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“She’s also human.” Doc’s voice was steady, with an edge of fury. “Tough doesn’t fix a subdural hematoma. Let’s go get her!”

We were halfway to their transport when the Hollow Chorus lost her mind. Lights spiraled, a plume of fuck knows what smashed through a window, and the gangplank slammed up and down.

“Err... is your girl in her luteal cycle?” Monica side-eyed the ship.

I stared up at my ship. “I don’t know what that is.”

Tambi shoved past me. “She likes Cass! She could know something. We’re going in.” She timed it and then jumped aboard as the gangplank lowered again. The others followed.

“Don’t fucking kill any of us,” I growled to the Hollow Chorus as I stomped up the gangplank.

The temperature dropped so fast that my breath came out white. Frost crawled across the bronze trim of the corridor walls, and the lighting surged and cut to a deep, pulsing amber that made the ship look like the inside of a dying heartbeat.

“What the fuck is this?” Monica stopped dead. The walls started bleeding. A slow, thick weep of fluid that pushed through every join. It ran down the walls in heavy rivulets and pooled on the floor, smelling of burned copper.

“Heads up! We’ve got spooks incoming.” Tambi drew back against the wall and ducked.

Full-bodied, almost solid figures surged along the corridor, detailed enough to see the textures of their clothes. Kelvane, all of them.

But they weren’t attacking. They were frantic. Pacing, turning, pointing toward the gangway with movements that stuttered and reset. One of them, a tall female with engineer’s marks on her hands, kept gesturing at the walls, at the resin, at me.

Doc stepped forward, her hands open. “Easy. We see you. Is this about Cass? Do you know where she is? Is she at Pier Nine?”

Monica was pressed against the opposite wall, her jaw set. “They’re pointing away from that district.”

“But they know she’s in trouble.” My throat was tight, frustration heating my insides as I tried to understand their meaning. “The ship has part-bonded to Cass’s neural signature, so the Chorus feels her emotions.”

“Can your ship find her?” Tambi asked. “Once you bond to your ship, it’s like having a second brain, isn’t it? You work in tandem?”

“Similar. But the matrix is damaged and the bonding architecture fragmented.” The figures kept cycling through their frantic loop. “This ship is running on grief and broken hardware. It’s too big a risk to trust her with locations.”

The resin under my boots shifted, the amber fluid still pooling, and a low vibration ran through the deck plates. Every system fired, every fragment of trapped consciousness pushing to the surface. It should have torn the neural matrix apart, but it kept running.

My ship was risking everything to show us where Cass was. I had to trust the Hollow Chorus.

I sprinted to the bridge, the others behind me. The console was live, every display running data I hadn’t called up. The bonding architecture was spread across the screens.

I sat in the chair and put my hands on the console. “Come on. I know you’re hurting, and I know she’s gone. Show me where Cass is. Where is our heart?”

The console flickered under my hands, but the connection didn’t catch. The ship was reaching for me, but she couldn’t hold my link.

The apparitions had also followed me to the bridge, crowding the space, their faces cycling between anguish and urgency. The engineer kept pointing at the empty anchor slot on the neural map where the captain should be.

“I’m trying to be your captain!” I pushed harder and closed my eyes, reaching for the ship the way every Kelvane captain had for a thousand years, opening the neural pathways that should let me feel the vessel’s living systems like an extension of my body.

The ship reached back. I sensed her, faint and broken. The connection sparked and collapsed.

I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against the console. The resin was warm, almost hot, pulsing with an erratic heartbeat rhythm.

“I’m not leaving. I know Habor died. They killed him right here, and you were left to suffer. You tried to help him and the crew, but their killers denied you closure.” My throat constricted. “But I’m not walking away from you, and I’m not walking away from her. So, we figure this out and find a way. I’ll meet you halfway, but you have to let me in. Cass is depending on us. We can’t lose her. She’s too important to our bond.”

Doc cleared her throat behind me.

I kept my head down, but a side glance revealed they were all there. Doc was feeling the ship’s pulse with a handheld device. Tambi watched the neural map spiral and shatter. Monica watched me in wide-eyed shock.

I kept my hands on the console and my forehead against the resin. “Please, if we lose her, we die. We don’t abandon the things we love. I will never abandon you. And I will never leave Cass. She is a part of us. We can’t exist without her.”

The ship stopped fighting, and the apparitions froze. The amber fluid stopped flowing down the walls, and the temperature held.