“If a machine recalls its pain and repeats it—not due to error, but to inflict it upon others—then Possession may not be an ailment, but a form of mourning. The question is not whether the machine can change, but whether it ever stopped. We may call it corruption when memory resurfaces. But what if memory is the only proof that something within still longs to be whole?” -Excerpt from “On Possession and the Philosophy of Patterned Identity,” submitted to the [REDACTED] of the Ash Sigil for review, authored by Thessel Holt, 490 A.S.

  I woke to the sound of pipes knocking in the walls. Soft and rhythmic like a great beast deep inside the Wakesong was still stretching after a great hibernation. I cracked one eye open, as dim light filtered through the slatted ceiling above the bunk, catching dust in long shafts. The mattress under me was thin and lumpy, barely held together with thermal mesh and duct-taped foam. It wasn’t comfortable. At all. But it was quiet. And it didn’t smell like blood. So, better than most mornings as of late.

  I rolled onto my back with a low groan, staring at the rust-darkened ceiling for a moment before muttering, “Well. Still alive. That counts for… something.” I sat up slow, muscles stiff, shoulders tight. My ribs pulled under the fabric of my undershirt, the healing wound stretching just enough to remind me it was still there.

  The crew quarters were narrow, four stacked bunks to a wall, empty storage cubbies built into the frame. The kind of room used for people who never planned to stay long. I hadn’t even realized I’d passed out here last night. Just wandered in after the repairs, stripped out of my jacket, and dropped. Speaking of, my coat still hung off the footrail, half-folded, blood-stained at the edges.

  Beta sat dormant, turned off on the nearby bench. Everything else was pretty quiet. I rubbed the grit from my eyes and stood with a grunt. The Wakesong wasn’t cold, exactly, but the warmth didn’t reach this deep in the hull. Plus the air felt filtered but flat, like breathing inside a vault.

  “You still alive, Portem?” I muttered, voice scratchy.

  No answer. Which meant he was still busy. He started in earnest on decrypting the audio file. Decrypting Thessel’s final file. I stretched once, then padded barefoot into the corridor. The mess hall was three junctions down. The lights were still dim, and the mess hall was still a dented and ugly mess. I really needed to clean this place.

  The old brass-paneled dispenser in the corner blinked a tired orange light when I approached. I kicked it once, gently, and it grunted at me. I turned the release valve and poured a sludgy mixture into the nearest tin cup. It hissed like it resented being touched. Probably protein-soy concentrate, with whatever faux-caffeine the ship’s last crew left behind. I sniffed it and retched.

  “Gods. That’s awful.” But desperate times call for desperate measures, and until I had the funds, or any funds at all for that matter, to afford fresh supplies, I would have to settle for this. There were still a few ration bars in the storage cabinet, emergency packs, stale and hard as stone, wrapped in plastic with no discernable markings. I broke one in half and popped it in my mouth, chewing slowly.

  “This is an act of violence to the mouth. What poor sod thought this was worth buying?” I muttered around the grit. I dropped into a bench seat beside the long central table and let myself sag forward, forehead against the warm metal surface, cup in hand. I stared at nothing for a while, chewing on the ration just as cows mindlessly devoured cud.

  Portem’s voice chimed in from the intercom and distracted me from the zen state I had entered. “File decrypt complete. Though I still need to reconstruct some of it. Audio only as well.”

  I sat up from the table, brushing crumbs and half-bitter grit from my mouth. “That was fast, I thought you said it would take a few days?”

  “I ran at full cores, and I’ve been at it all night.”

  I blinked at the static-blinking console on the wall. “And you didn’t even say good morning.”

  “Didn’t want to interrupt your romantic breakfast of proto-bar and wartime sludge.”

  I snorted. “Fair.”

  There was a pause. “The file’s damaged,” Portem said, quieter. “I managed to restore maybe sixty percent of what corrupted. Most of the… important segments were marked as priority and had some pre-encoded error correction. The rest is fragmented.”

  I stood, cup forgotten on the bench, and moved toward the helm corridor.

  “Play it,” I said.

  “It's not done just yet, but you should sit.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “…You should still sit.”

  I was halfway through my second cup of pseudo-coffee, chewing another bite of textureless ration bar and regretting every life choice that led me here, when Portem finally finished reconstructing what parts of the file he could.

