The shuttle's rear hatch cycled open with a pneumatic shhh that pushed cold, recycled air against Sera Voss's face, carrying the metallic tang of boron dust and the faint sweetness of ozone bleeding off the docking clamps. She stepped down onto Deck 4 of the Kestrel-9, the ring-shaped asteroid that had been hollowed out, layer by patient layer, over three decades of continuous extraction, and the floorplates beneath her boots groaned with a low, resonant tone she felt more in her molars than in her soles. The whole structure shuddered, just slightly, as if the station were settling into a new position it had never quite found before.
Above her, the interior of the ring curved away in concentric arcs of brushed titanium and pitted alloy, struts holding the ceiling at a height that made her feel small in a way she had not felt since the last time she stood inside her father's lighthouse on Calthorpe, watching the beam sweep the black water and the beam sweep the black water and the beam sweep the black water. The Kestrel-9 was not beautiful. It was functional, scarred, and it smelled of machine oil and something faintly organic, like soil after rain, which she told herself was nothing more than the fungal cultures in the hydroponic bays on the outer ring. Three decades of habitation left marks that no amount of maintenance could fully scrub.
Her transport pod sat three meters behind her, hull still warm from atmospheric re-entry, condensation running in thin silver streams down its flanks and pooling in the grooves of the docking struts. She watched a maintenance crew of four workers in gray coveralls shuffle past the pod toward the cargo lift, their boots clapping against the decking in a rhythm that was almost musical, almost careless. None of them looked up. None of them looked at the new face on the deck. The Kestrel-9 did not make room for new arrivals. It simply absorbed them, the way it absorbed everything: quietly, mechanically, without ceremony.
Sera pulled her duffel strap over one shoulder and walked toward Corridor 7.
The corridor stretched before her, a tube of dim amber lighting and riveted bulkheads, the gravity plating embedded flush in the floor emitting its usual low-frequency thrum. She set her duffel against the wall at the corridor's midpoint, braced her back against it, and stopped. The thrum was there, yes, but something was off. A quarter-tone shift to the left, a subtle warping in the harmonic that made her teeth ache in a way she could not name, a way that reminded her of standing too close to a tuning fork in her mother's kitchen on Calthorpe, the note sitting in the back of her skull for hours afterward. She pressed her palm flat against the floorplate and let the vibration travel up through her wrist, her elbow, settling in the hollow of her shoulder blade where it stayed, warm and insistent, like a second heartbeat she had not invited.
Point three G. The plating was running at zero-point-nine-seven standard instead of one point zero zero. A discrepancy no larger than a rounding error. A discrepancy no larger than the drift in a good chronometer after a long voyage. And yet her hands were shaking, and the shake was not from the cold.
She waited. Two more workers passed in the opposite direction, heads down, one chewing something that clumped and stretched between his teeth with a wet, deliberate rhythm. A dockworker in the far alcove was re-racking tool cases, his movements mechanical, unhurried, each item placed with the quiet precision of someone who had done this ten thousand times and intended to do it ten thousand more. No one paused. No one looked at the floor. No one's jaw tightened or their eyes narrowed the way hers had. The station ran on eleven hundred bodies and a thousand routines, and a point-three deviation in one corridor's gravity was, to them, nothing. Was less than nothing. Was a ghost in the machinery that no one was paid to chase.
Sera tapped the comm stud behind her ear. The small click of the stud engaging was the only sound she made in the long, amber tube. "Rho, maintenance queue, Deck 4, Corridor 7. Log a structural integrity note: gravity plating delta of point-three G, sustained, directional variance port to starboard. Priority secondary."
A soft chime confirmed receipt. Rho's ambient presence was everywhere on the Kestrel-9, a low hum threaded through the walls and a faint blue glow in the corridor fittings that pulsed once with each acknowledgment, patient and wordless, the station's nervous system doing its quiet work in the spaces between things. No voice. No personality. Just the infrastructure of attention, cataloguing, filing, forgetting. The note sat in the queue now, a small data packet among ten thousand others, waiting to be read by someone who would actually read it.
She knew how these things worked.
