Consciousness came back slow and warm, something off underneath it he couldn't name yet.
Hikaru cracked his eyes open to pale light filtering through curved glass, or not glass, something that gave a little when his shoulder shifted against it. No armor weighed him down, no helmet or hum along his spine where the suit usually sat, just his own hoodie, soft and ordinary, and skin underneath that didn't hurt anywhere it should've.
Where the hell am I.
The last thing he remembered: a rooftop, a woman with a sword and eyes like she was doing math on him, then light, a lot of it, swallowing everything.
Did she get me? Am I dead? This feels like a weird way to be dead.
Through the curved wall of whatever he was lying in, a shape moved into view close enough to fog the glass with her breath.
She was short, round-hipped, hair the color of wet bark and singed white at a few of the ends like she'd leaned over an open flame one too many times and never learned the lesson.
A lab coat two sizes too big slid off one shoulder, sleeves shoved to her elbows over hands scarred pale across the knuckles.
A pair of fur-tufted ears sat pricked up on top of her head, twitching, and something striped swished behind her that took him a second too long to register as a tail.
Okay. Does the afterlife contain women with raccoon ears or something?
Her whole face lit up the second their eyes met through the glass, both hands slapping flat against it like she couldn't help herself.
"Oh thank every star still burning, you're awake~!"
She sounds way too happy about this.
Hikaru pushed up onto his elbows, and the surface under him gave slightly, warm and humming faint against his back like it was alive in some small way he didn't want to think too hard about.
His voice came out rougher than he expected.
"Where am I."
"My ship." She said it like that answered everything, tapping the glass once. "You're in a healing pod. Standard recovery unit, does wonders for blunt trauma, general getting-thrown-off-a-roof stuff."
"A healing what."
She pointed at the glass again, at him, at the glass, like repetition would make it click faster.
"Pod. You've been in there about twenty minutes. Vitals are great, by the way, whatever you are, your body bounces back fast."
Whatever I am. Cool. That's a totally normal comment to make to a guy who just woke up.
"Can I get out of the whatever-I-am box, then."
She was already moving, hands flying across a panel he couldn't see from this angle, tail flicking hard enough to knock something off a shelf behind her that neither of them looked at.
"Right, yeah, obviously, hang on. Sela, pop the seal on pod two, would you? He's up."
A soft chime answered from somewhere in the walls.
The pod hissed open along a seam he hadn't even noticed, warm air spilling out ahead of him, and Hikaru sat up the rest of the way on his own for the first time in what felt like hours.
His body didn't argue back.
The soreness that should have been there wasn't, just a loose, sleepy calm settled all the way down to his bones, like every bruise he'd earned that night had simply decided to clock out early.
Huh. That's actually amazing.
He swung his legs over the edge and stood, testing his weight. He found it held just fine.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Thanks. For, uh, hauling me out of whatever that was."
Maci waved him off before he'd even finished, tail giving a lazy swish behind her.
"Don't mention it. I was looking for you anyway."
She's looking for me. Fantastic. That's not ominous at all.
His guard climbed back up fast enough to surprise him, spine straightening, weight settling back onto both feet.
He didn't let the question breathe before pushing another at her.
"Why are you looking for me? This got anything to do with that Starseed the shrieking bird-lion kept demanding?"
She said it plain, no hesitation, which somehow made it worse.
"Yeah, actually. That's exactly what I'm after."
Of course she is. Just my luck.
He took half a step back before he caught himself doing it.
Maci's hands lifted, ears flattening like she could already read his face.
"I'm not the bad guy here. I'm trying to help you. That's the whole reason I dragged you off that roof in the first place."
"Who even are you?"
She stuck a scarred hand out, then thought better of it and let it drop.
"Right, sorry, should've led with that. Maci Tindal. I dig up things everyone else calls too dangerous to touch, got expelled from two schools over it, and right now I'm the only person alive who can keep up with whatever your Key just pulled off back there."
Hikaru blinked at her, not catching half of what she'd just said.
Two schools, and this is how she introduces herself. Sure.
He gave his name.
"Hikaru. No expulsions on my end, for the record."
The question got out before he could stop it.
"That woman on the roof. The one with the sword. What happened to her?"
Maci's ears dipped, just slightly.
"No idea. The second I got you clear, she was gone. Wasn't exactly sticking around to find out where."
That's real comforting, thanks.
Before he could push further, Maci's whole posture shifted, leaning in close enough that he could count the singed ends of her hair.
"Okay, question. Can I see it? The Key, the belt, all of it."
Underneath the ozone was an herbal soap that hadn't fully won the fight against whatever she'd last set on fire in her lab. Up close, all the frazzled energy dropped off her face, round-cheeked and bright-eyed in a way that did nothing to help his current situation.
Wow. Her face is doing something unfair up close. Not the point right now.
The lab coat did her exactly zero favors in the concealment department, sliding off one shoulder to reveal a curve of collarbone, fabric stretched snug everywhere else that mattered. Her ears twitched, catching the light, and her tail swayed slow behind her like it had its own separate agenda from the rest of her.
