The system classified it four minutes after she first saw the flux disturbance.

  She had spent those four minutes standing at the window with her hands flat against the glass, watching the disturbance in the flux move closer, and she had used the time to note several things: that it was larger than she'd initially estimated, that its movement had a quality she was having trouble describing even to herself — not swimming, not flying, something more fundamental than either, like the void was simply making room for it as it passed — and that her flux perception, which she'd been quietly proud of developing, was doing something she hadn't experienced before.

  It was trying to look away.

  Not her eyes. Her perception. The part of her that read flux the way eyes read light was flinching from this thing the way you flinched from something too bright, except the opposite — this was too dark, too absent, too much of a hole in the colored currents that should have been everywhere.

  Then the system updated, and she stopped thinking about how to describe it.

  PROXIMITY ALERT — UPDATED

  Classification: IGO Level: 3

  Designation: ARCHITECT CLASS — EARLY STAGE

  Estimated size: 41.6km

  Distance: 203 km

  Trajectory: Passing — Non-intercept course

  Threat Assessment: EXTREME

  Recommended Action: DO NOT ENGAGE. DO NOT ATTRACT ATTENTION. REMAIN STILL.

  She remained still.

  The level three Igo passed at two hundred kilometers and she felt it the way you felt weather — not as a sensation exactly, more as a pressure change, a shift in the quality of the space around her. Through the window she watched the flux currents part for it. They didn't eddy or turbulate the way they did around her box. They simply moved aside, cleared a lane, gave it room the way everything gave it room, with the instinctive deference of things that understood on some level they were not the largest presence in the area.

  She got one clear look at it through her perception. One second, maybe two, before her mind did something she had no control over — a hard reset, a refusal to continue processing what she was seeing, a full categorical rejection of the input. She came back to herself gripping the window frame with both hands and breathing in the shallow careful way of someone who had just discovered a new limit.

  She did not try to look again.

  It passed. The currents settled back, slowly, the way water settled after something large moved through it. The system updated:

  LEVEL 3 IGO — PASSED Trajectory confirmed non-intercept. Threat level: REDUCED Residual flux disturbance: Elevated — monitoring

  She let go of the window frame. Her hands had left marks — not damage, just the impression of grip, the ghost of how hard she'd been holding on. She looked at them for a moment and then looked back at the window and the void beyond it and tried to remember what she'd been thinking about before the proximity alert.

  Volume two, chapter nine. Flux cycling in low-resource conditions.

  Right.

  She had just decided to sit back down when her perception caught the second thing.

  It was small. That was the first thing — small enough that she'd missed it entirely in the wake of the level three, which had occupied every available frequency of her attention without trying. But now that the larger disturbance had passed and the currents were resettling she could see it clearly, and what she saw was a different kind of absence than the architect had left.

  The level three had been vast and dark and somehow total — a hole in everything. This was smaller. More localized. A tight concentrated dead zone, a place where the flux currents didn't just move around an obstacle but stopped, terminated, ran up against something that wasn't blocking them so much as ending them.

  And it had seen her box.

  She knew this the way she knew things through perception rather than regular sight — not as a visual confirmation but as a change in trajectory. The small thing had been moving without clear direction, drawn by the wake of the level three the way small fish followed large ones, and then it had stopped, and then it had turned, and now it was moving with the specific purposefulness of something that had found what it was looking for.

  The system updated before she could ask.

  PROXIMITY ALERT Classification: IGO Level: 1 Sub-classification: ANTI-FLUX ATTRIBUTE (Rare — 0.001% of Igo population) Distance: 412 km and closing Threat Assessment: SIGNIFICANT — ELEVATED DUE TO ATTRIBUTE

  ANTI-FLUX ATTRIBUTE NOTE: Anti-flux Igos obliterate nearby flux with density lower than their own anti-flux field. They are drawn to high-density flux sources. Your box's flux signature and personal flux reserves represent an attractive target. Recommended Action: Evasive maneuvers Propulsion Status: None Revised Recommendation: INFORMATION UNAVAILABLE

  "Again with the information unavailable," she said, but she was watching it come and her voice didn't have its usual energy behind it.

