the captain had said yesterday about his strange, nervous cook. I wondered how many times Sevus stayed on the ship because of how people treated him. I wondered how anxious I would feel if everybody in the universe knew my genes were created for war and nothing else.

“You don’t seem nervous,” said Sevus, turning and opening a cupboard behind him.

“What’s that?” I tilted my head. Why should I be nervous? I wasn’t the one that was created in a petri dish.

“Most Onworlders– well, not all of them, but most of them,” started Sevus as he unclipped a lid from a box, “feel uncomfortable aboard our big, loud, metal ships.” He looked up at me briefly, a few strands of his dirty-blond hair falling into his catlike eyes. “But you don’t.”

I had to take a moment to think about it. About six months ago, I was part of a massive transport crash. So, no, this wasn’t my first time aboard a ship; at least, that I knew for sure. But other than that, I had never really been inside one again. Technically I should be terrified of this strange metal creature that hurtled fearlessly through the most terrifying parts of our universe–

–but I wasn’t.

Not yet, anyway.

I shrugged. “It’s different. And… I think I like things that are different.”

Sevus didn’t laugh, but blew out a short breath of air through his nose. “Well,” he said with a small trace of amusement. “You’ll definitely like this one, because… it’s, uh… one of a kind.”

I tried to figure out if Sevus was being sarcastic, or if he genuinely believed the words. But just like yesterday with the bread, I couldn’t figure it out. The Nefnat appeared to be somewhat unreadable, but not like captain Rigg was. This was a different kind of unreadability that reminded me painfully of Lewis, and when Lewis was trying to be so sarcastic, I actually thought he was being serious again.

I sighed.

“Well, if it’s one of a kind, then I’m glad I got to see it while it was in port.” I tapped my hands on the metal bench lightly. “I consider myself lucky.”

Did I, really? No, I didn’t. (Gray Raven; Dels'; Kovals'; running for my life and eating stale protein bars for six months; sleeping in an alley– the list went on.) But the words felt right to say, at least in reference to the ship. I gestured back towards the engine room.

“And I’m learning a lot, too. From all your crew members.”

Sevus nodded again as he poured what he was working on into a flat, square pan. “I bet Charge makes a wonderful teacher,” was all he said.

I frowned. Was he serious? I squinted over at the Nefnat as he scrapped out the silver bowl with a rubber implement.

Again, Sevus’s expression was calmly blank.

Did this cook spend any time with Charge?

He looked up at me, finally smiling shyly.

“I’m kidding,” he mouthed.

Ah. I smiled. He was joking. That was the only way that sentence made sense.

I clasped my hands together as I looked down at them thoughtfully, distracted.

“I never–” I glanced back up at Sevus. “I never had a chance to…”

I shook my head, shrugging. “I didn’t mean– I mean, I meant to say–”

Ugh, why was this hard?

I tried to concentrate, as the Nefnat had stopped what he was doing to pay attention to me. It was so much easier to talk to people when you felt like they weren’t really listening to you. The pressure of undivided attention was positively incapacitating.

I gave up.

“I’m sorry,” I sighed in resignation. “I didn’t mean to make you nervous about the Scelirian thing. I… I didn’t think. I never really do; I’m told that’s one of my things, you know… ‘not thinking'…”

Sevus shook his head, going back to working calmly around his very organised kitchen. “I’m not sure I know what that’s like.”

“What?” I asked, leaning onto the bench with my elbows tiredly. “Not thinking? Oh, well, it's fantastic. Gotten me into a thousand moments I will never be able to live down.”

Sevus turned so I couldn’t see his face, silent for a moment. He seemed to be thinking about what I said. Without looking up, the Nefnat nodded a few times as he opened a cupboard and took out a few plates.

“Well, it's fine,” I heard him say quietly. “You don’t need to worry about it, miss West.” he shrugged smally, still laying out the plates, and still not looking at me.

“Please don’t feel bad.”

As I watched him, I tried to figure out how old Sevus was, and again, I found it difficult. Late twenties? Early thirties? If he turned his head to the side, he looked positively ancient because of his perpetual worried expression. But when he was working, he seemed younger, and less weathered by life, in general.

I was about to ask him when I heard the engine room door swing open, and like clockwork, someone’s voice echoed out angrily, the door thudding back against the metal wall.

“Evren? Evren?” Charge's voice echoed out of the short passageway. “Command to Corporal Obvious?”

I sighed, gesturing to the engine room. “It’s my teacher.”

Instead of a serious comment, or worried look, Sevus gave me a mock salute by placing his hand to his heart, and then out towards me with a whisper. “Good luck, comrade.”

Good luck? Didn’t have any. But I left the kitchen bench feeling like I had somehow made up for my stupid lack of courtesy yesterday.

I took off happily down the passageway, and poked my head back into the large engine room. I was startled to see Charge a few inches from my face, arms folded with a glare.

I recoiled without thinking with a small noise of surprise. I didn’t know he was standing so close to the door.

“I thought I told you to come back to the engine room,” the small engineer said curtly, arms still folded.

“I did,” I said, stepping over the lip of the door, and closing it again. “Here I am.”

“Only after I called you,” was Charge’s retort from behind me.

I turned back to him, giving the small engineer an equally small shrug. “Sorry.”

Charge’s finger came up to point at me. His four fingered hand was strange, but not completely unfamiliar. Rusty Ris only had four fingers on each hand, too. But I knew that wasn’t normal for a Secodack. Or was it? Wait a minute, she had told me once, but I could never remember what she said…

“On a Freelance Merchant ship,” Charge started, “when you are given an order, you follow it. It doesn’t matter who you are.”

I sighed mentally.

Ew. Another hypocrite.

“And you would know that best, right?” I asked calmly, looking past his finger to engine One. “Because you seem to follow orders so well?”

Charge shifted, looking up at me strangely. ('Strangely' having the meaning of 'angrily' in this instance, and nothing else.)

In an equally strange kind of mood– from the table, the dead Lightcore, and talking to Sevus– I decided to stare down at Charge instead of just looking away.

Charge blew out a long breath, like he had just decided something.

By the way he turned away and stomped down the stairs, it looked like the decision was 'you are so not worth my time'.

“I hope you got a good look at the ship,” he said as he walked down the steps, “cause it’ll be one of the last times you ever see it.”

“I did,” I said as I followed him. “And I liked it.”

“Well, good for you.”

“Yes, it was.”

Sighing loudly, Charge took off straight into the engine cavity without another word. It looked like his decision had solidified marginally.

I folded my arms. Lewis had a very specific word for customers like Charge that would come up to the Port, but he made me promise to never use it. I wondered vaguely if Lewis would mind too much if I broke another one of his promises…

Tarik’s head happily poked up from the other side of the engine. I looked up, hiding my startlement. I had forgotten about her.

“Now, for the big moment!” she signed, reminding me of a small child that had just been given the go-ahead to use their favourite toy.

Charge exited the engine cavity and looked at Tarik.

In shorthand, she signed to us both, “Everything off?”

Charge nodded.

Tarik gestured to engine One– the humming, sleepy engine on the other side of the room. She issued a few signs to Charge, but again, they weren’t ones I understood.

Charge on the other hand, practically leapt over the fuel-well walkway. He stood at engine One’s sides and started flipping switches and turning dials in a fascinating blur. He watched a gauge for a brief moment, and then put his hand on a large lever.

With his other hand, he pushed a button on a wall panel behind him, twisting around to reach it.

“Engine room to hold,” Charge spoke into the panel. “Engine One about to go cold.”

It took a small moment, but eventually something crackled through the wires in the form of a few words.

“Hold is clean–” Xander’s voice came out of the panel. “Fire away, you excellent engineers!”

Nodding to himself, Charge pressed the button again. “Confirmed. Standby for power down.”

I unfolded my arms, watching as Charge started to turn a wheel on the other engine. Wiping his face quickly, he went to the lever he'd had his hand on before. He pulled it down with all his strength, and then came the shift.

