And he’d wonder if she was still drifting, still smiling that terrible smile, still keeping the door closed with her own quiet, impossible weight.
Kael never spoke of Seven again. But sometimes, in deep night, he’d hear a faint hum from the empty engine bay—a single, perfect frequency.
One night, Kael found Seven in the engine bay, her palm pressed against the reactor’s lead shielding. The metal was warm. It should have been freezing. juc-877
When the pod hissed open, the woman inside didn't gasp or shiver. She simply opened her eyes—two chips of flint in a gaunt, sharp-boned face. The guard, a man named Kael, tapped the frost off his datapad and read her file aloud.
She didn’t move. “Do you know why they exiled me, Kael? Not because I drifted through time. Because I came back.” And he’d wonder if she was still drifting,
The Mourning Star was not a prison. It was a garbage scow that limped between dead stars, hauling toxic slag from mining colonies to incinerators. The inmates were the dregs of seven systems—murderers, cannibalistic cultists, broken androids. JUC-877, soon known simply as “Seven,” was assigned to the sludge filters. She worked in silence for three weeks.
“JUC-877. Convicted: Unauthorized temporal drift. Sentence: Permanent exile aboard the Mourning Star . Additional notes: Extremely dangerous. Do not engage in conversation.” One night, Kael found Seven in the engine
He looked up. “What’s ‘temporal drift’?”
Jump to