Stars thinned at the edge of the galaxy, each one farther from the next, the darkness between them wider and more absolute. The Morningstar dropped out of hyperspace into a silence so vast it registered as pressure against the hull, the luminous tunnel collapsing behind them into ordinary vacuum and the cockpit filling with the cold light of scattered suns.
Sera leaned forward in the pilot's chair, hands resting on the console. Four days of hyperspace had smoothed the edges of her anxiety into something functional. She'd slept, eaten, run diagnostics with Prime, studied Marcus's data until the weapon's energy signature lived behind her eyelids. Now the work was here.
The viewport showed the Frontier Reaches in its sparse, unforgiving clarity. Fewer ships than she'd expected. A handful of freighters drifted at various distances, most of them oriented toward the portal that dominated the starboard view, but none of them moving through it. They hung in space like debris caught in a current that had stopped flowing. Beyond the portal, a mid-sized orbital station turned in slow rotation, its hull a patchwork of mismatched plating and bolted-on modules that told the story of a community that fixed what it had because replacement parts didn't come this far out.
The portal itself was wrong.
She could see it from here, even at approach distance. The Sovereignty portal had been a membrane of light, its edges precise, its surface alive with the deep, unbroken light of something that had existed for billions of years and intended to exist for billions more. This portal's edges were ragged. They shifted and reformed in irregular pulses, the border unable to decide where it ended, small fragments breaking away from the perimeter and dissolving into nothing. The colors were muted, washed out, the swirling vortex surface moving with the sluggish rotation of something winding down.
The pendant warmed against her sternum. Not the gentle warmth of proximity she'd felt at the Sovereignty station. This was sharper, an ache translated through crystal, Aurelia's tuning fork vibrating with frequencies that were wrong.
"Frontier Reaches Portal Seven," Prime said from the copilot station, his voice steady, data scrolling across his displays. "Traffic volume is approximately eighteen percent of projected capacity for a portal of this classification. Consistent with progressive degradation over several months." His channels held their calm blue, but the rhythm had quickened slightly. Concern, running beneath the professional assessment like a current beneath ice.
Sera counted the ships. Eleven visible, most of them small haulers and cargo runners. A portal this size should have had dozens in transit at any given moment, streams of commerce flowing in both directions, the lifeblood of Frontier trade. Instead, a trickle. Some of the ships weren't even pointed at the portal. They'd oriented toward the station or aimed their bows at open space, ready to engage FTL toward other destinations. The portal had become unreliable enough that pilots were choosing the long way around.
She knew what that meant. She'd grown up on stations like this one. When the portal traffic dried up, the supply chains broke. Prices climbed. People who'd built lives around the intersection of trade routes found themselves stranded at the edge of nothing, too stubborn to leave, too practical to pretend everything was fine.
Crimson stirred along her left thigh, the tattoo's warmth sharpening. Unfamiliar territory. The protective instinct of something ancient that cataloged threats the way other beings cataloged landmarks.
Quiet out here, Gold observed from her right thigh. Strategic, not nervous. One station. Open approach vectors. Limited cover if someone wanted to make trouble.
"Hail coming in," Prime said.
The comm crackled with the particular quality of Frontier equipment — maintained but aging, the signal slightly rough at the edges. "Unidentified vessel, state your intentions. You are approaching Frontier Reaches Portal Seven. Be advised, portal crossings are currently restricted to essential traffic only."
Sera opened the channel. "Portal Seven, this is the Morningstar. We're here on a mission from the Dragon Sovereignty Council to assess and heal failing portals. Requesting direct approach clearance."
Silence. Not the brief processing pause of a busy traffic controller. The kind that came before something broke open.
"Morningstar, say again. Did you say heal?"
"Confirmed. We have the capability to restore portal stability. Requesting direct physical access to the portal and a temporary halt to all crossings while we work."
The silence stretched longer this time. Sera could picture the control room — a handful of overworked staff exchanging looks, someone pulling up the Morningstar's transponder data, someone else staring at the hull on their external cameras. The dragon-armor reinforcement would be visible even at this distance. The bio-magical crystalline wards grown into the hull structure caught starlight and scattered it in prismatic patterns. A cargo hauler wearing dragon armor. Nothing about it was subtle.
