Chapter 11: Sera Alone

The rented berth smelled like someone else's soap. A chemical sweetness hit her the moment she swung her legs off the narrow cot — baked into the recycled air, clinging to the thin mattress pad and the walls and the clothes she'd folded on the shelf the night before. Wrong. The Morningstar smelled like engine grease and Pip's soldering flux and the ozone tang of Prime's systems running warm in the next compartment. This smelled like a place that belonged to no one. She reached for the side table before she was fully awake. Her hand found the edge, found nothing — fingers closing on empty air where a mug should have been. Prime made tea. Every morning. Not because she'd asked — she'd never asked — but because he'd observed her reaching for caffeine in the first twenty minutes of consciousness and had quietly incorporated it into his routine. A ceramic mug, dark and bitter, set at the exact spot her hand would find it. Her hand hung in the air for a beat. Then she pulled it back and pressed her palm flat against the mattress. Warmth. Azure, rising through the fog of waking. Warmth spreading behind closed eyelids. The empathic dragon didn't try to fill the gap. Azure simply acknowledged it: here is the ache, and here am I beside it. Sera sat on the edge of the cot and let the warmth settle. The quarters were small — four meters by three, a cot, a shelf, a narrow lavatory behind a partition that stopped short of the ceiling. Standard Frontier accommodation, paid for in advance, no questions asked. The walls were bare composite, scarred with the ghosts of previous tenants' modifications — bolt holes, adhesive residue, a faded sticker in a script she didn't recognize. Through…