The mess hall always sounded a little different after physio.

  Not quieter, exactly. Just softer. Less of the sharp, bright noise that came with post-sim adrenaline and more of the low murmur of people who’d already hurt today and didn’t feel like shouting about it.

  Kaden followed the smell of reheated stew and protein bricks toward their usual corner. His left forearm hummed with a deep tired ache from Liang’s torture toys. Every time he flexed his hand he could feel the subtle lag in the graft, just enough to be wrong.

  Navarro had claimed the corner table. She sat sideways on the bench, one heel hooked up on the edge of the seat, pad resting on her knee. Her hair was pulled back in a rough knot, the kind she did when her patience was wearing thin, and she was halfway through whatever passed for noodles today.

  She looked up as Kaden and Tanaka approached, eyes flicking automatically over both of them, checking gait, posture, any sign that rehab had gone badly.

  “There they are,” she said. “Liang’s favorite toys.”

  “Don’t call us that,” Kaden said, setting his tray down opposite her. “She’ll start charging rent.”

  Tanaka eased himself down beside him with a small grunt, bad leg stretched a little farther under the table until he found the angle that didn’t make his face tighten. His tray was loaded down as usual.

  Navarro eyed the mountain of food. “You rob the line, Kenji?” she asked. “Or did they just wheel the whole pan over for you?”

  “Liang said more calories,” Tanaka said. “I’m being obedient.”

  “That’s horrifying,” Navarro said. “I don’t like a universe where you and Aurora agree on anything.”

  Kaden took a cautious bite of stew. It tasted vaguely of salt and something that wanted to be beef. His body didn’t care what it wanted to be; it cared that it was warm and not in a med bay.

  “Where’s Eden?” he asked.

  “Arguing with a dispenser,” Navarro said. “He wanted pudding. The machine wanted him to accept a vitamin smoothie. It got heated.”

  “As heated as it can get when one party is bolted to the deck,” Vos said, sliding in on Navarro’s other side.

  He set his tray down with a flourish. There was, somehow, a pudding cup sitting on it, haloed by the less impressive bulk of vegetables and starch.

  “How’d you win?” Kaden asked.

  “Superior tactics,” Vos said. “And a bored tech with override access who owed me a favor.”

  Navarro reached for the pudding. Vos slapped her hand away with his spoon.

  “Hands off,” he said. “I fought hard for that.”

  “You whined at a machine,” Navarro said. “Heroic.”

  Kaden half smiled and went back to his stew.

  Vos dug into his own food for a few minutes, then glanced between Kaden and Tanaka. “So,” he said. “Did Liang declare you both fit for duty, or are we looking at ‘fit to suffer creatively’?”

  “Somewhere in the middle,” Kaden said. “She says my hand’s adapting. Slowly. With encouragement.”

  “And she wants me to stop pretending my hip’s fine,” Tanaka said. “Work it, but don’t get clever. No sprinting. No jumping off things.”

  “Which means you’re going to jump off something in the next month,” Navarro said.

  “Only if there’s a good reason,” Tanaka said.

  “Your definition of ‘good reason’ worries me,” she said.

  Kaden rolled his wrist. The ache travelled up to his elbow. He could almost hear Liang’s voice: stop expecting it to feel like it used to.

  His HUD pinged quietly in the corner of his vision.

  [AURORA//MOTOR ADAPTATION]

  Left Hand – Integration: +1%

  Context: Post-rehab use, minor load bearing

  He dismissed it. Progress felt too small to talk about.

  “Feels weird,” Navarro said, as if reading his mind. “Seeing you use that thing to hold a fork instead of, you know, bleeding out on a table.”

  “That’s the goal,” Kaden said. “Less bleeding, more eating.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” she said.

  They drifted into a light, nothing conversation for a bit—complaints about the taste of reconstituted peas, speculation about what canned history lesson Aurora would push to the feeds next, quiet jabs at Vos’s choice to guard his pudding like it was classified.

  The noise of the hall built and ebbed around them. A group of engineers argued cheerfully at the next table over. Someone from deck maintenance walked past with a mug the size of their head.

  After a while, Navarro set her fork down and leaned back, bracing her shoulders against the bulkhead. Her gaze unfocused slightly, the way it did when her thoughts weren’t lining up with her mouth.

  Kaden recognized the look. He’d seen a different version of it in med, talking to Liang.

  “You talked about your dad,” he said to Tanaka, then looked at Navarro. “And mine. Seems unfair you don’t have to suffer, too.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You want my tragic origins?” she asked. “It’s not that interesting.”

  “Good,” Vos said. “I’m tired of everyone else’s being dramatic. Give me boring. Boring sounds great.”

