The Auroral Key

Juno Marik learned the rhythm of the Hearth by ear long before she could name the constellations that hummed beyond its glass. The station was a scaffold of stacked neighborhoods and gardens, a skeleton wrapped in a thousand cables, and its heartbeat was the slow, constant thrum beneath the archive floor where she spent her mornings. The hum vibrated through her boots as she slid the holo-tray into the indexing cradle, watched light unfurl into a map of routes that once sang like a choir. She traced one line with a fingertip; it felt like cool metal, like something alive.

The archive smelled of oil and rain—recycled air carrying the sweet green of Mira's hydroponics on the promenade, the metallic edge of solder, the faint sour of boiled beans from the communal kitchens. Lumen, a squat owl-bot with copper feathers and jittery optical lenses, blinked on a nearby shelf and dropped a tiny parcel into her palm: Mira's midday bread. Its voice was a timbre of chimes. "Thermal flux in Corridor Seven will spike by eleven," it announced, then tilted its head as if listening for some private answer.

"Thanks, Lumen," Juno said. She tucked the warm flatbread into the pocket of her oversmock and pulled a thin datapad out of the cradle. Old maps unrolled on its surface like sleeping animals. She fed the pad a request—a simple query that should have returned routine navigation logs—and watched the query stall. A lock symbol crawled across the projection, a little bar of red like a wound.

"Anomalous closure," she muttered. There had been so many little closures, one after another: a corridor sealed for maintenance, a server node quarantined for a week, ship manifests held under directive. The announcements in the public ducts said everything was under control. Officially, the Hearth was as secure as ever. Unofficially, routes outside the station’s orbit had begun to blur. Traders complained in the bazaars that the starways were changing shape when you weren't looking.

Her fingers moved without waiting for full permission, a habitual trespass. She looped a backdoor into the archive's index and caught a sliver of a file—no bigger than a moth, stamped with the sigil of the Wayfoundry. For a breath she had it open: a pattern of light and pulse, a resonance signature that felt like a lock's memory. The file vanished as the guard-lights on the far aisle breathed blue. Juno swallowed hard, pocketed the pad, and straightened.