The first thing I notice about Dock Seven-Lumen is that it pretends to be loud.
From the viewport, it looks like every other fringe salvage dock I’ve seen: patchwork plates, exposed scaffolding, too many cables and not enough structural sense. Beacons flicker a little off-sequence. The main bay doors have been repainted so many times you can see three different company logos fighting under the current one.
But underneath all that, the silence sits like a bruise.
I feel it through the hull before we even finish the final approach—a thin, overclean stretch in the Veins, like someone scrubbed a patch of resonance until it squeaked.
“Shadow, talk to me,” Kaien says from the forward console. He wears Sera’s spare captain harness over a plain dark jacket. No Aetherion sigil showing. Nothing
