When the Choir Sings

Jun Park woke to the steady thrum of the orbital's reactors and the faint, domestic smell of recycled citrus. The Tethers of Thaleia cradled the sunlit side of the station like a hand holding a glass. In the window above the mess, the nebula looked like spilled oil—colors folding into colors, a slow bruise that lived out beyond the docking rings. Jun could see it every morning: cobalt breath, threads of green that looked almost like sound. He had learned to measure the day by the angle of those hues against the porthole.

By trade he was a systems tech, half-mechanic and half-curiosity. He took apart old comm rigs for breakfast and stitched together patient sensor arrays for strangers by evening. He had the narrow hands of someone who tuned tiny things until they sang. His tools lived in a strip of foam beside the bunk, and a chipped enamel mug with a faded mark of a long-gone freighter called the Skylark brightened the workbench. People called him careful; he called himself loyal and, sometimes at night, restless.

On the day everything shifted, the docking bay smelled of ozone and burnt capacitor. A battered courier ship had come in at blistering pace, hull pitted like a city after a storm. The crew that clambered out had the hollow look of people who had listened to too much, or too little—their eyes kept darting toward the nebula as if expecting an echo to answer. One of them carried a box wrapped in greasy canvas and tied with wire. It was small, like a child's toy chest, and it hummed when Jun stepped near.

Jun was not supposed to be on the bay; he had stayed after shifts to help Khaled, the station's senior engineer, seal a leaking coolant braid. Khaled insisted on supervising him because Khaled liked having someone younger around who didn't mind reading schematics that must be read with a cigarette and a curse. But Jun had moved toward the box anyway. He had learned to be greedy for anomalies. The courier glanced up and, for a moment, his face was fully human—raw, pleading.

"That came from the Choir probe," he said, voice like paper. "It failed the run. We brought what we could." He didn't have to tell Jun what the Choir was. Everyone on Thaleia knew the probe's name. It had been launched three years earlier to map the song patterns that bled from the nebula, patterns the corporations wanted to flatten into charts and profits. The probe had stopped transmitting months ago.

Jun's fingers brushed the canvas. A single vibration shot through his palm—low and precise, a note that lurked in the backbone of memory. The courier swore softly and stepped back, letting Jun lift the box. He felt the note as if someone had pressed a cool coin against his sternum. It tasted like salt and something older: a lullaby his mother had hummed when he was small, though he could not have known the tune then.

Beneath the canvas lay a shard, no bigger than a palm, faceted and humming like a trapped star. Its edges were warm. The courier's eyes flooded and he said the only thing he could. "We salvaged part of the array. It sings in pieces."