The recycled air on Deck Nine smells like warm copper and old rubber, the same way it has for the eleven years Yolanda Figueroa has worked the filtration shift. She knows it so well she stopped noticing it around year three. Now she only notices it when something else cuts through — the acrid bite of a welding torch two corridors over, or the faint sweetness of the contraband citrus Ezequiel smuggles up from the hydro bays on Tuesdays.
Today is Tuesday. The citrus smell is there.
Yolanda finishes logging her filter readings on the scratched terminal bolted to the wall, her fingers moving from memory. Deck Nine of the Palloren Station is not a beautiful place. The ceiling panels are the color of old teeth, and the pipes that run overhead are wrapped in insulation tape that has been repaired so many times it looks like a bandaged limb. But it is hers, in the way that only a place you’ve spent most of your adult life can be yours — not by ownership, but by familiarity so deep it has become part of your body.
Ezequiel is already at the break table when she arrives, a segment of pale orange fruit balanced on his thumb like a coin. Across from him sits Jhevon Regis, who runs the pressure gauges on the adjacent corridor and who has, in Yolanda’s experience, two modes: either completely silent or talking so fast you lose the thread after the third sentence. Right now he is in the fast-talking mode, leaning forward on his elbows, and Ezequiel is watching him with the careful expression of a man who is not sure whether he is about to hear something interesting or something dangerous.
The fourth person at the table is Nexil.
Nexil is not human, or not entirely — the precise taxonomy is something Yolanda has never asked about, because Nexil has made clear, in the polite and absolute way that Nexil makes most things clear, that the question is not welcome. What Yolanda can see is this: Nexil stands roughly human-height but with a torso that is too long, jointed in one extra place below the ribcage that allows a slight forward curve when seated, like a reed bending toward water. Their skin is a deep, shifting grey-green, textured in fine overlapping scales along the neck and forearms, each one catching the fluorescent light with a faint iridescence. Their eyes are large and lidless, the irises a pale amber that seems to glow from inside when the light is low. They wear the same station-issue coveralls as everyone else, but have cut the sleeves off and replaced them with long wrappings of dark cloth, a personal modification that nobody on Deck Nine has ever commented on. Nexil has worked filtration longer than Yolanda. They know where every valve is in the dark.
“They ran a compliance audit,” Jhevon is saying when Yolanda sits down. “Not a standard one. A full-spectrum biometric compliance audit. On Kovash in cargo.”
Yolanda reaches for a segment of the orange. “Kovash has been here longer than any of us.”
“Twenty-two years,” Nexil says quietly, without looking up from the pipe coupling they are cleaning with a cloth. “He came on the first resupply contract.”
“They found discrepancies,” Jhevon says. “In his bio-signature. They said his neural compliance markers didn’t match the terms of his original indenture contract. And then they just — “ He stops, spreads his hands flat on the table. “They walked him off. Security. Two of the Palloren Corp liaisons in their grey suits. He didn’t even get to go back to his bunk.”
The break room is quiet for a moment except for the low hum of the air recyclers.
Ezequiel sets down the orange.
“Neural compliance markers,” he says slowly, like he is tasting the words. “That’s not in any contract language I’ve ever signed.”
“It’s in all of them,” Nexil says. Their amber eyes lift from the coupling. “Clause 14, subsection C. ‘Physiological and cognitive outputs generated during the term of service remain the intellectual and biological property of Palloren Corporation, subject to audit and retrieval.’ It has been there since the second-generation contracts. Twelve years ago.”
Yolanda feels the copper-smell air go very still in her lungs.
She signed a second-generation contract.
They all did.
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