“Outer door is closed,” Dag said, and I wondered if he was going to announce every step we took, the habit so ingrained in him from his years in space that he couldn’t stop it even if he tried.

The computer told me the same thing:

EXT SEAL: ON

INT SEAL: ON

I stared at the screen, momentarily frozen. I didn’t know what to do next. I had to know. I could not be forgetting all I had studied already.

“That’s the one,” Dag said, pointing over my shoulder to the word INGRESS.

The shine of our headlamps cast a glare on the screen, throwing our reflections back to us. I touched the command, and the word INGRESS changed to PRESSURIZING. The chamber filled with a soft hissing sound as air tumbled to fill the vacuum. It grew louder, louder, louder—the numbers on the screen marched upward—then the hiss abruptly stopped.

LCK 83 kPa 21 O2 79 N2 258 K

“Airlock is pressurized,” Dag said, making a solid fist to state the same thing in gesture. “Two hundred fifty-eight K is cold for an active ship.”

I gritted my teeth and tried to ignore him. He was only doing what came naturally to him.

“We’re getting another position verification request from Orbital Control,” Boudicca said over the radio. “So if you could hurry it up a little, that would be good.”

Her impatience, her worry, they seemed so very far away. I turned the wheel on the interior door, felt it loosen and spin, and pushed inward. Some part of me had expected it to stick, to be rusted closed, but House of Wisdom had been built to last far longer than ten years in space.

Beyond the hatch was a sea of stars.

I blinked, turned my head, moved my light. The stars winked and turned. It was not empty space, but a cavernous chamber filled with tiny, glinting reflections. One of the stars floated close. I reached. It bumped against my glove and spun away, so I stretched farther and caught it.

It was a shard of glass. Thinner than my finger, clear as crystal.

All of those glinting lights, they were broken pieces of glass floating in the chamber. By opening the door, we had set them turning and glinting, a strange and beautiful dance of air currents and debris. I looked around until I spotted large panes of glass secured to one wall, the whole stack of them shattered where something heavy had struck it in the center. Throughout the cargo bay there were crates and boxes floating free, broken away from the nets and bands meant to hold them in place.

I let go of the shard and sent it spinning back into the darkness. I tracked its motion through the room. The beam from my headlamp danced over the walls, found conduits and panels, cargo secured to the wall with webbing, and a pair of legs.