Jiayi slammed the locker shut, giving it an extra shove with her knee to force its bent metal into place before she hoisted the heavy duffel onto her shoulder. Preston hadn’t specified precisely what was causing the outage, and she had a feeling he didn’t know, so she’d erred on the side of caution and taken enough tools to cover every basic disturbance. Then she walked into Yamaguchi’s office, opened the cabinet on the left-hand side, and tried not to think too hard about him as she stepped into his spare maintenance suit.

She got as far as the zipper before she crumpled.

A sob choked from her throat. The room blurred. The edges of her vision narrowed as she bend over the sudden hard, sick feeling in her abdomen. For a few long, roiling seconds, she didn’t breath.

Yamaguchi hadn’t recovered. Despite her efforts to get through to him, there’s be absolutely no recognition in his eyes when he’d looked at her—and she hadn’t recognized him, either. Nothing about his mannerisms rang true. Nothing. It was like all the little ticks and slips and movements that made him Yamaguchi had blown away, leaving an empty shell in his place. The body was his, but everything inside had left.

And when she’d looked into his eyes…

Well, she finally understood what Alderon had been trying to tell her. They’d been dead black. As if someone had spread engine oil under his cornea and let it cover everything. No iris. No pupil—even a pupil would show something. No sclera.

Just black.

And Kapil must be exactly the same.

He hadn’t answered her latest call.

Fortunately, her uncle had. And he was going to check in on her aunt, Lian, his sister, and send messages to her parents on Chamak. He hadn’t messaged her back after that, but it had only been five minutes. Nothing to panic about.

Well, no, there’s plenty to panic about. But she couldn’t—not yet.

As a set of approaching footsteps came from around the corner, she took a deep breath and straightened, pulling her shoulders back and giving herself a moment to center herself. Then she bent down, grabbed the bag, and met the soldier at the door before he could come in.

“Come on. Let’s go.”

Harbin level took longer than she expected to reach. Five floors down, and they dropped into a sub-level of station architecture, accessed only by station maintenance workers and ex-station maintenance workers looking to hide drugs. When the doors to the sub-level opened, she stepped out and to the left, reaching for a faint light hidden behind a set of dangling power cords. The level’s main light flicked on with a clunk.

Pipes and cables snaked up the wall, covering a mix of plate steel and modified pre-fab patches. Spots of rust and grime coated the edges in dark, stubbly rashes, and the wall’s metal reflected the light back with a dull, green tinge—all symptoms of the station’s age. She pushed a few thick, hanging cables to the side to reveal the built-in map of the sub-level.

This wasn’t her first time in one of these places. Yamaguchi wanted his workers well-versed in sub-level layouts before they got anywhere near to doing field work.

The levels and sub-levels ad mirrored each other, once upon a time. Unfortunately, that time had ended long ago. The maintenance levels may not have seen as much renovation as the others, but there’d been enough modifications to skew its form.

She scanned the map to get her bearings. Behind her, the three soldiers she had as escorts—the other four had split with Sergeant Preston to answer the e-call on the floor below, armed with flashlights—stepped into the hallway behind her and took in the coarse, narrow corridor. They’d gone silent as soon as they’d realized where she was taking them.

Probably expected me to pop open a service panel and muck about with it. She might still have to do that, but it always paid to duck into the sub-level connections first. There was more to access, which meant a higher chance that the problem was here. Plus, they’d said the entire floor had gone dark, which kind of lend itself to being a bigger problem than the inset panels dealt with.

She stepped back after a minute of study. One of her escort, Dimas, hesitated as she took the lead, the indecision and discomfort clear behind the plastic-glass of his faceplate. “Uh, shouldn’t we be—”

“It’s just up here,” she said, cutting him off and stepping past with a heave of her shoulder bag “The main terminal will tell me the problem, then we can go find it. Maybe a rat’s chewed through the cables.”

She could understand their unease. They looked station-raised, and anyone who wasn’t first-gen grew up with sordid, spooky tales of all that went down in the sub-levels—the station’s answer to all the traditional planet-side stories their ancestors spread. It’s not that the sub-levels were particularly scary. Creepy, yes, and filthy, and absolutely stripped of any aesthetics beyond what the original creators had welded into its bones—but that’s what she liked about it. Working in these places, she could touch circuits that were more than half a century old, ones stamped with the original Fallon logos or the small, elegant imprints of the old New India company, the first private firm to start engineering work on massive projects like the stations. Tianjin had been one of the first of the behemoths to come alive during Fallon’s Alliance days, and she’d far surpassed the project the rest of the planets had cobbled together. From what she remembered, that station had been re-gifted to the outer edge. A glorified tourist and miner hub.

