Latticework of Distant Lights

Etta treated mornings at the Kestrel Node like prayers she had learned by muscle rather than creed. Before most people woke, she was already under the hum — hands steady in grease-dark gloves, fingers rewiring the tiny, bell-like coils that kept arrival pulses polite and ships from kissing the ring iron. The maintenance gallery smelled of scorched oil and toasted seaweed buns from the concourse below; someone always fried something comforting near dawn, and the smell threaded up through the service grates like a promise that not everything out here was alloy and alarm.

She moved with the certainty of someone who had spent her life inside spaces that could not be trusted to think for themselves. Her tools were worn petitions: a torque spanner with a nick in the handle, a sonic scrubber with one tooth missing, a thin stethoscope she used to listen to the resonance of coils. Etta knelt at the alignment panel and traced the pattern of microfractures with the tip of a probe, feeling for the faintest give. The Lattice sang low there — not a problem yet, she told herself. Just a tired note. She coaxed the array back toward its intended phrase, adjusting the phase dampers until the pulse tightened like a fist.

Rowan hovered at the edge, replicating the ritual with eyes wide and a dozen questions tucked behind their lips. They were still young enough to treat a maintenance crawl like an adventure; their hair stuck up at odd angles from too many static shocks, and they had a habit of humming while they worked, as if nervousness needed company. "You always start with the dampers and end with the prayer?" Rowan asked, not because they wanted an answer but because they liked to hear Etta talk through a sequence.

Etta snorted a laugh that felt like a loosened rivet. "Dampers first, bargaining later. Keeps the gods off-balance." She slid a shim into place and thumbed a tiny set screw. Her hands remembered the pattern before her mind did: loosen, nudge, listen, retorque. Rowan mimicked the motions and misjudged the last torque; a strip of grease shot from their glove and landed on the console like an offering. "There," Etta said, wiping it with the hem of a sleeve. "You made the node look alive. It appreciates irony."

Outside, ships threaded the dark like slow-headed fish, their navigation lights cleaving the black with patient ceremony. The concourse below hummed with early trade — vendors with floating carts selling kelp buns glazed in fermented kelis, a woman with a basket of hand-knitted thermal scarves, a trio of children chasing a toy drone that sputtered gossip like a persistent aunt. Those small human loops reminded Etta why she took the job aside from the math and the precision; the waystation was a throat through which lives passed, and she tended it the way most people tended relatives. She checked the telemetry logs on her wrist-pad: routine drift here, a jitter over there. Minor. She tapped a dismissive command and sent a maintenance notice to the morning roster.

Then the console blinked a sequence she did not expect: a soft ping from the Auroral Array's development office. The header read, simply, An opportunity. Etta let the message sit in the corner of her vision like a pebble in a boot. She didn't open it yet. She had learned the danger of promises made in bright fonts on the wrong kind of morning.