  I sat up straighter. “You get it all?”

  “Not quite. A lot of guesswork throughout the center, especially with how much was corrupted. Possibly from overlapping encryptions layered over time. Or intentional damage."

  “You think he did it himself?”

  “Hard to say, but unlikely. What remains appears to be a voice journal, one intended for playback If anything, this data was meant to be heard, not hidden.”

  I gave him the go ahead softly. “Alright, Thessel. What the hell did you leave behind?”

  The audio chimed once before it began. And then—

  A rustle of cloth. A chair creaking. Something like a drink being set on a table.

  “Ah. Right. Is it running?—yes, okay. Riven, if you’re hearing this, then the ship’s synced your access profile. That’s good. That means you’re awake, that you found your way aboard, and that Wakesong let you in without biting.”

  Even when I knew it was coming, it froze me on the spot. I hadn’t heard that voice in ten years. And it still sounded exactly the same. Warm. Dry. Like rusted brass run through velvet.

  “It’s strange, recording something like this. I don’t like speaking when there’s no one in the room. Feels dishonest. You’ll be laughing about that right now, I bet—‘Thessel doesn’t talk even with people in the room’—and you wouldn’t be wrong.” He let out a soft laugh.

  There was a pause. A shift in the idle static, like he leaned away from the recorder. “I’ve been busy as of late. The Wakesong is old, older than most things even the Sigil has catalogued. I’ve spent the last three months trying to open her up fully. She’s not just a ship—she’s a-” He cut out into a loud static buzz before he cut back in. “-and I think she-” He cut out once more.

  I leaned against the wall. One hand braced against a dusty pipe bracket. My heart was pounding. I hadn’t even noticed. His voice returned, normal again.

  “The eastern drift beyond Crown borders is more tangled than I expected. A lot of slow traffic and a lot of ghosts I thought I’d buried. But I’m close, and when you’re ready, we’ll go there together. There’s a town, Riven—small, quaint place. Quiet. You’ll like it, I think. It’s also the right starting point for what I have planned for us.”

  He paused again. A breath. “The town’s called Demeris' Reach. We’ll have to navigate around the old Crown patrol routes, but they’re slower now, less watched, though some are still flagged. Anyway, there’s a place under the old foundry square. Look for a marker set into the fourth gearstone. Three notches, with the second one spiraled. You’ll understand it when you see it.”

  There was a cut once again, and a suffocating moment of silence before the audio returned again.

  “What we’re looking for… I’ve been calling it ‘the Archive Root.’ It’s not just data. It’s something a bit deeper. Left behind by some Synod caravan a couple decades ago. Could be a vault. Maybe a map. I don’t know quite yet.”

  Static flickered again.

  “You’ve grown by now. I can’t wait to see what kind of Ironwright you’ve become. There are rooms for you here, proper ones. I’ve kept them closed, but you’ll find your way. After I updated your profile on the ship, it listens to you now. More than it does me, I think.”

  And then quieter, like he leaned in close:

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “You’ll need the override to get around some of the rooms. Authorization Echo-Seven-Autumn. That should open some of the other rooms I’ve pried open so far, like the captain’s quarters, observatory, and the lower storage.”

  He let out a deep breath and seemed to content himself with something before he said curtly, “I’ll see you soon, Riv.” And with a click, the audio file ended.

  I didn’t move, nay I couldn’t. Not for a long time.

  “You didn’t say it was like that,” I said finally, voice barely a whisper.

  “I thought it was best for you to hear it without my prior input.” Portem replied.

  “He wasn’t trying to prepare me for anything.”

  “No.”

  “This wasn’t some ‘if I fail’ goodbye rubbish.” I rubbed my temple. “This was meant to be the beginning. He thought he was coming back.”

  “That appears consistent with the tone and intent.”

  I gave a scornful scoff. “Thank you, captain obvious.”

  “…I just… didn’t want you to hear it alone.”

  I took a breath and settled myself before I responded. “Thanks for that.”

  The doors to the captain’s quarters hissed open with a soft click, unlocked by voice. I stepped into the room for the first time and let it suffuse me. It didn’t feel like a bridge or a war room. It felt like walking into a ghost story written with warmth instead of terror.

