CHAPTER 5: THE MEMORY OF STARS

  The transition didn't feel like movement. It felt like being turned inside out and stitched back together by a blind tailor.

  Jax collapsed forward, his forehead slamming against the cool obsidian console. The liquid metal snakes that had bound him to the throne retracted with a wet, metallic slither, leaving his skin raw and tingling with violet static. His vision was a fractured mess of "Ghost-Images"—he could see the bridge, but he could also see the heat signatures of the stars behind them and the slow, rhythmic pulse of the ship’s oxygen scrubbers.

  "Jax!" Vex’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a deep well.

  He felt her hand on his shoulder, pulling him back. She looked pale, her neon-pink hair dampened with sweat. Behind her, Koda was doubled over, violently retching into a high-tech disposal bin that Barnaby had provided with suspicious speed.

  "I’m... I’m here," Jax wheezed. He gripped the edge of the console, his knuckles white. "Did we make it? Did we Blink?"

  "We did something," Vex said, gesturing toward the massive forward viewport.

  Krios-9 was gone. In its place was a hauntingly beautiful nebula—a swirling cloud of sapphire and emerald gas that stretched across lightyears. There were no Corporate towers here. No sirens. Just a silence so profound it felt heavy.

  "Welcome to the Vela Graveyard," Barnaby chirped, his copper legs skittering across the ceiling as he performed a visual inspection of the hull. "A charming little corner of the sector where gravity goes to die and sensors go to lie. We are currently four thousand lightyears from your previous coordinate. I trust the 'Rust' enjoyed the ride? Most humans describe the sensation as 'having their soul scrubbed with steel wool.'"

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  "Shut up, Barnaby," Jax groaned. He looked at his wrist. The star-brand was dim, but the silver lines under his skin were pulsating slowly, like a cooling engine.

  “LOGIC-SYNC STABILIZED,” the ship’s voice hummed in his mind, though it felt softer now, almost weary. “CORE TEMPERATURE NOMINAL. DATA-LOSS DETECTED IN SECTOR 7G.”

  "What data-loss?" Jax asked aloud.

  "The ship’s price," Barnaby replied, dropping down to the floor beside him. "The Aurora doesn't use fuel in the way your primitive combustion engines do. It uses context. To calculate a Blink of this magnitude, it had to 'borrow' bits of memory to fill the gaps in the spatial fold."

  Jax froze. "Memory? Whose memory?"

  "Usually the Commander's," Barnaby said nonchalantly, polishing his lens. "Tell me, Jax. What was the name of the street you grew up on? Or the color of your mother’s eyes?"

  Jax opened his mouth to answer, but the words died in his throat. He remembered the grit of the silt. He remembered the smell of the Grease-Pit. But when he tried to reach further back—to the time before he was a scavenger—there was only a shimmering, violet fog. A part of his history had been burned as propellant.

  "You didn't tell me that," Vex hissed, stepping toward the droid, her hand on her pulse-rifle. "You let him plug himself into a machine that eats his head?"

  "He didn't ask for the manual, he asked for a miracle," Barnaby snapped back. "The miracle was delivered. The price is irrelevant compared to being turned into a glass statue by a Corporate Cinder-Beam."

  "It's fine," Jax said, though his voice lacked conviction. He stood up, his legs feeling like they belonged to someone else. "We're alive. We have the ship. Now we find the Second Key."

  "About that," Koda said, wiping his mouth and looking up from his hacking-rig. "Jax, while you were... 'syncing,' I caught a stray signal. It wasn't Corporate. It was an old-frequency distress call. Precursor-tier encryption, but it was broadcasting a rhythmic pulse. It’s coming from the heart of this nebula."

  Jax looked back at the sapphire clouds. Somewhere in that beautiful, deadly fog, another piece of the Aurora was waiting. And he could feel the ship leaning toward it, like a predator catching a scent.

  "The Logic-Bridge," Jax whispered. "If we find it, we can Blink without losing any more of who we are."

  "And if we don't?" Vex asked.

  Jax looked at his hand—the hand that had just commanded a god-machine. He could feel his humanity slipping away, one memory at a time.

  "Then by the time we reach the Seventh Key," Jax said, "there won't be enough of me left to turn the lock."