—If it’s drifting, it’s probably dangerous to touch.

  As we closed on the graveyard, the radar got grainy.

  The display picked up a faint static haze, like a sandstorm trapped behind glass. Metal shards. Frozen fuel. Snapped antennae. Torn hull plating. And organic lumps—things that looked uncomfortably like bodies—rolled through the dark in slow tides.

  “…I hate this place.”

  I didn’t even try to sound brave. The words just fell out.

  Thomas gave me a crooked smile. “Salvagers love it.”

  “Do they, though?” I shot back. “Can people actually live here?”

  Genichiro spat the answer like it tasted bad. “Not living. Surviving.”

  Ahmad’s voice cut in, short and sharp. “We’re getting close. Launch anchor drones.”

  Genichiro nodded once and released the drones.

  Small, darting machines slipped between the debris, weaving wire lines around a target point and cinching it tight. The graveyard looked still at first glance, but everything here moved—slow rotations, micro-drifts, hidden momentum that would happily turn into a collision if you let it.

  That was why you anchored.

  Anchor wrong, and you didn’t stop the wreck—you got dragged with it.

  Dragged into something you couldn’t see yet.

  A boulder. A hull. Or just… the end.

  Genichiro glanced over at me and didn’t bother softening his tone. “Nardia. Don’t stand by the window. If something hits, fragments will fly. Barrier’s off right now.”

  “I’m not standing there!” I snapped. “I’m back!”

  “You’re not. Two steps.”

  “Yeah, yeah!”

  The way he said it made me want to throw something at him. But his instructions were always correct, which meant I had to obey like it or not.

  I took two steps back.

  A heartbeat later, a thin sliver streaked past the window outside—knife-bright, impossibly fast.

  If it had hit the glass… it would’ve been over.

  “…See?” Genichiro said.

  So irritating.

  And so right.

  Space was infuriating like that.

  Thomas suddenly leaned forward. “Contact in an asteroid’s shadow. …Small craft? Maybe. But it’s… half-wrecked.”

  The external feed zoomed in.

  The ship’s silhouette was wrong. Not human wrong—alien wrong.

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  It looked like someone had taken a hexagonal column, stretched one end, and studded it with too many protrusions. It reminded me a little of the craft Barlok had used… only simpler. Less ornamental. More utilitarian.

  And it was burned.

  The outer shell was split open. Wiring guts spilled out. Ice crystals clung to exposed innards like frost on bones.

  Ahmad’s voice went quiet. “A GalaXFI-Za B scout. Ultra-small, but… it should be capable of independent FTL, like Shiratori.”

  GalaXFI-Za B.

  They were hostile to the Grabhul—arsenic-breathers, built for environments that would poison us in seconds.

  They are a hybrid of two species, Gara XFI-Za A / B. I had seen Gara XFI-Za-A vessel on the moon of Veshild, but this was my first time seeing Gara XFI-Za-B one.

  Genichiro’s jaw tightened. “They got chased. Ran all the way here.”

  Everyone fell into the same grim understanding without needing to say it: the graveyard wasn’t just a dumping ground. It was a hiding place.

  Ahmad’s decision landed like a stone. “We approach. Salvage it.”

  The air on the bridge felt colder.

  The drones secured the scout, and Al-Safar crept in, slow and deliberate.

  Slow was the scary part.

  People assumed fast meant dangerous. In space, slow killed you more often—because you could see the other object’s rotation, its tiny wobbles, and your brain tried to match them. You got pulled into the dance. You made a mistake.

  You collided.

  But Ahmad didn’t dance. He placed the mothership with a careful, effortless grace.

  As we closed, the cockpit area came into view—barely intact. The hatch was warped, debris wedged into the seams.

  And—

  There was a shadow inside.

  “…A person?” I breathed.

  Genichiro shook his head. “No. …Looks like an android.”

  Then, like he was announcing torque specs, he continued. “Orbit’s matched. Bringing it in.”

  Al-Safar’s hangar doors yawned open.

  Working in tandem with the AI, Genichiro feathered the thrusters, guiding the scout into the bay with a precision that made my skin itch. One wrong nudge and the wreck would’ve scraped us—then we’d all be part of the graveyard’s collection.

  “Lock complete. No power response detected.”

  Genichiro and Ahmad rose at once and headed out of the bridge.

  I hustled after them.

  In the hangar, we swapped into suits and grabbed a toolbox. Genichiro moved like a battlefield mechanic—no hesitation, no wasted steps.

  That lack of hesitation was terrifying.

  “Opening it,” he said. “Back up.”

  “Always with the—”

  “Back up,” he repeated, blunt. “You’ll lose fingers.”

  I bit back a retort and did as told.

  The bay was already pressurizing. Metal creaked as the hull equalized with a tired groan. Genichiro slid a tool into the hatch seam and levered.

  The gap widened by a hair.

  Old cold air leaked out.

  Not just cold—stale cold. Like the last breath someone exhaled had frozen and stayed there.

  “You know this,” Genichiro said, voice flat. “Gara XFI-Za-B atmosphere is lethal to humans. Don’t lift your visor.”

  Ahmad tapped his wrist screen. A thin yellow line lit across the deck—quarantine boundary.

  “Containment loop engaged. Filtration at maximum. No breaches detected.”

  “Swab the seam,” Ahmad ordered. “If the cockpit vented anything, I want it logged before we open it wider.”

  Genichiro didn’t argue. He dragged a sampling strip along the hatch gap, then sealed it in a clear capsule with a click.

  The hangar’s filtration system roared, the kind that didn’t merely “clean” air—one that broke compounds down with lasers and refined them back into elements.

  Inside the cockpit, something sat upright.

  Metallic skin.

  A human-shaped face—female.

  Eyes closed.

  Not dead-looking, exactly.

  More like… sleeping.

  Ahmad stepped closer with a diagnostic unit, suit lights painting hard reflections across the figure’s cheekbones. “A Grabhul… kikai (machine-monster) doll.”

  “An android built to channel Grabhul psychic output,” Ahmad said. “Treat it like a weapon that pretends to be a person.”

  “Grabhul… those were the beast-like aliens who can do something like magic, right?”

  The words sounded childish even to me, but the unease in my stomach didn’t care.

  I stared at the face again. “Then why does it look… completely human?”

  Genichiro’s voice came out low. “Yeah. Human. It’s mimicking us.”

  His eyes narrowed behind the visor. “I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  That stopped me colder than the vacuum ever could.

  Genichiro almost never said things like that. He was the type to beat a bad feeling into silence with a wrench.

  Ahmad nodded once. “Check for contamination. Then see if we can bring it online.”

  Bring it online.

  Here, in this graveyard. With this corpse-sleeping doll.

  “…You say that like it’s easy,” I started.

  Genichiro cut me off, blunt as a hammer. “It’s not. That’s why we’re doing it.”

  And the worst part?

  The way he said it was weirdly reassuring.

  Which made me want to punch him even more.