The other fist unwinds. The shell touches its face, rolls fingers across the empty spaces where eyes should be. It feels the pits and scars on its hull, and finds the fresh weld in the middle of its chest. It’s just a little thicker than my thumb, and still silver, not even painted over yet.

I quietly curse Sul Kadi.

I am broken.

I’ve never seen a shell do that. Damage assessments, yes, more times than I’d like to count—but they’re always clinical and robotic. Hardware abstractions testing to see where functionality begins and ends.

This is something else.

There is a hole. It touches the railgun wound. Here.

“Let me fill it.”

I twitch, surprised at my flapping tongue.

The machine doesn’t move. I step closer, even as everything else is telling me to run. My pulse runs so fast it hurts.

The Juno moves slowly. It closes the hand around the remains of its eye, and sets itself down on one knee. The way it would when a jockey gave the order to present.

The operator’s lock clicks open.

“Don’t move,” whispers Hail, somewhere far behind me.

They’re going to pull the plug. They have to. It’s the only way this doesn’t end with another fight and another wreck. I look up at the Juno.

And it looks down on me. It isn’t watching Hail and Lear climbing scaffolds in the distance. It’s right here, waiting for something.

Oh.

Of course.

“My name is Rook.”

Five

FIVE

I’VE BEEN ALL over on NorCol’s tab. All over, from the core to the bloody fringes, and across the border more than once. I’ve spent nearly all of that time hustled from one unfamiliar tub to another—never to anything the size of Horizon, but across every configuration of deck and bulkhead and hull that you can imagine, and a few you’d have to guess at. Century ships built by ancestor-engineers, and grandline vessels with lore and legends of their own. Fractal-shapes cooked up by neural networks and R&D acid trips. Nightmare-things built using stolen secrets, cold-forged from starlight and emptiness.

Some things change, others stay the same, even on a monster like Horizon. Even on a boat like this, bigger than anything and teetering on the edge of nothing, I don’t need a map for what I’m looking for. I follow passages I have no reason to recognise, steering by gut and instinct first, then by sound and smell. It’s a rumble in the distance, filling every vent and passage full of echoes and familiar scents. It’s a wall of noise when I find it, and a wash of heat and steam.