Page 1 of 18
When Talia Ardis uncovers a living shard that can unweave the galaxy’s folded corridors, she must choose between selling its power and using it to reopen isolated lanes. With a ragged crew, a reluctant old mariner, and a sentient AI, she fights a syndicate intent on locking the stars and returns home with a new kind of map.
The station smelled like rust and lemon oil—two good things and one forgotten. Talia Ardis tuned the injector on the Wren’s aft manifold with hands that still remembered the miner’s calluses from her childhood on Ravel’s thin crust. Outside the hangar bay the sky was a bruise of industrial dusk: strip-miner lights stitched in lattices, a ribbon of cargo drones crawling between spires, and the low, persistent hiss of the orbital scrubbers that kept dust from settling into breath.
Ravel was the kind of place that wore its problems like ancient welds. It kept the belt in orbit and the small, ragged colonies beyond it alive by turning chorus crystals into communications relays and selling the lanes’ timing to freighters. Talia had made a modest living returning wrecks and missing parts to customers who paid in credits and favours. She liked the small certainties: a bolt that fit, a report that matched the star map, a meal on Mira’s table when she returned. The rest of the galaxy could get by with its grand fleets and gilded parlours; Ravel survived in small triangles of trust and grease.
Her sister Mira had a laugh like an alarm bell, bright and sharp and practical. Mira ran a clinic in the central sprawl and patched miners with coffee-stained hands. The two of them had learned to speak without adjectives—savings were numbers, promises were parts, and fear was an unprinted tab. The night Talia slid the Wren into the moonlit cleft and clipped the hatch, she felt the old knot behind her ribs—an ache she had learned to cinch with routine. Routine was safer than the stories about open lanes collapsing into nothing.
A salvage contract had brought her back that evening: an old courier that drifted across a weave-cut and never called home. Its hull was ragged, its passengers long gone. Talia had expected corrosion and a busted core. She had not expected the soft blue glow under the courier’s plating, like veins of some buried ocean, nor the small shard of crystal wedged in the frame that hummed when she ran her fingers across it.