The Seedling Dark
When Adun Kael's cryo-lid cracks open, the light bleeding into the chamber is wrong. Three weeks of stasis across the Kepler Rim was supposed to be a soft, blue-shifted dream. Instead, the reactor lamp burns arterial red, the hull hums at the wrong frequency, and something is breathing in the spaces between bulkheads. Adun was supposed to sleep straight through to the jump point. He didn't. Now he is alone on a derelict vessel drifting through coordinates no chart recognizes, and the other five pods are still sealed. When Mara Voss, Dain Okafor, Lira Senn, Jethro Hale, and Yuki Tan finally wake, they bring six different versions of the same memory: a routine transit that should have taken three weeks. The ship disagrees. The reactor disagrees. Something rooted in the dark behind the hull disagrees loudest of all. The seedling dark has been patient. It has had time, more time than any of them were promised, to learn the shape of every breath they take. To make it home, the crew will have to trust each other across silences none of them remember keeping. The alternative is to become part of whatever is growing.