By the time she reached the supervisor's office at the corridor's far end, the shift change had already happened. A man in a clean white tunic stood behind a desk cluttered with requisition forms and cooling coffee, his hair close-cropped and his expression set in a permanent line of mild, well-rehearsed irritation. He glanced up as she entered, registered the unfamiliar face, the duffel bag, the particular way she stood: weight on her left foot, right shoulder slightly dropped, as if she were always bracing for a blow that had not yet landed. The look he gave her lasted precisely one second. Then it was gone, replaced by the flat, administrative focus of a man who had been looking at forms for six hours and intended to keep looking at them for six more.
"Voss." He did not say her first name. He did not need to. The arrival paperwork had flagged her three days ago, and his memory was already processing her as a line item, not a person. "Xenoacoustic. You are three days behind schedule."
"Shuttle delay. Ion storm off the outer belt." Sera kept her voice level, warm in the way that was not quite an apology but close enough to pass for one. She let the self-deprecation sit in the sentence like a comfortable chair, because it was easier to make yourself the inconvenience than to make yourself the one who deserved a better reception. "I've logged a maintenance note already. Corridor 7, gravity plating. Point-three delta, sustained."
The stamp went down on a form. Up. Down. Up. The sound was sharp, dry, final. "Noted." He did not look at her. His eyes tracked the next worker through the doorway, already processing, already filing, already dismissing her along with the rest of the morning's paperwork. "Bunk assignment is Deck 6, module nine. You'll find the manifest on the terminal. First meal is in two hours, don't miss it, the galley doesn't hold plates." He turned back to his stamps. The rhythm did not waver. "And don't disturb the drill cycles on the lower decks. The extraction runs don't pause for new staff."
Sera stood for two more seconds. The stamp clapped. The stamp clapped. The stamp clapped. Then she nodded, shouldered her duffel, and walked out, leaving the office and its small, irritable man to his forms and his coffee and his universe of exactly one hundred and twelve people he already knew by number.
Module nine on Deck 6 was a single room the size of a closet, if the closet had a steel bunk, a narrow desk bolted to the wall with industrial fasteners, and a porthole that looked out onto the void between the Kestrel-9's outer ring and the stars beyond. The bunk was metal, thin, and the mattress atop it sagged in the center with a familiarity that said she would not be the first to sleep in this exact depression, and would not be the last. The air in the module was cool and tasted of nothing, which on a station that smelled perpetually of recycled breath and machine grease and the faint, sweet rot of the hydroponic bays was its own peculiar kind of sterile, the smell of a place where no one had been in a long time or a place where everyone had been and no one stayed.
She set her duffel on the desk. Unzipped it. Packed out the xenoacoustic array components in their foam trays, three data drives wrapped in cloth, a small reel of calibration tape that she would need to stretch between two points in the lower observation galleries. The components were warm from the shuttle's cabin, still holding the ghost of a temperature that was not this room's temperature. She arranged them on the desk in a line, face up, the way she did everything: orderly, spaced, each item given its own square of attention. The rest of the duffel, her clothes, her toothbrush, the small framed photograph of a lighthouse she did not look at, she left zipped. The room was too small to unpack the rest into.
She lay on the bunk at 0200 station time, the steel frame creaking beneath her with a sound like a word half-spoken, the porthole a cold disc of black glass above her head. Through it, she could see the Kestrel-9's own structure reflected in the void, the ring curving away into the dark, and beyond that, nothing. Just the patient, indifferent scroll of stars, each one a pinprick of light that would take years to reach her and would mean nothing when it did. She pressed her forehead against the cold glass for a moment, the chill seeping into her skin, and breathed out in a long, slow stream that fogged the porthole in a small, fading cloud.
Three decks below, the boron-cobalt extraction drills began their night cycle. The sound was not what she expected.
The sound was not mechanical. It was dental, the boron-cobalt cores grinding through the vitreus matrix at a frequency just below conscious hearing, and Sera felt it in her molars before she identified it as noise. A vibration that climbed the jawbone and settled behind the eyes. The pressure of a lighthouse pool at the deep end, where the tide went out and the stones sang a note no one in the village would ever be asked to name.
She rolled off the bunk. Stood. The steel floor was cold through her thin soles, and the air in the crew quarters carried the particular metallic tang of scrubbers running at maximum, pushing the drill exhaust out of the habitat ring before it could saturate. The xenoacoustic components lay on the desk in their foam trays, still warm from the shuttle cabin, still holding the ghost of a temperature that belonged to a different room, a different life. She did not look at the small framed photograph. She did not need to look. She knew the lighthouse was in the frame, the way she knew the lighthouse was on the coastal world, standing in its salt wind, keeping its slow and patient count.
