The storm was nice.

  Not useful. Not important. Just... nice.

  Lightning stitched the sky in lazy patterns, brighter than plasma coils, messier than voidstreams. The wind howled like a newborn god trying to remember its name. Rain fell from every direction, like the atmosphere forgot gravity existed; very Void-like, honestly. Made me feel a little nostalgic.

  I perched on a bent comms antenna sixty stories up, balanced on the static between pulses. Wind didn’t touch me. Gravity didn’t argue. The metal groaned below, but I wasn’t really sitting on it. I was just there.

  It reminded me of home. Not the place, because the Void isn’t a place, but the feeling. Directionless energy, swirling around like it might become something if someone bothered to care. Nobody does. That’s kind of the point. It’s a good place to nap, if you don’t mind never waking up exactly the same.

  Down below, humans scrambled for cover like soft, panicking snacks. One dropped a bag of groceries. Tomatoes rolled into the gutter. Tragic.

  I would’ve stayed longer, maybe even enjoyed it. But I blinked. Just once. A single moment of distraction.

  Plop.

  A fat drop of freezing water landed right between my shoulder blades.

  I stared at the spot like it had personally betrayed me.

  Unacceptable.

  With zero fanfare, I vanished from the storm and reappeared by Mia’s feet, curling against the base of her noodle stand’s heat coil like I’d been there all along. She didn’t even flinch, just reached down and scratched behind my ears.

  Good girl. Warm is better than majestic.

  The stall sizzled with familiar comfort; steam, spice, grease, and the faint hum of broken electrics someone fixed wrong but just right. The counter was clean in the way that only obsessive poverty could enforce. Chen ran it like he ran his life: honest, sharp, and one gust of bad wind from toppling.

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  Chen was nice. He also had a cat allergy so bad it could hospitalize him. Yet somehow, I was fine. Curious.

  He squatted down beside me, wiping his hands on an old apron, eyes squinting as he reached out like someone expecting static shock. His fingers brushed my fur, and when nothing exploded or swelled up, he actually chuckled.

  “What are you, little guy?” he muttered.

  I considered telling him.

  Instead, I blinked.

  He turned to grab a broth pot. By the time he turned back, I was millions of miles away.

  ***************

  The air tasted expensive.

  Inside the command cabin of a vessel wrapped in military plating and criminal ego, a woman moved with the precision of someone who knew the value of each breath. Mid-forties, beautiful in that quietly dangerous way. Lines at the eyes, not from laughter but from counting lives traded for silence.

  The cabin was too nice. Rugs. Wood grain veneer. Tiny bonsai tree; fake. I hate fake.

  The Blue Owls, written on the wall in stylized chrome. Pirates, technically. But really just glorified scavengers with PR.

  She tapped at a console, pulling encrypted files and stashing them in something shaped like a locket.

  She mattered. Not now. But she would. The thread that tied her to Mellody was buried deep. Too deep to see the knot. But it was there.

  She noticed me.

  Her head snapped around fast, combat reflex, eyes narrowing like the question had already become a threat.

  “How did you get here?”

  I didn’t answer. It wouldn’t have helped.

  But her voice triggered the ship’s automated defense grid. A ping in the wrong pattern. A cadence recognized as a password under threat.

  Red lights flared. Alarms screamed. Oops.

  She turned to the terminal. I turned to the wind.

  —

  Back on Earth. Or close enough.

  Perched atop the broadcast antenna again, in the clouds, the real ones, thick with static and birdsong and ancient metal. From up here, I could see causality stretch out like threads soaked in oil. Something had changed.

  I didn’t know what exactly. Not yet.

  But I felt it.

  The future wobbled like a plate on a tilted table. Probabilities twisted. Something new, foreign, spooled out ahead, alive and wrong. The antenna bent beneath me, steel whining like it had suddenly remembered what gravity was.

  Heavy.

  That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  In the next blink, I was back. At her feet.

  *******************

  “Meow.”

  “Hey there, big guy.” Mell looked up from whatever ancient component she was gutting. “Where’ve you been?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t look at her either. My tail twitched the wrong direction. I didn’t know why.

  She narrowed her eyes, wiped her hands on her coveralls, and picked me up like I weighed nothing.

  But this time, I didn’t float.

  She brought my face to hers, brows furrowed. “What happened?”

  I blinked. Slowly. Carefully.

  And didn’t answer.