“Pretty big rat,” said another soldier, eyeing the wrist-thick cables that ran along the wall. “You get many of those?”

“Some. I’ve heard stories.” She frowned. They’d all introduced themselves, but her sleep-deprived brain hadn’t been keeping up with things. She only remembered Dimas’s name because he had a giant ‘D’ graphed onto the inset of his collar and it had caught her attention, but she wished she’d focused on the second guy instead. Tall, and sharing the same deep brown skin tone as Preston, he had a quieter presence than the others. Noticed more.

“Maybe it’s a demon that’s eating through the wires.” The guy at the back—his name started with an ‘T,’ she thought—had a wide-eyed look, visible even beneath the visor. His pale skin shone with a clammy sweat.

She doubted that reaction owed completely to old sub-level faerie stories.

“Yeah, well, if it is then you guys can go ahead and shoot it first.” The pathway narrowed and she squinted her eyes as a pile of thick cabled, tied loosely by what looked like a mix of plastic-ties and old, dirty twine, draped over the path. Modified power relay. Happened when someone wanted to, say, open a set of server banks in a place that used to be a hallway or sitting area. This one looked pro, at least. Residential tended to be more of a nightmare.

She slunk by underneath, trying to ignore the way her legs seemed to be swimming and the hall seemed to be swaying.

Sleep deprivation, part two.

Dimas gave a low whistle when the main terminal came into view. “Damn. That’s retro.”

She ignored him, setting her bag down on the floor before she stepped up to skim the terminal’s surface. He wasn’t wrong. It was retro. A hunk of dust-covered metal than ran about ten centimeters deep and came up close to the bottom edge of her ribs—she wasn’t blessed with height—but it wasn’t all that complicated. In fact, when one got down to it it was damn simple.

She liked that, too.

A holoscreen slopped out of its top like a blade when she mashed the start-up button n its side. Pulling off her right-hand glove—the old touchpad still ran on electro-sensitivity, which limited the types of automata they could send in for it—she input the section number into the diagnostics program and waited. After a few seconds, it spat out a series of coordinates and diagnostic checks.

The numbers put a frown on her face. She pulled out her netlink, double-checked the codes she’d pulled from the database logs, and ran them again.

“Huh,” she said.

“Is it a rat?” Dimas asked. “Do you have codes for rats?”

“It’s not a rat,” she said, her frown deepening. “It says there’s nothing wrong at all.”

A small silence filled the space around her. Behind her, the soldiers exchanged uneasy looks.

“We were just down there. It’s definitely not working.” The second man, the one with darker skin whose name she’d forgotten, stepped up to the terminal, his brow furrowing at the display as if he could understand it just by frowning at it.

“Well, maybe a switch is off?” she suggested.

“For an entire level?” he said, doubt rising in his tone.

She held up her hands. “I don’t know what to tell you. According to this, there’s nothing mechanically or circuitally or electronically wrong. No power imbalances. No outages. I mean—look,” She slid out her netlink again, swiped it over to a diagnostics display app she liked to run, and clicked it into a node at the front of the terminal. After a few seconds of buffering, a bar graph slid up onto the netlink’s smaller screen. “This is the power usage output. It’s not out.”

With a few taps, she filtered the results. Targeting the light fixtures themselves was a bit misleading—only those registered with the system, AKA anything within the section’s public maintenance sphere, would show up. Anything unregistered within private companies and offices would be sorted into the miscellaneous division—but the dancing graph still proved her point. “These lights are currently active.”

He stared at the graph for a few seconds longer. Then he raised a hand to his earpiece. “Sergeant? You still in the dark down there?”

He stood close enough that she could hear the answering, “yep.”

She threw up her hands. “Well then, maybe it’s a light problem. I’m no expert on light fixtures, but I can at least back-trace the voltage and narrow down the problem.”

“Can you fix the problem?”

“Won’t know that until I know what the problem is.” She waved a hand at the terminal. “And it isn’t here.”

There was a tension in his face and shoulders, but he held it back. The muscles of his jaw rippled. He stepped back. “So we need to get you down there, now?”

“That’s where I’d go next, yes.”

“All right.” Shifting his hand on his rifle, he brought it back up to his earpiece. “Sergeant, we’re coming down to you.”

(the chapter is split due to a character limit. Read on for part two!)