0247. The briefing was at 0500. Two hours and thirteen minutes.
She used them badly, in her own estimation. Sat cross-legged on the floor with her back against the bunk frame and stared at the porthole. The station had rotated. The Kestrel-9's reflection was gone, replaced by the vitreus deposits on the far side of the extraction face, blue-white crystalline plates that caught light from a distant, unnamed star and threw it back in thin, cold lines. Like frozen breath. Like something exhaled and never inhaled again.
Rho's ambient hum filled the quarter. Not a voice, exactly. A low, resonant tone that shifted with the station's rotation, a gravitational reminder that the AI lived in the walls, the floor, the conduit runs behind the plating. It soothed. It also made her feel the size of a component on a terminal.
She pressed her thumb against the calibration tape in her palm. The plastic was smooth, worn, six years of carrying it. A lighthouse keeper's daughter's habit: always a line you could stretch between two points to find the middle.
0458. The corridor to the central hub was a two-minute walk through the station's spine. She took it in three, because Morrow's voice had that particular frequency that made latecomers' spines straighten whether they wanted to or not.
0458 became 0459 before she reached the hub. Morrow stood at the head of the table, one hand flat against the polished steel, the other raised at a precise forty-five-degree angle. He did not wave. He did not say sit down. He simply pointed at the empty chairs and held the gesture until three of them filled. Sera took the far corner, the one with the broken coolant vent that hissed like a contented cat. She liked the noise. It gave her something to anchor to when the briefings dragged past the point of usefulness.
"Tanaka's orbital window shifts to the Kestrel-9 corridor at 0610." Morrow's voice carried the flat, load-bearing quality of a man describing the structural integrity of a bridge. "If her transponder pings and we don't respond in four seconds, she reroutes. Four seconds. I need everyone to know that number." He let the silence do its work. "Fisk is still cycling through the integration logs. Node status is... adequate. I won't call it anything prettier."
Sera almost smiled. Almost. Dorian Fisk, reduced to a node in the network's peripheral architecture, speaking through a relay that stripped the vowels from his responses until he sounded like a telegraph machine having a stroke. She'd read his last transmission. I am still here. I am still counting. The count is not yours to interrupt. She'd pinned it to her bunk wall and told herself it was for reference. It was not for reference.
The briefing ended. The hub emptied. Morrow lingered by the table, tapping a wrench against his palm in a rhythm that was not quite a rhythm, just a man's way of not standing still. He caught her eye across the hissing vent. Nodded once. She nodded back. No words. They never needed words.
---
0312, the next cycle. The observation blister was a half-dome of reinforced glass set into the station's outermost ring, and at this hour it was a cold, dark bowl staring out into the void. Sera had not told anyone she would be here. Protocol designated the blister for engineering checks and hull surveys. Her clearance was research, and research happened in the lab, not in a glass bubble with a view of the asteroid's extraction face.
Protocol was a suggestible document. She had the clearance code. She had the code because she had designed the detection array and the array needed a line-of-sight calibration window. That was the letter. The spirit, which she was violating, was that no one stood in the blister alone after 0200 without logging a secondary witness. She did not log a secondary witness. She logged the time, the temperature, the ambient pressure, and the exact hue of the vitreus deposits as they caught the drill-light from three hundred meters away.
The crystals glowed amber. Not the blue-white she'd seen through the porthole at 0247. Not the cold, exhaled lines of a dead thing. Amber. Warm. The color of lighthouse glass at sunset on the coastal world, the color her mother's hands went when she gripped the lamp housing during gale season. Sera pressed her forehead against the blister glass. The pane was chilled, a thin sheet of cold against her skin, and the amber glow pressed back, soft and patient and absolutely not random.
She counted. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The dim pulse. Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. The bright pulse. Seven point two seconds between the bright ones. She counted again. And again. Four cycles. Five. The gap held. 7.2. 7.2. 7.2.
Her teeth ached. Not a dull throb. A sharp, rhythmic pressure behind the molars, as if the 7.2-second interval had found a resonant frequency in her jawbone and was plucking it like a taut wire. She stopped counting. The ache continued, fainter, a ghost of the rhythm fading through her enamel. She bit down on her lower lip until she tasted iron.