  Through her perception she could see what the system meant. The dead zone around the Igo was visible — a sphere of absence that moved with it, the place where flux simply stopped existing. Where the currents should have been there was nothing, and the nothing was spreading slightly as it traveled, the anti-flux reaching ahead of it like a scent. She watched a tendril of color — a thin current passing too close — hit the edge of the dead zone and simply end. Not deflect. Not slow. End.

  She pressed back against the far wall from the window without deciding to.

  It hit the window first.

  She heard it before she saw it — a sound she had no reference for, not an impact exactly, more like the absence of sound pressurizing and then releasing, and the window flared in her perception, brilliantly bright, the indestructible glass lighting up against the anti-flux field like something that had been waiting to prove a point. The Igo pushed. The window did not move. It pushed again. The window did not care.

  She had approximately three seconds of relief before it moved around the side of the box.

  She didn't hear the hull breach so much as feel it — a pressure change that hit her everywhere at once, her ears, her sinuses, her eyes, her skin — and then the wall to her left was gone and she was in space.

  The cold arrived before the breathlessness did.

  Not the ordinary cold of the metal floor, not even the cold she'd felt when the box's temperature management had dipped overnight. This was the cold of the actual void — the cold of the complete absence of thermal energy, arriving through every surface of her body simultaneously, reaching for her core the way something reached when it meant to take something. Her skin registered it and then stopped registering it, which she understood dimly was not a good sign.

  She couldn't breathe. There was nothing to breathe. She'd known this intellectually from the moment she understood she was in space, had known it the way you knew abstract facts — yes, vacuum, yes, no atmosphere, understood. Knowing it and experiencing the specific sensation of her lungs finding nothing, working against nothing, contracting and expanding against a complete absence of resistance — that was different. That was a thing her body understood in a way her brain was still catching up to.

  She was dying. She knew this clearly and without particular drama. The 1HP skill was active, she could feel it, the system's anchor on her biological processes doing the thing it did — holding the line, keeping the threshold at bay — but the threshold was very close and the cold was very fast and she could feel her flux reinforcement doing something she hadn't asked it to do.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  It was doing it anyway. The optimization she'd been practicing for six days, the smoothing of the leak, the gathering of herself into herself — her body was doing it automatically, reflexively, pulling every available frequency of her flux reserves inward and pressing them against her surface like insulation, like a membrane, like the only thing standing between her core temperature and the void.

  It was working. She was still dying, but she was dying more slowly than she should have been, which was the kind of distinction that mattered.

  She was also, she noted with the detached clarity of someone conserving cognitive resources, floating away from the box.

  The Igo was coming back.

  She could see it in her perception — the dead zone repositioning, the anti-flux field sweeping toward her, and then pausing. Recalibrating. She watched it happen through the colored haze of her own flux field struggling to maintain itself, and she understood what it had understood: the box was less interesting now. The box was a container. She was the source.

  It turned toward her.

  She had no propulsion. She had no weapons. She had twenty-two percent flux reserves and falling, a borrowed oxygen supply that was measured in the dimming of her vision at the edges, and a level one Igo with an anti-flux attribute closing the distance between them with the patient certainty of something that had decided.

  The system chimed.

  EMERGENCY ADVISORY Current situation: Critical Owner is in vacuum. Flux reserves: 19% and falling. Igo (Level 1, Anti-flux) approaching. ETA: 4 minutes. Available option:

  "CRASH COURSE: SURVIVING AN ANTI-FLUX IGO ENCOUNTER" Cost: 500 Drift Points Current Drift Points: 632 Proceed?

  She looked at it. She looked at the Igo. She looked at the absolute black of space around her, the box with its ruined wall tumbling slowly at what she estimated was forty meters and increasing, Gerald's light still on inside it throwing a rectangle of yellow into the void like a beacon for nothing.

  She looked back at the system.

