She’d been counting for twenty minutes when Ivo found her the same struts twice, the same conduit three times in the wreck’s gutted engine compartment, tablet in one hand and a frown that made the numbers look personal.
He braced one hand on the buckled frame at the threshold; the frown only deepened with each pass.
“Problem?” he asked.
She didn’t look up.
Tapped the tablet twice, hard.
“We’re short.”
Ivo waited.
“The escape plan needs forty-two kilos of conductive pathways to bridge the power cells to the thrusters.” She gestured at the stripped walls, the hollow ribs.
“This wreck had sixty before the crash. I’m finding thirty-eight and change.”
Thirty-eight.
He turned the number over like a bad coin he couldn’t spend.
He’d eaten maybe three hundred grams since the ice haul.
Aluminum filings.
A cracked fitting.
A palm-length strip of nickel alloy Don had tossed him with a wink and no explanation.
All of it scrap.
All of it gone.
Maureen turned, finally, and met his eyes.
“You’ve been in and out of this section more than anyone. Have you seen conductive stock? Anything copper-jacketed, aluminum core, anything that could carry load?”
He had the truth ready small, exact, easy and let it die behind his teeth instead.
“No,” Ivo said.
“Just the structural stuff you’ve already tagged.”
She held his gaze a half-second longer than comfortable, then nodded and turned back to the tablet.
“Then we stretch what we have. Lower margins. Higher risk.”
He left her to the counting.
Don found him two hours later, near the cargo sledge, coiling salvage line that didn’t need coiling.
“You look like a man doing math he doesn’t like,” Don said.
Ivo let the line fall.
“Maureen’s short on conductive stock.”
“Yeah. Heard her muttering about it.” Don leaned against the sledge, arms folded, easy as a man with no problems at all.
“Funny thing, though. I might know where some unlogged parts ended up.”
Ivo looked at him.
Don’s grin was quick and sharp.
“Stuff that fell off the manifest when nobody was looking. Happens in a wreck. Happens more when people are stressed and counting fast.”
“You’re holding out on the family.”
“I’m holding out on the list.” Don’s voice stayed light, but his eyes didn’t.
“There’s a difference. The list says what Maureen thinks we need. I’m keeping a separate shelf for what we’ll actually need when her plan hits something she didn’t model.”
The logic was sound.
The logic made Ivo’s skin itch.
“How much conductive stock?”
“Enough to close her gap.” Don tilted his head.
The Line offered no opinion.
It didn’t need to.
Ivo could taste the question forming before Don said it.
“I need a favor first,” Don said.
There it was.
Ivo’s hands stilled on the coiled line.
“What kind?”
“The small kind. The kind where you don’t ask follow-up questions and I don’t explain why I need it.” Don’s smile didn’t move.
“I’ve got a crate I need kept off Maureen’s inventory. Nothing dangerous. Nothing that’ll compromise the escape. Just something that’s mine, not the colony’s, and I’d like it to stay that way.”
“You want me to hide something.”
“I want you to not mention something. Different verb. Less effort.”
Ivo looked at the wreck’s skeletal frame, the stripped walls, the gutted ribs that had already given everything they could.
Thought of Maureen’s face as she recounted the same struts, looking for grams that weren’t there.
Thought of the molar ache that never really left.
The taste of iron that settled heavier every night.
The pull toward mass he couldn’t name and couldn’t stop.
He needed to eat.
He needed to grow.
And the only metal left in reach was the metal someone was counting on to stay exactly where it was.
“How much extra?” Ivo asked.
Don’s grin widened, just a touch.
“Enough that you won’t have to go hungry.”
The arithmetic was clean.
Maureen’s gap closed.
Ivo’s larder stocked.
Don’s secret kept.
Nobody loses except the list, and the list wasn’t a person.
The list was just a number on a tablet, and numbers could be wrong.
Ivo met Don’s eyes.
“Show me,” he said.
The crate sat in a nook behind the fuel-cell stack, tucked where the debris field’s shadow kept it out of casual sight-lines.
Don levered the lid open with a pry-bar.
Inside: conductive cable, rolled tight.
Aluminum blanking plates.
A nest of copper ferrules still in their protective wrap.
All of it clean, spec-grade, exactly what Maureen’s plan was bleeding for.
And underneath, packed in fiber-wrap: something else.
Ivo caught a glimpse dark polymer, compact, hand-sized before Don let the lid drop back into place.
“The metal’s yours,” Don said.
“The thing under it stays mine, and stays off every manifest, inventory, and maintenance log until I say otherwise.”
“A question you just promised not to ask.” Don’s voice stayed easy.
His face didn’t.
“We’re both aboard for reasons we don’t talk about, Ivo. I’m offering you the professional courtesy of not asking yours if you don’t ask mine.”
The ache in Ivo’s molars spiked, sharp and hungry.
The cable alone was maybe four kilos.
The blanking plates another two.
Enough to carry him through the next threshold and past it, if he was careful.
Enough to stop scavenging the family’s leavings and start building the charge Heat II would demand.
Enough that he wouldn’t have to take from survival.
Just from honesty.
Ivo looked at the crate.
At Don.
At the math that had stopped being clean the moment he’d understood what the bargain cost.
He held out his hand.
Don shook it.
His grip was warm, solid, and carried the same weight as every deal Ivo had ever made to stay aboard something that wasn’t his.
“Pleasure doing business,” Don said.
Ivo said nothing.
Pulled one of the cable rolls free, hefted it.
Two kilos, maybe a touch more.
The weight sang against his palm, familiar and patient and exactly what the Line had been whispering toward since the ice.
He walked back toward the supply tent with the cable tucked under one arm and the taste of copper already settling on his tongue.
Behind him, Don re-secured the crate and whistled something off-key and unbothered.
Maureen would get her forty-two kilos.
The escape plan would hold.
And Ivo had just traded a clean conscience for a full stomach, because the alternative was starving in a lifeboat made of math he couldn’t eat.
The Line pulsed, steady and satisfied.
He ignored it.
Kept walking.
The cable’s weight didn’t change.
But by the time he reached the tent, it felt heavier than the strut on the ice, and he couldn’t tell if that was the copper or the lie.
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