Chapter 16: The Drain

Grey particulate drifted past the viewport like ash from a fire that had never burned. Sera pressed her palm flat against the glass and felt nothing. No vibration from the engines, no hum of the power grid running through the hull, no warmth from the dimension beyond. The Morningstar had always been a living thing under her hands — responsive, warm, present. Now the glass was cold and the ship was quiet in a way that settled into her back teeth. She pulled her hand back and walked. The daily check. She'd invented it on what she thought was their second day in the Badlands, though Prime's chronometer had read seventeen hours that morning and forty-three the time before, and once it had simply displayed a string of symbols that weren't numbers at all. Structure, she'd told herself. Routine keeps people alive when nothing else does. So she walked the ship, stem to stern, the same route every time, checking systems she increasingly couldn't fix and crew she increasingly couldn't protect. Corridor lights had failed on the port side sometime during what passed for night. Emergency strips along the baseboards cast a thin amber glow that turned the walls the color of old bone. She moved through it with one hand trailing the bulkhead, feeling for temperature changes, for the subtle flex of hull plating under entropic pressure. The metal was cold. Everything was cold now. The Badlands consumed thermal energy the way they consumed everything else — not violently, not with any malice she could push back against. A slow, constant subtraction. Heat flowing outward into the grey, never replenished. The navigation array had been the latest casualty. She'd woken to it dark — surfacing from a thin, unsatisfying unconsciousness that never quite resolved into sleep. The holographic display…