The world went black.

There was something else about ships that I hadn't really thought about.

Their lack of windows.

The crew room had some, but that was all I had noticed on the Passerine so far.

So, when Charge turned the power off, I stood blinking in the darkness, disorientated and unnerved. I looked down at my hands. I couldn't see them.

I craned my neck around, completely unprepared for such a change in energy.

It was like the very blood of the ship had stopped pumping, and all the organs in this metal corpse had all failed, instantaneously.

No lights twinkled out from little panels. No humming could be heard from any processes or mechanism. There was no sound or electricity to be found inside its cold, steel walls.

I could hear only the sounds of the two engineers- fussing about the room with practiced movements- and the gentle rhythm of my breathing.

Yet, I felt something, on the tip of my senses. I frowned, shifting my feet as I tried to place what it was.

Again, it was like the light of a small star, refusing to shine when observed directly.

I shook off the feeling, trying to focus. I didn’t have time for vague feelings. I wanted to watch what was happening.

A light had emerged to my left, and I saw Tarik's form blossom into shape as the lantern she held flickered to life slowly.

I opened my mouth to ask the old lady a question, but something made me pause.

As I watched from the darkness of the engine room, Tarik hurried to turn on another lantern, after hanging up the other.

Her metal and organic fingers moved fast, but not fast enough to hide the tremors.

Even in the lowlight of her flickering light, Tarik's dangerously blank expression was easy to see as she lit lantern after lantern. Finally arriving at the sync-box, Tarik placed a lantern on it, and leant heavily against the large piece of equipment.

The Tironian rubbed her forehead, shifting her goggles as she breathed out shakily. The light in the room had seemed to calm whatever emotion she had been experiencing.

Finally, her hands left her forehead and she started rubbing the scars on her throat. She blew out one more long breath, shutting her eyes briefly.

"Hey 'Rik! Need another light over here!" After Charge's shout from the other side of the room, Tarik leapt to a shelf to her right, and pulled a lantern from it quickly.

As she delivered said light, I walked back to engine Two, trying to puzzle out what I had seen.

Don't ask about the scars. That's what Zara had commanded. But I wanted to. I wanted to so badly. Why was this Tironian scared of the dark? Why had she lost her hand? What gave her those scars? Was it when she had lost her arm?

I sighed. If only I was less scared of Zara.

Behind me, I could hear Tarik walk across the fuel-well walkway with her heavy boots. She passed me, and I pretended to be looking at one of the lanterns near the stairs. After Tarik started working on the engine, I cleared my throat, asking my original question.

“So, why do you have to do that?” I asked, gesturing to the other engine.

Tarik looked up from what she was doing, blinking once as she processed the words.

“Because, to sync up the two engines, the other has to be off.”

I frowned. I really shouldn’t have zoned out earlier.

“Then, why do you have to turn off the other Units? Like the incinerator, and the Nav consoles?”

Charge appeared, and rolled his eyes at my question, picking up the new, glowing Lightcore.

“Well, if you had been listening earlier, maybe you would know, wouldn’t you?” He leaned into the engine next to Tarik, practically climbing into the cylindrical frame again.

“Lightcore’s run on subtle electricity.” He picked up a handful of wires and reattached them to the roof of the engine. “Too many electrical fields when you prime them make them prone to instability later in life… That's why we turned off everything else.”

“Why are you only worried about it now?” I asked, worry tinging my voice. “Haven’t- haven’t you had the Lightcore for days?”

Charge shrugged. “Yeah, well, we’re priming it now. That’s when it’s sensitive.”

Tarik waved to get his attention, which he gave immediately.

“Well, most sensitive, when unstable,” she signed, “like the one we took out.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Charge waved her off. “But this engine was as cold as a Skellian’s heart. Dead Lightcore’s need a massive electric charge to be reintroduced for it to be a danger, and it can’t just ‘accidently’ pick up loose energy. It has to be direct– ”

“Danger?” I echoed. “What would happen?” I laughed, scratching the back of my neck. “Would it… would it be very dangerous?”

Tarik nodded, placing the Lightcore into the engine carefully, and snapping two caps onto its ends. She fiddled with some more wires, re-screwing a small plate around them.

“Yeah,” Charge said with a frown. “But only if a large enough electrical pulse is re-introduced to the unstable Lightcore. Then it will start pulling in energy until it can’t hold any more. After that…” he paused, and Tarik finally finished with placing the Lightcore into its new bed.

She stood up and made an explosive noise with her mouth.

“Blow up,” she signed.

“Yeah,” Charge intoned, “something like that.”

Oh.

Oh no.

I looked down at my hands. Horror filled my expression.

Wait a minute.

I thought back to the Hauler Bot, all those weeks ago when I powered it on. I knew it was me, I knew I had done it, but I just didn’t– didn’t know how.

I thought back to the light, the feeling I couldn’t focus on. The core, it should be dead, that's what they said– but when I held it, it didn’t feel dead.

It felt alive. Lingering.

Were Lightcores always like that? Or did it feel alive because of me?

… Like the Hauler Bot?

In the pit of my stomach, I had a sick, disgusting feeling, that yet again, I might have turned something on that I really, really shouldn't have.

I turned to Tarik urgently, grasping the frame of the engine, eyes wide and voice panicky.

“So you’re saying that if the old Lightcore had some power in it, and it got exposed to another electrical field, then it would become, like, super sensitive?”

Charge sighed. A loud and frustrated noise.

“Yes it would– but why is this important?” He looked at me with a mixture of confusion and anger, in his hands, the half a dozen tools that he'd been laying out when Zara came in. “I measured the Lightcore myself, alright? It’s cold. So stop worrying and just take a breather or something– you’re kinda freaking out.”

I took a step back as Charge jumped past me and strode across the room to the other engine.

Like Charge had suggested, I took a breath, trying to focus.

Wait, maybe I was freaking out prematurely.

Maybe nothing was wrong. Maybe I was just being silly and the old Lightcore was safely tucked away into a garbage bin, out of harm's way.

I’d find the Lightcore after this, and if it looked like it would blow up, then I would panic. I wasn’t exactly sure what I should do after that– I usually never got past the panic stage in these situations.

Suddenly, Tarik was signing to Charge. My eyes snapped to engine Two. The new Lightcore was happily in its engine, and its chamber had been closed. I looked behind me, and Charge was standing next to his engine. He was talking into the panel, again.

“Ship-wide, this is engine room– standby for power up.”

He turned back to the lever, and looked at Tarik.

She nodded, and grabbed a similar lever on engine One. After a silent countdown of three, both levers were pushed back up.

I found myself wondering vaguely what happened when two Lightcores were synced.

A split second after that, unfortunately, I found out.

The entire ship sprang back to life like a corpse leaping from the grave. It was like standing on a still, windless plain… and all of a sudden being hit with a hurricane.

The energy from the two cores felt so palpable and large and present, that I could taste the electricity in my mouth. Something like a wave cascaded over me, and I caught myself heavily on the railing to the fuel-well.

Tarik looked over from the happy engine, the ridiculously gleeful look on her face dying away as she saw me.

“You okay?” I saw her sign from the corner of my eye.

No. I couldn’t think! I couldn’t do anything. There was just–

So.

much.

to process.

I rubbed my eyes, standing as the surge of power and pain slowly ebbed away. I looked up at Tarik.

“What the hell was that?”

Tarik raised an eyebrow. “What?” After a confused second, she understood. “Oh, small electrical surge. Lightcores do that, when primed,” she explained. “It's not dangerous for Organics.”

“Well, how big are the surges?” I asked.

“Errr… not big?”

As I thought about it, suddenly the small, minute glow in the corner of my mind forced its way to the front.

It burned in my head like an emergency flare in the dead of night, like a flashlight in the dark, like a small star that finally wanted to be seen.

