Marko lay still in the dark, eyes open, and went looking for it.
Not moving yet not with thirty men breathing around him in racks stacked three high, air dragging through filters that had never quite stopped smelling like the hangar’s hydraulic mist.
The amber wasn’t there.
He’d half-expected it to be waiting behind his eyelids, patient and unbidden, same as it had appeared over Frame 14 without asking.
But his sight was clean.
Just the underside of the rack above him, stenciled with the same maintenance tag it had probably carried for twenty years, and the faint glow of the compartment’s night lighting tracked across rivets he could map without looking.
Ninety minutes to reveille.
The chrono on the bulkhead said 0510, which meant the last sleep cycle before the final inspection day, and a deckhand who showed up foggy to a final inspection was a deckhand someone would remember.
He needed to know what the amber could do before someone else learned he had it.
Marko let his attention go loose.
Not thinking at it directly that hadn’t worked in the two hours between the frame repair and lights-out, when he’d tried willing the amber back and gotten nothing but eyestrain and Cally asking if he was all right.
He tried the opposite.
Let his mind drift sideways, same unfocused slide as the junction box, skimming across the berthing’s small faults without fixing on any of them.
A loose stanchion two racks forward, listing half a degree to port.
The vent cover third from the hatch that didn’t sit flush.
Below him, Socko’s rack and the smell of whatever Socko was using to pad the mattress not regulation, probably not legal.
Nothing.
The amber stayed dark.
He tried narrowing it.
Pulled his attention to the berthing’s structural load racks transferring weight down through the deck mounts, mounts feeding it into the frame ribs below.
His hands knew the math.
The body had done this inspection a hundred times, marking stress points on a deck chart, flagging anything that’d fail if the ship went to battle stations and the hull twisted under fire.
Still nothing.
But he felt it.
A gap in his peripheral vision where the grid should be, a hollow that wanted to resolve into something if he could just The amber flickered.
Not over the berthing.
Over his own forearm, resting across his chest.
A faint phosphor grid snapping into focus over skin and bone, tracing the radius in clean geometric lines, and below it a block of teletype that materialized one line at a time, patient and cold.
RADIUS HAIRLINE DISCONTINUITY 41MM DISTAL.
HEALED POORLY.
LOAD-BEARING COMPROMISED UNDER SPECIFIC ROTATION.
Marko stared at it.
He’d broken his arm as a kid.
Thirteen, maybe fourteen.
Fell wrong off a loading scaffold and spent six weeks in a brace that itched like fire.
The bone had set fine.
He’d never had trouble with it.
Except the overlay said otherwise, and the overlay had been right about Frame 14.
He rotated his wrist.
Slowly.
Felt for the weakness the block said was there.
And stopped.
Because the block had updated not with new text, but with a shift in the grid’s shading, tracking the movement, highlighting the exact angle where the load would concentrate wrong and it had done it a half-second before he’d consciously decided to test it.
The answer arriving ahead of the question.
Marko held very still.
The rack’s metal frame pressed cold against his shoulder blades, and he let it, needing something solid that didn’t know more than it should.
WATCH ESTABLISHED, KOWALSKI.
STANDING TO.
The name hit him like cold water.
Kowalski.
His name.
The old one.
The one that had drowned with the rest of his old life in whatever gap sat between the junction box and forty minutes later when he’d woken up wearing someone else’s hands.
He hadn’t said it aloud.
Hadn’t thought it clearly, not since the first shock of wrongness when Socko had called him Dabrowski and the name had landed on him like someone else’s coat.
The overlay flickered once and went dark.
Marko lay there, heart rate controlled, breathing steady, staring at the dark patch of air where the block had been.
He tested the recall tried to summon it back by wanting it, by thinking the name, by narrowing his attention to his own radius as he’d narrowed it to the frame.
Nothing.
It was gone.
And it had used a name no one on this ship knew, in a block that read like a watchstander’s log, and it had called the watch established as if the watch were him.
“You’re doing it again.” Socko’s voice, low and scratchy, from the rack below.
Marko didn’t move.
“Doing what.” “Staring at nothing like it owes you money.
You been awake this whole time?” “No.” “You’re a terrible liar, brother.
I can hear you not sleeping.” A pause.
Fabric shifted.
Socko’s hand appeared over the edge of the rack, waving vaguely in Marko’s direction.
“You want to talk about it, or you want to keep doing that thing where you pretend you’re fine and I pretend I believe you?” Marko considered the hand.
Considered the question under the question, which was Socko’s way of offering cover without asking for an explanation.
The name sat in his mouth, sharp-edged and old, and he swallowed it down.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Just didn’t sleep worth a damn.” “Nobody sleeps worth a damn on this boat.” Socko’s hand dropped back out of sight.
“That’s what the ambrosia’s for.
You still owe me for yesterday, by the way.
Two-jump favor, plus hazard.
I’m keeping a running tab.” “You’re always keeping a running tab.” “That’s how you know I care.” The berthing’s lighting cycled up a notch sixty minutes to reveille.
Somewhere forward, someone coughed, and a rack creaked, and the low-grade breathing shifted toward waking.
The air thinned out as bodies stirred; thirty men burning off sleep at once gave the compartment a sour, warm edge.
Marko swung his legs over the edge of his rack and sat up.
His radius felt fine.
The overlay stayed gone.
He pulled his boots on in the dark, laced them without thinking, and ran through the morning’s checklist with hands that knew the routine better than he did.
Wash the water tasted faintly of recycled ship’s air.
Shave.
Uniform buttoned to the throat.
Tool belt inspected and inventoried, every item in the pocket his hands reached for without looking.
By the time reveille sounded, he was standing in ranks with the rest of the deck gang, composed and present, carrying a name he’d never spoken aloud and the cold certainty that whatever was addressing him knew exactly who he was.
And hadn’t asked permission.