Chapter 19: Lira Barters with Physics

The station smelled wrong.

Not wrong in the way of malfunction or rot — Lira had catalogued both, in various vaults and cellars and the particular damp dark beneath Varenthal's Spire where dead oaths went to calcify — but wrong in the way of something familiar being used by someone who didn't know what it was. The galactic relay station smelled of machinery and recycled atmosphere and the faint metallic edge of whatever they used here instead of torchlight, and underneath all of that, faint as a word half-remembered from sleep, it smelled of cold night sky.

She had almost missed it. She was supposed to be missing it, technically, her attention allocated to the task Maren had assigned her with the brisk efficiency of someone delegating precisely as far as trust allowed: the secondary access corridor, the two guards on rotation, and the small but logistically significant problem of the sealed bulkhead between the corridor and the lower level where Desta was currently walking toward something that breathed.