From one corridor she heard Orla Jareni and Cohmac Vitus saying something indistinct, no doubt about the antiquities that seemed to practically litter the decks. They’d be distracted by that for a while and would pay no attention to where Affie went or what she did. This was ideal.

She pushed aside a curtain of vines and made her way into the tunnel that led “upward.” Gravity adjusted with her as she went, an unusual and ingenious modification; apparently all those ancient station mechanisms remained in perfect working order. Affie had no intention of touching anything inside, because any tech so old that was still running would be best left alone. Any other space traveler would know that, too.

Other space travelers would also know that the top and bottom rings were the likeliest places for storage bays, and for the cargo others had left behind. If she was any judge, this station’s storage was at the top.

Sure enough, as Affie stepped from the tunnel into the shadowy topmost rings, she could make out long lines of storage bays—some locker-sized, some bigger—stretching into the central dark. Larger storage might be located on the lower rings. The larger bays could hold potentially dangerous substances, so she’d go through those later, maybe with Leox’s help. For now she would just rummage around…

Then she cocked her head. Was there writing on the lockers?

Affie turned on her glow rod as she crept forward. Across the lockers and other bay doors were scrawled some symbols—not labeling but actual handwriting or painting, with the same kind of grease pencil pilots used to mark wires for repair. Affie had never handwritten anything in her life, which was hardly unique. Probably she’d never even met someone who wrote something down.

Nor was this writing Aurebesh. It was…symbols. Little pictures instead of letters. Different lines were written at different heights, in different styles. Then she spotted, at the very ends of the lines, much smaller numbers—

Dates! Affie realized. Those are dates; that tells us when they were here!

As she’d suspected, it hadn’t been that long before. One line was from just six years back. Another was from earlier, but still only about thirty-two years prior. All the writing seemed to come from the recent era, a very long time after this station would’ve been abandoned.

There was no making sense of the lines without knowing their language—or, more likely, their code. The pictographs were fairly crude. Affie ran one finger beneath a line drawing of a crested wave with a diagonal streak through it; that looked like the readouts that indicated a gravitational disturbance. And there was one shaped like a Y—that suggested a potential fork in the hyperspace lanes, or some other diversion. She began to smile as she realized that this was a place where wayfarers left messages for each other, warnings about the path ahead.