Chapter 21
KRISTI
The air inside the orbital stub is stale with recycled breath, burnt protein paste, and the faint metallic tang of radiation shielding gone cheap.
There’s a constant hum beneath everything—like the whole place is remembering how to be a station but keeps glitching halfway through. I hear it even in my dreams.
They call it the Tether, but it’s not tethered to anything anymore.
It used to be a refueling platform before it was deemed “non-essential” and sold to some shell corp that gutted it and dropped half its bulk into the superstructure of a half-finished skyscraper.
It’s fused right into the building’s spine now, forty floors up, wrapped in steel girders like a tumor too expensive to cut out.
And inside?
Families. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds, depending on how many kids are hiding behind crates and under tarp partitions. Vakutan, Olari, Solenari—all of them displaced, undocumented, and now invisible. To the council. To the census. To the sky.
They let me in because I brought them things they needed.
And because I didn’t come in wearing a badge.
I trade them rations. Meds. Power cores I got from a junk runner who owed Kenron a favor. In return, they let me sleep on a padded bench and don’t ask why I flinch when I hear the crackle of a power conduit sparking near the ceiling.
“Montana,” an old Olari woman grunts as I pass her spot, her scaled fingers counting out ration cards with a math no human ever bothered to learn. “You got more of those electrolyte tabs?”
I hand her a packet without asking who she’s giving them to. Half this place is dehydrated from bad recycling and unbalanced diets.
“Thank you, child,” she mutters.
“Don’t thank me,” I say quietly. “I owe you more than you owe me.”
She squints at me with one good eye. “You learnin’ that late, but you learnin’. That counts.”
I move deeper into the habitat deck. My boots crunch over detritus—brittle plastic, scorched wires, and scraps of woven insulation from when the council yanked out the last of the station’s living modules. These people shouldn’t be here.
But they are.
Because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
Children buzz past me—lanky-limbed, silver-eyed, skittering on extra joints or humming with static fields.
Some of them were born here. No papers. No registries.
Not even a system ID. Which means no education.
No health clearance. No right to walk down a clean street without being flagged by a drone.
And I used to write reports on how “refugee populations are being integrated with compassion and efficiency across Novarian sectors.”
I swallow bile.
That was the lie I used to believe.
“Kristi,” someone says, and I turn to see Milla, one of the coordinators. She’s Vakutan, her face marked with fresh ink from a ceremonial rite she’s never had the time to complete. Her arms are filled with ration boxes, one shoulder braced with a welding plate that makes her limp when she’s tired.
“We logged six new arrivals,” she says. “Three minors. Two are burn-adrift. One’s got a shunt wound that smells bad. Think it’s septic.”
“Show me,” I say immediately, and we move.
The med bay—if you can call it that—is a corner room reinforced with torn insulation panels and what looks like a scavenged escape pod door.
It stinks like alcohol pads and sweat. I kneel next to the child—Solenari, maybe seven?
It’s hard to tell with their physiology. Their breathing’s fast. Fever’s high.
“Shit,” I murmur.
I unroll the kit from my belt, start flushing the wound. They whimper. Milla sings low in Vakutan, a lullaby that winds around the pain like a protective barrier. I work fast.
No one asks how I learned field medicine.
I don’t tell them it came from watching soldiers bleed out in kitchens we weren’t supposed to be in. That it came from helping Kenron stitch up mercs in supply closets while explosions turned meal plans to ash.
The kid pulls through. Barely. But they sleep easier when I tape a heating coil near the cot.
“Keep him hydrated,” I say. “Small doses. And keep him off the main grid—he’s too weak to fight a scan.”
Milla nods. “You’re good at this.”
I shrug, suddenly exhausted. “No. I’m just trying to make things less broken.”
She studies me.
“You’re different than I expected.”
“Most Montanas are,” I mutter.
She doesn’t ask more. That’s the rhythm here. We give. We take. We don’t pry unless we need to.
Later, I hunker down with a few teenagers to record statements.
They speak in hushed tones, their faces ghost-lit by the pad’s interface.
