Chapter 2

Her feet remembered the old rhythm, like the rescue routes across ash pathways and lantern-bridges. That same tug now pulled her toward shelter. With her belly full, the grasslands gave way easily: long swales, ribboned streams, and fog that thickened where the land cupped the wind. Patches were unfriendly, such as the tufts of flora that pulsed and then belched green, acrid clouds. She slid wide around those, recalling ADA’s earlier “caution” about the gas.

Metal winked on the low side of a rolling hill. Just a sliver at first, then a clean geometry that no rock could fake. The closer she came, the more it came into focus: a squat, angular structure nested into the slope.

“The HUB. Congratulations on locating your employee base of operations.” ADA said, dry as stamped paper.

Inside, the place breathed a cool, manufactured brightness… This was a kind of light she couldn’t feel the way she felt one running on magic. One big room: the humming terminal and desk; lockers; a tidy living corner. Two bunks stacked into an alcove, plus a little pantry face and cabinets, most of it more decoration than kit. “Reminder,” ADA added with helpful heartlessness. “Sleep is non-billable. Consider optimizing downtime for improved uptime.”

A smaller door opened onto a cubby with a porcelain throne. The water sat high. No pit. Reaper blinked, shrugged, and tried it. A rush, a whirl, clean water returning like nothing had happened. Fancier than any baron’s manse back home. ADA refused to miss the moment: “Sanitation interaction successful. Note: hygiene positively correlates with survival and morale… Mostly for your colleagues.”

“A little privacy,” Reaper murmured, and then remembered there was a voice in her head that filed her thoughts like incident reports.

She lay down on the lower bunk. The sun was still up. She had fought through one night already, back where the air tasted of soot. By the time her eyes opened again, the friendly parts of the world had moved on.

Night. Not hers. The sky wore unfamiliar jewelry. No constellations she knew, and there was another distant body, a second wandering lantern that wasn’t her sun at all. ADA, unflapped: “Restatement: you are on MASSAGE-2 (A-B)b, a habitable planet in the Akycha binary system. Expect a distinct day-night cadence and variable fog thickness.” Reaper gasped in wonder and terror. The blink hadn’t taken her across a sea; it had skipped her between stars. There was, pragmatically, no way back. Unless she could pull off that extreme of a shadow step again.

Footsteps from around a corner. A human silhouette crossed the threshold, baggy kit and a helmeted head, the weight distribution reading woman to Reaper’s quick, appraising eye.

The clang hit before the thought finished. Metal on metal, a fat bolt ricocheting off Reaper’s shoulder guard hard enough to make her arm ring. Instinct took over: a sidestep, a half-turn, and she vanished into the thin seam between artificial light and her own shadow. The incoming slug chewed a fist-sized divot in the wall behind her and stuck there humming. Crude, sure, but dense; the kind of projectile that won by momentum.

Reaper snuck behind the intruder, scythe already aiming for the assassination…

“Advisory to both parties,” ADA said, suddenly everywhere. “Pioneer-on-pioneer harm is strongly discouraged. Exceptions: FICSIT-approved termination of employment.”

The woman froze. Then her shoulders slumped with the same long oh Reaper had just had about the sky. She holstered the gun, undogged the helmet, and pulled it off. Human. Brown hair flattened by padding. Tired eyes.

Reaper let the veil lift and stepped into view, chains settling like well-trained snakes. Her diminutive stature in comparison to the larger woman was apparent.

The stranger blinked at her ears, at the scythes, at everything. “ADA?” she asked the room, half-accusation. “Why doesn’t she look like me?”

ADA responded, only mildly entertained, “Other pioneers typically present a standardized phenotype. Reaper is… pioneer-adjacent.”

The woman raised an eyebrow, her features plain but not without beauty, “FICSIT hired an intern?”