—Sleeping beauties don’t wake up just because you poke a button. Usually.

  Pulling the “doll” out of the cockpit was a lot more boring than I’d imagined.

  And a lot more terrifying.

  The ship graveyard didn’t do jump-scares. No screaming. No blood splattering across the wall. It was a silent place, the kind that let you forget you were in danger right up until a tiny mistake quietly killed you.

  Oxygen margins. Metal dust in your lungs. Backflow from trapped pressure. Thawing frozen fuel the wrong way. Micro-debris impacts you never saw coming.

  Every one of them waited for the exact moment you thought, This is probably fine, and then sank its teeth in.

  In here, you didn’t get warnings—just consequences.

  “More fixation. One more stage. Add wires.”

  Genichiro barked the order like the air itself had personally offended him. But his hands were careful—precise in a way his voice never bothered to be.

  We were in Al-Safar’s hangar, but the inertial gravity was dialed down to the bare minimum. If you shoved too hard, you’d drift. If you braced wrong, you’d kick yourself into a bulkhead.

  Genichiro didn’t drift. His tool angles stayed constant. His posture didn’t wobble. It was like he was built with gyros.

  His “sloppy” lived only in his tone. The work never was.

  “I’ll add two more with the drones!” Thomas answered, muffled through his suit.

  The anchor lines tightened again, and the half-wrecked scout ship creaked.

  I hated the way it creaked.

  It sounded like bone.

  Ahmad stayed quiet, watching the whole operation like a hawk that didn’t need to flap. He gave few orders.

  But when he did, they landed dead-center and everyone moved like they’d always known what to do.

  The doll was strapped into a seat that clearly hadn’t been designed for a human body. She wasn’t “secured” so much as bound—molecular wire wrapped around her like a restraint for something that might try to escape.

  It felt like a philosophy you could read at a glance.

  A tool is a tool—whether it has a mind or not.

  “Don’t rip her out,” Genichiro said. He pointed at a thick bundle of cables. “Spine… no—frame will snap.”

  The wiring looked less like wiring and more like nerves. Uniform color. Smooth sheen. Too clean. Too pretty.

  Human wiring was a mess of compromises.

  This was… deliberate.

  “Power’s dead?” I asked.

  Genichiro gave a snort. “If it was dead, she wouldn’t still be sitting here. Something’s left. Problem is which something.”

  I didn’t like the way he said it. Which sounded like a minefield.

  He plugged in a terminal and started external power tests—low voltage first, watching for response, inching it up in careful steps. Too high, and you’d cook whatever fragile alien board was still intact. Cook it, and you’d never get another chance.

  “…No response?” Thomas asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “There is.” Genichiro didn’t look up. “It’s just not coming out where you can see it. Pull the logs.”

  Text crawled across the terminal in broken fragments.

  —UNKNOWN

  —DENIED

  —SYNC FAILURE

  —SAFETY DEVICE

  “Safety device…?” I repeated.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “Confinement lock,” Genichiro said, blunt. “Stops the doll from being activated without permission. Means there’s a key.”

  “A key… where?” Thomas asked.

  Genichiro’s answer was the opposite of comforting. “Who knows. That’s why we find it.”

  Find it.

  In a wreck, in a graveyard, in a cockpit full of dust and ice and shrapnel.

  If you said it out loud, it sounded like the worst kind of job.

  Genichiro’s eyes scanned the ship’s interior—not just the cockpit, but the surrounding harnesses, the burnt lines, the shape of surviving standard parts.

  He wasn’t looking for “this exact model.”

  He was looking for design thinking.

  Different standards, similar philosophy—similar shapes. If the shapes matched, you could route around damage.

  “…This connector’s still alive,” he said. “We can loop through here.”

  “Loop what?!” I snapped.

  “Power line.” His tone sharpened. “Watch. Don’t talk. If you distract me, my hand slips.”

  “…Y-yes, sir.” The words came out through clenched teeth.

  He built a quick foothold on the hatch edge, wedged himself into the tight space, and went to work: prying scorched casing, stripping insulation, bypassing a burnt line with a clean, improvised bridge.

  Metal powder drifted out, catching my suit light.

  Pretty.

  And lethal if you breathed it.

  “You’ve got your visor locked, yeah?” Genichiro asked without looking.

  I jerked a hand to my helmet. I’d been about to undo the lock—out of habit, out of nothing, out of stupidity.

  “…Thanks,” I muttered.

  “Don’t thank me,” he said. “If you die, you’re in the way.”

  “That’s not how you talk to people!”

  “It’s accurate.”

  The bypass finished. Genichiro fed power again.

  This time the terminal answered.

