The twenty-five books took five weeks.

  I will not walk you through all of it. Basic Space Engineering volumes one through twenty covered orbital mechanics, thrust-to-mass ratios, hull stress under acceleration, fuel systems, navigation principles, and approximately eight hundred pages of mathematics that I worked through with the specific focus of someone who understood that this was the price of moving and that moving was the price of getting home. Basic Physics volumes one through five covered the foundational theory underneath everything else and was somehow simultaneously more interesting and more dense than the engineering texts.

  I read them all. I took notes. I passed the trivia quests. I unlocked the propulsion recipes.

  Then I looked at the blueprint tree and found the first problem.

  The box did not have a door.

  I had known this since day one. It had been one of the first things I'd noted about my situation — no door, no visible seam where a door might go, no handle, no hinge, just uninterrupted metal on five of the six surfaces and the window on the sixth. I had filed this under mysterious and probably significant at the back of my mind and moved on because survival had more immediate line items.

  Now it mattered, because the external propulsion module had to be installed on the outside of the box, and the outside of the box was not accessible from the inside, and I was on the inside.

  The hatch/airlock blueprint cost 200 drift points and came with a materials list I could fill from current inventory. I bought it, fabricated it over four hours with the focused attention of someone installing a door in their home and knowing that the alternative to getting it right was the void — the actual void, immediately, with no buffer. The process was very annoying. So first I installed the hatch in an hour on the roof, with a ladder which only took roughly twenty minutes, then I made a flux bubble to fill the entire box to keep the atmosphere intact then opened the hatch and made the airlock and when it was done I had a hatch and airlock.

  A round hatch, flush with the wall, with a pressure seal I tested three times before trusting and a handle on both sides because I had been very specific with the fabrication about the handle on both sides. I stood in front of it for a while after it was complete.

  It was a door.

  I had a door.

  I pressed my hand flat against it. Solid. Sealed. Gerald hummed above me.

  "Right," I said. "Next problem."

  The next problem was getting outside without dying.

  The flux overlay skill — which I had been working toward since the gacha roll gave it to me locked and useless — was now accessible. Seven volumes of flux manual plus practice plus the additional theory from the engineering texts had gotten me there. I could generate a full flux bubble large enough to enclose myself completely, provide life support in vacuum, and hold against external pressure.

  The problem was precision.

  A full flux bubble was large. Generating one that enclosed my whole body with enough margin for life support meant working with a field that extended at least a meter in every direction, which was fine for open space and was completely impractical for installing mechanical components on the exterior of a five-by-five box. I needed my hands. I needed to work at close range, in tight spaces, with tools and components that required fine motor control.

  I thought about it for two days while finishing the internal components.

  The solution I arrived at was this: instead of a full bubble, I would generate the thinnest possible flux membrane I could maintain — not an enclosure with volume, but a skin, as close to my body surface as I could hold it. Enough flux density to provide the same protection as the full bubble. None of the bulk. Basically naked in space except for a layer of flux I could feel but couldn't see.

  I checked the flux manual. I checked the engineering texts. I checked every skill description and footnote I had access to. Nothing. There was no name for this anywhere — no technique description, no cautionary footnote, no academic paper referencing anything close to it. Either nobody in the history of the universe had thought of it or nobody had thought to write it down.

  I decided that meant I had invented it.

  I allowed myself exactly thirty seconds of quiet satisfaction about this. Then I got back to work.

  I practiced it for a week before I trusted it — generating the membrane inside the box, holding it for increasing durations, testing the edges, feeling where it wanted to thin and shoring those points up. On the fifth day I held it for six hours without degradation. On the seventh day I decided that was good enough.

  I also made a flux tether. A line of flux extending from my body... I didn't have anything to tie it to, so I closed the hatch with the tether still in the door giving me a physical connection to home while I worked. It would not save me if the lamination failed. It would save me if I simply drifted away, which was a different problem and one I preferred to prevent.

  I opened the hatch on day ninety-eight.

  The void was right there. I had known it would be right there — the hatch opened directly to outside, that was the point — but knowing it and experiencing the rectangle of absolute space framed by the hatch opening were different categories of the same information, and my body spent approximately four seconds communicating its detailed opinion of the situation before I overruled it.

  I climbed out.

  The lamination held. The cold was there — I could feel the void through it the way you felt weather through a coat, present and registered and not yet dangerous — and the absence of sound was complete, and I was on the outside of my box for the first time in ninety-eight days, clinging to the exterior hull with magnetic grips I'd fabricated for the purpose, the tether a line of light connecting me to the hatch, and space visible in every direction I looked.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  I stayed very still for a moment.

  The stars were different from out here. Inside, the window had framed them — given them edges, made them a view. Out here they were simply everywhere, the full sphere of them, above and below and to every side, and the box was a small metal thing I was holding onto in the middle of all of it.

  "Okay," I said, to no one, in a vacuum where sound did not travel. The word existed only inside the lamination, inside the small climate I was maintaining around myself. "Okay."

  I got to work.

  The nearby rock cluster had become relevant approximately a week before the EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity), when I'd done the full materials calculation for the external module and come up short. Aluminum, mostly — I'd used more than anticipated on the hatch fabrication and the hull reinforcement, and the external module's housing required more than I had in inventory.

  I floated to the rocks with all the enthusiasm of someone doing an errand they resented. The cluster was a loose collection of debris — nothing large, the biggest piece maybe three meters across — sitting approximately twenty meters from the box in the slow drift that characterized objects with no particular place to be. I tethered myself, floated across the gap, grabbed the nearest rock, and put it in my inventory.

