Pulse’s ship felt nothing like The Cradle of Gravity. Where her home was warm and lightly cluttered, full of mismatched comforts and the scents of food and oil, The Ghost Step was almost sterile in its precision. The walls faintly hummed with the pulse of CIPHER-linked processors, banks of hidden servers built directly into the hull. Every surface seemed designed to feed into one thing—Echo.

  The bubbly CIPHER wasn’t confined to a mask here. She skipped across the deck as a full holographic projection, a figure with light skin and bright pink eyes. Her straight black hair framed her face in neat, short lines, and she wore a fitted black bodysuit softened by a white jacket. If it wasn’t for her being partially transparent and faintly glowing from the light that made her visible, Tamiyo would almost believe she could touch her.

  Echo had first shown herself on the trip into Outpost Meridian when Raine was with them. She had been ecstatic at the opportunity to fully converse with new people—CIPHERs at that. They hadn’t been able to discuss much then, but they currently had around twenty hours until they’d be landing on Solaceum.

  Tamiyo was trying to figure out where Pulse was pouring caffeine into the girl’s processors.

  “These things are seriously adorable Tamiyo,” Echo said in a rapid-fire burst of curiosity. She was circling Tamiyo, her holographic form leaving faint trails of light in its wake as she inspected Tamiyo’s antennae. “The way you move them for expression, but they’re also stylish too.”

  “And functional,” Tamiyo added. “They help me understand most languages, pick up various frequencies, they do a lot.”

  “Wooah!” Echo’s eyes grew wider. The girl moved like her body was real. “I never had—I mean, the ship or the mask has never had anything like that.” Her expression grew sheepish.

  That was the other thing Tamiyo noticed. Between the hologram’s movements and subtle things she accidentally misspoke about, Tamiyo was fairly confident Echo used to have a physical body. It seemed like much too sensitive territory to go inquiring about, however.

  “What all can the ship do?” Tamiyo asked innocently, pushing the conversation past Echo’s slip up.

  “Oh, so much,” Echo said, almost bouncing. She looked over at Pulse. “Can I tell her? Can I tell her about all the things?”

  Tamiyo saw Pulse’s shoulders drop a sliver. Even though she could only see the back of his head, and his face was still covered by a mask, she was 99% sure he rolled his eyes.

  “Sure,” he answered simply.

  Echo squealed with joy. “We have cloaking tech, although not quite as advanced as what your ship seems to be running. We’ve got advanced decryption capabilities—those will come in handy for the mission. Oh! Oh! The best part—”

  The hologram strode over and started trying to press a button on Pulse’s console while staring at Tamiyo, one hand on her hip.

  “Pulse,” she said, finger bouncing up and down and repeatedly phasing through the button.

  “What.”

  “Press the thing, I can’t do it.”

  “You can activate it without the hologram.”

  “Pulse.”

  He just sighed back at her and pressed the requested button.

  Almost immediately, the thick beat of music filled the air, vibrating through Tamiyo’s chest. It was smooth, balanced, and rich without being overbearing—energetic, layered rhythms filling the ship like a heartbeat of life. It wasn't a harsh industrial racket nor the hollow crackle of cheap speakers. This was precision engineering—an acoustic weave that spread evenly through the hull, resonating just enough to make her antennae tingle.

  Echo beamed as the beat rolled around them, lightly dancing in place. “See? The whole ship is wired for this. Doesn’t matter if we’re in stealth mode or running hot—music is always optimal.” She winked. “Pulse pretends he hates it, but trust me, he’d go insane without it.”

  She dropped her voice to a whisper and cupped one hand to her mouth. “He dances when he thinks no one is looking.”

  Tamiyo giggled at them. “You two are cute.”

  “See?” Echo beamed at Pulse, poking a finger through the side of his head. “Someone else thinks we’re a cute couple, it’s not just me.”

  Pulse thumbed another control, the volume of the music dropped a little. “I never said it was just you.”

  Tamiyo smiled, watching the two of them. “You said something about decryption capabilities and our mission?”

  “Oh!” Echo perked up. “Right!”

  She hopped over to sit near Tamiyo. “So the data you guys are after is likely heavily encrypted. You’ll need to extract it and then get it back to me so I can crack it open. But I mean,” she gestured vaguely around them. “This is kind of your ticket off-planet anyway.” She punctuated her last point with a light laugh.

