The Last Luminarium

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The Selene’s Wake crawled out of the Spindle like a tired animal slinking from a den. Its hull bore pitted scars from a dozen systems, each mark a story Mira Solace preferred not to tell. Night markets clung to the ring stations of Harrow like parasites—neon gutters that fed on the recycled ozone of a thousand ships. Mira navigated them by instinct, hands folded over a worn yoke, eyes half on the sensors and half on a face that kept promises it could never keep.

“Three minutes to the drop,” Jax said. The maintenance droid’s voice had the flat humor of a machine that had learned irony to better understand the humans it serviced. He hung from the viewport, servo-arms tracing constellations of dust and advertising banners ads: legal histories, lost heirs, entertainment reels that promised to repair whatever loneliness their viewers had saved up.

Mira let the Wake drift and watched Harrow’s market spin past—a theatre of barter where names and lives were traded in quicksilver. In the cradle of that chaos, she kept her hands light and her eyes harder. Smuggling was not a trade for poetry; it was a ledger and a law. She had been a marshal once—Concord licenses refused by time and by decisions with too many deaths in them. Now she worked for credits and for silence.

“Is Nae actually showing?” she asked.

“Has arrived, cloak and all,” Jax replied. “Scent of ozone and old libraries.”

Nae’la—Nae—had eyes like a slow planet: patient and ancient. She moved among the market stalls like a scholar retrieving a lost footnote, and when she came aboard the Wake she smelled of dust and star-ink.

“Captain,” she said without ceremony. “I have what you were promised.”

The crate had been wrapped in layers of obsolete dampeners and archaic seals. Nae set it on the cargo platform with the care someone would show to an instrument in a cathedral. It pulsed faintly when Mira’s gloved hand brushed the metal—an afterthought of light, like bioluminescent algae disturbed in deep water.

“You paid Coventry for this?” Jax asked. He ran a diagnostic over the external plating. “This glyphing is old. Too old.”

Nae’s mouth tightened. “It is older than Coventry. It is older than the map systems that still bother to name those who once built things.”

Mira watched the crate. She felt, against reason, a small tug. Something in her digits hummed in recognition—no, not recognition; a memory like a dust shadow on a lens. Her Lumen-Lock, an illegal implant a marshal had shoved into her skull when her own memories became liabilities, warmed along a spine of nerves she had worked hard to ignore. She swallowed and went to the cockpit. The market’s lights receded. The Wake purred; its old bones tested the climb out of Harrow.

No one hailed them. No one signaled yet. But a shadow moved off the ring—three black slivers that suited the Dominion’s hunting style. Mira felt the hair at the back of her neck stand.

“Dirty weather on the climb,” she said, more to herself than to anyone. “Buckle in.”