She chose a corridor perpendicular to the one by the windows and followed it. Soon, she was at a plain metal security door upon which the building’s logo was painted. Locked. Reluctantly, she slid Izairis’s security card from a pocket and waived it near the panel on the door. It immediately flew open with a whoosh.

“Okay,” she said at the phenomenon of something working as it was supposed to.

She continued on like this, proceeding blindly across the upper floors of the building through service passages where the only interactions she had were the glances of maintenance staff or the occasional resident. In her helmet, they must have thought she was just another dilettante, drunk on shots of Moonspike after gambling away her daily allowance. Fighting the ever-present weight of hopelessness, she kept moving, and covered a considerable amount of ground, personally checking thousands of doors across dozens of buildings over the course of the cygie, with none of them rimmed in amber.

This went on until time had run nearly out.

They were all getting anxious. They’d only covered about twenty percent of the Blue Quadrant’s upper floors and were close to collapsing from exhaustion. All except the stringhunter, of course, who didn’t require sleep. Nevertheless, Aptat had become increasingly chatty about making the call to run, and Naecia had no doubt that they would have already done so if they had the permissions to unclamp the Child from the docks. She held a seed of remorse for using her leveraged ownership of the ship to hold Aptat hostage, but it was the only way to ensure they weren’t all abandoned. Plus, restraining the freedom of a slaver didn’t really knock the needle of her moral compass.

She was near halfway down her slice of latitudes at the end of the third cygie, jogging along a heavily cabled passage through which the city’s solar energy flowed.

“Hey Ben,” it was Patton. Using the all-channels broadcast again.

“Hey: Brown Dwarf,” snarled Naecia. “Get off the com unless you find something. Are you – are you eating?”

“Yeah, the empanada place,” he answered.

“You’re making me want to barf, man, geez,” said Ben.

“Have you even been looking for the Chime?” Naecia said.

“Anyway, Ben,” he swallowed loudly, “this thing reminds me of LEGO-Kong. Remember LEGO-Kong at your place?”

“Yes, Patton. I think that’s what it is.”

“I mean, it’s roundish, with like, all these layers. I swear even the space-fins are the same.”

“What do you mean by ‘fins’?” It was Aptat.

“Whatever the big panel-things are on the outside. The fishy-fin things.”

“Radiation shields,” said Naecia. “Shut up now.”

“Yeah, we put ’em all over LEGO-Kong. Made it look like coronavirus. Not exactly, but if you squinted. You know, all spikey?”

“What in the galactic fuck are you talking about?” said Izairis.

“See, we had this pandemic and–”

“Hold up, hold up,” Ben cut in.