Mira Cala woke to the steady, metallic heartbeat of Arden's Spire long before the station lit its public corridors. The bay alarms were soft now, a familiar hush she could feel through the soles of her boots as much as hear — a low thrum that threaded through the ribs of the hull and into the hydroponic terraces where she spent mornings coaxing basil and yeast into edible shapes. The terraces smelled of warm soil and recycled water, a scent that made the station feel less like metal and more like some stubborn garden clinging to a wide, empty sky.
She moved as she always moved: hands sure where they needed to be, fingers remembering small betrayals of hardware. A leak at the north manifold had been stubborn for two cycles; it squirreled condensation across the polymer ribs and left a tacky salt on her gloves. Mira worked the clamps with a bone-tired patience, listening to the ventilation and humming ballast pumps, talking under her breath to machines the way other people talked to pets. 'Easy,' she muttered when a stubborn clip resisted. 'Come on. Don't make me get the vice.'
Tomas Keel found her crouched amid trays of bright green, rubbing the residue from his own sleeves as if the gardens had rubbed some youth back into his afternoon. He had been a botanist before the belts and now taught apprentices to coax earth from air. His face was a topography of years—thin lines at the corners of his eyes, a small scar that cut one eyebrow. He looked at her with the quiet approval that had become his signature. 'You'd have been late to school in another life,' he said, and it sounded almost like a correction rather than a joke.
Mira's laugh came out like a dry cough. 'I don't have a school, Tomas. I have a stipend and three-month apprenticeships and the station's leaky plumbing.' She wiped her palms on a cloth and handed a tray of sprouting shoots over to him. The green was sharp enough to sting; she liked that.
At dawn the windows showed the planet below as a slow smear of cloud and ocean, light pooled at its limb like spilled mercury. The ring of cargo elevators jutted from Arden's spine, a collage of patched plating and slotted antennae. Somewhere down in the residential decks, a child would be waking up around the same hour and pressing his forehead to the view glass to watch the storms on Nova Thalassa bloom in violet crescents. Mira had done that once. She still kept a corner of the observation gallery to herself on weekends, where she watched the storms and practiced piloting in the station's aging sims. Dreams were cheap; training cost credits.
She'd been born on a mining barge and learned to feel the subtle give of a hull as others learned to read faces. She had a blunt way of looking at things and a habit of naming broken parts instead of people. That morning she tucked a curl of hair behind her ear and headed down the service ladder, palms smelling faintly of algae and repair oil. Outside, the sun bank glanced off a maintenance drone and turned its surface into a wink; inside, light moved in strips along the floor like measured breaths. This, she knew, was the ordinary she was supposed to protect.