Marie's home smelled like boiled plastic and sweat. A borrowed space carved out of a forgotten cargo pod, lit by strips of light that flickered when the station’s spin dropped a fraction of a cycle. Marie sat at the fold‑out desk, palms pressed flat to the metal. She’d cleaned her rifle. She did some reports. She’d beat the dust from her suit. The red injection syringes sat in a neat row like little priests in red robes.
She took one, popped it open, injected it into her arm, and waited. The surge came like a switch thrown - every nerve upright, the room expanding, every object tagged and catalogued by some invisible hand. Her heart slowed and sped at the same time. She felt like she could pick apart the stars one by one.
The job tonight was routine: meet a contact, arrange a protection run, get paid. Outside, the Zone hissed and spun, an indifferent gyre of debris and anomalies. Inside, she was an operator again. The mask fit.
The contact waited at a quiet canteen off the docking concourse. He was a pale man in a gray coat with a pale smile, chewing on something from a foil packet. He waved her over. She sat. His voice came through like a clean signal.
“You’re Marie Soban. Good. We need someone reliable.”
She nodded, automatic. “Reliable,” she said. Her tongue felt mechanical, almost robotic.
He started talking details. Coordinates. Payment schedules. Some Kiith faction name. But the words began to break apart like foam. His jawline shimmered. The skin on his hands slid off in ribbons, pooling on the table like paint stripped from a hull. Bone glimmered underneath, perfect and white. He kept talking, the same calm transactional tone, as if he didn’t notice he was a skeleton.
Something black pulsed on the walls behind him. Tendrils of Beast biomoss bloomed out of the metal, creeping upward, reaching or forming dense strands between surfaces. She smelled copper and ionized air. The room tilted.
"Infection event," one voice in her head said. A second said "containment breach." The third one whispered in her head, exhausted: "This is the last thing you'll see."
She thought: "Naar Directive. They’ll cook us. White‑hot plasma. Flash, gone. You’re about to be a smear on the bulkhead."
She felt herself brace for it, the blast, the instant erasure, and then facing Sajuuk for judgement in the afterlife. She even pictured her own skeleton turning to vapor.
But nothing happened. No alarms. No plasma. The skeleton kept talking. His lips were back. The walls were bare metal. She blinked, and everything was as it had been. Just a man in a coat, chewing slowly, staring at her like nothing was wrong.
She forced herself to nod. “Fine,” she said, voice flat. “I’ll take the job.”
She stood, signed nothing, and walked away on legs that felt like carved glass.
Back in her home she tried to drink water but her hands shook. Her heart drummed against her ribs like a faulty pump. She laid on the bunk and felt the world tilt and churn. The high escalated into misery. Thirty hours of sleep waited for her, but the crash wouldn’t come for at least two or three days. Instead of riding the D-63 and soaring, panic arrived instead, a wave of cold fire. She clawed at her collar, whispered fragments in Kharakid and Common, half‑memories, half static.
The door hissed. A shadow crossed the room. Metal feet on metal deck - it was KUn-de, its Somtaaw sigil on its chest dull in the low light
KUn‑de's attention fully focused on Marie, registering the signs of something going terribly wrong. It began to speak, its voice calm and unornamented.
“This ends now. You can’t do this alone anymore.”
She tried to answer but only air came out. The panic peaked, then broke, leaving her shaking, drenched, eyes blank. KUn‑de didn’t ask permission. It lifted her like a rag doll and carried her out into the corridor.
Her last thought before the blackness was the hum of its servos and the realization that she was not going to wake up in her pod again.
You’re going somewhere else. Maybe up. Maybe down. But not back here.
Then the dark took her.