My mind went to the Lightcore Zara had taken away. For Eth’s sake– it was still in the hangar!

My mind became physically incapable of thinking, and with something like their own volition, my feet leapt out of the engine room, and I crashed up the stairs to the door that lead to the bottom level of the ship.

As I tumbled clumsily down the stairway into the hold, skipping steps and praying hard, the panic stage started.

“Oh gods, what have you done? What have you done? What have you done? What have you–” My feet found the upper platform of the hold, and I dashed down the stairs. Oh, so many stairs! So many damn stairs! Doesn’t the universe know I'm having an emergency?

I wasn't the only one in the hold, and the captain looked up from some boxes he was stacking at the back of the large cargo bay.

“What’s gotten into you?” was the quite understandable query after watching me practically fall down the stairs.

I ran past him, leaping out of the hold and into the hangar with a breathless shout over my shoulder.

“I-think-everyone-is-about-to-die-no-time-to-explain!”

Finally free from the ship and all its damn stairs, I swung around in circles, searching wildly for the medic inside the hangar.

She wasn’t anywhere near the few crates that were left. “Zara!” I shouted, panic making my voice much louder and higher than I wanted it to be as I ran around the other side of the ship. “Zara!!”

Reaching the other side of the Passerine, I saw that the scaffolding was in the middle of being taken down. The Avaiyyatian was rummaging through a tool crate as she talked to Xander, who held a few tools in his free hand.

Zara looked up as I sprang out from behind the corner. She opened her mouth to speak, but I interrupted her.

“The Lightcore!” I shouted, desperately. “Where did you put it?!”

The Avaiyyatian frowned at me, recoiling somewhat at my volume. “What? The Lightcore? How–”

I grabbed her shoulders, hoping that the panicked, slightly insane look in my eye would compel the medic to answer me faster.

“The old Lightcore,” I shrieked, “where is it!?”

Zara looked around the hanger, completely lost. She lifted her arm as best she could, and pointed behind me. “Over by the doors,” she answered listlessly. “In the metal bin?”

Not wasting another second, I dashed across the hangar, jumping over crates that were in the middle of being reorganised. Reaching the opposite end of the hangar, I dove into the bin as gracefully as I could. Thankfully, I had some practice when it came to jumping into garbage piles.

The Lightcore wasn’t hard to find– it was glowing a hot, angry kind of blue. Well, as angry as the colour blue could get.

Little streaks of warm, sickly green ran down its smooth, glassy surface, mimicking lighting in a storm, or a pot of soup that was about to boil over.

I pulled it out from under some softboard and clambered out of the bin.

It didn’t take all my stupidly ambiguous senses to realise that the core was reaching its limit; the lights in the hangar started to flicker as they fought the Lightcore for power– the well of energy that Charge had been talking about had obviously already started.

I didn’t have time to take it out of the hangar.

What the hell was I going to do with it now? Dammit, I didn't think this part through.

I knew my time for decision-dithering was up when the lights above me stopped flickering and went out.

Frozen to the floor of hangar 42, a shiver ran down my spine as I heard the Power-loss sirens start to wail from the open street-side door. Those sirens only had one function, and that was to scream whenever a Level lost all power.

I looked down at the core, horrified. Did that mean that there was an entire Level's worth of power in this core?

I started running. I leapt past the ship, again, dodging crates and boxes as my body took control and my mind turned off. I didn’t know where my legs were going. I didn’t know anything.

Zara, Xander, and the captain all watched me from the landing ramp as I clutched the Lightcore and leapt over a crate labelled in bright purple.

I must look so stupid, was all I could think.

Tarik and Charge thundered down the steps, jumping out of the ship with confusion on their startled faces.

“Oi, moron– what the bloody Eth are you doing?” Charge shouted.

“Evren, just wait-” I could hear the captain say as I ran past.

But I didn’t have time to explain. I didn’t have time to make myself look normal. I didn’t have time to think. I didn’t have time to do anything!

Faster than I ever thought I could run, I raced across the hangar towards the large hangar opening.

Covien’s cool, mid-afternoon breeze greeted me as I drew back my arm and threw the Lightcore over the broken railing. With every morsel of my strength, the dead core flew out of the hangar.

As I watched the Lightcore fall, there was a nanosecond of pure, untainted fear. That fear slowed everything down– the Lightcore, me, the hangar.

Maybe I had gotten it wrong?

Was everything okay?

Had I just thrown a Lightcore out of this hangar for nothing?

–Effectively and promptly, the deafening explosion that followed answered all my questions, at once.

The blast knocked me off my feet, tossing me into a nearby pile of poles from the scaffold. Me, and a few other crates and pieces of equipment, were pushed backwards for a metre or so as the dead Lightcore gave up its life and burst forth in an angry, sputtering explosion.

The explosion abated, and I realised that I had my hands and arms clenched over my head. I couldn’t seem to take them down. It was like my entire body had been electrified with the blast, and I was frozen in this dumb, stagnant position on the floor of hangar 42.

Did it work? Was I dead? Did everyone think I was an idiot, now?

Probably. I mean, I knew they probably already did.

Blinking and rubbing my head sorely, I slowly sat up, seeing the great view of the mushroom cloud outside hangar 42.

“Oh,” I said quietly, rubbing my grubby face. “It worked.”

I collapsed back onto the floor, staring up at the ceiling in an emotionless blur.

Did that really happen?

Craning my neck, I looked out the hangar again, satisfying myself with the plumes of smoke that still hadn't dissipated.

Yep.

That happened.

I dropped my head back into the hangar floor, allowing the relief to flood back into my bones, and tried to quench the heart-stopping, muscle-tensing adrenaline that coursed in my veins.

Finally, I got to my feet, rubbing my head painfully as I kicked a scaffolding pole away from my feet.

When I looked back at the ship, captain Rigg, Zara, Tarik, Charge and Xander, were all staring listlessly at the smoky, soot-covered ship let-out of their hangar.

Slowly, the captain turned his dark eyes to to where I stood.

I gave him a thumbs up.

“False alarm, Captain!” I shouted. “Everything is fine, now!”

An hour later… ( 7 and ¾ years later, Evren-time)

“But how did you know that the Lightcore was going to explode?” Xander asked, looking out of the hangar for the fiftieth time that minute.

We all sat in a rough half-circle, our backs to the ship as we faced the hangar opening. Most of the smoke had finally been picked up by the wind, but small smoky ghosts remained to remind us of the past, like most ghosts were supposed to do.

“Tarik and Charge explained it to me,” I repeated to Xander, who had one hand tightly clenched around his steel crutch. It didn’t take a mystic to realise he was finding this event very sobering.

I continued as the others listened, as well. Even Sevus had been called out of the ship. He sat unhappily and tensely on a crate, pointed ears listening to me speak as he wrung a dishcloth in his clawed hands.

“They said energy would reactivate it, and when we powered on the engines-” I shrugged again. “I guess I just… put two and two together and… made the connection?”

Charge waved off the explanation, much like he had only moments ago. “But it needed electricity in it already.” Irritated and upset, he gestured to the ship as he held some kind of device in his hand. It was connected to a wire, and a soft, rubber circle was on one end.

“We tested that thing days ago to make sure this wouldn’t happen.” The Secodack looked over to Tarik, who had, so far, been quite silent as she leant her back against the ship.

“I read the metre,” said Charge, as if to explain himself. “An explosion would have been impossible– I mean, it was cold! Dead– there was no possible way it could have re-activated.”

There was a small, uncomfortable silence as Tarik looked at Charge wordlessly.

The old woman appeared to be thinking. She finally unfolded her hands with slow, resigned movements. “Metres can be wrong.”

She used an interesting sign at the end, like she was flicking the inside of her wrist with two fingers. Maybe it was Charge’s Alphon name?

“Not this metre,” Charge said adamantly, looking down at the device in his four-fingered hands. “I made this metre. Maybe it could be off by a few units, sure–” He looked back up at Tarik, almost pleadingly. “But it couldn’t have been completely inaccurate.”