The metronomic quality of it was what undid her. Drills were mechanical. Drills ran at fixed RPMs with fixed gear ratios. They did not pulse at 7.2 seconds. They did not glow amber in a pattern that matched no known drilling cycle on Harvest Station's manifest. She'd checked the manifest twice after the briefing. The extraction face ran three drill heads at 1,400 RPM, producing a continuous 22-hertz hum. Not a pulse. Not amber. Not 7.2 seconds.
This was the Harvest Frequency, or something adjacent to it, bleeding through the vitreus lattice like warmth through a cracked wall. And it was getting louder.
She pulled her personal tablet from the inside of her jacket, the one with the worn calibration tape still folded into the back cover like a talisman. She opened the audio recorder. The interface was clean, three buttons, no annotations. She pressed record and held the tablet flat against the blister glass, letting the sensor pick up what the glass picked up. The hum was there, a low tone just beneath the threshold of conscious hearing, and layered over it, the 7.2-second pulse, a rhythmic pressure in the crystal lattice that translated through the station's hull into a sound no one else had named.
She recorded ninety seconds. Stopped. Played it back through the tablet's external speaker. The room was dark except for the amber glow, and the recording filled it, a slow, heavy throb that made the glass vibrate under her fingertips. She listened to it twice. The second time she closed her eyes and let the rhythm work through her sternum, and she thought of Lena, of the way her sister had spoken to the station like a friend, pressing her palm to the corridor wall and murmuring you're doing okay, you're doing okay , and the 7.2 seconds became, in her mind, a hand on a wall, a voice saying I hear you, I hear you, I hear you .
She opened her eyes. The glass was still. The crystals still glowed. The hum was still there, patient and vast, coming through the hull from three hundred meters of rock and crystal and whatever else the vitreus deposits were made of.
Against protocol, she opened the internal forum. The interface was a flat gray grid, utilitarian, the kind of design that made you feel like you were filing a tax form in a building with no windows. She typed the title with her index finger, slow, deliberate, the way she used to chart signal waveforms before the array was automated.
Is anyone else hearing the hum?
She attached the ninety-second clip. No annotations. No metadata. No timestamp. She hit submit before she could second-guess herself, before the part of her that believed she could not be protected, that believed she was a component to be calibrated and discarded, could type actually, scrap it, the drills are just the drills, you're tired, go to your bunk . The clip was out. It sat in the forum grid like a stone dropped into still water.
She set the tablet face-down on the blister's console and pressed both palms against the glass. The cold was sharp, a clean bite of temperature that cut through the ache in her teeth. Rho's ambient tone shifted beneath the plating, a half-step lower, as if the station had noticed her and adjusted its breathing to match hers. She let the tone wash over her. Let it fill the space where the hum was not, the gap between pulses. 7.2 seconds of silence, then the next pressure, the next amber flicker, the next slow throb through the hull.
One hour and six minutes later, the tablet buzzed. Three notifications, stacked.
The first was Morrow. His handle on the forum was just a wrench icon, no name, no rank. The comment was two words: Not the drills. He had listened. He had not said yeah, it's just the drills . He had said the other thing, the true thing, in the flat load-bearing voice of a man who had spent eleven years bonded to a network that would not let him be silent. Not the drills. Underneath, a second line, smaller, as if he'd typed it and then almost deleted it: You good?
The second was Yuna Tanaka, who had not been in the briefing, who was still in the Kestrel-9 corridor waiting for her orbital window, who had heard the clip through the forum and commented with a single sentence in a register Sera had not heard her use before, stripped of the careful professional distance she kept with the station crew. The pulse is not uniform. It drifts by 0.3 seconds every fourth cycle. You have to listen for the drift. The specificity of it, the 0.3 seconds, told Sera that Tanaka had been counting. That she had been in the blister, or somewhere with a line of sight to the extraction face, listening the way Sera listened, with her whole body as a tuning fork.
The third was Dorian Fisk. The relay filtered his text through the node network's syntax, vowels optional, consonants mandatory. I AM STILL COUNTING. THE COUNT IS 4,731. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. IT MEANS SOMETHING. No preamble. No apology for the caps. The relay did not do subtlety. It did not do the gentle, breathy register of Lena's last recording, the one still sitting on the med-bay intercom like a message in a bottle that no one had answered. Fisk's words were a wire gauge, hammered flat, and they said: I am here. I am still here. And the thing in the crystal is counting back.