When the voice came back, it had changed. The professional wariness was still there, but underneath it, something unguarded. "Morningstar, you are cleared for direct approach. All crossings are suspended effective immediately. We're queuing traffic at safe distance." A pause. "How long do you need?"
"Unknown," Sera said. "This is our first attempt. I'll update you as we go."
"Understood. Morningstar, I..." Another pause. The controller's voice thickened. "We've been out here seven months with this portal dying. Supply ships stopped running the route two months ago. We've been rationing. If you can do what you say you can do, we—" The voice cut off. Professional discipline reasserting itself over gratitude that had nowhere to go. "You're cleared. Approach at your discretion. Portal Seven control standing by."
The channel closed. Sera sat with the weight of it for a moment — the controlled desperation in that voice, the seven months of watching their lifeline unravel. She touched the pendant. The crystal pulsed against her fingertips, warm and wrong, the damaged harmonics translating through Aurelia's tuning fork into something she felt in her chest.
"Traffic is clearing," Prime said. The ships were moving, pulling back from the portal in an orderly scatter, giving the Morningstar a wide corridor of approach. On the station, she could imagine the word spreading. Someone's come to fix the portal. Someone's actually come.
The cockpit felt emptier than it should have. The copilot station hummed with Prime's quiet efficiency, his dark chassis reflecting the console's blue-green light, but the space behind them — the space where Pip would have been perched on a console edge, wings buzzing, narrating the approach with running technical commentary — was silent. Four days of hyperspace had made the absence familiar without making it comfortable.
Sera brought the Morningstar around and aimed for the portal.
Up close, the damage was devastating.
The Sovereignty portal had been a window into deep time, its surface carrying the accumulated stability of billions of years. Sera had stood in its proximity and felt the solidity of something that predated every civilization in the galaxy. She carried that baseline in her memory now, the shape of health, the frequency of wholeness.
This portal was dying.
The edges writhed. There was no other word for it. The border that should have been a clean, stable line of energy was in constant motion, forming and reforming in irregular pulses, each iteration slightly different from the last. The portal couldn't hold its own shape. Small fragments calved off the perimeter like ice breaking from a glacier, drifting a few meters before dissolving into faint luminescence and then nothing. The portal was losing itself, piece by piece, through attrition so gradual that anyone watching on a day-to-day basis might not notice the shrinkage. But Sera had the baseline. She could see exactly how much border should have been there and wasn't.
The light it cast was thin, watery, illuminating the Morningstar's cockpit in pale washes that made Prime's chassis look gray instead of its true glossy black.
The pendant burned against her sternum. Not painfully, but insistently, the crystal's resonance climbing in response to the damaged harmonics, Aurelia's tuning fork vibrating at a frequency that translated the portal's distress into something physical. Sera pressed her palm flat against it and felt the wrongness pulse through her hand.
Vexis stirred along her right forearm, the emerald tattoo's presence sharpening into focused attention. The truth-sense reaching outward, reading the portal the way a botanist read diseased bark.
This isn't decay. Vexis's voice was precise, curious, the tone of something that had encountered a specimen worth examining. There's a pattern in the degradation. Specific. Structured. This is a pathology, not entropy.
"What do you mean?" Sera said it aloud. Prime glanced at her from the copilot station, accustomed to the half-conversations.
The damage has a signature. Something specific did this, and it did it the same way throughout the entire structure. Natural decay is random. Erosion. Weathering. This... A pause. The emerald presence deepened. This is engineering.
Azure's cool awareness spread across Sera's shoulder blades, the healer recognizing a patient. The empathic response was immediate and visceral — something ancient and alive was suffering, and Azure's instinct was to reach for it.
Gold's presence calculated from her right thigh, assessing the portal's structure, running the geometry of damage against the baseline data. Crimson burned low and restless along her left, the warrior's energy coiling, wanting to act, having nothing to fight.
Through the viewport, the portal writhed. Another fragment broke from the upper edge and dissolved.
