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The Eye wakes before Kira-7 does.
Vents sigh open. Old lights flicker into reluctant life. Somewhere deep in the station’s bones, something metallic ticks as it cools. Kira registers it all before their systems finish booting—habit more than necessity. She lies still on the cot wedged between two bulkheads, listening to the station breathe.
Integrity: 61%.
Dream logs: residual.
She leaves the dreams where they are. Digging them out only makes the day heavier.
Kira swings her legs down, the floor cold through the thin plating of her feet. A soft teal glow pulses at her collarbone as power stabilizes. The left optic lags half a second behind the right, turning the room into a smear of motion until it catches up. She blinks once. Twice. It settles.
Greenway smells like damp metal and old growth—moss climbing where it shouldn’t, roots drinking from leaks no one remembers fixing. She likes it here. Things break slowly in the Greenway. She can see the decay coming.
Outside, someone has left a maintenance drone slumped against the wall. Its casing is split open like a cracked shell.
“Morning,” Kira says, because she always does.
The drone does not answer, but its diagnostic light flickers when Kira kneels beside it. A loose connection. A bent pin. Easy. Kira works with practiced hands, fingers moving without thought, guided by a memory that isn’t quite theirs. When the drone reboots, it emits a soft, garbled chirr.
“Don’t thank me,” Kira mutters. “Just keep running.”
It buzzes away, steadier than before.
By mid-cycle, Kira is hauling a crate through the Rotunda fringe—nothing special, nothing traceable. Someone paid in scraps and a favor owed. That’s how it goes. She takes the long way, avoiding cameras that probably don’t work anymore but might still be watched by someone pretending they do.
A drifter waves from a scaffold overhead. “Ghostline!”
Kira looks up. The name still surprises her sometimes. Still fits.
“Your light’s acting weird,” the drifter says.
Kira holds a hand up and glances at the faint glow leaking from her neck port. It’s pulsing faster than usual. Stress, maybe. Or memory.
“Yeah,” she replies. “It does that.”
Later, when the work is done, Kira sits at their terminal with a mug of something warm and vaguely bitter. She doesn’t exactly need to eat. She still likes to pretend. The screen hums softly as she patches together code for a neighbor’s habitat lock—nothing fancy, just enough to keep it closing when it’s supposed to.
A sound slips through her audio buffer. Soft. Rhythmic.
Rain.
Kira freezes. The system flags nothing unusual. No leaks. No environmental audio. The sound is coming from inside them, threaded through old memory sectors like a ghost refusing to be archived.
She doesn’t shut it out.
Instead, she finishes the patch. Send it. Power down the terminal. The sound fades on its own.
As cycle-end approaches, Kira returns to her cot. She unwraps the braided fiber cord from her wrist, turning the three cracked data wafers over in her hand. She doesn’t access them. She never does. Some things are meant to stay unopened.
The Eye settles into night. Lights dim. Vents slow.
Kira lies back and lets the station hum fill the quiet spaces where dreams might come back if she's not careful.
Status: active.
Location: home.
It’s not much.
But it’s enough.