Thirty-nine days since arrival.

Ketches and warrens are creaky things. Cables groan, steps squeak, hammocks rustle. Ether-bright eyes should glow and blink in the comfortable dark.

Yaraskis had expected they would fill up the station, all of them, with repaired machinery and stolen comforts and familiar sounds.

All the station's sounds are lonely now. Even the station-voice would be a comfort, almost.

She hasn't seen Karrho in days. The remaining engineers only talk to each other, and the Servitors groan and bob in the air together in one nervous bundle.

And something is stalking the hallways.

It has eyes like an Eliksni, but they don't flicker like they should. They burn steadily, lit not by Ether but by something else. Even the Marauders tell her about it in whispers, so scared they ignore hierarchy.

Yaraskis feels its presence in her spiracles. She decides to head for Karrho's workshop. She can hide there.

Then a Marauder swings into view. His eyes are strange and he doesn't look at Yaraskis. He just says, "Come here."

She runs. Through the halls, leaping over platforms strung together, scoring her side badly on an unexpected twist of metal.

The missing crew loom out of corners, calling out as she runs past. She doesn't stop.

Till a voice calls her by name.

It's Karrho. He's braced himself in a corner of the ceiling near a broken vent grate that Yaraskis knows leads to the station hull. It's too small for anyone bigger than a Drekh.

She leaps. Hands claw at her ankles as Yaraskis kicks her way up the wall.

"This way," Karrho urges. They scurry through twisting passages, through the vents and under floors that long-ago Humans never meant for anyone to walk in. They run over wreckage, in and out of the gravity generators' pull, towards the Ketch. Maybe they'll be safe there. Maybe they can cast off and run.

"What's wrong with them?" Yaraskis asks, panting. Her heart kicks hard in her chest.

"Nothing."

Karrho stops on a dime at the vent's exit. Yaraskis's momentum takes her clear past him, into a wide room.

She looks far up into the bright steady glare of mechanical eyes. Filled with an alien light.

And Karrho pushes her forward into the waiting arms of the White Captain.