  —BOOT PREP

  —SYNC REQUEST

  —EXTERNAL AUTH: UNKNOWN

  —ALT AUTH: BIOMETRIC

  “Biometric…? Human biometric?” Thomas blurted.

  Genichiro clicked his tongue. “Not human. Owner. Could be blood. Voice. Smell. Something like that.”

  Smell made my skin crawl.

  The Grabhul weren’t just “aliens with weird tech.” Their whole thing—shadow matter, exotic fields, nudging physical constants—meant the way they read information could be completely different from ours.

  “So what do we do?” I asked, throat tight.

  Genichiro’s answer was short. “There’s a way.”

  “There is…?”

  “There is,” he repeated. “But it gets rough.”

  Rough was never a good word in an engineer’s mouth.

  He switched modes on the terminal. Output changed. Numbers jumped.

  Voltage went up.

  “H-Hey! You’ll burn it!” I snapped.

  “It won’t burn.” He paused half a beat, then added the most horrifying word in the universe. “…Probably.”

  “Probably?!”

  “Quiet,” he growled, voice dropping into the tone he used when his entire mind was on the edge of a needle. “I’m concentrating.”

  I stopped breathing.

  Text scrolled again.

  —ALT AUTH: PHYSICAL KEY

  —PRESENCE: DETECTED

  —UNDER SEAT: SLOT

  “Under the seat…?” I leaned in with my suit light.

  There it was: a thin slot at the base of the seat, like a card reader.

  “The key goes there?” I asked.

  Genichiro pointed with his chin. “Search around. It’ll be a standard piece. It’s here somewhere.”

  We searched.

  In a cramped cockpit full of floating dust and ice and fragments, looking for one thin piece of black.

  “I got it!” Thomas’s voice shot up.

  He pulled a slim, dark plate from the back of a shattered compartment. Fine etching ran across the surface in lines too delicate to be decoration.

  Through my suit’s haptic feedback, it felt cold.

  Too cold—like it was drinking heat right out of my glove.

  “…This has to be it,” Thomas said, offering it carefully.

  Genichiro snatched it like it was a live grenade. “Don’t break it. There’s no replacement.”

  “I won’t!”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “Why are you like this?!”

  “Because reality is like this.”

  He slid the plate into the slot.

  It vanished with a soft click.

  And the air changed.

  Not physically—filters were still roaring—but the mood snapped tight like a wire.

  A faint light bloomed in the doll’s chest. Thin lines ran under her metallic skin, pale and branching.

  Not veins.

  But it looked like veins.

  The terminal chimed.

  —AUTH: COMPLETE

  —BOOT: START

  —WARNING: MEMORY FRAGMENTS: DAMAGED

  Genichiro spat the words like they offended him. “Damaged. Of course it is. Annoying.”

  “Don’t call that ‘annoying’!” I snapped.

  “It’s annoying,” he insisted, as if he could argue the universe into obedience. “That’s why I called it annoying.”

  Then doll’s eyelids trembled.

  Not like a machine.

  Like someone surfacing from deep water, slow and reluctant, dragged upward by the pressure of waking.

  My body took a half-step back on its own.

  I was scared.

  But I also couldn’t look away.

  I needed to see what we’d just pulled out of the graveyard.

  Her eyes opened.

  Black irises—black, but with a faint light deep inside, like a lens gathering data instead of a human pupil reacting to it.

  “…U…” A voice leaked out.

  Breath.

  She was breathing.

  Why would an android breathe?

  The doll looked around—ceiling, walls, our hands—then down at her own. She flexed her fingers once, stopped, and held them like she didn’t trust them to belong to her.

  That pause was human.

  The way she looked confused was human.

  “…Where… is this…?” she whispered.

  The AI translated it as archaic Japanese.

  My mouth went dry. I swallowed and forced words out anyway.

  “Space,” I said. “A ship graveyard. …What’s your name?”

  The translator carried it through my suit speaker.

  The doll blinked—slow, careful, like she’d been taught blinking was a social act.

  “…Shiraishi… Miyu…”

  Her voice caught, like a thought snagging on a broken edge.

  “…I was… a twentieth-century… Japanese… high school student… I think…”

  Cold sweat slid down my back.

  Because that wasn’t a machine reporting its model number.

  That was a person—insisting on a life that should have been dust centuries ago.

  And suddenly, I understood what Genichiro had meant when he’d said he’d had a bad feeling.

  We hadn’t salvaged a device.

  We’d rescued—or stolen—someone’s nightmare.

  And the terminal kept blinking the same line, over and over:

  —WARNING: MEMORY FRAGMENTS: DAMAGED