Sera watched it go. One piece. One small piece of something billions of years old, gone. And tomorrow another piece. And the day after. Until the border couldn't hold and the portal collapsed entirely, and the station behind her lost its connection to the rest of the galaxy, and the people who'd built their lives around this intersection of trade routes found themselves stranded at the end of everything.
"I'm going to heal it," she said.
Prime's head tilted left. Concern. Calculations he didn't like. "Sera, you've never—"
"I know." She met his eyes, the blue glow of his optical displays steady and bright in the pale light. "I have the baseline. I have the theory. I have five dragons who know what they're doing even if I don't." She touched the pendant again. The crystal pulsed. "And I have this."
He held her gaze for a long moment. Whatever he saw in her face, whatever the 247 cataloged expressions told him about her state, it was enough. His channels warmed, the heartbeat rhythm steadying.
"I'll monitor your vitals and the portal's energy output," he said. "If your readings cross into dangerous thresholds, I'm pulling you back."
"Deal."
She turned to the portal. The gap between knowing and doing stretched before her, wide as the space between stars out here at the galaxy's edge. She knew the theory. Channel all five dragons. Harmonize the frequencies. Find the portal's natural resonance and help it remember its own stability.
She had never done it.
The queued ships hung in the distance, small points of light against the dark. People waiting. Hoping. Depending on her.
Sera closed her eyes and reached.
Crimson came first, because Crimson always came first.
The fire dragon's energy surged up through her left thigh like a furnace door opening, raw power flooding her meridians with heat that should have been painful but registered instead as fuel. Pure, undirected force. The engine before the machine. Sera gasped at the intensity — she'd channeled Crimson hundreds of times, but never like this, never with the specific intent of pouring that energy outward into something as vast as a portal.
Crimson's heat surged. More. Give it more. Don't hold back.
Gold rose to meet him. The golden presence climbed from her right thigh with the deliberate precision of an architect laying foundations, and where Crimson was raw force, Gold was form. Structure. The energy Crimson generated needed shape, needed direction, needed the geometric discipline that kept power from scattering into waste heat and noise. Gold wrapped around Crimson's output and gave it architecture.
Gold's presence steadied. Hold the shape. Don't let it scatter.
Azure spread across her shoulder blades, and the healing frequency bloomed. Cool where Crimson was hot, precise where Crimson was wild, the restorative wavelength that Sera had felt during every injury Azure had mended, every bruise smoothed away, every moment of physical distress eased. But this was different in scale. Azure wasn't healing a body. Azure was healing a wound in the fabric of reality, and the frequency she offered was vast, stretching outward from Sera's back like invisible wings reaching for the portal's damaged harmonics.
There, Azure said, gentle and certain. That frequency. Hold it.
Vexis sharpened along her right forearm, the truth-sense locking onto the portal's damage like a surgeon's eye finding the wound beneath the skin. The emerald presence didn't heal. Vexis read. Diagnosed. Directed. Where is the damage worst? Where should Sera apply pressure? Where should she pull back and let the portal's own nature reassert itself?
The damage is deepest at the lower edge, Vexis said. Focus there. The upper structure is more intact. Work from the foundation up.
Four dragons. Four voices. Four streams of energy flowing through Sera's body and outward toward the portal, each one distinct, each one essential, the Bound Court operating in concert for the first time in sustained, non-combat work. Sera held them all, the conduit through which fire and form and healing and truth flowed, and the effort was already more than she'd anticipated. Her muscles trembled. Sweat beaded at her temples. The pendant blazed against her sternum, amplifying her connection to the portal's harmonics, Aurelia's tuning fork doing what it was designed to do.
She could feel the portal. Not see it — feel it. The damaged harmonics were discordance, a song played on an instrument that had been knocked out of tune. The frequencies that should have aligned were offset, each one slightly wrong, the cumulative effect producing the ragged edges and dimmed colors and sluggish rotation she'd seen from outside. The portal was still trying to sing its own song. It just couldn't remember the melody.
Sera found the first frequency. Matched it. Held it.
The portal's lower edge steadied. Just slightly. Just enough to notice.
More, Crimson demanded. The furnace burned hotter.
Steady, Gold countered. Precision, not volume.