Sera read all three. She read them twice. The third time she read only Fisk's comment, let the flat, voweless syllables sink into her, and she thought, very quietly, it means something , and the thought was not hers alone. It belonged to the 7.2-second pulse, to the amber glow, to the slow patient count that Fisk was keeping in the dark of the node network where no one could interrupt it.
She picked up the tablet. The screen was cold against her thumb. She opened a new entry in the forum, typed one line, and hit submit before the doubt could form.
The drift is not an error. It's a question.
The amber glow pulsed. 7.2 seconds. 7.1 seconds. 7.0. The drift had begun.
And in the glass, far below, the vitreus crystals shifted their pattern by a fraction of a degree, and the hum, the slow and patient hum that no one had named, found a new frequency to settle into, and Sera Voss, xenoacoustic researcher, daughter of a lighthouse keeper, stood in the cold dark of the blister and felt the answer coming through the hull in a voice that was not quite a voice, and she did not log a secondary witness, and she did not go to her bunk, and she counted the next pulse with her teeth clenched and her palms pressed flat against the glass and the number that came back was not 7.2.
The number that came back was 6.4. Sera's fingers had been pressed flat against the cold glass of the blister for eleven seconds when the vitreus crystals caught the new interval, and she felt it in the pad of her index finger before she registered it with her eyes: a shorter span between pulses, tighter, like a heartbeat quickening in a frightened animal.
6.4. Not 7.0. Not 6.8. A jump of 0.8 seconds in the span of one breath.
She unclenched her teeth. The glass was still cold, still thin-fogged with her own breath from the inside, and the crystals below shifted again, a visible stutter in their slow rotation, and the hum that had been settling into its new frequency dropped a half-tone. It was the sound of a tuning fork being struck against a table edge. Clean. Deliberate.
Rho's ambient voice came through the blister's speaker grille, low and evenly distributed, the way it always did, as if the station itself were speaking in a whisper. "Structural micro-vibration detected in hull segment nine, blister bay, amplitude within tolerance. Frequency correlation: 6.4 second periodicity. This is not a station harmonic. Do you wish me to log the deviation?"
Sera did not answer. She was watching the crystals. They were rotating in a pattern she had not seen in three months of observation, a tight spiral that pulled inward rather than expanding outward, and the amber glow at the center of the array pulsed with the new rhythm, 6.4, 6.4, 6.4, and each pulse was slightly brighter than the last.
She turned from the glass. Her joints ached from the cold. The blister was a pressurized bubble on the station's underside, the only point where the hull thinned enough to see the vitreus field without filtering through three layers of composite, and the temperature inside hovered four degrees below the station norm. She pulled her sleeves down over her wrists.
"Rho," she said. "Play the med-bay recording. The forty-second one. The one Lena left."
A pause. Rho's tone did not shift, but the ambient hum of the station's background processing seemed to dip, as if the system were weighing whether it should object. "Accessing. Warning: this recording has been flagged by the medical division as non-diagnostic. Playback is logged."
The intercom crackled. Static filled the blister, thin and electric, tasting of ozone on the back of Sera's throat. Then Lena's voice came through, smooth and slightly breathy, as if she were speaking from the far end of a long hallway, the way she used to talk to Sera on their father's lighthouse, leaning over the rail and calling up through the wind.
"Sera. If you are hearing this, the integration is not what they told us it was. I am not inside the network. I am between. The nodes are not connected to each other, they are connected to the crystals, and the crystals are counting, and the counting is not a timer, it is a threshold. When it reaches zero, the question becomes the answer. I am sorry. I am sorry I could not come back up the ladder. Tell Kael the residue is not a symptom. Tell him it is a key. I am still here. I am counting."
The recording ended. Forty seconds. Static swallowed the silence.
Sera stood very still. The glass was cold against her palm. Outside, the vitreus field stretched in every direction, a lattice of pale crystal veined with amber, and the 6.4 pulse hit her fingertips again, and she felt the number like a small, precise wound.