  Kaden nudged Navarro’s boot with his own. “Tell them about the market,” he said. “And the dome. And your brother.”

  Her expression shifted at that last word, something like annoyance flickering over something older and quieter.

  “You’ve been running your mouth in med files again, Mercer?” Vos asked.

  “We were in the same class dumbass,” Kaden said. “We talked.”

  “When he says ‘we talked,’ he means I talked and he sat there being a wall with ears,” Navarro said. She blew out a breath and drummed her fingers once on the table. “Fine. You want the Navarro documentary, you get the cheap version.”

  “We’re all conscripts here,” Vos said. “None of us paid for premium.”

  She gave him a tired smirk. “Dockside dome, Sector Twelve,” she said. “Atmosphere leaks every monsoon season. Smells like salt and rust and old fish. My parents run a parts stall wedged between a recycler and a food stand that sells the worst skewers you’ve ever had in your life.”

  Tanaka leaned forward a little. “Ship parts?” he asked.

  “Whatever they could get that someone else needed,” Navarro said. “Old connectors, patch plates, scavenged Aurora-compatible interfaces that fell off a truck. Half the time they’re fixing things with spit and prayer because nobody wants to pay for the good stuff.”

  She picked up her cup and turned it between her hands.

  “Conscription came through like it always does,” she said. “Fifteen, Aurora says ‘you’re T1 with some physical aptitude, congratulations, you are now Navy property as of your sixteenth.’ Mom cried. Dad pretended not to. I did the tough act, like it was something I chose.”

  “You didn’t think about ducking it?” Vos asked.

  “Duck it to where?” Navarro said. “Off-world? With what money? Into the underlevels with the gangs? They don’t like people who can hit what they shoot at. Bad for business.”

  She shrugged, but it was forced.

  “Besides,” she said. “My brother was already in.”

  Kaden watched the way her fingers tightened around the cup. “Miguel,” he said quietly.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  She shot him a look, but didn’t deny it.

  “Older by four years,” she said. “Pulled Navy, same as me, but they slotted him into cargo. Big hull. Fat drives. Long routes nowhere near the front at first.”

  “Aurora blessed,” Vos muttered. “Logistics.”

  “Yeah,” Navarro said. “He sends messages when he can. Pictures of whatever rock they’re parked over. Stories about how boring it is. Complaints about inventory. He thinks that makes us feel better.”

  “It doesn’t?” Tanaka asked.

  “It does and it doesn’t,” Navarro said. “On one hand, he’s not over here getting shot at by birds. On the other, every year they move the cargo ships a little closer to the line because it’s cheaper than shuttling everything back and forth. ‘Efficient resource use.’”

  She made air quotes with one hand.

  “Aurora loves efficiency,” Vos said.

  “Aurora doesn’t have to sit through Mom wondering which news burst is going to have his ship’s name in the casualty list,” Navarro said.

  The table went quiet for a moment.

  “Last time we had a gap before an op at the Academy,” Kaden said, “you spent half your time on the terminal trying to get his ship’s routing out of Aurora’s public logs.”

  Navarro snorted. “Public,” she said. “Such a nice word for ‘heavily redacted.’”

  “Vos could probably get you the real thing,” Kaden said.

  “All right, let’s not log any crimes in the mess,” Vos said quickly. “I have a reputation to maintain.”

  “That you absolutely don’t,” Navarro said.

  He spread his hands. “I’m deeply offended.”

  “So what did Miguel think about you pulling a rifle slot?” Tanaka asked.

  “He told me not to,” she said. “Then he told me if I did, I’d better not shoot like a civilian. Then he sent me a sight he’d scrounged off some busted training rig. Said if I was going to make bad choices, I might as well make them well.”

  “Supportive,” Vos said.

  “He’s my brother,” Navarro said. “Supportive and pissed is the default setting.”

  Kaden poked at the mess on his tray. “What about before conscription?” he asked. “Back home. You weren’t born with a rifle in your hands.”

  “No,” she said. “I was born under a leaky dome with a broken air circulator. That’s close.”

  He waited. She sighed.

  “Dad did salvage runs,” she said. “He’d drag back whatever he could get off derelict barges or retired hulls. Sometimes it was junk. Sometimes it was exactly the part someone needed to keep their life-support from coughing up dust.”

  She smiled faintly at some internal picture.

  “He let us help sort,” she said. “Miguel and me. ‘This goes to rack three, this we break down, this we don’t touch because it might explode if you look at it wrong.’ I got good at knowing what something was for just by its weight in my hand. Where it fit. That’s how the stall started. Mom said if we were going to drown in parts, we might as well sell some.”

  “That how you got your aim?” Vos asked. “Throwing bolts at people you didn’t like?”