She worked the lower edge, frequency by frequency, Vexis guiding her attention to the worst damage, Azure providing the restorative wavelength, Gold shaping Crimson's power into something the portal could absorb. It was grueling. Each frequency she corrected revealed three more that were wrong, the damage cascading through the harmonic structure in patterns that Vexis traced with clinical precision. The pathology Vexis had identified wasn't random. It was systematic. The weapon had disrupted the portal's harmonics at specific intervals, creating a degradation cascade designed to look like natural decay.
Sera pushed deeper. The portal's interior harmonics were worse than the surface. Layers of damage, each one feeding the next, the whole structure slowly unwinding. She could feel the portal's age in its harmonics, the billions of years of stability encoded in frequencies so deep they were more geology than music. The weapon had reached into those depths and twisted.
Her vision blurred. She blinked sweat from her eyes and kept working.
The healing felt like singing. Not literally — she wasn't making sound. But the closest her mind could come to describing the experience was musical. Finding the right note. Holding it. Waiting for the portal's own resonance to catch and amplify, the way a tuning fork's vibration could set a glass humming. She wasn't imposing a frequency from outside. She was reminding the portal of its own song, note by note, layer by layer, coaxing the ancient harmonics back into alignment.
The pendant blazed. Hotter than it had ever been. The crystal at her sternum was a point of white heat, and through it she felt the portal responding, slowly, painfully, but responding. The lower edge solidified. The colors brightened by a fraction. The vortex's rotation increased, just slightly, the sluggishness giving way to something closer to its natural speed.
It was working.
And then Nyx spoke.
A single word, rising from the deepest layer of Sera's awareness, the void dragon's voice carrying the weight of dimensional perception that the other four couldn't access. Not loud. Not urgent. Just precise, in the way that a compass needle was precise — pointing toward true north without explanation or elaboration.
...align.
Sera understood. Not intellectually. The word bypassed her conscious mind and landed in the part of her that perceived portals the way other people perceived gravity, the hybrid awareness that was neither fully dragon nor fully human but something that bridged the gap between dimensions. The portal's surface harmonics were healing, but the deeper issue — the dimensional resonance, the connection between this portal and the barrier between realities — was still misaligned. The four dragons were fixing the instrument. Nyx was telling her to fix the song itself.
She reached deeper than she'd ever gone. Past the surface harmonics, past the cascading damage, past the ancient frequencies of the portal's geological age, into the place where the portal touched the dimensional barrier. The void-sense opened, and for a moment she perceived the portal not as a window but as a knot in the fabric of reality, a point where dimensions intersected and held, and the knot was loose, its threads fraying.
She pulled them tight.
The cost was enormous. Her body shuddered. Her hands gripped the console so hard the metal creaked under her fingers. Every muscle locked, trembling, the energy expenditure going beyond fatigue into something cellular — hollowed out from the inside while burning from within. The five dragons poured through her and she poured through the portal and the portal remembered, slowly, agonizingly, what it was supposed to be.
She held the alignment. Seconds that felt like hours. The dimensional resonance clicking into place like a bone setting, the rightness of it visceral and undeniable.
The portal's edges solidified. The fragments stopped breaking away. The colors deepened, brightened, the washed-out pallor giving way to rich, saturated hues that reminded her of the Sovereignty portal. The vortex accelerated, its rotation smooth and steady, the sluggishness gone. The surface began to glow, not the thin watery light of a dying portal but the full, warm light of something ancient and alive and whole.
The pendant's heat changed.
A recognition. The crystal at Sera's sternum resonated with a frequency she hadn't generated, a harmonic that was already there, embedded in the portal's structure like a fingerprint pressed into wet clay. The portal remembered being healed before.
Not by her.
The familiarity hit her like a wave of warm water. The harmonics she'd been coaxing back into alignment carried an echo, a shape she recognized without ever having encountered it. Someone else's touch on these same frequencies. Someone whose resonance lived in Sera's bones, in her blood, in the crystal that hung at her throat. The pendant wasn't just amplifying her connection to the portal. It was matching a frequency that already existed in the portal's harmonic memory. A frequency it had felt before.
Her mother's frequency.