  Then I grabbed another one. And another. I moved through the cluster picking up rocks with the brisk efficiency of someone doing the most undignified grocery shopping in the universe — no technique, no ceremony, just grabbing chunks of asteroid and dropping them directly into my pocket dimension one after another. The inventory accepted everything without complaint, organized it automatically, identified mineral content with its usual thoroughness.

  Aluminum ore. Enough. I went back inside.

  I smelted everything in the blast furnace, confirmed I had sufficient materials, and scheduled the EVA.

  Fourteen hours.

  That was how long the external module installation took. I am aware that this seems like a long time. I would like to note that I was alone, in space, in a flux skin I had personally invented with zero reference material, with the blueprints and manual floating in small tethered flux bubbles around me like a very impractical reference library, installing a propulsion system.

  The external module was a set of flux-driven thrust arrays — four of them, one on each non-window, non-hatch face of the box — with conduit connections that fed back through the hull to the internal control system I hadn't built yet. The manual was specific about installation order. I followed it with the focused exactness of someone who understood that incorrect installation of a propulsion system had consequences that were immediate and non-negotiable.

  I made three mistakes. Two of them I caught immediately. One of them I caught on hour eleven, which required disassembling a section I'd already completed and redoing it.

  By hour fourteen the external module was complete. I checked every connection twice. The system confirmed:

  EXTERNAL PROPULSION MODULE: INSTALLED Status: Nominal Awaiting internal module connection

  I floated back to the hatch, retracted my tether, climbed inside, sealed the hatch behind me, and lay on the floor for forty-five minutes without moving. The lamination dissolved the moment I was inside with air, and I let it, and I breathed normal box air and felt the floor under me and looked at Gerald.

  "Fourteen hours," I told him.

  Gerald flickered. I chose to interpret this as impressed.

  The internal module was easier.

  Atmosphere-present fabrication, and when it was complete my box had something it had never had before: a chair and a control interface.

  The chair was iron.

  I looked at it for a long moment. One hundred and twelve days. I had spent one hundred and twelve days sitting on an iron floor, sleeping on an iron floor, eating raw Igo meat on an iron floor. I had made peace with the iron floor. I had, in my weaker moments, developed a relationship with the iron floor. It was the only surface I had ever known out here and I understood it intimately and had zero remaining patience for it.

  My reward, after one hundred and twelve days and twenty engineering textbooks and fourteen hours of EVA and three months of daily quest grinding — my reward for all of that was a chair.

  An iron chair.

  Still iron. Just elevated iron. Iron with the audacity to have legs.

  "Of course," I said. "Obviously. Why would it be anything else."

  I sat in it anyway because it was a chair and I had not sat in a chair in one hundred and twelve days and my principles only extended so far. It was bolted to the floor directly in front of the window, which was where the control interface sat — a panel of components connected to the external thrust arrays, with a steering mechanism that the blueprint had specified and which I can only describe as a steering wheel. Circular. Two grips. Attached to a column. It had the general aesthetic of a 1900s minivan that had made some unusual life choices. It had a strange gear box too, since the propulsion mechanisms were on all 4 sides the gear had a shift for each thruster labelled 1 to 4.

  I put my hands on the wheel. I understood the controls immediately, which I attributed to five weeks of engineering textbooks and a month of staring at the blueprint. I ran the full system diagnostic.

  BASIC PROPULSION SYSTEM: FULLY INSTALLED

  External Module: Nominal

  Internal Module: Nominal

  Radar System: Nominal

  Maximum Velocity: 0.125c (1/8 light speed)

  Note: Sudden acceleration at high velocity may result in fatal inertial forces. Recommend gradual acceleration.

  One eighth the speed of light.

  I sat with that number. One eighth the speed of light, which sounded extraordinary and was extraordinary, and which was also — I did the math without meaning to, because five weeks of engineering had rewired something permanent in me — going to take approximately twenty million years to cover 2.537 million light years.

  I was not going home any time soon. I had known this. The knowing had always been abstract before, a number too large to feel real. Sitting in my iron chair with my hands on a steering wheel and a propulsion system that could go one eighth the speed of light and a distance between me and Earth that laughed at one eighth the speed of light — the knowing became concrete and specific and I let it be concrete and specific for exactly as long as it needed to be.

  Then I put it down.

  I was not going home. Not for a very long time. Not without something faster, something I hadn't built yet, something that was going to require more drift points and more materials and more textbooks I hadn't read yet. That was a problem for another day. For another chapter of this. For the version of me that existed after whatever came next.

  What I had right now was a direction.

  For one hundred and twelve days I had been drifting — no input, no control, a passenger in my own situation. And now I had thrust arrays and a steering wheel and I could point myself somewhere and go there. Not home. Not yet. But somewhere. With intention. Under my own power, in my own box, in a school uniform I was absolutely going to find a way to replace eventually.

  I allowed myself a moment.

  "Okay," I said, out loud, to the window and the stars and no one in particular. "Good job. Genuinely — good job, Star. You built a propulsion system. In space. Alone. In a box. With no help from anyone except a formal but occasionally strange system interface and a light fixture named Gerald." I paused. "That's impressive. That's objectively impressive and you're allowed to acknowledge it."

  The Andromeda Galaxy offered no opinion. Gerald hummed.

  "Thank you," I said. "I accept."

  I engaged the thrust at one percent. Gradual, the way the manual specified, the way the engineering textbooks had explained was the difference between controlled movement and fatal inertial forces. The box moved — actually moved, with intention, responding to the wheel in my hands — and I felt it through the chair and the floor and I was going somewhere for the first time in one hundred and twelve days.

  It wasn't home. It wasn't close to home. It wasn't even pointed at home because home was in a different galaxy and I had a steering wheel not a miracle.

  But it was a direction.

  And a direction, I had learned, was enough to start with.