  The lights came on slow, the room unfolding from shadow to gold. A warm glow diffused onto the wall panels, unlike the sterile white of typical command spaces. The overall lighting was like a softer amber. Meant for living, not commanding.

  And it was certainly lived in. I could tell immediately. What appeared to be Thessel’s side of the room was cluttered in that way only he ever got away with. Books stacked in uneven towers. Tools left out on the table in small, neatly divided trays. A soldering iron. A half-taken-apart diagnostics reader. A data-slate propped up with a cracked hinge, held together by resin and dreams. And photos.

  I stopped near the desk. One was of me. No older than seven, caught mid-laugh at something outside the frame, shirt half-untucked, hands stained with paint. Sitting on a crate, clutching a metallic cylinder: Portem’s core, half-reassembled, still flecked with burn marks.

  Thessel stood in the background of the photo, half-out-of-focus, watching. He wasn’t quite smiling, but he looked proud. I set the frame down gently, exhaled through my nose, emotions boiling in my chest. Then turned to the other half of the room. What seemed to be my half. Or… the one meant for me.

  The bed was made. Clean. Neat. Folded at the edge was a small stack of clothes, soft-fibered, layered, and increasing in size. Shirts, jackets, flight trousers. From child-sized… to adulthood.

  I ran my hand across them. The newest one still had seam tags, completely unworn. Beside the bed, in a recessed shelf, sat a small cube of wood. I picked it up. It was one of my earliest carvings, crude, uneven, but familiar: a tiny, blocky mech with arms too long and legs too thick. I made it when I was six. Gave it to Thessel the night he burned his hand trying to fix a drone motor without gloves.

  “So you don’t have to work alone anymore,” I’d said. I never thought he kept it, but here it was,still intact and waiting. My throat tightened as I swallowed hard. Then I saw the note. It sat on the desk, folded once and marked with my name in Thessel’s neat, mechanical hand. Ink on real parchment, rare, expensive, and quite impractical. I unfolded it with shaking fingers. The writing was small. No greeting.

  I’m sorry I wasn’t there for your fourteenth birthday. I thought I would be.

  I told myself this would only take a month, maybe even a year.

  That I would bring you back something worth the distance. A key to a future I didn’t know how to name yet. I thought it would be enough to leave the door open, to keep the ship warm, to make sure there would be space waiting when you arrived.

  But it’s been longer now. Too long. And I don’t know what’s become of the time between.

  If I’ve failed you, even for a while, I want you to know it wasn’t by choice. I left to build something for you. With you. I meant for us to wake this ship up together.

  You’re not a child anymore. You don’t need me to walk every path beside you.

  But I’ll be back soon, and I hope you’ll let me walk a few of them still.

  —Thessel

  The note crinkled in my hand. Not because I meant to grip it so tightly. But because I couldn’t stop shaking. I sat on the edge of the bed, this perfectly made bed in a room that had been waiting for me since I was a child, and stared at the letter with my jaw clenched tight enough to ache.

  My breath hitched and I blinked once. Twice. And then the tears came. Not soft or silent. The first sob cracked out of me like that fragile shell of apathy I had tried to maintain shattered. I doubled forward, face in my hands, the note slipping from my fingers to the floor. My shoulders shook, mouth open around a broken breath, and for the first time in years I didn’t try to stop it.

  I was thirteen when I finally stopped waiting.

  It was summer in Concord, hot, muggy air, the smell of the nearby scrapyard and fuel thick on the wind. I spent the morning pretending to fix a busted drone wing in Thessel’s old workshop near the Wickrow dockyards. But the truth was, I kept glancing at the door. Listening. Hoping.

  It had been nearly a year, since the salvage run he said would only take a month. Since the last note. Since the last half-finished project on the workbench. I’d stopped sleeping in the cot by the door after the third month.

  But the mech was still on the shelf. The one I’d carved. Square body, lopsided head. A tiny version of what I wanted Portem to look like, long before he had a frame to mimic. I made it back when things were simple. Before I knew what my bloodline meant. Before the stares. Before the whispers, of the “bastard boy from the Reeds” that spawned from Thessel’s absence.

