Forge Home

Kael let the boy talk and mostly listened, and what he heard didn't sit right — a kid pulled out of a bakery by men with clubs because his blood did something a wizard wanted to study. He did the talking with Zabetta too, laid the story out plain enough to be useful without handing over anything that wasn't his to give. Ten thousand credits changed hands and he watched her count every gem out loud so nobody could say later he'd been cheated. Three days of rented safety bought with a green chit felt like the first real breathing room since The Rock came apart. He's already cataloguing who on this station can be trusted exactly as far as their own interest goes — which, so far, is everyone.

Mistarion reached into Jax's mind for a memory and came back with a boy on fire in his sleep, hands lit and no idea why. It's the kind of thing he'd normally chase to ground, except the last thing he chased to ground was his own past, and that came back empty. He said little at Zabetta's, letting the negotiating happen around him, watching the gem-scanner tally up their price with the same close attention he gives anything that reveals more than it means to. Kessler Reach is a system built on people not asking questions. He is, professionally, a person who asks them.

Narok Tor looked at Now's sword and nothing else in the room, and nodded like he'd taken her measure and filed it away. She said nothing back. Vyakti Nau doesn't perform for men sizing her up, and she didn't need Zabetta's warning about the Rustblood Cartel's taste for gear to know what that look was worth. She sat through the negotiation the way she does most things — present, armed, unreadable — and left the workshop with the rest of the crew no better informed about her than they'd been walking in.

Verum tried diplomacy with a gnome who wanted paying by the question and got exactly ten tin's worth of the station's power structure for his trouble. He named Kemet to Zabetta unprompted — House Verum, chief-observer, the old habit of claiming rank in a room that doesn't care — and got a shrug and a joke about his portable throne for his effort. His stomach growled through half the meeting loudly enough that Zabetta pointed at him and told him to go eat. He didn't disagree with the assessment. Currying favor with the powers here still strikes him as the sound play; he's just increasingly aware that on this station, rank buys nothing his stomach can't also demand.

ND-E spent the walk to Zabetta's shop distracted by scrap and salvage the way another man might window-shop, and when Foxlon offered to dig the microchip out of his own chest, he didn't hesitate. He asked Zabetta, flatly, whether synthetics had any real presence out here, and got a shrug and a headcount instead of an answer. He tried the name Saint Crow on her too, and it meant nothing — one more question that came back with nothing behind it. He can't lie, so every question he asks costs him something if the answer matters; this one didn't, but he'll ask it again somewhere it might.

Gravity on Forge Home doesn't run one direction and Velveteen didn't fight that — he walked whichever wall or ceiling pulled hardest, sticking and peeling like something that was never meant to need a floor. He turned himself into a chair for Verum in Zabetta's office without being asked twice, and got called the first fucking time she'd seen that, which he'll take as a compliment. He pointed Whipkey's betrayal out the second he worked it out, gleeful about it rather than angry. Underneath the bit, he still wants to know what's actually inside the memory crystal riding in his gut, and nothing on this station so far has told him he'll ever get to taste it.