  "Yes," she said, except she had no air to say it with, so she thought it with the focused intentionality the system seemed to respond to, and the drift points disappeared and the pamphlet appeared and she opened it with the specific urgency of someone who had four minutes.

  CRASH COURSE: SURVIVING AN ANTI-FLUX IGO ENCOUNTER

  For the Unprepared Owner

  PAGE ONE: If the system has recommended this document to you, you are likely in immediate danger. You have, at most, rudimentary flux control and approximately zero combat experience. You are probably in vacuum or close to it. You are probably terrified.

  Before we proceed: read this page completely. Do not skip ahead. The information on this page is load-bearing for everything that follows.

  If you have already skipped ahead and are coming back: hello. You missed the part that tells you how you're going to survive the Igo currently approaching you. It was on this page. Please read on.

  She had skipped ahead. She was coming back.

  She read on.

  Level 1 Igos have not fully developed their motor control systems. They are capable of tremendous speed in a straight line but cannot execute lateral adjustments with any precision. Their attack vector is always linear.

  To avoid a level 1 Igo attack: expel flux from one side of your body with sufficient force to move your body laterally. The Igo will be unable to correct its trajectory in time to follow.

  Note: Force calibration is important. Insufficient force will not move you far enough. Excessive force will move you too far and compromise your flux reinforcement. Aim for controlled displacement.

  She closed the pamphlet. Looked at the Igo. Looked at her hands.

  Expel flux from one side. Laterally. Controlled.

  She reached for the flux in her right side — gathered it the way she'd been gathering it for six days, except instead of smoothing it inward she pushed it outward, shoved it away from her, and —

  She moved. Three meters to the left and then stopped, the flux expenditure too small, too cautious, the Igo correcting easily and continuing toward her.

  She tried again. More force this time, more intention, she thought move with everything she had and expelled from her right side and —

  She moved forty meters to the left in approximately one second and then kept moving because she hadn't accounted for the lack of friction, the complete absence of anything to slow her down, and she was now traveling sideways through open space at a speed that was doing nothing good for her flux reinforcement, which was now at eleven percent and she could feel the cold getting louder at the edges of her and the dark getting closer at the edges of her vision and the box was a hundred and thirty meters away now and the Igo was repositioning—

  She opened the pamphlet.

  PAGE THREE: Flux of equal or greater density than an anti-flux field will negate or destroy it. This is the only reliable method of neutralizing an anti-flux Igo.

  To determine the required density: observe the Igo's anti-flux field with your flux perception. The dead zone surrounding the Igo represents the reach and density of its anti-flux. You need to release flux of sufficient density to fill that dead zone entirely, plus enough excess to overcome the Igo's own output.

  Calculate carefully. Overexpenditure in vacuum is dangerous.

  She looked at the Igo through her perception.

  The dead zone was visible — she'd been seeing it since it arrived, the sphere of absence that moved with it, the place where flux ended. She looked at it now with the specific attention of someone taking a measurement rather than reacting to a threat. Estimated the volume. Estimated the density differential. Felt the eleven percent of her flux reserves and did the math with the part of her brain that had been doing flux calculations for six days without being asked.

  It was going to be close.

  The Igo was repositioning for another pass. Forty seconds, maybe. She gathered everything she had — pulled it from the edges of her reinforcement, felt the cold rush in where the insulation thinned, ignored it, pulled from deeper, from the reserves she'd been carefully managing since day one — and held it. All of it. As much as she could gather into a single directed output.

  She waited until the Igo committed to its vector.

  She released.

  The flux left her in a wave she could see and feel simultaneously — her own colors, her own signature, pouring outward in a directed burst that hit the edge of the dead zone and didn't stop. She watched it fill the absence, the colors rushing in where they'd been excluded, and the Igo's anti-flux field meeting them and for one suspended moment holding — equal pressures, equal densities, the universe balanced on a point —

  And then it wasn't.

  The Igo dissolved. Not dramatically — no explosion, no sound, just a rapid diminishment, the anti-flux field collapsing inward and taking the level one Igo with it, and then the currents rushed back into the space where the dead zone had been and the void was just void again, colored and enormous and deeply indifferent to what had just happened in this small corner of it.