“Maybe you read it wrong?” suggested Zara from across the semi-circle, who, like most of us, was tired of sitting on the hard hangar floor.

Charge’s ears went back farther than I had ever seen them go.

“I don’t read metres wrong,” he stated through gritted teeth. He was getting more upset, now, like every word he said was spurring on more and more anger.

“There should have been zero electricity in that core when we took it out-”

Zara sighed, already tired of talking to the Secodack.

“Yet here we are, Charge.” She looked over at him with a flat look. “Fine. The Lightcore blew up, but– Evren figured it all out, and we’re not dead. Why is this bothering you so much?”

“Because it shouldn’t have happened!” Charge shouted back, probably unaware that he had put so much volume into the words.

He lowered his voice after a small, silent moment, but he was still frustrated as he turned and gestured to me quickly.

“And how did you even figure it out?” he challenged, his sharp canines and orange, rusty eyes, seeming more threatening than I previously thought they could be.

“How could you have possibly known that the Lightcore was unstable?” Charge demanded, staring over at me.

Everyone looked at me, and I sat there, frozen for a few unbearable seconds.

I wanted to tell them how I knew. I desperately wanted to tell that poor Secodack that I was the reason that the Lightcore blew up, and technically, he had done his job perfectly.

But I knew I couldn’t.

Ever.

And I hated that.

“I must have seen it… f-flickering,” I said, as the Passerine crew all looked at me.

“Flickering?” Charge echoed instantly. He looked back at Zara. “Did you see it flickering?”

Zara turned her perpetual glare to the Secodack as everyone waited for her answer. She picked at just one of the rips in her dark pants, fingering some thread by her knee.

“To be honest…” she started, not breaking eye contact with the Secodack, “no.” She inclined her head to the side once in concession. “But… I wasn’t actually paying a whole lot of attention. I can’t even remember what colour it was.”

“What?” Charge shot back. “You held a potential bomb that could have blown us all to hell in your hands and you can’t remember what it looked like?”

Zara snapped at Charge, straightening from her lazy position against her crate. “It’s been an hour of your pointless arguing– and I am this close from following the maintenance hand’s example and throwing you out of this hangar. What the hell do you want, Charge? Interrogate Evren, not me.”

Xander spoke up, placing a calming hand on Zara’s shoulder. Surprisingly, she didn’t brush it off.

“Why do you direct your anger at Evren?” After studying Zara’s expression for a moment, he looked over at Charge. “Should we not be offering thanks, instead of interrogation?”

The group was quiet after Xander’s subtle reprimand, but the tense, unbearable silence remained.

Charge sat back down opposite me, starting to pull apart the metre in his hands. His small fingers and practised, precise movements, had the device in pieces on the hangar floor within half a minute.

I watched him silently. Thinking.

There was something about him that I couldn’t figure out.

Sure, he was a jerk, and there were a plethora of those around Covien that I had been exposed to on a day-to-day basis. But unlike them, this Secodack seemed to take what he did very seriously. So seriously, that he was ready to pull apart his own equipment to find faults he knew couldn’t possibly be there.

For some strange and absolutely bizarre reason, this frightened me mildly. Forget the insults, forget telling me to reorganise the crates, forget the glares and brush-offs and sarcasm– it was this– this fierce determination and cruel sense of maniacal, practised research, that made me want to shiver. It didn’t seem right.

But all I could do was watch him reconstruct the metre, and take it apart, and reconstruct it, and then take it apart again.

“Well, that could have gone a bit different,” captain Rigg said, interrupting the silence as he walked into our tense circle.

“What did the authorities say?” asked Sevus, watching the two men leave the hangar via the street doors. He stood up, grabbing a Tab from the crate beside him and hovering at the captain’s side.

Captain Rigg looked at the group, his eyes measuring the tight, tense energy there.

He seemed to make a decision based on the information he saw. I didn’t know what he saw, or what the decision was, but I knew he made one.

I squinted. What was he thinking? Did he know about the Lightcore, or was he fooled, too?

“Well, after I explained what happened– and that it was an accident, not an act of sabotage–” captain Rigg gestured out of the hangar, “they said we can all go about our business, so… you can all stand up, now.”

Captain Rigg looked at me, but I didn’t stand up.

I didn’t really want to.

“That was some quick thinking, kid.” He inclined his head briefly. “Good work.”

I looked up, blankly.

The words of affirmation shut down all the confusion about what I did or how it happened. Maybe it didn’t matter how the disaster was created. If I had done a good job– if Captain Aster Rigg thought I had done a good job, maybe that’s all I had to worry about.

He turned to the rest of the crew. “So, what exactly happened, again?”

Charge looked past the captain, to me. “She said she saw the Lightcore flickering,” he stated flatly.

Captain Rigg seemed confused as he looked down at Charge. “But I thought it was empty.” He gestured to the metre in Charge’s hands. “You designed a non-electric metre to check it, didn’t you?”

Charge deflated like he was waiting to hear those words.

“I know! I did! And I checked it over, and over, and over, but every reading said 'No Output', meaning an explosion would have been impossible.”

He looked up at captain Rigg, listless. “I… It shouldn’t have happened, Captain. No one hooked that Lightcore up to anything electrical.”

Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, captain Rigg shrugged slightly.

“I don’t know what to say, Charge. It happened. Something around the engine room must have done it. You guys have been doing a lot of work. Accidents happen.”

Charge looked up at the Fletric, words lingering just behind his teeth as his face contorted. He looked away sharply, and without another word, he left the captain’s side.

I watched as he disappeared back into the ship.

My eyes found the floor.

I felt like such a jerk.

Vaguely, I could hear the captain talking to Sevus. “... No, no, nothing like that..." He held up a small, clear Tab, not unlike the ticket tucked safely in my pocket. He waved it back and forth. “All we have is a fine for damages– a railing got knocked out of the hangar below us from the blast.”

“Oh, of course,” said Sevus, marking something down on his Tab. “They’ll be a registry or office we’ll have to visit to pay the charge before we leave, or else they’ll blacklist the Passerine and we won’t be able to make port here, again.”

Captain Rigg’s ears went back, and he cursed quietly. “Yet another expense I wasn't planning on. Damn.” He looked up at the roof. “Scriking nightmare from Eth, this planet.”

I pushed myself to my feet, rubbing my arm– it had been aching for the past hour. I stared at the Tab, an idea forming in my head.

“Who issued the fine?” I asked, coming to stand by the two merchants. The captain seemed surprised that I had spoken.

Sevus took the small, clear Tab from captain Rigg, squinting at it. “Someplace called ‘Tri-Dock 61’. Oh, that’s where Tarik went to look for the Lightcore back on Firstday.”

Captain Aster rubbed his right eye for a moment, sighing. “That’s on the surface, isn’t it?”

I nodded in confirmation. “The very top.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to promise anything I couldn’t fulfil. “How long do you have to pay it?”

“It says here that we have the duration of our visit.” Sevus sighed, turning back to the ship as he imputed things onto his Tab. “That’s only two days.”

“Two days?” I echoed strangely. Two days? Eighthday was only two days away?

I smiled, almost in disbelief. I was nearly there. That Leokesh freighter would take me away from here in just two freaking days!

Beside me, the captain clapped his hands together, once.

“Well, we've only got a few more days in port, and a lot of more work that needs to be done.” He got Tarik’s attention. “Apart from the” – he spared a glance at me– “Lightcore… difficulties… that we experienced earlier this afternoon, is engine One looking good?”

Tarik nodded, not needing to give a large explanation. “Fine.”

“Okay, good news. Great.” The captain looked at the floor momentarily, gathering his thoughts, “We need to disengage the scaffold, purge the incinerator, and organise the water Tax.” He looked back at Tarik. “Evren can continue to help you and Charge get that engine back together as fast as possible.”

