If you stare at the Veins long enough, you start thinking in graphs instead of thoughts.
Dock Seven’s lattice is wrong even before it lights.
I can feel it in my teeth.
Stretched intervals. Forced harmonics. Someone’s shoved Nameris-derived geometry into infrastructure that was never meant to carry this much silence.
“Two minutes to scheduled calibration,” I say, eyes flicking over the ugly spike building on my slate. “MAINT-CAL-99 is not a calibration. It’s a full-field ignition.”
Kaien doesn’t look away from the bay.
From up on the secondary gantry we’ve claimed as our vantage point, Dock Seven looks like any other junk ring: cargo stacks, battered loaders, the Skybreaker chained to its clamps like it might bite someone. Dock workers hustle. The air stinks of lubricants, old storms
