LOGINThe Renn-line woman does not give her name.She gives the name she wants me to hear."Renn."Kovac removed the gauze from her mouth after making her bite a rolled towel twice to prove she could stop. Renn spat blood afterward and told Kovac her ferry smelled like wet charity.Kovac said, "Accurate. Bite again and I remove teeth."Renn has behaved since.Mostly.She is strapped to a bench beside the laundry cabinets, one wrist bandaged, one ankle swollen, mouth split where Sarah hit her with the tray. She looks at me like hate is the only splint keeping her upright.Sarah stands behind my left shoulder.Nadia stands behind my right because she still thinks I might fall.She is not wrong.I have Kovac's `DECISION HOLDER` strip folded in my coat. In my hands, I carry Seven's smear tray and a gauze packet Nadia did not want to give me.Renn sees the tray first."Copy blood," she says."Seve
Kovac finds a pencil before she finds a bandage.That tells me plenty about Saint Lark."Deck liability," she says, ripping the back off an inventory form and slapping it onto an oxygen crate. "If you people are going to perform illegal experimental medicine in my storage bay, I want rules I can pretend I hated."Sarah stands at the door with a towel over one arm and a knife under the towel."That sentence contradicts itself."Sami, sitting on a coil of rope with a split lip, raises his hand."Am I nephew?""Pipe consultant," Kovac says without looking.Sarah mutters, "Do not promote him."Kovac writes at the top of the form:STORAGE BAY PROCEDURE / TEMPORARY / EVERYONE DENIES LATER.The doctor looks pained. "That is not a sterile header.""Neither is the floor."Nadia kneels beside the fish box, sorting supplies into piles: clean enough, dirty but usable, no, and ask Kovac if desperate.
For six breaths, nobody asks the field unit for more.That is the closest thing we have to peace.My son lies in the fish box with one hand open on the cloth. Not relaxed. Not safe. Open enough that Nadia keeps staring at the crease across his palm like it is a road she might use if the room floods again.Leo is quiet in the waterproof bag.Too quiet.The local panel cools on the oxygen crate. Its cut wire smells faintly burned. The folded card with `ANCHOR MEMORY LOSS` sits under my knee because I do not trust my hands with it. If I read those words again, I may feed the whole machine to the river.Kovac opens the storage bay door just wide enough to put half her face through."Are you finished inventing doctrine in my supply closet?"Sarah, still nearest the door, says, "No.""Wrong answer.""Accurate one."Kovac looks past her at the fish box, the doctor on the floor with wire cutters in his lap, Nadia's bent shoulders, and me crouched like my knees have become a rumor."I have pat
Kovac gives us the storage bay behind treatment because every real bed on Saint Lark has a coughing person in it."Eight minutes," she says, shoulder against the door. "Maybe ten if legal keeps arguing with the woman who thinks my captain is awake."Sarah looks at the strip of blood running down Kovac's forearm."You need that wrapped.""I wrapped it.""That is a blood pressure cuff.""It has pressure."Kovac shuts the door before Sarah can answer.The storage bay smells of wet canvas, iodine, old oxygen, and fish from the box we keep pretending is only equipment. Three crates are stacked under the broken vent. Nadia kneels beside my son with her sleeves shoved up. The doctor has the field unit's local panel on an oxygen crate. Copper contacts hang from it.Seven's blood smear sits in a shallow dish.Leo's waterproof bag sits on the other side.Between them, my son fusses in the fish box, not crying yet. He keeps working toward it.The field unit has no Board key now. Seven took that.
The scarred woman says, "Not Board-made," and the ferry moves before anyone answers her.Saint Lark pulls away from the quay with a violence that has nothing to do with waves. The whole treatment bay tilts. The legal woman's dropped papers slide under the cot. The old field unit rocks against its bolts and knocks once, annoyed by gravity.Kovac grabs the doorframe."Who authorized departure?"No one on deck answers.The horn blows again, long and guilty.Sarah keeps the knife at the scarred woman's throat."Name."The woman spits blood onto the floor."Renn-line.""Not a name.""Only one you get."Her voice is raw and ugly. Good. I need one voice in this room that has not been polished into law, triage, or evaluation.The white-haired legal woman pushes herself up on one elbow."This vessel is under sealed custody hold."Kovac looks at the moving floor, the attacker with a knife
The first attack does not come from the Board.Almost funny.It is not funny at all.The ramp alarm dies, and for one full breath the treatment bay listens to the wrong silence. Kovac's head turns toward the passage. Sarah moves half a step in front of the door, hands still visible, every visible part of her lying.Then the ferry takes a hit.Not a wave.Not docking.A hard, ugly boom rolls through the starboard side. The old field unit knocks once behind me. Patients scream somewhere down the passage. A metal tray falls in the next bay and keeps spinning after it lands.Kovac grabs the wall."Not my ramp."The white-haired legal woman appears at the far end of the passage with two dark coats behind her."Stand clear for sealed review."A second boom hits closer.The cot wheels jump and slam back down.One of her men turns to look back.An iron bolt punches through his thigh.
The lab doors haven't finished sealing before Julian drops into his chair.His breathing is wet and uneven, a man hyperventilating in slow motion. He won't look at me. His eyes are fixed on the space where Damian stood, as though the air there has been permanently altered."He knows," Julian says. T
The red light doesn't blink. It bleeds.I take my hand away from the intercom panel. The wood is still warm where Leo's signal-jammer scorched the line. My skin crawls.Leo called me an antenna. If he's right, every second I spend in this suite is a broadcast address—coordinates being sold to whoeve
Damian's thumb presses into the pulse point at my wrist as though he's trying to read my bones.He isn't just holding me. He's measuring me. Searching for the tremor my blood left behind.I don't pull away. Resistance is a confession. I let my hand go limp, fingers mimicking the brittleness of a wom
Seventeen cameras. Eight armed guards. One way out, and it's a thirty-story drop if the elevator cables snap.I count them before my boots clear the lobby's marble threshold. It's a reflex—a rhythm as natural as the pulse I'm working so hard to flatten.One guard stands by the revolving door, his pa







