Nine days into life on the Hub, and dinner in the private room had already turned into muscle memory: same door, same drones, same half-second flinch he was slowly unlearning every time violet rice landed in front of him instead of white.
Training had settled into its own routine too, which was its own kind of relief. Zaria ran them through drills until his arms gave out, Senna corrected his stance twice as often as she strictly needed to just because she liked being right about it, and Lyra bounced through the whole session like sparring and fun were the same word. Nobody brought up the zero-g shaft anymore. He'd stopped waiting for someone to.
Food came after training, same as always. Not the mess hall. Hadn't been since day one.
The door to the private dining room slid open before any of them reached for it, same as every door on this station seemed to know exactly when to move. Small drones floated in right behind them, no bigger than dinner plates, hovering at exactly polite height, chiming a soft double note that somehow sounded like an apology and a greeting stacked together.
"Good evening, Star Maidens. Gold Ranger." The lead one dipped in something that was unmistakably a bow, its little propellers whirring quieter than his own heartbeat. "Your table is ready."
Senna dropped into her usual seat like gravity owed her a favor.
The drones set the table without needing to be asked twice, each dish arriving in its own careful hover before it touched down exactly where it belonged. The colors didn't throw him anymore, not really, but they still weren't anything he'd have believed from a photo back on Earth. A pile of something rice-shaped sat a deep, glossy violet. Strips of what might have been vegetable curled bright orange-red, more traffic cone than carrot. A sauce pooled at the edge in a green so saturated it looked built for a highlighter, not a dinner plate.
He'd asked about it exactly once, his first week in. No dye anywhere on the station, not in food, Zaria had told him, like the question itself had been slightly insulting. Whatever grew here just came out looking like this, sun and soil doing something Earth plants had never bothered learning.
Lyra reached over without asking and swiped a piece straight off his plate, popping it into her mouth before he could do anything about it.
"You gonna eat that or just glare at it all night?"
"I was getting to it."
"Sure you were." She took another piece anyway.
"Quit stealing my food."
She just laughed, entirely unrepentant, and he decided arguing with a thief mid-crime wasn't worth the calories.
He got a proper bite in this time, violet rice and all, and the first thing that hit him was sweetness, clean and sharp, the kind of opening jab that made him drop his guard on instinct. Then something else landed half a second later, smoky and rich, catching him square in the back of the throat the way a body shot catches you right after you think you've already taken the worst of it. He chewed through what felt like a full three-round exchange packed into one bite, flavor throwing combinations he had no idea how to counter.
If food could knock a guy out, this station would have a body count.
Something crunched next, unexpected, some kind of seed or shell buried in the sauce, and for one wild second his brain tried to file it as an attack before his tongue caught up and told him it was just texture. He swallowed, blinked, and sat there a second just processing what his own mouth had survived.
Whoever cooked this had never once heard of mercy.
The door got shoved aside, not opened. Maci came through it at a flat sprint, scanner bouncing off her hip.
"There you are." She zeroed in on him, nobody else at the table registering. "You promised. Tonight. You said tonight."
"…I said maybe tonight."
"You said tonight. I have it on record. Wait, no, actually, I don't. I just remember it really clearly. Same thing."
Lyra perked up. "Ooh, is this the Starseed thing?"
"The Starseed thing." Maci already had him by the sleeve. "Archived scans aren't cutting it. I need him live. Now. While the data's fresh."
Zaria didn't look up. "Try not to break him."
"No promises." Maci was already three steps toward the door, Hikaru stumbling after her, dinner still in one hand.
Senna, from the table: "Bring him back digesting."
"Best I can do is mostly."
The door shut. His plate stayed behind, and so did four people who didn't look nearly concerned enough about where he was headed.
* * *
The corridor blurred by too fast to actually take in, Maci's grip on his sleeve leaving him exactly two options: keep up or get dragged. He picked keep up.
The lab door slid open onto something that looked less like a lab and more like the aftermath of an explosion that had decided to keep working anyway. Every surface fought for space with something else, tools nobody had bothered putting back, cables looped over cables like nobody trusted the floor to hold them on their own. A wall of what used to be other machines, stripped down to guts and spare parts, took up one whole side, and somewhere in the corner a diagram floated and rotated slow, nobody watching it, nobody explaining why it still needed to turn at all.
This looks like someone lost a fight with their own equipment and just left the body where it fell.
"So this is just." He gestured at the whole mess, not sure where to even start. "This is all yours?"
"Mine, and everyone else's who's given up trying to keep it organized." She waved him toward a raised disc set into the floor, ringed with lights that hummed at rest like they were clearing their throats. "Stand there. Don't touch anything you don't recognize. Especially not that."
She pointed, without looking, at a jar on the third shelf.
"What's in the jar."
"That's exactly the kind of thing I just told you not to touch."
He stood on the platform anyway, arms crossed, radiating the specific discomfort of someone who'd rather be doing literally anything involving getting hit.
"This isn't going to, I don't know, hurt, right?"
"That's statistically unlikely." She tapped the console awake, and the ring of lights brightened around him, climbing from his boots up. "The last person I scanned who complained this much turned out fine. Mostly fine. Structurally fine, at least."