  “How exactly are we getting the data?” Tamiyo asked.

  “The Conservatory keeps redundancies,” Pulse’s filtered voice spoke up. “Anything important—classified research, prototype schematics, personnel files—it isn’t just stored in one place. It gets mirrored, distributed across secured hubs. The one we’re after is in Sandari. There’s a massive government research hub built into the foundations of the city.”

  He pressed what must have been auto-pilot then swiveled his chair around to face them. “Echo, can you bring up schematics please?”

  Her hologram exaggerated a salute, and a moment later, a holographic display of a spire-like structure appeared. White and angular, every line screamed Conservatory design.

  “Front doors are obvious—high security, biometric clearance, constant monitoring. But the hub isn’t just labs and offices. It’s wired into the municipal infrastructure. Power, traffic control, communication relays. That’s where there’s some weakness. I’ll piggyback off some of those channels to slice a hole into their security.”

  Tamiyo tilted her head. “Sounds like you know what you’re doing. Mind humoring some of my questions?”

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  “No,” Echo chirped, “He wants to sit here in silence for the next half a day.”

  Pulse shook his head. “Ask away.”

  Still smiling, Tamiyo asked, “You said you need me physically inside the complex, right? What do I need to be aware of to make sure I don’t give us away? Any cameras or things like that? Guards?”

  Pulse reclined a little in his chair. “If we run into any guards, I can incapacitate them quickly. We’ll go in at night when there should be minimal personnel. No need to worry about cameras.”

  He said his last point like it should have answered any remaining questions.

  Tamiyo’s brow furrowed, and she looked at Echo.

  “There’s a reason he’s called ‘Pulse,’” Echo smirked. “He can emit a short-range EMP to knock out most tech for a while. And he never appears on cameras.”

  “Uh,” Tamiyo said nervously. “What will that do to me? How short-range we talking here?”

  “Ten meters,” Pulse answered. “As long as you’re further than that, you’ll be completely unaffected. It won’t damage you permanently if you’re within range, but it would be… unpleasant.”

  He swiveled his chair back around as he said the last word.

  Tamiyo eyed Pulse curiously for a few moments. “If you need to take that mask off, you don’t have to worry about me looking at your face. I won’t peek.”

  There was a moment of gentle quiet before Echo said, “I trust her.”

  The silence lingered. After a long hesitation, Pulse lifted his hands, and the mask disengaged with a hiss. He didn’t turn to face her at first—just shifted it free and set it on the console. His hands settled back on the flight controls.

  “You can look,” he said at last.

  Tamiyo’s chest tightened a little. She didn’t get up to go gawk and he didn’t move to intentionally let her see—he had simply given permission that she didn’t need to look away.

  “Where exactly did you say the base was?” Tamiyo asked, pushing through any awkwardness.

  “Sandari,” Pulse answered. He sounded less different than Tamiyo expected without the voice filtration. It was natural, no slightly robotic tones—but other than that, his voice was mostly the same.

  Tamiyo frowned. “Is that near the capital at all? Where the heads of government sit? Security has to be the tightest there, I would imagine.”

  “No,” Echo answered before Pulse could. “Sandari is over a thousand miles from the capital. Security will still be heavy, but Pulse was made for this.”

  Pulse’s hands stayed on the controls, but he quietly said, “Lucien.”

  Tamiyo tilted her head. “What?”

  He leaned over, just enough to reveal more of his face without looking directly at her. Nothing about him gave Tamiyo a reason to think he might be perceived as homely or unattractive, but she saw another reason beyond his tactical display that he likely kept his face covered up.

  Scars caught the dim light—small ones along his nose, cheeks, and jaw. The most prominent was a pale, jagged mark across his temple, as if something used to be permanently installed there and hadn’t healed clean after being forcibly removed.

  “My name,” he said quietly. “It’s Lucien.”

  Then he turned back forward, facing the viewport.

  Tamiyo and Echo continued to chatter idly for several hours about nothing and everything—CIPHER design, the quirks of living in cramped quarters, even snippets about Raine that made Tamiyo laugh despite herself. Echo’s presence warmed the space, her pink eyes glowing softly as she spoke with an easy cadence.

  Pulse eventually got up to go to sleep, both to pass the time and to rest before their mission. He had a small bedroom near the back of the ship he retreated to, and Echo showed Tamiyo where she could relax as well.

