Chapter 2 Thresh #2
But I've also seen Helix send people who look exactly like this.
Desperate. Sympathetic. The kind of person you want to help.
The kind of person you let through the door because turning them away feels cruel.
And then the door is open and the enforcers come through it.
I learned this lesson on a different station, three years before Haven, when a woman with kind eyes and a convincing story opened an airlock for a Helix strike team.
Fourteen people died. I carry those fourteen like ballast, heavy and permanent and useful in that the weight keeps me from ever being careless again.
Trust is not something I can afford to give freely. Not here. Not when every person behind these walls depends on me not being wrong.
I close the file. I'll watch her. I'll watch how she works, how she talks to people, what questions she asks, what information she seeks.
If she's a Helix plant, she'll make a mistake.
They always do. The corporations are good at many things, but they don't understand what it means to actually care about the people you're lying to.
Fakes always miss the small things. The way you remember someone's name.
The way you follow up on a complaint. The way you sit with someone in pain instead of documenting the pain and moving on.
If she's what she appears to be, a tired medic who needs money and ended up somewhere unexpected, then I'll know that too.
And I'll be grateful. Because Fen is right: Renna's infection needs real medical attention, and there are at least a dozen other residents who've been waiting months for someone who can actually help.
I shut down the secondary screens, leaving only the perimeter feeds running.
The operations room is dim and quiet. Through the walls, I can hear the station's pulse: recyclers humming, coolant flowing through pipes that Fen has patched so many times the original material is barely visible, the faint vibration of the gravity generators that keep us all stuck to the floor instead of floating.
It's a living sound, the sound of a place that works because people make it work, not because it was designed to.
Haven. I named it. Four years ago, when we claimed this abandoned relay and turned it into something else.
I named it Haven because that's what it was supposed to be.
A safe place. A harbor. I was younger then.
Not in years, but in the particular optimism that lets you name things hopefully.
Now I'm older in the way that running a refugee station ages you: compressed, accelerated, like dog years but for the soul.
I wonder sometimes if the name is a promise or a lie.
The morning comes too fast, the way it always does.
I'm in the mess hall at 0645, because being early is free and being late costs trust. The mess hall is the largest open space on the station, a converted cargo hold with long tables, benches bolted to the floor, and a kitchen area that Fen somehow keeps functional despite equipment that predates my birth.
The ceiling is high enough that voices carry and echo, which makes it the natural gathering point.
Drawings from the children are taped to one wall, bright spots of color against the gray.
Residents trickle in. I know all of them. Every name, every face, every medical concern, every personal quirk that might become a security issue. That's not friendliness. That's awareness. There is a difference, and I am very aware of the difference.
Renna comes in slowly. She's human, mid-forties, a former factory worker from a Helix labor camp.
She's been here six months. The infection in her leg started as a minor wound that should have healed in a week.
Without proper medical care, it became something else.
She walks with a limp now, her jaw set against the pain each step brings.
She doesn't complain. The people who've been through the worst rarely do.
She heads straight for the kitchen, because Renna's response to everything, pain, fear, boredom, is to cook for people.
She's been feeding this station with the same fierce determination that got her out of the labor camp.
Nola Reyes arrives at 0658. Two minutes early.
I know the exact time because I checked, and I know I checked because the checking was deliberate rather than habitual, and I don't want to examine what that distinction means.
She's carrying a datapad and her expression is the controlled neutral of someone who's cataloging everything she sees: the room's layout, the social clusters, who sits where, who looks healthy, who doesn't. She's already done her hair, plain and functional, pulled back from her face.
She's wearing the station-issue clothing I left in her quarters, which tells me she looked through what was available and made practical choices instead of asking for something specific.
She sits at the end of a table near the kitchen.
Not in the middle, where the established residents sit.
Not at the far back, where she'd be invisible.
At the end, close enough to see everything, far enough to not impose.
It's a smart choice. It tells me she understands group dynamics, which tells me she's worked in environments where reading a room correctly was a survival skill. I notice.