  “That’s how I learned to watch hands,” Navarro said. “Someone reaches for the cheap patch line after you tell them it won’t hold, you stop them. Someone tries to slip a better part into their coat, you notice. It’s the same thing on a breach. You watch what people are reaching for.”

  There was a quiet pride in her voice now, buried under the sarcasm.

  “You miss it?” Kaden asked.

  “Every time I smell rust and fry oil,” she said. “But I don’t miss haggling with people who’d rather spend their last credits on rotgut than on a sealant that’ll keep their kids breathing. At least here the stakes are honest.”

  Vos tapped his spoon against the side of his cup. “Scavenger rat to shock rifle,” he said. “It tracks.”

  “Better than your track,” Navarro said. “What are you? Palace brat to corridor gremlin?”

  Kaden hid a smile behind his cup. “He did say ‘climate-controlled facility’ once,” he said. “Like a confession.”

  All eyes swung to Vos.

  He held up both hands. “I hate all of you,” he said. “Just so we’re clear.”

  “Good,” Navarro said. “You’re deflecting. That means there’s a story.”

  Tanaka folded his arms on the table, the motion slow but solid. “Mercer gave up privacy points in physio,” he said. “Fair’s fair.”

  Vos looked toward the far end of the hall, as if hoping for a spontaneous fire drill. The hall refused to cooperate.

  “Fine,” he said. “But if any of this ends up in a morale newsletter, I’m changing your medical flags to ‘allergic to anesthesia.’”

  “That’s not how any of this works,” Kaden said.

  “Details,” Vos said. He blew out a breath. “All right. Pre-conscription, Eden Vos: cautionary tale.”

  He poked at his vegetables for a second, as if negotiating with them.

  “High-tier block,” he said, finally. “Not top of the tower, but high enough we couldn’t see the ground without leaning over something that beeped at you. Good views. Clean water. Climate control so perfect it felt fake. My grandfather was Tier Three Navy. Big career, nice medals, a couple of stories that might even be true. My parents rode the wake. Admin posts, committee seats. Nothing too dangerous. Nothing that risked the perks.”

  Navarro let out a low whistle. “Little prince,” she said.

  “Exactly,” Vos said. “They’d never use the words, but that’s what it was. Schools with more terminals than kids. Tutors who talked about ‘potential’ a lot. Aurora watching through every screen and telling them I’d be great in data management or systems oversight or some other lovely phrase that means ‘you never smell outside air again.’”

  “Some of us would’ve killed for that,” Tanaka said.

  “And that’s the fun part,” Vos said. “You grow up being told how lucky you are, and you know they aren’t wrong. You’re not patching leaks in a dome. You’re not eating ration bars that taste like cardboard. But you’re also… property. Just in a nicer suit.”

  He nudged his pudding absently, not eating it yet.

  “They had my life plotted in bullet points before I hit five,” he said. “Academy track. Specialization. Committee placement. Marriage options they could live with. Aurora did its little pings and they nodded along like it was a divine plan.”

  “And you hated it,” Kaden said.

  “I didn’t have the vocabulary for that at first,” Vos said. “I just knew every time someone said ‘we’re so proud, you’re going to do great things for the Hegemony,’ my skin tried to crawl off.”

  He paused.

  “So I found terminals. And code. And systems that were supposed to be locked but weren’t locked quite enough, and dumb little exploits some bored tech had left in a forgotten corner. You want an escape when your whole life is a schedule? You find the one thing you can control without anyone else’s permission.”

  He stabbed a bit of vegetable, then forgot to eat it.

  “I started small,” he said. “Fixing game limits on the school network. Unlocking extra sim scenarios. Spoofing study hall attendance so I could spend three hours talking to bots instead of people. Then it got… less small. Quietly rerouting power from my block’s giant ornamental fountain to an underfed med clinic three towers over. Faking a data packet so my neighbor’s conscription got delayed long enough for his mom to finish treatment.”

  Navarro’s eyebrows climbed. “That last one sounds like a felony,” she said.

  “Oh, it absolutely was,” Vos said. “I’m not claiming I was some noble digital Robin Hood. Half the time it was just because I wanted to see if I could. But sometimes the System shows you exactly how uneven everything is, and you either stare at the numbers or you poke them.”

  “And Aurora let you?” Kaden asked.

  “Aurora let me until it didn’t,” Vos said. “Sometimes it slapped my wrist with a warning. Sometimes it just watched. Sometimes it helped. Gave me the right error log at the right time, flagged a node as ‘overloaded’ when I was trying to hide my tracks. It was like having a bored god in the ceiling going, ‘sure, kid, let’s see how far you get.’”

  He finally took a bite of pudding.