Some talk about border sweeps. Some about watching friends vanish into blackships.
One girl, barely twelve, tells me she saw her father shot because he argued over expired credentials.
I don’t flinch.
I just hit record and let her speak.
They’re stories, yes. But they’re also evidence. Proof. Real truth. Not the curated garbage the council spoon-feeds into the newsfeeds.
I’m not just an archivist anymore.
I’m a witness.
A resistor.
A goddamn fighter.
When I climb back to my bunk—an old maintenance shelf with a blanket stapled to the wall—I stare out the one sliver of window that still works. It’s cracked and dirty, but through it I can see the city.
Mirrored towers. Gleaming spires. Clean light that never touches the tether.
I used to eat in those towers. Used to toast crystal flutes with council elites who made deals with genocide behind closed doors. I used to think I was doing good.
Now I know better.
Now I carry the weight of my mistakes on my back like armor.
And I won’t stop until every lie is brought screaming into the daylight.
Morning comes early for resistance fighters, it turns out. I’m up with the sun and already working up a sweat before breakfast. It’s impossible not to hear things, with such tight confines.
It starts like a whisper. Small, sweet. The kind of thing that would’ve made me smile a lifetime ago.
I’m helping distribute heating pads from a busted cargo locker.
The coils are barely warm, but here, that counts.
A dozen hands reach out—scaled, feathered, furred.
And one small palm, grayish-lavender, attached to a Drevia boy with moon-wide eyes and the kind of expression that cuts right through me.
“Are you Kenron’s mate?” he asks, voice quiet but clear.
My hands freeze.
I look down at him. He can’t be more than six, maybe seven. His spines haven’t come in yet. His nose wrinkles when he speaks, like he’s worried he might’ve done something wrong.
I should say something light. Laugh it off. Tell him it’s complicated.
But the words don’t come.
Because the truth’s heavier than I expected.
“I don’t know,” I say, honestly.
He tilts his head. “But you sleep with his smell on your coat.”
That stops my heart for half a beat.
He’s not wrong.
I’ve been sleeping with his jacket tucked under my makeshift pillow since I left the safehouse. I told myself it was for comfort, for familiarity, for warmth.
But it’s him.
And I miss him.
I crouch to the boy’s level, smile just enough not to lie.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Pael,” he says.
“Well, Pael,” I murmur, “I think I’d like to be.”
He beams. Then darts off with his heating pad like the world’s just made sense again.
I stay kneeling there a second longer, the ache in my chest not entirely unpleasant.
Later, after the supplies are distributed and the hallway lights dim to conserve power, I slip into the old maintenance closet where the signal's strongest and tap into the secure line Kenron hard-coded into my pad.
Three tones. A pause. Then his face blinks onto the screen.
I exhale like I’ve been holding my breath for hours.
“Hey,” I whisper.
His voice comes low and rough. “Hey yourself.”
His eyes scan the screen. “You alright?”
“Tired. Hungry. But yeah. I’m alright.”
A pause.
He looks like hell. Eyes shadowed, stubble thicker, tension wound into his shoulders. But there’s something in his gaze that softens when he sees me.
I don’t even try to hide how I feel.
“I miss you.”
“Same.”
Another pause. We don’t fill it with nonsense. We just breathe through it, tethered by static and unspoken things.
“I talked to a Drevia kid today,” I say eventually.
“Oh yeah?”
“Asked if I was your mate.”
His mouth twitches. “That so?”
“Yeah. I told him I didn’t know.”
He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t tease. He just looks at me, long and deep like he’s memorizing my soul.
I add, quieter, “But I wanted to say yes.”
That silence again. Not empty. Full. Heavy. Fragile.
Then he says, “We make it through this, we’ll talk about what we call each other.”
“You think we’ll make it?”
He doesn’t answer immediately.
I hate that. But I respect it too.
At last, he says, “If we don’t... then we become ghosts.”
My throat tightens.
He adds, softer now, “But not forgotten ones.”
And that’s enough.
For now.
“I need to see you.”
That makes me smile.
“My door would be open.”