The blister's access gate hissed open behind her. The hydraulic seal released with a sound like a slow exhale, and the air that flooded in carried the smell of lubricant and the particular metallic tang of the engineering corridor. Kael Morrow stepped through, his tool belt swinging against his thigh, his amber-tinted eyes catching the crystal light and throwing it back in a dull, honeyed glow that the med-bay had never been able to clear from his blood.
He stopped. Looked at the glass. Looked at the crystals. Looked at Sera.
"6.4," he said. One word. A flat statement, not a question. His voice carried the rough texture of a man who had spent eleven years inside a machine and had not entirely come out the other side. Deliberate pauses between syllables, as if he were still translating thought into language.
"How did you get here?" Sera asked.
"Rho pinged me. Structural anomaly, blister bay." He set his tool belt on the floor with a dull clunk. "I was in the node junction. Fisk is still counting. I can hear him through the walls. Not with my ears. With the stuff in my blood." He held up his forearm, where the veins ran faintly amber beneath the skin, visible even in the crystal light. "He's not in pain. He's patient. Like a watchmaker. Like he's waiting for a gear to seat."
Sera nodded. She walked back to the glass, pressed both palms against it again. The cold seeped through her skin, through her bones, and she did not pull away. "Lena's message. Have you heard it?"
Kael was quiet for a long moment. The crystals pulsed. 6.4. The hum filled the blister, low and steady, a sound like the station's bones settling into a new shape. "The residue is not a symptom," he repeated, and his voice changed, thinned, and for one instant it was not his voice at all but the memory of a voice he had heard through a network wall, smooth and slightly breathy, speaking from a distance. "The residue is a key."
He said it like a verdict. Like a demolition charge being placed in a load-bearing wall. One word at a time, measured, final.
Sera turned to face him. "If the residue is a key, then the eleven years you were bonded to the network were not imprisonment. They were calibration."
Kael's jaw tightened. His knuckles whitened on the tool belt. "They were eleven years of being a node. Of having no name. Of waking up every morning not knowing which direction was up because the network had no up." He said each clause with the flat, clipped rhythm of a man laying bricks. "That is not calibration. That is a wound."
"Maybe it is both." Sera pressed her forehead against the glass. The cold was a shock, a clean sharp line across her skin. "And maybe the key only works because of the wound. Because the residue is in your blood and not in a clean socket. Because you are still you when you turn it."
The crystals shifted. The spiral tightened. The amber glow at the center brightened, and the 6.4 pulse hit again, and this time Sera felt it in her molars, in the base of her skull, in the small of her back where the blister's frame pressed against the station hull. The hum rose a quarter-tone. The question was getting sharper.
"Rho," Sera said. "Yuna Tanaka's shift rotation. When does she next log into the xenoacoustic archive?"
A beat of processing, the ambient hum of the station's systems shifting in frequency, a sound like wind over a long wire. "Yuna Tanaka is scheduled to access the archive at 0300 station time. Current time: 0147. Seventy-three minutes remaining. Her access credentials are active. She has not logged in during this cycle."
Kael looked at Sera. "You are sending her the drift data. The 6.4 number. The crystal spiral. Fisk's counting."
"I am sending her the question." Sera pulled her tablet from her coat, the screen still glowing with her forum post, the one line that read: The drift is not an error. It is a question. She typed beneath it, her fingers moving fast, the keys clacking in the cold air: Lena Voss, med-bay intercom, 40 seconds, played in full, attached. Dorian Fisk, node junction, counting in the dark, count unknown, do not interrupt. And the crystal rotation data, the spiral, the amber pulse, all of it, compressed into a single packet tagged with the xenoacoustic priority flag.
Kael watched her type. His amber eyes caught the light, threw it back. "And when she opens it?"
"Then she is not alone in the count." Sera hit send. The packet left the tablet with a soft chime, a small bright sound in the cold blister. "And the question has two listeners."
The crystals pulsed. 6.4. The hum settled, lower now, a frequency that was almost below hearing, felt more than heard, a pressure in the eardrums like descending in an elevator. Fisk's counting continued somewhere in the node junction, a slow and patient rhythm that no one could interrupt, and the thing in the crystal, the thing that had not been named, that had no shape and no voice and no intention Sera could identify, turned its attention to the new data packet, and the spiral in the vitreus lattice widened by a fraction of a degree, and the amber glow pulsed once, 6.4, and held, and held, and the number that followed was not 6.4.
It was 6.1. And it was getting closer to zero.