Captain Rigg wandered off, Zara close behind him, who started pestering him about a some kind of hot beverage she wanted to find while they were in port.

I found myself looking at the ground, again.

I didn’t feel like working. I felt like sleeping. I felt a little like crying, too, but I wasn’t sure why…

Something heavy nearly pushed me into the ground for the second time that day.

I looked at my shoulder, realising it was Xander’s hand.

He looked down at me with a tight, somewhat amused smile on his face.

“Little Geo, is there nothing you cannot do?”

I smiled, shaking my head with a chuckle.

“I feel like an idiot.”

“What nonsense.” Xander dropped his free hand from my shoulder, gesturing to the Passerine. “First, you were smart enough to realise that me and Charge were looking for a Lightcore, and told us of its whereabouts.” He then gestured to himself, but lowered his voice. “Then, you were brave enough to save a dumb Geodian from falling to his death on the low levels of this settlement. THEN–” He took a step back with his crutch, beholding the disappearing smoke outside of the large hangar doors. “You were smart enough to realise that we were all in danger when we were too busy to realise.”

He looked back at me, getting a little more serious. “What about those things make you an idiot, Little Geo?”

I looked up at Xander, blinking.

Did he know? Did he know what a hurricane raged in my head? Did he know that everything I thought about myself was up in the air? Is that why he was talking to me when everyone else was either mad at me, or busy? Or was this just another fortunate coincidence?

I shrugged, rubbing the back of my neck. “I… only did what I thought was right.”

Xander nodded seriously, patting my shoulder again.

“As you always should, Evren, as you always should.”

I looked up sideways at the taller Geodian, wearing a small smile.

“Did it... look cool?” I asked.

Xander leant down as if to share a secret.

“Very cool,” he answered.

The night air outside of hangar 42 was an interesting mix of cool and sticky. Covien had a funny way of mixing things up like that; good and bad, nice and unkind, cold and unbearably hot…

I pulled the cowl of my poncho up, even though the air wasn’t very cold on this level, and looked both ways before stepping onto a quietly busy street.

I had no idea what time it was, but my stomach knew that I had missed a meal, and it had no qualms about grumbling about it, quite literally.

A quiet look of grief overcame my face as I gazed longingly at the row of street vendors, all selling the last of their food in the tapering evening rush.

I tapped my pockets. Just to make sure.

“Yep,” I said aloud. “You’re still soot poor.”

Padding my way down the street, my mind inevitably drifted to other things.

The past week had been so strange. It was only Fifthday, and one, I had stolen an arm from Kovals'; two: nearly got kidnapped by a research guild; three, saved an Offworlder from falling to his death; four, ate some bread, and then five, threw a Lightcore out of a hangar and saved a bunch of people from exploding. (!)

Certainly trumped getting beat up and getting wet, which seemed to be all I was doing before the start of the week.

I walked past a few hangars that were still open, vaguely aware of fuel pumps chugging thousands of litres of fuel into tanks the size of small houses.

I shook my head, thinking back to my many adventures over the past six months. Well, there was getting stuck in a tunnel for a few days… and then there was the Hauler Bot.

I scratched the back of my neck as I watched a small handful of hangar workers argue about how to coil a pipe, and moved on.

“That Hauler Bot, huh?” I laughed, somewhat nervously, even though I was practically the only one on this side of the street. “And… and that table…” I rubbed my arms under my poncho, chewing absently on the inside of my cheek. “And… then... then the Lightcore….”

I pushed the thoughts away as I walked. “You don’t know that you’re the one that made it unstable. It could have been anything that activated the Lightcore… Like-like captain Rigg said.”

The words satisfied me for a few more paces before Charge’s words came back to haunt me.

“There's nothing around here that’ll power that thing back on.”

I started down the stairs for the next level heavily, trying to will the evil words away. An almost tangible sense of agony crept up the back of my throat as I put both hands over my ears, blocking out what I knew I couldn’t ignore.

“Charge is evidently, really smart,” I said aloud to the empty stairwell. “And-and so is Tarik, but maybe they’re wrong. Maybe they’re all tired and they just… made a mistake.” Decidedly, I stepped down onto another step, avoiding a hungry patch of rust in the dull metal.

“Maybe something else activated the core– made it unstable–” Taking my hands from my head, I clicked my fingers, squinting thoughtfully. “Maybe Charge’s metre did it! Or-or maybe it was Zara, I mean she was holding it for a while…

At the bottom of the large stairwell, I greeted level thirty-nine with a tired sigh and a blank expression.

I paused just inside the mouth of the stairway tunnel, gesturing with my hands as I argued with literally no one.

“Look, all I’m saying is that it’s just… jumping to silly conclusions to think that I’m the one that made the Lightcore unstable. I’m not smart enough for that.”

I continued my walk, readjusting my grey bag as I walked past a small soap shop that had been closed for the day. “Those Offworlders are smart, but they can’t know everything, right? I’m not the only one that gets stuff wrong.”

As I said the words, a small, somewhat unobtrusive noise started rattling above me.

I froze, without looking up. The sound seemed like either a bug had caught itself inside a lightbulb, or that that very lightbulb had become sentient and was on the verge of rattling its way free.

Just past the soap store, and high, high up on the wall of the street, there was nothing but a humble little street light attached to the drab grey concrete.

It was flickering.

I looked up the street.

All those lights were normal.

I looked down the street.

So were they…

I turned back to the street light in question, with a slow, scrutinising glare. For about twenty seconds, I listened to it rattle and struggle, as the light started and stopped erratically.

When it refused to right itself, I pointed a finger at it threateningly.

“Stop it,” I demanded the lightbulb, angrily. “Stop it and just go back to being a normal lightbulb!”

As if spurred on by my angry words, the bulb started to flicker faster, and the sound of struggling electricity filled the bulb.

I tried to jump up, convinced that I could reach it, and teach that infernal light source a lesson.

“I’m normal, dammit!” I shouted as I tried to reach the light, “just stop–”

There was a moment of absolute struggle, but, finally, the light burst above me.

I was showered in a magnificent array of little sparks.

They drifted down slowly from the dead, blackened light, like little wisps being carried off in the wind.

I folded my arms as the light smoked above me and I turned to face the street.

I knew I couldn't prove it, but I was sure it was mocking me.

Nothing moved on the street for a small minute. A few people took the stairs and turned right; a piece of garbage blew across my feet; a beetle fluttered onto a sign a few metres to my right.

No one cared about my predicament– not even the bugs.

After a moment of dark pondering, I strained my head to look back at the light. As I looked at it angrily, another explosion of sparks erupted from the dead filament.

I threw my hands up, the explosion pushing me over the edge.

“Oh, for Eth's sake!” I found the stray piece of paper on the ground, and for the lack of nothing else to do, started kicking it angrily.

“Scrike that stupid, stupid storm– and that stupid, stupid Scavenger– and her stupid horse, and that stupid survivor she rescued–” With every word, I kicked the crumpled piece of paper across the street, determined to punish this little piece of parchment for sins it hadn't committed. “And Dels'! And Kovals'! And that lady that smacked me with a broom a few months ago! And Lewis– and his stupid, stupid, stupid arm– and that stupid Hauler Bot!”

With one last shout, I kicked the piece of paper against the curb. A fierce stab of agony shot into my toe and up into my foot– a torn, angry kind of gasp erupted from my mouth.

I crumpled onto the sidewalk, cradling my abused foot and clenching my jaw. Pulling off one of my mismatched boots, I examined my foot painfully.

Finding nothing wrong with said limb, my shoulders slumped. I dropped my face into my hands, feeling the rough brush of my bandages against my cheek.

“What did it really do to me?” I whispered into my fingers softly, losing all the will to be really be angry about my foot.

“What did the Astrostorm change…” I looked at my bandaged hand, pulling it away from my face. I flexed my fingers tiredly, looking at a scar that showed between the fraying bandages on my pinky finger.

