Ivo carried the toolbox in and had already set it down before he understood what he’d walked into.
“The sun’s dying,” Maureen said, from the workbench, tablet in hand, a graph on the screen behind her that bent the wrong way.
Not burning out.
Dying.
The distinction landed in the silence like a stone dropped down a well the kind where you wait and wait and never hear it hit bottom.
Ivo watched from the doorway.
He’d been sent to carry a toolbox and hadn’t left yet.
The family had gathered without anyone calling them; they just arrived drawn in, iron to lodestone.
John leaned over Maureen’s shoulder, studying the curve.
“How long?”
“Days,” Maureen said.
“Maybe a week before the cold makes the Jupiter unflyable. Two weeks before we can’t survive outside the hull at all.”
Judy went very still, the kind of stillness that in her meant fury held on a short leash.
Will went quiet too that sudden child-silence when adults stop pretending everything’s fine.
Penny stood with her arms crossed, glaring at the graph like she could argue with math if she got angry enough.
“So we leave,” John said.
Simple.
Immediate.
A soldier’s reflex ground on fire, so you run.
“We leave,” Maureen agreed.
She tapped the tablet and the graph became a checklist.
Forty-seven items, color-coded by priority.
Red at the top.
A lot of red.
Ivo set the toolbox down where Maureen had pointed and started to back out.
“You.” She never looked up.
“You’re on salvage with Penny. Anything we can’t use for the escape, you catalog. Anything that might be useful, you bring to me first.”
Penny’s head snapped around.
“I’m babysitting?”
“You’re partnering,” Maureen said.
The correction had edges.
“He doesn’t know the systems yet. You do. Show him what we need and what we don’t.”
Penny’s face cycled through three reactions too fast to catch, landing on a smile Ivo couldn’t read.
“Fine. C’mon, Exhibit A.”
Ivo followed her out before he could ask what that meant.
The salvage took them into the compartments that had crumpled on landing the spaces where the hull had folded like foil and left a maze of torn panels, sheared brackets, and sensor arrays that would never see again.
Penny talked the whole time narrating their route, rattling off which system fed which like she’d memorized the ship out of boredom and every few minutes she’d stop to scratch something into a small notebook she kept producing from her jacket like a magic trick.
“You hum,” she said.
Ivo had been running his hand along a support beam.
He pulled it back.
“What?”
“When you’re near the hull. You hum. Barely. Like you don’t know you’re doing it.” She wrote it down.
“Exhibit B.”
“I don’t hum.”
“You absolutely hum. Also you flinch when anything sparks. Toaster yesterday. The welder this morning. Tiny flinch, gone in a second, but it’s there.” She tapped her pen against the notebook.
“I’m building a case.”
“A case for what?”
“That you’re deeply weird and I’m going to figure out why.” She said it cheerfully.
Then she pointed at a twisted sensor mount.
“That one’s dead. We don’t need it. You want it?”
The Assay had already told him.
Aluminum-scandium alloy.
Ninety-two percent.
Two kilos.
His molars ached.
“Why would I want it?” Ivo said.
Penny shrugged.
“You looked at it like it was yours and somebody stole it.”
He made himself look away.
Picked up a cracked plastic panel instead and turned it over in his hands like he’d been inspecting that the whole time.
“This one’s trash too.” Get faster updates on g.com.
“Uh-huh.” Penny wrote something else.
Her smile got wider.
They worked for two hours.
Penny kept a running tally on her tablet parts Maureen wanted, parts she rejected, parts that needed a second opinion.
Ivo kept his hands busy and his mouth shut and tried not to taste the air in every compartment they passed through.
When Penny ducked into a forward storage bay to check a manifest, Ivo stayed in the corridor.
The sensor mount was still there.
He looked left.
Looked right.
Pulled it free.
The Assay lit it up in copper-and-silver lines.
The numbers were clean.
Digestible.
The hunger never asked; it pulled, the way gravity pulled, and he was tired of holding himself upright against it.
He bit down.
Aluminum gave first.
Scandium held.
He worked it like jerky, low and methodical, and swallowed the pieces faster than he should have.