Aurelia had healed portals. Aurelia had stood where Sera stood, reached where Sera reached, sung the same song to the same ancient structures. The portal remembered. And the pendant — Aurelia's tuning fork, passed through Elena's hands to Sera's neck — resonated with its maker's work, preserved in harmonics that outlasted death.
For a moment, Sera was not a pilot doing impossible work at the edge of the galaxy. She was her mother's daughter, doing her mother's work. She hadn't discovered this ability. She had inherited it. The frequency was in her blood the way her dark red hair was in her blood, the way her deep blue eyes carried Marcus's genetics. Aurelia's gift, passed down through biology and crystal and the stubbornness of a mother who had planned for a future she wouldn't live to see.
Azure stirred across her shoulder blades. Not the healer's usual cool awareness but something deeper, a recognition of the sacred in the harmonics, the gentle acknowledgment of a moment that belonged to Sera alone.
The feeling faded. Brief as a breath held and released. The echo receded, the portal's harmonic memory settling back into its restored patterns, the fingerprint still there but no longer singing. Sera couldn't hold it or examine it. She could only acknowledge that it happened.
Her tuning fork. And now it's yours.
Marcus's words, spoken in a dimension between realities, landing differently now that she had felt what they meant.
The pendant cooled from blazing to warm. The portal's final stabilization carried the echo of two healers, mother and daughter, separated by death but connected through frequency. The surface pulsed with renewed energy, alive, whole, the ancient structure remembering its own song because someone had reminded it.
Because two someones had.
The portal blazed in the viewport, vibrant and stable, its edges sharp against the dark, and Sera's body gave out.
Not dramatically. No collapse to the floor, no cry of pain. Just the sudden, complete absence of the energy that had been holding her upright. Her hands slid off the console. Her spine softened. She listed sideways in the pilot's chair, and Prime was there, his arm around her shoulders, the warmth of his chassis against her side, solid and real.
"I've got you," he said.
She leaned into him. The trembling wouldn't stop. Not her hands, not her arms, not the deep involuntary shudder that ran through her core like the aftershock of something seismic. Her vision swam. The cockpit blurred at the edges, Prime's blue glow the only sharp thing in a world gone soft.
"It worked," she managed.
"It worked." His voice was quiet. His arm tightened around her, supporting her weight with the effortless strength of a being who could lift several tons. The tenderness in the gesture had nothing to do with strength. "Can you walk?"
"Probably not."
He stood, lifting her with him, and she let him. The trust of it was absolute, the bone-deep certainty that he would not let her fall. His chassis was warm against her body, the blue channels at his sternum casting gentle light across her face, and she closed her eyes and let him guide her through the cockpit, through the narrow corridor, to her quarters.
The bunk was too short. It was always too short. She didn't care. The moment she was horizontal, the exhaustion hit her like a physical weight, pressing her into the mattress, and the world narrowed to the hum of the ship's systems and the warmth of Prime's hand on her shoulder and the five dragons dimming in her skin, their bioluminescence fading to barely visible traces, the Court spent alongside their bearer.
She was asleep before he pulled the blanket over her.
Prime sat beside her bunk in the narrow space between the bed and the bulkhead, his back against the wall, his channels dimmed to match the room's quiet. Not because he was depleted. Because vigil required a different register than action, and the soft pulse of his blue light was calibrated to the rhythm of Sera's breathing, steady and slow in the deep sleep of exhaustion.
The station's comm chatter filled the cockpit he'd left on low-volume relay. He could hear it from here, the voices carrying through the Morningstar's corridors with the particular quality of people who had been holding their breath for months and had just been allowed to exhale.
"Crossings are resuming. Portal Seven is stable. All queued traffic, you are cleared for transit."
Ships began moving. He tracked them through the ship's sensors, the data feeding directly to his awareness. Eleven vessels, then fourteen as ships emerged from behind the station where they'd been sheltering. The first freighter approached the portal and passed through without incident, its hull disappearing into the restored vortex, and the comm channel erupted with voices. Relief. Gratitude. Questions that tumbled over each other.
"How long will it hold?"
"Who is that ship? Is that dragon armor?"
