With one boot propped up on a crate and the other bracing against the metal grating, Hunter crouched low under the weak, milky white light of the engine room. She had been breathing in too much ionized metal, which was never a good sign. Some things were in dire need for some tinkering.

  One of her backpack appendages held a flickering blue flashlight steady, while the other three worked inside the open panel of the ship’s jump drive. One twisted a rusted bolt loose, another held a diagnostic scanner, and the third reached deeper inside, searching for the real problem.

  Her ‘backpack’, which was in fact not a backpack and just a backpack-shaped gear, had more than just the signal jammer she’d used the first day she met Gravel. She would call herself a good technician, but in reality, these neurally-controlled appendages would often do plenty of heavy lifting. She liked them, but not nearly enough to warrant all those tentacle jokes Gravel had been slinging around.

  She felt it before she saw it—her appendage brushing against something that wasn’t supposed to be that hot. “Shit,” she muttered, retracting it quickly before she lost another actuator to melted wiring.

  A voice cut through the grumble of the engine room. “Is there a problem?”

  Hunter turned her head just enough to see Priest standing by the doorway, hands in his pockets, looking like he had wandered in by accident. He hadn’t, of course. He never did anything by accident.

  “There might be,” she admitted, rolling her shoulders. “If I don’t fix up this phase relay regulator, we might not even be able to initiate a jump next time we're in a pinch.” One of her appendages lifted the burnt-out component for emphasis. “It’s holding on by, like, two stubborn screws and my blind optimism.”

  “We have not needed a space jump for months. Why do you fix it now?” He asked.

  “Gravel put me to it.”

  “As he should. You should have done your periodic maintenance two weeks ago.”

  “I know.”

  “Nobody knows where we will need to initiate a space jump.”

  “I know.”

  “Your next scheduled maintenance is five days from now.”

  “I know.”

  “You use your appendages too much, and you might forget how to use your real hands. It will not be a nice feeling.”

  “I know.” Hunter’s fingers twitched, and one of the appendages twitched with them.

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  She felt an iota of guilt gnaw at her, small but sharp as the edge of a stripped screw. She had slacked off. Again.

  The past week had been a rinse-and-repeat routine of sleeping and reading—mostly old books she’d meant to get through months ago. When she ran out of those, she’d started picking at the ship’s archives, skimming through magazine snippets about the galaxy’s new physical currency standards. Apparently, tantalum was shaping up to be the next big thing, some high-density, corrosion-resistant metal that was easier to authenticate than the last fiasco with counterfeit palladium ducats. She’d never cared about money before. But the moment Gravel reminded her about maintenance, suddenly, she had all the time in the world to take a deep dive into interstellar economic policies.

  Not that I wanted to slack off, she thought to herself, jaw tightening as she wrenched a panel loose. I was just stressed.

  Stressed about being on the ground.

  Being in a tropical jungle, more specifically.

  It poked her wound in peculiar ways.

  Hunter grunted as she reached deeper into the open panel, one appendage holding a wrench steady while another twisted a corroded bolt loose. A third appendage snaked inside, feeling around for the exact spot where the power relay was shorting out.

  “Could be a bad capacitor,” she said even though Priest didn’t ask, gripping a component and giving it a firm tug. It didn’t budge. “Could be a miscalibrated field coil. Could be the universe just screwing with me because it knows I’m the one stuck fixing it.” She yanked. Something inside gave way with an unsettling snap, and the burnt-out relay came free, trailing a mess of singed wires and carbon scoring. She tossed the ruined part onto the deck with a clatter.

  Priest fixed his gaze on the writhing appendages at Hunter’s back. “You once claimed you acquired that system in Vyleri,” he said, hands still in his pockets, his voice steady but probing.

  “Yup.”

  A second of silence passed. Then, he said, “You lied.”

  Hunter’s grip on the relay tightened. Not out of guilt—bracing for impact.

  He must have looked through the records, being the tech-obsessed machine of a man he was.

  “Vyleri is a tech haven, yes. But it exports more fruits than neural-linked tech,” Priest continued.

  Hunter rolled her eyes. “What, you don't think I got it in a back alley from some guy selling black-market mods between smoothie stands?”

  Priest gave her a blank stare.

  She shouldn’t have gone with that lie. It would have never flied. If Priest could take steroids to enhance his mechanical performance, he probably would. Somehow she just thought he was just asking about her appendages for the sake of it. He clearly wasn’t.

  Hunter sighed, pulling a bundle of fried wiring out of the engine and setting it aside. “Well, maybe I was misremembering.”

  “Neural-linked tech is military grade, Hunter,” finally, he said.

  "And I was a military woman," Hunter said as she reached for a replacement wire.

  The conversation dropped there. Nobody said anything else.

  Hunter tightened the last bolt into place with a sharp twist. The phase relay regulator was secure, wires were neatly reconnected, and the fresh component hummed with a steady, reassuring current that didn’t sound like its lungs were on strike. One of her appendages closed the panel shut.

  She reached for her water bottle, took a sip, and only then did she notice the empty doorway.

  Priest was gone.