  They chatted a little more, but fatigue eventually caught up, and Echo encouraged her to rest. Tamiyo drifted into shallow sleep in a narrow bunk that hummed faintly from the processors beneath. When she woke, the ship felt subtly different—quieter, like someone had reined it back in. Pulse was awake again, setting out food on the console like it had been his makeshift table for years.

  The meal was simple, but it startled her with its normalcy. Bagels, protein bars, and—most surprising of all—a small pouch of fresh fruit, probably expensive stock he’d picked up at Outpost Meridian. She sat across from him, the glow of the console light washing his features in half-shadow.

  Although he had told her his name, she got the distinct impression it wasn’t something she should freely call him yet, even in private. Pulse wasn’t particularly chatty while he ate, speaking only when necessary and otherwise keeping his focus on the food. Maskless, he didn’t explicitly try to hide his face—but Tamiyo could feel the edges of his discomfort, like heat radiating off metal left too close to a fire. He was exposed, and for someone like him, exposure was vulnerability.

  So she angled her body away, letting her gaze wander around the cabin. She traced the seams of the panels, let her eyes follow the faint glow of processor vents, studied the shapes of the chairs bolted to the deck—anything but his face. Every time his eyes flicked up from the food, she made sure hers weren’t there to meet them. It seemed to put him a little more at ease, and for that, Tamiyo was happy.

  The tension grew as they drew closer to Solaceum, however. By the time the Jump Drive had wound down and their destination planet was the size of a pinhead through the front viewport, Tamiyo’s pulse had begun thudding in her throat. The planet grew steadily larger, details of its surface gradually appearing through the maze of military vessels. Its surface was a lattice of sprawling cities connected by bands of white light that traced across the night side like veins of fire. Orbital platforms and patrol routes glittered above it, Conservatory control visible in every symmetrical line.

  A massive carrier ship slid across their flight path, so large it dwarfed The Ghost Step like a speck of dust. Its hull was a continent of white plating etched with hard black lines, bristling with docking bays and weapon mounts. Smaller patrol vessels orbited around it in perfect formations, their movements sweeping like blades guarding a beating heart. Tamiyo’s throat tightened as their ship passed beneath its shadow, the weight of the thing pressing down like gravity itself.

  She felt herself grow uneasy as Pulse’s clearance codes slid through without resistance. No challenge from the military or false identity required to slip in undetected. “I thought you burned your life down when you cut ties with the Conservatory.”

  “I did,” Pulse answered flatly. “I’m no longer employed by the Conservatory government, but I have a skillset they value. They like to keep their doors open for me, in case I ever want to crawl back. So they let me keep my clearance.”

  The words sat cold in her stomach, and she didn’t respond.

  Echo’s projection flickered beside her. “Don’t worry. He almost always tells them ‘no.’”

  Her words sounded genuine, but they didn’t offer Tamiyo much calm.

  Then the planet claimed them.

  The viewport blurred white, then orange, as they punched through the upper atmosphere, the ship shuddering under the friction of reentry. Pulse’s hands never wavered on the controls as The Ghost Step cut through the turbulence. The haze peeled back, and Solaceum unfurled beneath them, basking in an afternoon sun.

  The city of Sandari stretched across the horizon like a living circuit board, a lattice of gleaming towers and endless avenues pulsing with orderly light. Great spires of glass and steel reached upward like frozen lightning, their peaks cutting into the clouds. Air lanes crisscrossed the skyline, streams of shuttles gliding in coordinated grids, each movement dictated by unseen hands. Even from this height, Tamiyo could feel the artificial order of the place—the precision, the control.

  Pulse adjusted their descent, guiding them lower. The outer districts rushed up, long bands of industrial complexes and processing towers feeding into the brighter core. From there, the city narrowed upward, a forest of corporate and government structures bathed in sterile white glow.

  Tamiyo’s fist squeezed tight in her lap as the ship tilted into its approach vector. Every instinct screamed that she didn’t belong here, but there was no turning back. The Ghost Step cut between two soaring spires, slipping into the endless light-grid of Sandari’s airspace. The descent steadied, engines whispering as Pulse guided them toward a private landing zone hidden in the shadows of the outer districts.

  The glittering city swallowed them whole, a stark white authoritarian fly-trap of glass and metal waiting for them to give it any reason to snap shut.