"Someone tell the supply convoy on the other side. Tell them the portal's open."
"Is the healer alright? Is she—"
Prime opened a channel. "This is the Morningstar. The portal has been restored to full stability. The healer is resting and will be unavailable for some time. The underlying cause of the degradation has not been addressed. I cannot guarantee the portal won't be affected again."
The honest answer. The careful one.
More questions. He answered them with the same measured precision, his attention split between the comm traffic and the data Pip's diagnostic systems had captured during the healing. The readings scrolled through his awareness in parallel streams: energy signatures, harmonic frequencies, degradation patterns, the weapon's fingerprint embedded in the portal's damage like a serial number stamped into a bullet casing.
In the bunk beside him, Sera slept. The pendant rested against her collarbone, warm but no longer blazing. The dragon tattoos were barely visible, their usual bioluminescence reduced to faint traces of color against her skin. Crimson's red-gold was a whisper along her left thigh. Gold's warm yellow was nearly invisible on her right. Azure's blue-silver across her shoulder blades had dimmed to the color of a winter sky. Vexis's green-gold on her right forearm was a shadow of vines. Nyx's violet on her left forearm was indistinguishable from the room's darkness.
The Court at rest. Five ancient consciousnesses that had poured themselves through a twenty-six-year-old woman and into a portal billions of years old, and the effort had left all six of them depleted.
Vexis's voice rose from the dim green along Sera's right forearm. Quiet. Precise. The truth-teller speaking to the only one awake to hear.
One per week. Perhaps two if she pushes beyond safe limits. There are thousands.
Prime processed the calculation. Cross-referenced it against the data Marcus had provided: the degradation pattern radiating outward from the galactic center, the edges failing first, the timeline of approximately fifty years to catastrophic barrier failure. Thousands of portals. One healer. The math was simple and devastating.
She could buy time. She could not be the solution.
He filed the calculation. He would present it when she woke, alongside the other data, in the organized and clear manner she needed when the work was too heavy for anything but facts. For now, he sat beside her in the dim room, monitoring her vitals, listening to the celebration she couldn't hear, and processing the weight of watching someone you loved give everything they had and knowing it would not be enough.
The portal blazed outside, vibrant and whole. Ships flowed through it. The station hummed with renewed activity. Seven months of slow strangulation, reversed in a single act of extraordinary effort.
One portal. Thousands failing.
Prime's channels held their dim, steady glow. He did not move. He did not need to. The vigil was its own form of action, and he would hold it until she woke.
Sera opened her eyes to the amber glow of her quarters' low lighting and the particular ache of muscles that had been used in ways muscles were not designed for. Not soreness from exertion. Something deeper, as if the energy expenditure had reached into the cellular level and left every fiber of her body aware that it had been borrowed against.
She sat up slowly. The pendant shifted against her collarbone, warm but settled, its frantic resonance replaced by the steady pulse of proximity to something magical. The dragons stirred in her skin, still dim, still recovering, but present.
Prime was beside her bunk, his chassis reflecting the amber light, his channels at a low steady glow. He'd been here the whole time. She could tell from his stillness, the way he was already turning toward her before she'd fully registered his presence.
"How long?" she said.
"Four hours and seventeen minutes." A pause. "How do you feel?"
"Like someone reached inside me and wrung me out." She swung her legs over the edge of the bunk and sat there, gathering herself. Her hands were steady. That was something. "The portal?"
"Stable. Traffic has resumed. The station has been communicating their gratitude at considerable length and volume." The faintest shift in his facial surface, the liquid-metal equivalent of a wry expression. "I've been fielding questions."
She almost smiled. "Sorry."
"Don't be. You were unconscious. It seemed like a reasonable excuse."
She stood, testing her balance. The floor was solid under her boots. The Morningstar's engine hum vibrated through the deck plates, familiar and grounding, the ship's heartbeat steady around her. She followed Prime to the cockpit, moving carefully, her body reminding her with every step that she'd spent herself in ways she was still learning to account for.
The viewport showed the portal. Vibrant. Stable. The vortex spinning at full speed, its colors rich and deep, its edges sharp and clean. Ships moved through it in both directions, a stream of traffic that had been dammed for months now flowing freely. The station beyond it was lit up, every external light blazing, the visual equivalent of a celebration.
