I go to the bed.
I drop to my knees beside it and run my fingertips under the lip. The obsidian runs as a single molded piece, fusing directly into the floor. There is no space underneath. Checking the edges and the join at the wall, I probe the bio-mat layer on top with my fingernail to see if it peels, if there lies a seam in the underside, if there isanything.Nothing.
I sit back on my heels.
The bite of panic I have been shoving down my whole life is creeping up my tight throat, demanding release. I suppress it entirely. I have survived worse places than this. I have been locked in the freight hold of the Kestrel with three dead men anda cooling plasma leak, and I got out of that, and I got out of the labor broker’s office on Halvek Four at seventeen with a split lip and a chit I was never meant to have, and I got out, and I got out, and I will get out.
Except there is a mark on my chest.
An interlocking, geometricmarkthat sits right over a scar I earned the hard way at twenty-one, and every time my heart beats, the mark twitches with it, a warm pull under my skin that sayswe are in rhythm, you and me, we are in rhythm now, whether you agreed to it or not.
I claw at the neck of the tunic and yank it down enough to look.
The lines of the glyph are thinner than they felt when they were burning into me. Almost delicate. A tight cluster of angular strokes folding into each other like a lock, or a knot, or a cage, and within the cluster, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, a tiny beaming focus of violet ticks frequently on a beat that is exactly,exactly, the beat of my heart.
Two beats. Because of course there are two.
One is mine. The other livesundermine, a deeper second throb I feel now that I now look at it, a pit-a-pat sitting just behind my sternum. I know this cadence. I felt it in his throat when he breathed on me. I felt it jolting through the column at my back when his voice hit me with absolute refusal.
I study the mark without blinking. Eventually, I run my palm over it. The warmth under my hand is foreign to me.
"Oh, you son of awreck," I breathe.
The thought arrives unbidden: the lights in the corridors. The doors that opened when others sealed. The ship was guiding me—I thought toward him; I thought it was curious—but it was herding me away, wasn't it? Toward the cargo holds, toward the safe places. I was the one who took the unlit hatches. I was the one who went where it didn't want me to go. The ship tried tostop me, and I outsmarted it straight into its stasis chamber. The irony tastes like copper.
I scramble to my feet.
I’m unsure of my next course of action. Claw it off, maybe. Scrub it off with the sterile water in the basin. Scrape it off with one of those little implements on the tray.Something.As I cross halfway across the bio-mat toward the bathroom archway, the sealed door across the ward makes a sound I feel in my chest.
My head snaps toward the sealed door, and at the same moment, a faint glimmer blooms into being on the wall beside it. A panel—unseen moments ago—rises out of the obsidian like a bruise surfacing on skin. Glyphs cycle in controlled rotation across a flat black surface. A control interface. An actual, honest-to-everythingcontrol interface.
I lunge for it.
The glyphs repeat the liquid gold script from the stasis chamber, maintaining that dense alien geometry; however, a familiar shape occupies the corner, featuring a sub-cluster of small symbols at the bottom of the display that every salvager in the fringe recognizes on sight. Manual override glyphs. Every serious shipbuilder leaves them on every panel, even the ones they deny strangers from touching, because even the most paranoid warship in the galaxy needs a way for a dying engineer to open a door by hand.
My glove is on the panel before my brain finishes the thought.
"Come on," I urge. My fingers fly across the glyph cluster. "Come on, come on. Give me a door. Give me ahatch.Give me a lit hallway; that's all I need, that's all I?—"
The panel flashes once, amber to deep red, and a smooth, flat, horrifically polite voice rises out of the wall in perfect clarity. A cool, neutral, translated voice follows—carefully shaped for my ears.
"Override denied. You are not an authorized user."
"Oh, the hell I'm not," I snap at it, already retrying the sequence. "I have hands. I have fingers. I will use the manual override the way the ancestors of whoever built youintended,so you open this door before I?—"
"Override denied. Authorization not recognized."
I try again. Different glyph. Different sub-cluster. A full sequence I watched hold a Coalition freighter hatch open once for a crew that was bleeding out. The panel does not even pretend to consider it.
"Override denied. Access has not been granted by the Commander."The word lands like a slap.
The Commander.That's what the ship calls him. Not captain. Not pilot.Commander.As though the title is all the ship knows him by, and as though the ship is very sure I do not deserve to know him by anything else.
I try again, viciously. "Commander, myass.Emergency override. Medical override. Life support cycling override.Priority distress.Open, open,open?—"
"Override denied. Access not permitted."
"Override denied. Access has not been granted by the Commander."