“You were humming it again,” Arjun said, not looking up from the relay board. “Third time this shift.”
I hadn’t noticed. I almost never did.
“Humming what?” Diarmuid asked from the bunk above me, his voice still thick with half-sleep. He’d been on the night rotation and had only managed three hours before Arjun called us all in.
“The docking hymn,” Arjun said. “The one they play on Vekara-7 when a ship clears the outer ring. The Tethered Welcome.” He finally turned around. His face under the cold blue light of the relay board was the face of a man who had decided something was wrong. “Except none of us have ever been to Vekara-7.”
The silence in the crew compartment was the particular silence of a small space with recycled air and no windows. Vekara Station hummed around us — not melodically, just mechanically, the low-frequency vibration of a structure that had been bolted together over four decades by eight different corporate contractors and still hadn’t quite decided what shape it wanted to be. We were in Spoke Three, the oldest residential arm, where the walls were the color of old teeth and every corridor smelled faintly of flux sealant.
“I’ve never even heard of the Tethered Welcome,” I said.
“I know,” said Arjun. “That’s the problem.”
Alma was the one who had been keeping notes. She didn’t say so right away — she sat in the corner seat with her knees pulled up and her datapad face-down on her thigh and let the rest of us talk for a while first. That was her way. Alma Lozano had been a documentation specialist for Meridian Freight before the company folded its Outer Spoke operations and left forty-three workers stranded on station with no return contract. She’d been here three years now, same as most of us, and she had the habit of watching people the way a cartographer watches coastlines: not for beauty, but for drift.
“It started six weeks ago,” she said, when the rest of us had run out of explanations. She turned the datapad over. “With Riya.”
Riya Ramachandran was our systems tech. She was compact and precise and had a way of tilting her head when she was processing something that made her look like she was listening to a frequency no one else could hear. She had a silver subdermal mesh running from her left temple to just below her ear — a Meridian-issue neural interface, the kind they gave to workers who needed to run diagnostics in vacuum without a console. It had been deactivated when the company pulled out. She’d kept it because removal required a licensed medical bay, and the only licensed medical bay on Vekara Station charged more than she made in a month.
“I started dreaming about a cargo hold,” Riya said quietly. She’d been standing near the hatch, and I hadn’t realized she was listening. “Not any cargo hold I’ve worked. The gravity was wrong — too light, maybe point-six standard. The containers were marked in a script I didn’t recognize. And there was a woman.” She paused. “Not anyone I know. But I know her face better than I know my own mother’s.”
Arjun sat down slowly on the edge of the relay board console. “And then it spread.”
It had. That was the only word for it. Over six weeks, each of us had begun carrying fragments of something that didn’t belong to us. Diarmuid woke up knowing the maintenance access codes for a class of docking clamp he’d never trained on — and when he tried them on a rusted coupling in Sub-Level Four out of sheer disbelief, three of the four worked. Arjun had started calculating fuel ratios for a drive architecture that didn’t match any ship in Vekara’s registry. I had begun, apparently, humming a ceremonial song from a station seven sectors away.
And none of us had spoken about it until now.
“Why didn’t anyone say anything?” Diarmuid asked. He was sitting up in the bunk now, his broad shoulders hunched, his red-brown hair flattened on one side from sleep. He had the look of a man recalibrating something fundamental.
“Because it felt like ours,” Alma said simply.
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