Hearth in the Hollow Sky

Maris woke to the slow pressure sigh of the hydroponic ward and the soft, green breathing of foliage. The plants had been planted into the curve of the hull like a second skin, their roots braided through clear tubes and held by rust-flecked clamps. In the low light of the ward the leaves threw back a strange chartreuse glow, and the whole room smelled of wet soil, ozone, and the faint chemical sweetness of nutrient broth—comforting, familiar, as reliable as the rhythm of her own pulse.

She ran her fingers along the rim of an old aluminum basin where a spiderwort leaf had curled itself into a cup. The metal was warm from the ward's vents. Across the basin a little cluster of bioluminescent nodes pulsed in a pattern everyone on the station called the Lumen Seed. It was neither seed nor lamp in the way of stories; it was engineered, stubbornly alive, a compact bloom of fiber and cell that hummed with a slow internal weather. To the people of Aurelia's Reach, it was the hearth—the thing that balanced humidity and fed the ward's microorganisms. Without its particular cadence the ward’s water would cloud, the fungi would spike, and the farm’s yields would wobble.

"You finally manage to surface before noon," Jun said from the shadowed walkway, voice threaded with clinking tools. He had the flat, salt-cracked hands of a tinsmith and the narrow smile of someone who had spent most of his life bargaining with parts and rust. He moved like someone half in love with gravity.

"I had a nightmare about the filtrars again," Maris said, and her mouth softened around the word as if that could hold it. She had grown up in this ward—had learned to read algae by taste and to coax tomato vines with stories. At twenty-one her bones still remembered how to laugh with the ward's fans.

Kera, a young courier whose legs were scarred by micro-meteor impacts, slid a tray across the bench. "You’re late because you stayed up composing nonsense songs for the seedlings," she said, biting into a protein bar. She always spoke like a wind that had no time to linger, blunt and direct.

"Songs help," Maris said.

Jun snorted. "Songs don't fix a cracked pump."

They were a small triangle of routine—a mentor, a courier-friend, an apprentice—each woven into the station's orbit like the knots on the hydroponic frames. The Reach itself was not a planet but a ring city drifting in the shadowed halo of Arran, a cold gas giant with storms like living drums. The ring's modules were stitched from salvaged hulls, glass from abandoned habitats, and the scavenged bones of freighters that had never found home. People made homes inside that jury-rigged anatomy; they called it a hub, or a sector, or simply "the Reach." Maris called it all "home," in a voice that hid the small recoil she felt any time the outer bulkheads thumped with distant collisions.

She watched the Lumen Seed's nodes, and noticed a shift: a tremor in the pattern that felt like a misread heartbeat. One node dimmed, not the soft fading of night but a sudden, precise drop, like someone turning off a lamp in another room.

"Did you see that?" she whispered.

Jun's jaw tightened. He stepped closer until his shadow swallowed the smaller light and the ward's scent wrapped denser around them. Kera put down her tray with a near-silent motion.

The Lumen's pulse returned after a blink—less bright, as if it had been asked to whisper. Yet the echo of that flat silence lodged under Maris's ribs. The ward felt thinner, the air colder. Across the hull the old comms trilled: a soft, bureaucratic chirp, the station's heartbeat testing its own nerves.

The message that arrived was small and square: a maintenance flag from the central node. "Check Lumen array," it read, brusque, and appended beneath in a different hand, "Report anomalies."

Jun's fingers were quick on the panel. He read the diagnostics and exhaled. "It's not a sensor glitch. Feed variance, micro-attenuation in the Lumen's core. It's subtle, but it's there."

Kera's hand found Maris's sleeve. "It's old tech," she said. "They say you can't get old parts anymore—unless you trade, and you can't trade without coin."

Maris pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum, where her pulse drummed at the thought. She had told herself that nothing would fall away while she was in the ward. The seed had stitched her childhood into the Reach's nights. When the outer hull scratched or old pumps coughed, she sang the seedlings awake. A hollow filled her, a place where a name should have been, and she heard the faintest echo of the dimmed node like a distant bell.

Outside, beyond the ward's glass, a ring-tug threaded a line of salvaged plates through the dark. Its visor blinked white against the black. The Reach spun the same, inexorable arc.

And the message from the central node returned, red now, an exposed line in a tidy network: "Lumen array trending downward. Immediate intervention required."