“What’s really wrong with you, Evren West?”

“You shouldn’t sit on the g-ground.”

The noise sent my heart into a panic. I pulled my boot back on and sprang to my feet, whipping around to see who had called out.

A dirty, greasy, frycake stall greeted me.

I deflated, looking at a pair of grey eyes.

“Loose?” I asked listlessly, “Where in Ethreal did you come from?”

I gestured to her stall at large, stuttering, “And-and when did you get here?”

The stall in question was perched about ten metres away, calmly tucked next to a cluster of sign posts for Lower Lisk.

Loose calmly stirred her batter from behind the counter. It was evident that this old lady was thoroughly undeterred by my shock. “Been here the whole-whole… time,” she answered back, hesitantly. “You was just-just-just… too busy to… n-notice.”

I walked up to the stall, where the old Covienian stall owner happily spooned cakes onto her griddle. I looked up and down the street again. Sure, there were people, but they were far, far down the street. Loose had, supposedly, been ten metres away. “But I didn’t see you…”

Loose shrugged, spooning more batter into the hot oil.

“You were shouting at the lights again, shoeless girl,” Loose said softly as she looked down at her frycakes. They sizzled unhappily in the heat, screaming soft pleas as the oil turned their skins to light brown.

I sighed as I put my hands into my pockets, looking down the street at the mouth of the stairway. “Yeah, well– It's been an interesting day.”

“Is it the b-birds?” Loose asked, stirring her batter.

“The… birds?” I asked, tilting my head.

Loose nodded as she worked. “Mmhhm. The b-birds. Those wretched creatures are-are-are back again.”

I waited for Loose to elaborate, but understandably, no elaboration came.

Sighing, I rested my elbows on her bench as I grumbled to myself. “No, Loose, it’s… not the birds. It’s just been a bad few… interphases...”

Loose nodded, like she already knew that I was having a bad time.

Who knew? Maybe she did.

“Kovals' is… looking for y-you,” the old lady informed me pensively.

I looked around the street, eyes lingering on a few people that I hoped to Evering were out of earshot.

I gave Loose a pained expression as I turned back to her.

“Maybe not so loud, Loose?” I readjusted my poncho cowl, bitterly. “I already know they’re looking for me… besides, they’re not the only ones, anyway.”

Gray Raven was looking for me, and the only thing keeping me safe was the Passerine crew and their secluded, poor little hangar.

Passerine… Passerine… was there something I was supposed to remember about the Passerine?

I slammed by fist on the frycake counter. “Right! Now I remember–”

Loose turned a baleful eye towards my fist, and I slid it off her stall timidly.

“Sorry.’ I straightened. “But I wanted to ask you something. You take your stall up to the Port, right?”

The old Covienian nodded a few times. “Yes.”

“Well, you know Lewis? The Port Bot there?”

Loose frowned, giving me what I could only describe as an evil eye. “Aye, I know him,” she answered back curtly.

For a moment, I forgot my plea. I squinted back at her.

“What is your problem with each other? Lewis doesn’t like you either, you know.”

Loose went back to working, her eyebrows raised as she straightened things on her bench. “It goes back… back…. back a long time, shoeless girl. I just d-d-don’t like that Bot’s way of doing… things.” Loose clutched a shaker of flavoured salt, eyes narrowing as she looked down the street. “B-besides, I don’t like his… soul.”

I shook my head, watching Loose work. I guess it made some kind of sense– Lewis was logical, practical, un-superstitious, and extremely suspicious of strange people.

This crazy, old, frycake stall-owner, on the other hand, was the exact opposite of all those things– except of course, being suspicious of strange people– that was something they both had in common.

Actually, that was probably why they disliked each other so much...

I shook my head. Now was no time for petty dislikes.

“Loose, I was wondering if you could get a message to him– Next time you were up there?”

I had Loose’s attention. She turned her head, still eyeing me strangely.

“Okay… I can do that… but what kind of… m-message? Is it a bad one?”

Relieved and overtired, I rested an elbow on her bench, rubbing my forehead as I blew out a breath. “No, no, not a bad one. Okay– where to start? Um… tell him ‘Hope you have your arm back on… sorry for leaving you in the Lower Levels… Um… there's a hangar that’s being charged with a fine. Hangar 42, level forty. Can you delete it?' Wait- 'or better yet, mark it as paid?'”

I looked up at Loose. “Ask him to manipulate the hangar fines with the Tri-Dock consoles. I know he can do it.”

Loose grabbed her spatula and started fishing out her frycakes. “Seems like… an-an awful lot of trouble to get one f-f-fine to go… away.”

I gestured down the road. “But these people can’t afford that fine… and I’m the one who caused them to get it. It’s not fair, and I…” I trailed off. “I need to know if Lewis is okay.”

I rubbed my arm under my poncho, the familiar, metallic taste of guilt making my mouth go sour. “I… miss him.”

Loose opened the lid to her warming tray. “Then why don’t you g-g-go? I got things to do.”

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again, looking away. “I can’t go up there.”

“Is it the birds?” Loose asked again, and I shook my head.

“No. Not the birds.”

Loose seemed disappointed as she worked. “Oh.”

There was a small moment when Loose muttered to herself as she worked, and I looked down the street, troubles and thoughts clouding my head. A few more people had come down the street, milling by absently or travelling to and from their shifts at work.

Gray Raven and their horrible ships came into my head as I stared up the street.

Gray Raven and their ceaseless search for Astrogate debris.

I sighed, shifting on the dusty, cracked concrete. “Loose?”

“Hm?”

“Do… Do you have any experience with… Astrogate debris?”

“It’s cursed.”

I sighed, looking down at my hand. “Yeah, I know that. But besides that? What do people think about it?”

Loose pursed her lips, picking up her bowl of batter as she stirred it deftly.

“Hmm, well, ch-churches don’t like…it. And Scientists don’t l-like it, but they… t-t-take it. And take others th-things, too.”

I rubbed my arm as she talked, listening thoughtfully.

“What's so different about it?”

Loose shrugged. “Don’t-Don’t… know. But it makes… p-p-people sick more often then… n-not. Makes a… hole for the bad ones… Makes some big… damned holes…”

I sighed, looking up painfully at Loose.

There was a very special place for Loose in my heart because she was the only person that didn’t mind talking to me about strange things, not to mention she seemed like a bit of an outcast, herself. But there were days when I just couldn’t figure out what the Eth she was talking about.

That being said, something she said did catch my attention. “The… bad ones?” I asked.

Loose started muttering to herself, her movements getting jerkier as she worked. “Well, it could-could be the birds, c-couldn’t it? Mh? No? Maybe it was the shadows. Shadows gotta come from s-somewhere, don’t they? I think… so–Think so.’

I watched her for a moment, sighing.

“Well, thanks for talking, Loose.” I rubbed my arms again, scanning the street, absently. “It’s kinda nice talking to someone. But… I better get going. I got an early start tomorro-”

I shut my mouth, and a second later, dove behind Loose’s stall, trembling next to a sack of flour by her feet.

Loose looked down at me, expressionless. “What?” she asked simply.

I shook my head, trying to tuck myself closer between the sacks. “Loose, don’t look at me. I thought I saw Scavengers up the street.”

Loose smacked the top of my head with her spoon. “What have-have I told you about… touching the f-fl-flour?”

I rubbed the top of my head as I looked up, gesturing up the street as I whispered urgently. “Loose, please! Don’t look at me! The Scavengers will see you.”

As if to confirm my rambling, Loose looked up the street to see what I did.

Three figures dressed in Scavenger garb walked easily down the street, talking to each other absently.

Loose’s eyes narrowed, and much to my surprise, she didn’t push me onto the street.

Instead, she started flipping over her frycakes.

One by one.

As I huddled next to her flour, I heard the sounds of the Scavengers in question draw painfully closer.

It was strangely quiet as I waited for them to pass.