She'd done that.
The thought settled through her, warm and heavy. She'd healed a portal. The theory was real. The ability was real. She had reached into something billions of years old and reminded it of its own song, and it had listened.
Then Prime brought up the data, and the warmth cooled.
"Pip's diagnostic systems captured continuous readings throughout the healing," he said, pulling the information onto the main display. Waveforms and frequency maps filled the holographic space between them, dense with data that Sera was still learning to read but that Prime had already organized into comprehensible patterns. "The weapon's signature is embedded in the damage pattern. Here."
He highlighted a specific frequency band. The waveform was jagged, irregular, distinctly different from the smooth curves of the portal's natural harmonics. It looked like a wound looked — the tissue around it distorted, pulled out of its natural shape by the force of whatever had cut it.
"That matches Marcus's data from the source dimension," Sera said. She leaned forward, studying the display. The pendant pulsed gently against her throat.
"Precisely. The degradation has a designed curve." Prime isolated another layer of the data. "At surface level, the damage reads as natural decay. Entropy. The kind of gradual erosion that might occur over millennia. But at the deeper harmonic layers — the ones you accessed during the healing — the pattern is artificial. Engineered to mimic natural processes."
Vexis stirred along her right forearm. The emerald presence sharpened, the truth-sense engaging with the data the way it had engaged with the portal itself.
The damage wears a mask, Vexis said. Surface reads as natural decay. Underneath, the pattern is precise. Engineered.
Sera stared at the waveforms. The weapon wasn't just destroying portals. It was designed to hide its own work. Anyone performing a surface-level scan would see gradual deterioration and assume natural causes. Only a deep reading — the kind that required all five dragons and a hybrid's portal sensitivity — would reveal the artificial pattern beneath.
"Someone wanted this to look like it was just happening," she said. "Like the portals were just... wearing out."
"That assessment is consistent with the data." Prime shifted the display. New information replaced the waveforms: system logs, maintenance records, equipment status reports. "There's more. During the healing, the ship's sensors performed a comprehensive scan of the area. The portal's monitoring equipment has been tampered with."
The word landed like a stone in still water.
"Tampered with," Sera repeated.
"Data logs wiped. Three of the four monitoring stations positioned around the portal have been disabled. Not malfunctioned — disabled. The shutdown sequences are in the maintenance logs, but the authorization codes are spoofed. Someone with physical access to the equipment powered them down and erased the records of having done so."
"When?"
"The timestamps on the remaining logs suggest the tampering occurred within the last three to four months. The work is professional." He paused, the brief consideration before an important statement. "Systematic. Methodical. Whoever did this knew exactly what equipment to target and how to cover their tracks."
Systematic, Gold echoed from her right thigh, the strategic mind engaging. This isn't one portal. If they came here, they've been to others.
Crimson's heat flared along her left thigh. Not rage. Something tighter, more focused. They were HERE. Right here. And we missed them.
Sera stood slowly from the console, her body protesting the movement, and walked to the viewport. The healed portal blazed against the dark, beautiful and whole. Beyond it, ships moved through freely, and the station's lights burned bright, and somewhere inside that station people were celebrating because their lifeline had been restored.
Someone had come to this portal. Had stood in this same space. Had methodically disabled the equipment that might have detected the weapon's signature and erased the records that might have led someone to ask questions. And then they had left, and the portal had continued dying, and the people on that station had continued suffering, and no one had known that the death was deliberate because someone had made very sure it looked natural.
"Someone was here," she said. Her voice was quiet. Flat with the compression of anger that hadn't found its shape yet. "Someone who didn't want anyone looking too closely."
The pendant pulsed at her throat. The dragons stirred in her skin, still dim, still recovering, but awake now, alert, the Court processing the same information through five different lenses.
Through the viewport, the portal burned. One portal healed. Thousands failing. And somewhere in the dark between the stars, someone was making sure no one noticed.
Sera touched the pendant. The crystal was warm against her fingers, steady, Aurelia's frequency humming beneath her skin.
"Set course for the next portal," she said.