  ENCOUNTER RESOLVED IGO LEVEL 1 (ANTI-FLUX) — ELIMINATED

  Drift Points Awarded: 10,000 Flux Reserves: 4%

  Owner status: Critical

  Vacuum exposure: Ongoing

  Hypothermia progression: Significant

  Distance from Unit 00: 174 meters

  Four percent.

  She was at four percent and the cold was very loud now and the edges of her vision had taken on a quality she recognized from the chapter on flux depletion as the beginning of cascade failure and she was a hundred and seventy-four meters from the box which had a hole in it but also had Gerald and a floor and air.

  She gathered the four percent. Every remaining trace of it, scraped from the edges, pulled toward center.

  She pushed.

  It was not an elegant maneuver. She moved in the right direction with approximately the grace of someone who had just done something that cost them nearly everything they had, which was what she was. She corrected twice, small desperate corrections, losing another half percent each time, and then she was through the ruined wall and inside and the system—

  ERROR: OWNER LIFE SIGNS CRITICAL EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ACTIVATED ADMINISTRATIVE OVERRIDE: EMERGENCY PURCHASE INITIATED

  Reconstruct Unit 00 to original state?

  Cost: 5,000 Drift Points

  WARNING: Next emergency reconstruction will cost 10,000 Drift Points Confirm?

  Yes, she thought, with the last available part of her that was still thinking clearly.

  The wall rebuilt itself. She heard it — felt it — the flux reshaping metal, the breach closing, the seal completing — and then there was air and she gasped for it with the full unguarded desperation of someone who had spent an indeterminate amount of time without any, her lungs filling and filling, her vision doing something complicated and gradually resolving, the cold retreating by inches as the box's temperature management kicked back in.

  She was on the floor. She didn't remember deciding to be on the floor. The floor was fine. The floor was wonderful. The floor was the most beautiful surface she had ever been in contact with and she had been thinking uncharitable things about it for six days and she took all of them back.

  She pressed her cheek against it.

  "I'm sorry," she told the floor. Her voice came out wrecked and she didn't care. "I said you were cold and metal. You're — you're a great floor. You're my floor."

  She pushed herself upright. Looked at the wall that had been a hole. Looked at the window. Looked at Gerald, still on, still humming, still flickering at his irregular interval.

  She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against the nearest wall. The metal was solid and cold and real and sealed and she kept her forehead there for a moment, eyes closed.

  "I will never," she said quietly, "say another negative thing about this box. You did your best. The window was indestructible. That was— that was very good of you. That was excellent structural planning."

  The system chimed.

  CURRENT DRIFT POINTS: 5,132

  FLUX RESERVES: 3%

  UNIT 00 STATUS: FULLY RESTORED

  OWNER STATUS: STABLE — RECOVERY RECOMMENDED

  NOTE: Next emergency reconstruction cost: 10,000 Drift Points

  She read the last line.

  "Ten thousand next time," she said.

  CORRECT.

  "So I shouldn't get thrown into space again."

  THE SYSTEM WOULD RECOMMEND AGAINST IT, YES.

  She looked at Gerald. Gerald flickered. It felt, for once, like solidarity.

  She lay back down on the floor — her floor, her excellent floor that she had never properly appreciated — and looked up at the ceiling and breathed. Just breathed. The cold was still in her bones and the flux depletion had left her with the specific exhaustion of a system running on fumes, and she had three percent reserves and five thousand drift points and a pamphlet she had only read three pages of and somewhere out there a level three Igo that had passed without noticing her, which she was choosing to count as the one good thing about today.

  She had killed an anti-flux Igo.

  With four percent flux reserves.

  In a school uniform.

  "Day six," she said to the ceiling. "Worst one so far."

  The ceiling offered no counterargument.

  She closed her eyes, and for the first time since waking up in the Andromeda Galaxy, she let herself just be alive for a minute without doing anything about it.