Quiet enough to hear Loose’s frycakes squeal in agony, quiet enough to hear my heartbeat in my throat.

Quiet enough to feel how terrified I was.

The footsteps came nearer, and I swallowed, holding my breath, and feeling my chest start to burn with its need for air.

The hunters spoke in a tongue that I reconised as the plain-people’s native tongue– the Scavenger language. They might have been trying to decide on something, based on their tone.

I looked up to see Loose glaring at them as they passed her stall.

Looking away, I fought the urge to tell her to stop. Real subtle, Loose. Real damn subtle.

After what felt like an age, I heard the Scavengers pass, and very carefully, poked my head out from behind the sack of flour.

They looked like normal Scavengers– the garb, the fabric, even the scarves around their mouths. There was just one, near imperceptible difference.

Around their left arm, just below the shoulder, there was a grey piece of fabric. On that fabric, there was a depiction of a bird in flight.

A grey bird.

My stomach soured as I looked away, frowning at the pavement next to the flour sack.

This is not great.

After about a minute, I finally shifted, standing in a crouch as I watched them turn a corner.

I put a hand to my forehead, looking back down at the ground.

So, Gray Raven was looking for me, and they were dangerously close to hangar 42. Were they scouts? Is that how it worked? Were they lost? Were they systematically going from the surface to the Shaft? Or were these three just trying to find a nice place for dinner?

Whatever the reason, I would definitely have to change the way I got to work tomorrow.

Beside me, Loose was still looking at the place where the Scavengers had disappeared. She made a disgusted noise with her mouth, and said the clearest thing I'd ever heard her say.

“I just hate them damn birds.”

I shuffled out from behind her stall, looking at Loose, and then back to the street.

Finally, the months of ramblings clicked in my brain.

“You know what, Loose? I… think I agree with you.”

It was about two hours past midnight when Kan Oh’Krean finally stepped out of Koval’s and pulled up the collar of her thick, worried jacket.

Air blew out of the century old ventilation systems above, chilling her even through the thick fabric of her clothes.

On Covien, once the pale sun had set and the mountain had cooled, new air was pumped into the Low Levels, heralding something the locals would call the ‘ghost hours’– the long hours in which old air would mix strangely with the new, forming pale, ghost-like fog that would move and shift restlessly along the Tunnel-streets, like a creature cramped in a cage too small for it.

Although it was only the product of badly primed ventilation Units, it never helped that the ghost hours would only appear in the coldest part of the night, when the lights up above would disappear from run-down apartment windows– when the constant noise of the world would die down into a distant murmur. When the stars were far away, and everybody decent had gone to bed.

Kan looked up at the vent responsible for pumping air into the level, distantly aware of the ever-present noise of Kovals' at her back.

Ever since she was fourteen years old, the vent outside of Kovals' Engineering reminded her of a mouth, perched in a tangle of tubes and wires menacingly. Somedays, it seemed so threatening she almost likened it to a bird of prey, readying itself to strike her down.

A part of her assumed that was why she always looked up when she walked out onto the street– and why she always gave it a glare before continuing on her way. But she could never decide if it was because of her dislike of its lurking appearance, or because she had the blood of a thousand miners under her skin, and with them, they’re constant fear of suffocation– reaching back to a time when the subtle difference between one working ventilation shaft meant the not-so-subtle difference between life and death.

She didn’t know, and on some level, she knew she didn’t care, either

Giving it her habitual glare, she walked a few paces from the door and pulled something out of her pocket. Her grease covered fingers fumbled with a thin, softboard box as she leant up against the perpetually damp wall of the street.

Other people milled about outside the shop– some she recognized as Kovals' mechanics who were also on break, other’s she knew to be local repairers and engineers from neighboring shops– but they were all engaged in conversation as they sat on crates, or next to the Vending Units installed on the side of the street.

She turned her attention from them and pulled a burner from the box. She tucked it back into her pocket safely, and pulled out a lighter.

The click sent a spark into the deep, damp mountain air, but nothing else.

She frowned, trying the small lighter again with another violent click.

Nothing happened.

“Bad day, Oh’Krean?” someone asked a little way off.

Kan looked up from where she still leaned against the wall. She was greeted with one of the older mechanics who had been talking up the street. He had detached himself from the group, and was in the process of walking towards her.

She dropped her hand with the dead lighter, tucking it back into her pocket with a glare.

What’s it to you?”

The mechanic reached into his own pocket, and tossed something at her.

She caught it easily, and saw it was another well used lighter.

Hesitantly, she lit the burner in her mouth, the other mechanic joining her as he leant back against the wall, too. Her muscles tensed at the proximity, but she remained silent.

“I should say that you’re too young to be smoking burners, but…” he sighed, shrugging easily as he watched sparks fly out of the workshop opposite them. “–what the hell, right? You’re too young to be Head Mechanic, yet… here you are.”

Kan breathed in the scent that she had come to associate with long hours, and too few breaks. She blew out, adding another ghost to Covien’s mountain air. “Here I am,” she said quietly, dark eyes tracing a crack in the concrete below her feet.

“So, how's the hunt?” commented the other mechanic, easily. “Any luck yet?”

Kan eyed the man with dark, unyielding eyes. She turned her face from him, trying to puzzle out why the other mechanic cared. Was he sizing up her situation? Maybe getting comfortable with the fact that there might be a new Head Mechanic soon? She decided she’d keep her answer short. “She’ll show up eventually, and when she does, we’ll be ready.”

Almost in concession, the other mechanic shrugged and inclined his head.

“I'm sure you will.” He turned his attention back to the workshop, scratching a scruffy beard that was in dire need of trimming. “Kinda strange, isn’t it? Lou going after an Offworlder urchin kid, and not the brightest one, either… Reminds me of the old days, y’know.”

A small silence settled between them as the two mechanics watched more sparks fly from the other shop, like shooting stars springing into the night.

To Kan, her scrutiny and curiosity had always been hard to differentiate, and this moment was no different. She took another lungful of air through the burner and blew it out, frowning.

“What do you mean?”

The other mechanic drew his head up to look at the ceiling, his eyes probably finding the air vent and its terrible mouth.

“Oh, you know… the start up of Kovals' engineering. When Lou was young, and every blessed shop, mech and grass stalk was his enemy. Even his friends.” Taking his attention from the roof, the older mechanic made a motion through the air like he was slicing something. “He just decided he was gonna be the best, and… Here he is.” He put his hand into his pocket, shaking his head.

“Seven other mech shop owners died the year he started Kovals' Mech Engineering… and six more shops just… shut down. No one really did anything about it, but… what a damn coincidence, eh?”

Kan kept her eyes on the sparks of the grinder, letting the words sink into her head. She took another lungful through her burner, almost absently. She'd come out here to clear her head and to be alone. She wondered vaguely what she could say to the man to make him walk away.

“Guess you’ve been around for phase and a half,” is what the young mechanic said at last, her tone rich with the biting taste of sarcasm.

“Too many, in my opinion,” answered the other mechanic, seeming unbothered by her words.

Kan shifted, readjusting her weight against the street wall, and it seemed he had finished talking. Kan blew out a not so figurative sigh of relief. Her burner glowed a faint red at its end; the air twisted restlessly from the vent; the mechanics up the road kept talking.

The ghosts on the street kept shifting.

Finally, the older mechanic spoke, breaking the silence. “You know, I’ve been here for about thirty years, now– I’ve seen a lot of things, probably done a lot worse… But I ain’t never seen a mechanic so young get to where you are. And when Lou promoted you after Rivi passed away–”

“Ferryer collect his soul,” Kan commented habitually before pulling in another poisoned lungful of air.

The other mechanic nodded, somewhat absently. “Yeah, yeah… Ferryer collect his… but when I saw you, I thought– ‘Ethreal’s lights, that girl must be something real special if she can pull off this role so young.’” He paused, looking up at the ceiling.