"That's not reassuring."
"Wasn't meant to be." She grinned at the readout instead of at him, which he suspected was for the best. "Hold still. This part's boring."
He held still. The light climbed, mapped, settled, a full-body pass that should have taken forty seconds and come back with one clean reading, same as it did for literally everyone else who'd ever stood on that platform.
It took forty seconds. It did not come back with one clean reading.
Maci's ears went flat against her skull, and for one full second she forgot he was even in the room.
"Okay. Okay, hang on." She leaned in until her nose was nearly against the display, tail gone rigid behind her.
"What. What's wrong." He hadn't moved, but his jaw had gone tight.
"Nothing's wrong. Maybe it's the opposite of wrong. I don't even have the words for what this is yet." She scrolled back, ran it again, got the same result. "You're not putting out one signal. You're putting out three, all stacked on top of each other, like three separate digs opened in the same trench, each one insisting it's the real one."
"…Is that bad?"
"It's never happened before. Not once. Not to anyone. Not in two hundred years of records." She was already pulling up a second screen, checking it against nothing, because nothing existed to check it against. "This is either the best day of my career or the weirdest glitch I've ever seen."
"Please pick the first one."
"Working on it." She waved a hand at him without looking, the universal gesture for you can go now, this is between me and the machine. "Go on, shoo. I need to yell at this readout in private."
He went, visibly relieved to be dismissed, the door sliding shut behind him on a room he was pretty sure he'd never fully understand.
* * *
Alone, the lab went back to being just hers, which made it a much easier room to think in.
"Three." The word went out to the empty console, to the dead Keys catalogued three decks down, to whoever had built this station and never once planned for a bearer doing exactly this. "Three, and you're not going to tell me what any of them are, are you."
The console, predictably, gave her nothing.
She pulled the readout apart the way she'd pull apart a strata wall, one careful layer at a time instead of just staring at the mess of it. Somewhere under all that noise sat an answer she'd been chasing since the Key first bonded, and the data kept doing the thing archived sites always did when she got close, going soft right at the one spot that mattered, like the ground itself had decided that particular find wasn't hers yet.
The door opened without a chime, an hour later, someone letting herself in the way only one person on this whole station ever did. Selu came through in a uniform two sizes too big, sleeves rolled and still bunching at the elbow, cap pulled low enough to shadow a pair of dog-like ears pinned flat against dark hair coming loose from its tie. A striped tail trailed behind her, held dead still. She had a covered bowl balanced in one hand, carried the way someone carries a thing they've carried a hundred times before, and her eyes went straight to the mess on the console before they went anywhere else.
"Hey. You missed dinner."
"Hey, thanks for coming by." Maci didn't look up. "Seriously, you are not gonna believe what I just found."
"Yeah, I heard something happened. Zaria said you made a noise and called it concerning."
"It was a good noise."
"She didn't say which kind." Selu set the bowl down within arm's reach, close enough to matter, far enough not to interrupt anything currently glowing. "Eat. You've had that look on your face for like ten minutes now."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine, you're just ignoring me." She kept working the lid off the bowl the whole time she said it, the same unhurried attention she'd give an untied shoelace. "So what'd you find."
Maci turned the display toward her, and something in her whole posture eased the moment she did, shoulders dropping half an inch, the frantic edge she'd carried with Hikaru still in the room draining out of her all at once. It always went like that around Selu. She'd never once tried to figure out why, mostly because she suspected the answer would be inconvenient.
"There's three separate signals coming off one guy. It shouldn't even be possible, and there it is anyway, just sitting there being impossible." She traced the overlapping lines on the screen with one finger, more careful with them than she'd been with the person they belonged to. "Could be interference bouncing off something nearby, except there's nothing else in range to bounce off of. Wait, no, actually, could be one Starei that just doesn't sit still the way the others do. Could be some kind of feedback loop in the Driver itself, something nobody's ever built by accident before. Or maybe it's not even a Starei signal at all, and I'm looking at some piece of Vaelmori tech nobody's ever seen switched on before."
"Which one's your money on."
"Honestly, none of them. Or maybe all of them. That's the fun part." Maci dragged both hands back through her hair, leaving it messier than it started. "The signal's real. I just don't have the story to go with it yet."
Selu looked at the overlapping lines a while longer, head tilted, the kind of quiet that meant she was actually working something out instead of just not talking.
"Three signals, and one belt's holding all of it." She wasn't asking. "Something in there's carrying more than it was built for."
Maci went very still.
"Say that again."
"I don't know what it means. It's just what it looks like." She shrugged, already reaching to pull the bowl back since Maci clearly wasn't touching it. "You're the one who gets paid to have theories."
Maci logged the session anyway, careful for exactly as long as logging things stayed boring.
Log entry: new bearer, live scan pass. Equipment built by:
Her fingers hovered there a second too long, ready to type the name that belonged in that slot, the one that had belonged there for two years running, the one she'd never once had to think twice about typing before tonight.
She deleted the line instead. Typed in-house. Didn't let herself dig any deeper into why that felt like the harder choice, and moved on before she could talk herself out of the easy one.