Four days, Ivo had held this shape knees to his chest, spine folded into the gap where the ribs met the hull’s skin, breath kept shallow on purpose.
Four days of counting footsteps in the corridor outside, learning which boots moved like they cared and which moved like they didn’t.
The blister stank of hydraulic fluid and someone else’s panic.
He’d stopped noticing around day two.
The klaxon tore that quiet apart.
Red light flooded the blister’s single porthole.
The ship groaned, metal parting under a stress it hadn’t been designed for, and the deck pitched hard enough that his head hit the bulkhead.
Voices outside families, running.
A child screaming for her father.
The hydraulic hiss of a ramp unsealing, close, and then the louder hiss of atmosphere venting somewhere it shouldn’t.
Ivo moved.
The access hatch was two meters away.
He’d mapped it blind in the dark, every handhold, every seam.
His fingers found the first grip and pulled, and the bulkhead above him buckled with a shriek that made his teeth ache.
The exit folded shut like a mouth closing.
He froze.
Watched the gap collapse to a hand’s width, then nothing.
The only way out now was through the maintenance crawl behind the coolant line, and that meant the salvage pile the junk heap the Resolute’s engineering crew had shoved into the blister’s aft corner and forgotten.
Another groan.
Deeper.
The kind of sound that said the spine of the ship was deciding whether to hold.
Ivo crawled.
The salvage pile was a tangle of failed parts and pulled components, slick with old grease and the hydrocarbon stink of a fuel leak no one had cared enough to track down.
He shoved a cracked manifold out of the way, then a length of conduit, and his hand landed on something cold.
A rib.
Structural alloy, fractured lengthwise, the break recent enough that the edges were still sharp.
It shouldn’t have been here salvage like this went to the smelter, not a storage blister.
Someone had pulled it and left it no smelter tag, no chit, nothing to say who, like whoever cracked it out had wanted it to disappear.
His hand didn’t want to let go.
Ivo looked at the rib, and the world opened.
Numbers.
Rust-orange, laid over the metal like frost he could see through his own palm.
Composition in percentages that scrolled as he blinked: titanium-aluminide, trace chromium, a dozen trace elements his drill instructors had never asked him to memorize.
Mass in kilograms.
Purity index.
And at the bottom, one word in a font that looked like it had been etched with a cutting torch:
DIGESTIBLE
The taste of iron flooded his mouth.
Ivo jerked his hand back.
The numbers vanished.
The taste stayed.
The ship screamed.
Not the hull this time something alive, something moving through the sections above him with a sound like shearing steel and a heat he could feel through the deck.
Footsteps, hundreds of them, all running the same direction.
Away.
He grabbed the rib again.
The numbers bloomed.
His molars ached.
This time he held on.
The crawlway was narrow enough that he had to pull himself through on his elbows, the rib clutched against his chest.
It should have been cold.
It wasn’t.
It sat against his sternum like a banked coal, warm and patient, and the numbers never stopped: 4.3 kg, 87% purity, digestible, digestible, digestible.
The hatch at the far end was open.
Miracle or oversight, and Ivo didn’t care which.
He shoved through into the corridor and the light hit him like a fist.
Emergency floods.
Red and white strobing in a pattern that meant evacuate now.
A family sprinted past mother, father, two children, the smallest one crying and didn’t see him at all.
A deckhand in a Resolute jumpsuit sealed a door behind them without looking at their faces, then moved down the row to the next one.
Down the corridor, a ramp.
Open.
A Jupiter’s loading bay visible beyond it, cargo nets and tie-downs and the smell of somewhere else.
Ivo ran.
His legs had forgotten what running was.
Four days folded into a blister, living on ration bars and the water he’d siphoned from a coolant return line, and his knees nearly buckled on the first three steps.
He held the rib against his chest and ran anyway.
The deckhand saw him.
Looked at him.
Looked at the tablet in his hand and the manifest that said this section was clear.
Ivo ran faster.
Twenty meters.
Fifteen.
The Jupiter’s ramp was lifting, slow, the servos whining under a load they hadn’t been calibrated for.
A man’s voice from inside the bay, swearing in three languages, something about a chicken and a hydraulic line and who the hell designed this piece of
Ten meters.
The deckhand’s hand moved toward the wall panel.
The one that would seal the corridor and trap Ivo on the wrong side of a ship that was coming apart.
Five.
Ivo threw himself through the gap as the ramp closed.
He hit the deck on his shoulder, rolled, and fetched up against a cargo net that smelled like engine oil and ozone.
The rib was still in his hand.
The numbers were still there, glowing faint through his clenched fingers.
His mouth tasted like he’d been chewing on a battery.
The ramp sealed.
The Jupiter shuddered, lurched, and dropped.
Ivo lay still under the cargo net and counted his breaths.
In for four, out for six.
A rhythm his body remembered even when his brain didn’t.
The deck thrummed.
Somewhere forward, a man was still swearing at a chicken.
Somewhere above, the Resolute was dying in pieces, and the thing that had killed it was made of living metal that moved like it had a will.
His molars ached.
The rib was gone.
He opened his hand and it wasn’t there.
The numbers were.
They hung in his vision now, even when he blinked, a faint overlay on the cargo netting, on the deck, on his own forearm: alloy, purity, mass.
The net was steel, forty percent recyclable.
The deck was a titanium composite he didn’t have a name for.
His forearm was meat and bone.
Not digestible.
He filed that away like a mercy he hadn’t earned, and didn’t look at it twice.
The taste didn’t fade.
Ivo closed his eyes and tried to swallow it down.
Iron.
Old blood.
The back end of a migraine that hadn’t started yet.
His throat was dry and his chest hurt and his hand still remembered the weight of a thing that was under his skin now.
Footsteps.
Close.
He went absolutely still.
A man’s voice, quieter now, tired.
“Yeah, Debbie, I know. I know. We’re all having a bad day.”
The footsteps moved aft, away.
A hatch cycled.
Silence, except for the hum of the drive and the faint electric whine of something charging in the walls.
Ivo cracked one eye open and looked at the bulkhead nearest his head.
A stencil, white on gray: JUPITER 2.
He closed his eye again.
Let his head rest against the deck.
Let his heart slow down to something that wouldn’t crack a rib.
He was aboard.
Uncounted.
Alive.
The iron taste sat at the back of his throat like a bill he hadn’t read yet.
One hand cramped, still shaped around something that wasn’t there, and he made himself let go.