Chapter 15: The Voidborn

Cold light stuttered across the viewport glass, a dying pulse from the Morningstar's emergency strips that turned everything the color of old bruises. Sera pressed her forehead against the transparency and felt the chill bite through skin to bone. Outside, the dark was absolute. This was a dark that ended things. Light from the ship's hull reached maybe four meters before it simply stopped, swallowed at a boundary so clean it looked carved. She'd been on watch for three hours. Or what she was calling hours — Pip's mechanical chronometer was the only timepiece still functioning, and even that seemed to tick with reluctance, as though the mechanism itself resented the effort of counting in a place where counting meant nothing. The Morningstar's life support wheezed and clicked, a rhythm Sera had learned to read like a pulse. Stable meant regular intervals. Faltering meant the recyclers were struggling again. Right now: stable, but the gaps between clicks were a fraction longer than they'd been when she started her watch. The ship was losing ground by degrees too small to see and too consistent to ignore. Behind her, Pip slept curled in the navigator's alcove, their tiny form barely visible beneath a scrap of thermal blanket they'd rigged from insulation material. Eight inches of Fae stubbornness, wings pressed flat against their back, toolkit clutched to their chest even in sleep. They'd worked for two straight shifts on the atmospheric scrubbers using nothing but mechanical knowledge and sheer bloody-mindedness before Sera had ordered them to rest. Pip had argued. Sera had used the captain's voice. Pip had obeyed, but the look they'd given her — frustrated, scared, trying to hide both — still sat in Sera's stomach like a stone. Prime stood at the sensor console, his dark chassis catching the stuttering…