“But… now, I guess have a different thought...”

“Oh really?” Kan commented dryly, putting her free hand in her jacket pocket, trying to distract herself from the cold air. “Was it ‘why the hell is there a mixling in this shop?’”

Shaking his head, the older mechanic smiled. “No, but us older mechanics took a bit to get used to that...” He sighed, blowing out a lungful of air before he continued slowly. “Now, my thought is ‘if she was talented enough to get herself into that position so young, then why the Eth would she work for a glob of grease like Lou? Why waste herself like that?’”

Kan looked to her right, to the open doors of Kovals' Mech Repair.

She looked back at the other mechanic with a dark look. “What are you on about, Shaw?”

With another shrug, the man pushed himself from the wall.

“You don’t got the makings of a liar, Oh’Krean, so don’t pretend that you don’t know Lou Koval murders what doesn’t fit his needs.”

Kan looked up, taking the burner from her mouth with a shallow breath.

“I ain’t no liar.”

“Yes but smart and clever as you are, you just might be a fool.” He gestured to her, lazily. “Cause it don’t take a genius to know that chasing down that girl? It ain’t right.”

Kan tilted her head, still leaning against the wall. Her voice was low, and full of anger.

“You think I got to where I am by questioning Lou? Do you think any of us did?”

Shaw shook his head.

“No, in fact, I know the opposite is true.” He dropped the tone of his voice, looking around the street as his eyes discreetly kept tabs on the other mechanics out of earshot. “That’s why we’re all here. Because– you, me, Gary, everyone– we’re all just moral pushovers like our ancestors, and we’re all so used to being pushed around by whoever has the biggest stick.”

Shaw pointed to Kan. “And you’re no different.”

The mixling threw the lighter back.

“And what makes you so exempt?" she demanded angrily. "Pretty holy words, coming from the likes of you…”

Catching it easily, the man only put the lighter back into his pocket, unbothered. “I'm not exempt. It's just, I’m only one man.”

Kan pushed herself from the wall, pushing past Shaw to return to the shop. “You’re weak.”

Catching Kan’s arm, Shaw's grip was undeterred by her attempts to pull away.

He tilted his head, voice quiet, but calmly forceful. “If you think for moment that Lou will treat you any different than that mechscrubber if you fail, you’re wrong. Because I’ve seen it, over and over– like clockwork– and when your usefulness finally runs out, you’ll be gone. And no one will do anything. Because no one’s ever done anything. Because no one’s ever wanted to.”

Shaw’s eyes seemed far away for a moment, and he shook his head, breaking eye contact with the wrathful Head Mechanic. He seemed old, and tired, and full of some kind of regret she just couldn’t understand.

“In this life, we all get a chance to tie our souls to something, Oh’Krean– something we believe in– but once we’ve made that choice, it’s damn near impossible to unmake it.”

Kan jerked her arm away. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Throwing her burner onto the ground, Kan stomped towards Kovals' doors, shaking her head as she put both of her hands into her jacket pockets.

“I know enough,” she heard Shaw say behind her. “I know that you were the one that hired that girl despite what Lou said.”

Kan slowed, finally stopping her steps right before the entrance to Kovals'. She bit the inside of her cheek, running a hand over her long, tired braid.

Shaw continued.

“I know you watched her like you used to watch your younger brother. And I know you only took that arm because Lou told you to do it.”

Kan opened her eyes, her irises as dark as any other Covienian's, and just as angry. She shook her head, and walked through the doors of Kovals' Engineering without sparing Shaw another glance.

In the back, by her workbench, Kan turned to a utility cupboard and opened it resolutely. She walked inside and shut the door.

It took a moment, but she finally sank onto the ground, wrapping her arms around herself and leaning back up against the shelves.

She dropped her head into her hands, wishing she could just cry all of her frustration out, but no tears came.

The silence in the utility cupboard was deafening.

It was about ten minutes later when something started shuffling outside the door.

“What do you mean? Inside the cupboard?” Kan could hear Gary’s voice, directed to someone behind him.

“Yeah, saw her go in there a few minutes ago.”

“Really?”

There were a few knocks on the door. “Kan? We need to talk to you. There’s something you should see…” There were a few more moments when Gary talked to someone over his shoulder, again. “Look, I feel stupid enough– no. I’m not doing that. What if she’s asleep?”

Kan straightened to her feet, turning and facing the door. Opening it, she was greeted by Rin and Gary, huddled together as they argued about something in a whisper.

“What is it?” Kan asked, ignoring the fact she was standing in a cupboard.

Gary and Rin were smart, so they ignored it too.

Kan shifted her feet. “Did you find anything up near the Port?”

“No, but here, look–” Gary pulled out a large Tab and handed it to the Head Mechanic.

Taking it, she listened to Gary as she walked passed them, back through the workshop.

“While Rin’s been looking around the Port, I’ve been looking through the newscast just to see if there was anything that could help us.” Gary ran a hand through his pale, sand coloured hair. “And well, so far, I’ve found squat all– but–" he pointed to the Tab. “I saw this, and I thought you should see it.”

Kan frowned at the Tab, looking up at Gary strangely. “‘Bluemeal has gone up by three Disks?’”

Shaking his head, Gary pointed to the bottom of the screen, where an official Tri-Dock 61 notice rested at the bottom of all the other news of the week. As Gary leant in, Kan got a better look at him.

Before she could stop herself, Kan blurted out what was on her mind. “You look like hell.”

Gary dropped his hand, returning Kan’s strange look. He gestured to the nose that Evren had kicked to splinters. "What gave it away?”

Kan turned her attention to Rin. “So do you, actually.”

The dark-skinned mechanic folded her arms, flicking her short hair to the other side of her face. “Thank you for the update, but could you look at what we found?”

Nodding, Kan looked tiredly back at the screen. It was hard to focus on.

“Wait.” She looked back up. “Where’s Lev?”

Behind Gary, Rin rolled her eyes. “Probably drunk under some table.”

As Gary and Rin’s expression darkened, Kan looked between them. “Wasn’t he supposed to be asking about Evren around the Shaft?”

Rin paused, like she was thinking as she held up a finger. “Sorry, let me amend. He’s probably drunk under some table in the Shaft.”

Kan looked darkly at the Tab, trying to push her anger out of her range of focus. She needed to read the Tab, not plan the murder for one of her top mechanics.

“Tri-Dock 61 fines offworld Merchants one hundred and twenty Disks for damages incurred during failed Lightcore replacement.” Kan looked up from reading aloud. “So? Am I getting an update every time a bunch of Offworlders screw up an engine replacement in the Lower Hangars?”

Gary gestured with both his hands, almost shaking as he forced his words out rapidly. The deranged man seemed to be on the verge of implosion.

“I’m sorry, but what kind of engine replacement were they fined for?” He nodded to the screen.

“Who helped some offworld merchants steal a Lightcore, Kan?” Rin asked, her arms still folded disapprovingly. “So, who would be doing a Lightcore replacement? Those don’t happen every day.”

Kan looked up, eyes wide. “Where was this?”

“Lower Hangars,” replied Gary, instantly. “They say there was a huge explosion this afternoon, a few levels below forty.”

Kan rubbed her eyes. “Gods in Eth– have we been looking in the wrong place this entire time?”

Rin shifted. “Well, we don’t know that the mechscrubber is still there, but…”

Gary continued Rin’s absent train of thought.

“But we do know that the merchants are still there, and they were the last ones– that we know of– to receive help from Evren… So, they were the last ones to see her.”

Kan narrowed her eyes, looking out the door of Kovals'. Her head was filled with all the conversations she’d had that day. She was tired of the noise.

She sighed, her free hand sliding into her pocket where the broken lighter rested comfortably in the worn fabric.

Kan shook her head, clearing her thoughts. She handed Gary back his Tab with a firm, resolute decision.

“Then I guess we’re taking a trip down to the Lower Hangars.”