The taste was bright and wrong and his throat fought it but he kept going.
The warmth came first low in his chest, humming outward.
Then the ache.
Then the tremor.
His hands started shaking.
“Got it,” Penny called from the storage bay.
“Manifest says we’re missing three oh.”
She stood in the doorway with the tablet in her hands and her eyes on his.
Ivo’s fingers were still curled around the half-eaten mount.
The tremor ran from his wrist to his elbow and he couldn’t make it stop.
Penny stared.
He set the mount down.
Wiped his mouth.
Tasted metal and swallowed it.
“Low blood sugar,” he said.
“You were eating a sensor mount.”
“I wasn’t”
“I watched you bite it.”
The lie he’d been reaching for fell apart before he got his hands on it.
He tried a different one.
Tried the truth.
Landed somewhere in between and hated all of it.
“It’s a thing,” he said.
“A condition. Rare. I just”
“You ate part of the ship.”
“Non-critical part.”
Penny’s mouth opened.
Closed.
Opened again.
“You’re going in the notebook.”
“Penny”
“This is going in the notebook and then I’m going to have so many questions.” She was already writing, stylus flying.
“Does Judy know? She knows, doesn’t she. She’s been doing blood work on you. Oh my God, is this why you’re always”
“It’s handled,” Ivo said.
Quiet.
Flat.
The tremor was easing but his pulse was still hammering.
“It’s handled, it’s not contagious, and it’s not dangerous to anyone but me. And I only touch things we don’t need.”
Penny stopped writing, head tilting like she was re-checking her own math.
“You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
“You’re asking me not to tell Mom.”
She studied him.
The notebook stayed open in her hands.
The stylus hovered.
“Exhibit A,” she said finally.
“Eats metal. Literally.” She snapped the notebook shut.
“I’m not saying anything. Yet. But you’re going to owe me the whole story eventually, and it better be fascinating.”
Ivo exhaled.
Penny grinned.
“Also if you eat something we actually need, I’m turning you in so fast.”
“Noted.”
They finished the salvage run in silence.
Ivo’s hands steadied.
The warmth in his chest held; it settled banked low, steady, ceramic-warm.
The Assay read the corridor differently now.
Brighter.
Clearer.
The edges sharper.
He was close.
Not there yet but close enough that the corridor around him felt less like a cage and more like a pantry with an unlocked door, every rivet and bracket whispering its composition into the back of his skull.
Dinner was ration packs and recycled water and Maureen going over the checklist item by item while John asked questions and Judy took notes.
Ivo sat at the edge of the table.
He wasn’t hungry.
He was never hungry at meals anymore, and Penny’s eyes kept finding his unopened pack, then her notebook, then back, cataloguing without a word.
“So,” Penny said, too casual, too loud.
“I’ve been keeping a list. Weird things about our newest crewmember. Want to hear it?”
“No,” Judy said.
“Yes,” Will said.
Penny ignored both.
“Exhibit A: never eats. Exhibit B: flinches every time something sparks. Exhibit C: hums when he’s near the hull. Discuss.”
The table went quiet.
Ivo made himself smile.
Self-deprecating.
Easy.
The kind of smile that turned a spotlight into a joke.
“Picky eater. Jumpy. Tone-deaf. You’ve just described half the people I grew up with.”
John snorted.
Don, two seats down, grinned.
Will laughed the sharp, relieved kind, the laugh that comes when somebody defuses a bomb you half-believed was real.
Maureen didn’t.
She’d stopped chewing.
Her fork was halfway to her mouth and her eyes were on Ivo, steady and cool and working through some equation he couldn’t see.
Then she set the fork down, picked up her tablet, and went back to the checklist.
“We’ll run diagnostics on the fuel cells tomorrow,” she said.
“John, you’re on the couplings. Judy, I need you to restock the med-bay for a two-week margin. Ivo, you’ll assist.”
“Copy,” Ivo said.
Maureen didn’t look up.
Penny was still grinning.
Ivo forced down a bite of the ration pack, swallowed it, and told himself he’d scraped through another day.
Two people watching now.
The medic who could read his blood.
And the engineer who counted everything to the gram.
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