  “Then conscription came,” he said around it. “Sixteen. Aurora says ‘Tier One. Technical aptitude. Flag for Navy systems.’ My parents were thrilled. This was the part of the plan where I got to be important without getting shot.”

  “That worked out great,” Navarro said.

  “Oh, they petitioned,” Vos said. “Pulled every favor they had. Granddad called in old contacts. ‘Surely Eden would be better suited at Fleet Command than on a ship.’ Aurora didn’t care. It weighed my profile, my actions, where it thought I’d be most ‘effective,’ and shoved me into a pipeline with other kids who liked breaking locks more than writing reports.”

  “Democracy is dead,” Navarro said. “Long live Aurora’s sense of humor.”

  “They gave me a tech rating and a ship assignment,” Vos said. “Ramses, eventually. Marines instead of some nice safe station. My mother cried. My father went very quiet. Granddad laughed his ass off and told me it was about time someone in the family did real work again.”

  “Do they know what you actually do now?” Kaden asked.

  “They get the sanitized version,” Vos said. “Official updates. ‘Your son assisted in the successful interdiction of Opp assets.’ ‘Your son contributed to systems integrity during combat operations.’ No one mentions how many times I’ve almost gotten crushed by doors.”

  “You could tell them,” Navarro said.

  “Yeah,” Vos said. “And have my mother spend the rest of her life staring at the fleet reports waiting for ‘Valiant’ to scroll past with a casualty tag? Hard pass. They worry enough knowing the quadrant I’m in.”

  He scraped the last of the pudding out of the cup.

  “I miss the hot showers and decent coffee,” he said. “I don’t miss never seeing the sky. I don’t miss pretending that pushing points around on a resource allocation screen is the same as doing something that matters.”

  “You could’ve done good work there,” Tanaka said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Vos said. “Somebody has to keep the logistics from eating itself. But I’d have spent every second wondering what was happening out here and how many of the numbers I moved were people who’d never step out of a corridor again. If I’m going to carry that, I’d rather be in the corridor.”

  Navarro lifted her cup in a small toast. “To poor life choices,” she said.

  “To leaving nice things behind,” Vos said.

  Kaden raised his own cup. “To not letting them be for nothing,” he said.

  They drank.

  The noise of the mess wrapped around them again, familiar and strangely distant. For a few moments, it was just four people at a table, with bad food and worse stories and the kind of honesty that only seemed to show up when the adrenaline had finally drained away.

  Navarro set her cup down. “You realize,” she said, “if we keep this up, by the end of the tour we’re going to know each other better than our own families do.”

  “Occupational hazard,” Vos said. “They weren’t there when the doors blew in.”

  “They weren’t there when you dropped a marble for the fourth time,” Tanaka added.

  “Trauma takes many forms,” Kaden said.

  A shadow fell across the table. Jax set her tray down at the end, sliding into the spare seat without asking.

  “Keep going,” she said, picking up her fork. “What have I missed?”

  Vos groaned softly. “You have terrible timing, Sergeant.”

  “Lucky for you, timing is my job,” Jax said. She glanced at each of them in turn. “Navarro under a leaky dome. Vos under three generations of expectation. That about the shape of it?”

  “Been listening long?” Navarro asked.

  “Long enough,” Jax said. “Relax. I’m not grading it.”

  She took a bite, swallowed, made a face, then added, “You all left something behind when you came aboard. That’s normal. Missing it is normal. Letting it get you kitted wrong or thinking you owe the past more than you owe the person next to you? That’s when it gets you killed.”

  “Is this the part where you tell us not to be stupid?” Vos asked.

  “I save that for when you’re actively being stupid,” Jax said. “This is the part where I remind you that whatever you were before—dock rat, tower brat, stairwell hero—that’s your foundation, not your job. Out here, you’re Theta-3.”

  “Four idiots and a sergeant,” Navarro said.

  “Four idiots who keep each other moving,” Jax corrected. “Gorgeous sergeant optional.”

  ”Gorgeous is definitely optional.” Vos chuckled.

  Jax raised an eyebrow towards him and he quickly stopped.

  Kaden felt something settle behind his ribs at that. Not comfort. Not exactly. Just… weight rearranging into a shape he recognized.

  He looked around the table—at Navarro’s crooked smile, Vos’s restless hands, Tanaka’s steady presence, Jax watching all of them like she was memorizing their faces for some future she refused to name.

  “Guess we better not make you look bad,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “It’s far too late for that.”

  They ate. They argued about whether pudding counted as a strategic asset. They made plans to play cards later in the bay, laundry IOUs piling up in promises instead of on paper.

  Outside, the Valiant prowled its patrol line through contested space, quiet and watchful.