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A salvage crew aboard the Harbinger recovers an ancient cognitive lattice that can reconstruct people from living patterns. When a fragment of the captain’s lost partner surfaces, the crew must reprogram the Spire while a corporation closes in — and one life is asked to anchor the choice.
Rowan Hale kept the scarf folded inside a pocket of a jacket that had long outlived its warmth. The fabric was a stubborn yellow, the color of something found in sunlight rather than manufactured light, and when they folded their hands around it the memory of hands that had once woven it came sharp as a cut. There were nights when the Harbinger’s hull sighed through the dark and Rowan would press the scarf to their face as if the scent could be coaxed back into being. Instead, the smell that clung was space grease and recycled coffee and the faint tang of ozone from the engine coils — ordinary things that made grief into a domestic habit.
Outside the observation porthole the system was almost empty: a bruise of cold stars, a long-dead mining colony’s skeletons, a float of husks where commerce had once been noisy and territorial. Salvage ran on margins and rules, on charts no one kept polite, and Rowan had built the Harbinger into a shape that made taking advantage of the universe’s neglect feel safe. There were days when they convinced themselves it was only business; there were nights when they would look at the scarf and admit it was not. Eli had been the difference between profit and purpose, between a bunk space and a life. Two years had thinned the edge of the memory into a silhouette that the Harbinger’s lamps could not quite illuminate.
The ship’s bulk hummed, a low animal sound that threaded the crews’ sleep. Lio Vang had left lights on in engineering, always, because darkness made his fingers clumsy. Sera Ikeda kept a stack of repair schematics and a small, battered medical pad she carried like a rosary for future mistakes. They were practical people with practical grudges; loyalty on the Harbinger was less a vow than a ledger of favors owed and received. Rowan ran their hand along the inside seam of the jacket until the fabric settled; the action steadied them.
They were three years from the accident by the calendar the banks recognized and two years by the calendar that mattered when the nights got thin. They had picked at the edges of the day like a seamstress pulling at a loose thread, each tug finding a new problem to mend. The Harbinger’s work kept memory busy. You dismantled the old to build a living again, and the ship smelled of other people’s pasts. Rowan liked that; it felt like being useful.