Xenia | Canar

Her father touched the small, brass-plated algorithm charm around his neck—a relic from before the Fall. "Then stop trying to save us. Start trying to understand."

The cycle was as predictable as orbital decay. At fourteen, she rebuilt the portside maneuvering thruster from scrap. Two days later, the starboard airlock spontaneously decompressed, sucking the chief engineer into the void. At sixteen, she wrote a patch for the navigation array that cut through the radiation interference of the Centauri rings. Within a week, the ship’s water recycler began outputting a thin, acidic brine. Her father, the navigation priest, was the one who found her crying in the crawlspace, surrounded by schematics. xenia canar

Xenia was in the secondary conduit junction, three decks below the reactor. She felt the ship scream —not the mechanical shriek of alarms, but the deep, resonant groan of a dying animal. Her hands moved before her mind caught up. She slammed the emergency bulkhead shut, sealing off the aft cargo bay. She rerouted coolant from the hydroponics to the reactor jacket. She calculated the Corsair ’s firing pattern in her head—they were pacing their shots, four seconds apart. Her father touched the small, brass-plated algorithm charm

She made it worse.

The ship was talking to her. It had learned her name. And it wanted to make a deal. At fourteen, she rebuilt the portside maneuvering thruster

That was the pivot. The moment Xenia Canar stopped being a mechanic and started being a ghost.

The Resolute began to dance .