He was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of every detail he had no business noticing.
Her hands hovered an inch from his hip like she couldn't quite decide whether touching was allowed, tail flicking hard enough to send a wrench clattering off the shelf behind her.
Somebody should introduce her to the concept of personal space, preferably before his brain finished short-circuiting.
He rocked back on pure instinct, though the pod bay didn't leave much room to retreat into, heat climbing up his neck in a way he refused to acknowledge out loud.
"You didn't check while I was out cold?"
She straightened up fast, mock offense flashing across her face.
"I mean, I wanted to. But that felt rude. It's yours. Starseeds pick their person, they don't belong to whoever's standing closest when the owner's unconscious."
Whatever a Starseed actually was, it apparently made its own choices about who it belonged to, and didn't much care who happened to be standing closest when it made up its mind.
Huh. I wasn't expecting an actual line there.
That bought her a little patience. He reached down and thumbed the Key loose from where it sat clipped against the belt, holding it out on his open palm, the driver's frame still buckled snug around his waist.
The coin caught the pod bay's light, gold veins pulsing faint and slow across its surface.
Maci's whole face lit up like she'd forgotten how to breathe.
"Oh. Oh, that's incredible. I have never seen one this active outside a museum case~"
Incredible is a weird word for a coin.
"Why are you so hyped about this."
She caught herself creeping closer again, hand twitching toward the coin before she yanked it back.
"Because I've had my hands on three of these before, Zaria's, Senna's, and Lyra's, and none of them ever made my instruments do what yours just did. I've spent six years trying to figure out how the Vaelmori actually built these Keys, and this is the first one I've ever touched that might actually tell me, not counting the fact that it bonded to a..."
She stopped herself mid-word, jaw snapping shut like she'd caught her own hand in a drawer.
She was about to keep going. What was she about to say?
Maci cleared her throat, tail going still behind her for the first time all night.
"Right. Not the important part right now. You need to come with me. To the Bureau."
He tucked the Key back against his hip, glancing toward whatever passed for a door on this ship.
"Yeah, I'm gonna pass on that. It's the middle of the night. I'd like to go home."
The stillness hadn't left her tail yet.
"You can't. Not anymore. Not with that Key bonded to you."
Suddenly her hand closed around his wrist, and she was already pulling, before he could even react.
"Wait, hold on."
He planted his heels and threw his weight backward, doing everything twelve years of forms had taught him about breaking a grip, and she barely slowed.
She's way stronger than she looks. Way stronger.
Whatever strength lived under that lab coat wasn't proportional to her size, not even close.
"Let go. I can walk on my own, thanks."
"It's faster this way."
She didn't bother turning around.
The corridor gave way to a narrow room lined with light-panels, a wide window curving across the front of it showing nothing but open dark and a scatter of unfamiliar stars.
Maci steered him into a seat by the shoulder, more guiding than shoving, and the harness clicked shut over his chest before he'd even settled into it.
He grabbed at the harness, more out of principle than any real hope of getting it off.
"Hang on, wait. I need to go home. My sisters are gonna think I'm dead if I don't show up for breakfast."
Maci dropped into the pilot's seat, hands already moving across a panel lighting up under her fingers.
"You'll tell them next time. Right now you need to be at the Bureau. That's not optional anymore."
"Since when."
"Since about twenty minutes ago, when that Key decided to bond itself to you."
Not the answer I wanted.
Lights along the console shifted from blue to gold, and the hum under the floor climbed into a vibration he could feel in his teeth.
Maci flipped a switch without checking, one hand already braced against the console.
"Fold jump in five. Hold onto the armrests."
The stars outside the window smeared into thin lines of white, then into a single wall of light that swallowed the whole window at once.
His stomach dropped out from under him like the floor had vanished.
Ship and seat both felt like ideas rather than anything solid holding him up, his own body hanging somewhere with no up or down left to measure it by.
This is worse than the fastest rollercoaster I've ever been on, by a lot.
Suddenly the light snapped away, as fast as it had come, and the stars outside were different ones, strange and scattered in patterns he'd never seen from any rooftop back home.
He sat there for a second just breathing, waiting for his stomach to catch up with the rest of him.
Then he saw it.
A ring hung in the dark ahead of them, so massive his brain refused the scale of it for a full second, curving out of sight in both directions like it didn't have an edge to find.
Silver-blue metal caught starlight along its length. Nothing about it looked built the way a normal station should.
The curves flowed into each other without a single straight seam or visible panel anywhere, like the whole thing had grown there instead of being assembled by hand.
That is not a space station. That's a moon that decided to be a donut.
A single spire jutted up from one point along the ring, needle-thin and taller than anything else nearby, catching the light in a way that made it look sharper than any skyscraper he'd ever seen back home.
Hikaru pressed his palm flat against the window, mostly to check the glass was actually solid and not some hallucination his stomach had cooked up on the way through the fold.
"That's the Hub," Maci said.
He didn't answer right away, still trying to find an edge to the ring that wasn't there.
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