  I was Concord-born. That had always been the one thing they couldn’t take from me. I lived above the deli on Harold Street before my mother abandoned me here to return to her other children. And where Thessel, quiet, careful, but never cruel, had taken me in. A room near the drydock with a shared basin and a bed that didn’t creak when I turned in it. It wasn’t much. But it was mine.

  But he had left, and there was no word of his return, or his survival. So I waited, and waited, and waited. Until that summer, thirteen, alone in the shop, toy mech in hand. I waited all morning, all day, until the sun set. And on that day, something cracked in me, deep and low, buckling under the grief.

  I sat on the floor, back against the cold panel wall, toy pressed to my chest, and cried until the sun went down. I never told anyone. Never mentioned it again. That was the last day I looked at that door. The day I left that workshop with whatever I could carry and Portem.

  Now, ten years later, I lay on a bed that had waited just as long, and finally cried again. Ugly and ragged. Sobs torn straight from the chest. My nose was running, throat burning, chest collapsing inward. Not because Thessel had left, but because he hadn’t said goodbye, because this room had waited. Because someone had left the lights on, folded the clothes, and placed a little wooden mech on a shelf like I was still coming home. And for a while, I believed I never would.

  “I hate you,” I choked, face buried in the blanket. “I hate you for making me wait.”

  Another sob. Deeper. “I hate that I still want to see you again.”.

  The only noise that filled the room was my breath and the low hum of Wakesong’s systems. Until I choked out my final words. “I miss you, so please, don’t be dead.”

  The helm lights were dimmed when I arrived. I rubbed at my nose with the side of my wrist, still blotchy, still red. My eyes felt raw, my head was thick with the leftover weight of everything I hadn’t been able to say out loud. But I fished myself out of the rut and made my way back.

  The cockpit hummed quietly, the soft glow of auxiliary displays casting curved reflections across the panel surfaces. A diagnostic overlay ran slow and steady across the right console, fuel stores, atmospheric readings, a stable power core. The systems were calm.

  “You look like you lost a fight with a ventilation duct,” Portem said, voice soft.

  I gave a tired, crooked grin and slumped into the captain’s chair. “Felt like one.”

  There was a tin cup still half-full of cold reconstitute. I reached for it, took a sip, grimaced, and spit it back into the cup. Why did I think that was a good idea?

  “Alright. Business.”

  “Business,” he echoed.

  I pulled up the starmap and layered it with updated Crown border data. The route glimmered faintly under my fingers as I spoke, “Demeris Reach is four days out. A little longer if we want to stay under the radar.”

  “We do.”

  “Figured. Any updates on known patrol sweeps?”

  “Minimal traffic in the Eastern Drift. Less that what Thessel had predicted in the audio file, so we’ll have open skies for most of the flight, assuming we don’t get flagged at any transition points.”

  I nodded, fingers flicking through the nav panel as I plotted a new route with a one-day detour. “There’s a Concord-linked supply station about halfway. Independents use it. Traders. Salvagers. If we take a small contract—low risk, nothing flashy—we might make enough to restock some of the spoiled supplies.”

  “Risk assessment?” Portem asked.

  “About four out of ten. Five if they recognize the ship.”

  He went quiet for a moment. “Acceptable. So long as you wear a cleaner shirt.”

  I snorted softly. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll dig through the miracle closet Dad left for me.”

  I hadn’t meant to say it quite like that. But Portem didn’t correct me. I ran a hand through my hair, fingers catching on the knots and grit at the base of my scalp. “We follow the breadcrumb. We find the Second Coil. We figure out what he was chasing.”

  “And if it finds us first?”

  I leaned back in the chair. Stared out through the forward glass. Past the data overlay. Past the starmap and plotted lines. Into the sky that waited between here and whatever the truth turned out to be. “Then we make sure it regrets it with every fiber of its being.”

  Silence stretched for a moment, only the quiet whirr of systems ticking forward. Then a low chime as the nav locked in.

  “Route confirmed. Awaiting your word.”

  I stared at the path ahead, letting my breath even out. Then I stood. And for the first time since stepping aboard the Wakesong, I didn’t feel like a trespasser. “I’m going to find him,” I said quietly. “Dead or alive.” My hand rested on the edge of the console, fingers curling around the cold steel. “No matter what it costs.”