Tess Rivera had made exactly three mistakes that night.

  First, assuming the pawn shop on Sector Seven would take a refurbished capacitor without asking questions. Second: not noticing the Kellmar Brothers’ tags spray-painted on half the damn alley. And third—the critical one—not immediately trying to run when Big Yuri stepped out of the shadows with his friends and their shiny new stun batons.

  She vaulted over a pile of discarded crates, her boots skidding on something wet she didn’t want to identify. Behind her, heavy footsteps echoed off the narrow walls of Tertius-Prime’s lower industrial district. The neon sign for “Tak’s Noodles” flickered in bright pink overhead—casting strobing shadows across her path.

  “Just hand it over!” one of them shouted. “It’s not worth the trouble!”

  It’s worth forty credits, Tess thought, ducking under a sagging awning. And you’re not getting it.

  The capacitor in question sat heavy in her tool belt, a neat little cylinder she’d spent four hours rewiring and another two testing. It was good work. Clean work. The kind that should’ve fetched enough credits to keep the freighter’s lights on for another week.

  Instead, she was sprinting through Tertius-Prime’s guts at midnight while three idiots with weapons decided that stealing was easier than paying.

  She hooked left into a maintenance alley, one of the countless forgotten veins that ran between the city’s decaying buildings. The walls here were bare ferrocrete, old and cracked, with bundles of exposed wiring sagging like dead vines. A few still sparked occasionally, throwing brief flashes of blue-white light into the darkness.

  The footsteps behind her grew fainter. Good. They were losing ground. Tess might not have a class, but she knew Tertius-Prime’s lower sectors like she knew the back of her father’s freighter. Every shortcut, dead end, and broken panel you could squeeze through if you didn’t mind getting filthy.

  She slowed to a jog, then a walk, breathing hard. Her scanner—a jerry-rigged piece of tech strapped to her left wrist—beeped once, showing her heart rate spiking. She tapped it twice to silence the alarm.

  “Idiots,” she muttered, leaning against a wall to catch her breath. “Who pulls weapons over forty credits?”

  The alley opened onto a small plaza—if you could call it that. Really, it was just a wider section of street where someone had optimistically placed a few benches decades ago. Now those benches were rusted skeletons, and the plaza’s key feature was a battered nutrient paste dispenser mounted to the wall like a mechanical tumor.

  Two figures sat near it. Thin, hollow-eyed. One of them looked up as Tess emerged from the alley, and she recognized him: Old Kev, a scrapper who sometimes traded parts with her father.

  The other was a woman, maybe Tess’s age, with a worn jacket and the exhausted expression that came from too many missed meals.

  The dispenser’s screen flickered weakly, displaying an error message in faded red text.

  SYSTEM FAILURE. DISPENSING HALTED.

  Tess stopped. The dispenser’s error message glowed between her and the two figures hunched nearby.

  “How long’s it been broken?” she asked.

  Kev shrugged. “Three days? Maybe four. City maintenance stopped coming to this sector months ago.”

  The woman said nothing, just watched Tess with the wary attention of someone used to disappointment.

  Tess sighed. She should keep moving. Get home. Make sure her father hadn’t hurt himself trying to repair something.

  Instead, she walked over to the dispenser and pulled out her scanner.

  The device on her wrist was cobbled together from a medical diagnostic tool, a ship’s sensor array, and a few components she’d liberated from broken equipment over the years. It wasn’t pretty. The casing was held together with friction tape and optimism, but at least it worked.

  She aimed it at the dispenser’s maintenance panel and waited while it analyzed the internals.

  Lines of code scrolled across the small screen—energy flow patterns, mechanical diagnostics, and a 3D wireframe of the dispenser’s guts.

  “Clogged feed line,” Tess said after a moment. “Nutrient paste crystallized in the reservoir. Happens when the temperature regulator fails.” She pocketed the scanner and gave the machine a solid kick just below the dispensing chute.

  Something inside clunked, then whirred, and the dispenser’s screen flickered from red to green before it began spitting out sealed packets of nutrient paste with mechanical enthusiasm.

  The woman scrambled forward, catching them before they hit the ground. Kev laughed, though it came out as a dry, raspy sound as he grabbed a few for himself.

  “You’re Marcus’s girl, aren’t you?” Kev said, tearing open a packet. “The one who fixes things.”

  “Tess,” she said. “And yeah.”

  “You’re good at it.” He took a long sip of the paste, grimacing slightly. “Your old man taught you well.”

  Tess shrugged. “He tried.”

  The woman looked up at her. “Thank you.”

  Tess nodded and turned to leave. Behind her, the dispenser continued its mechanical generosity, churning out packets faster than the two of them could collect. Someone else would find them. Someone else who needed them.

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  The walk back to the dock district took another twenty minutes. Tess kept to the shadows, avoiding the major thoroughfares where the Kellmar Brothers might still look for her. The city around her was a patchwork of light and darkness. Neon signs buzzed and flickered in equal measure, while streetlamps struggled to stay lit. Entire blocks had simply gone dark from yet another power outage.

  Tertius-Prime had been beautiful once, or so her father claimed. Back when the dungeon below was still active and pumping Aether up through the city’s veins like blood. Back when House Tertian ruled from their towers and fortune-seekers crowded the streets, hoping to strike it rich in the depths.

  Now? Now it was a corpse on life support, kept barely alive by the dregs of energy leaking from a dungeon everyone swore was “cleared.”

  Tess didn’t believe that. Neither did her father.

  But most people didn’t ask questions. They just survived.

  The dock district sprawled along Tertius-Prime’s eastern edge, a graveyard of ships that would never fly again. Freighters, haulers, and personal transports were all grounded, stripped for parts, or converted into permanent housing for people who couldn’t afford anything better.

  The Rivera’s Reprieve sat near the back, a mid-sized cargo freighter that had seen better decades. Its hull was patched with mismatched plates, and its landing gear had fused to the ferrocrete long ago. But it was theirs, and that mattered.

  Tess climbed the external ladder to the main hatch, punched in the code, and stepped inside.

  The interior smelled of recycled air, machine oil, and the faint tang of ozone from overtaxed electronics. The main corridor was narrow, lined with conduits and access panels. Most of the ship’s original cargo space had been converted into living quarters: Marcus’s workspace on one side, Tess’s cramped room on the other, and a common area that doubled as a kitchen and everything else.

  She found her father in the engine room, which was less of a room and more of a hollowed-out section of the ship’s aft where the main reactor used to sit. Now it housed a tangle of jury-rigged power converters, backup batteries, and a dozen other systems Marcus had installed over the years to keep the lights on.

  He was bent over a converter, coughing into his sleeve.

  “Dad,” Tess said.

  Marcus looked up. He was fifty-something, with gray streaking his dark hair and a weathered face that came from years of breathing dungeon air. His calloused hands were gripping a wrench like he was about to throw it.

  “This Founders-cursed power regulator,” he muttered. “I swear it’s held together by spite at this point.”

  Tess set her tool belt on a nearby shelf and stepped closer. The converter was sparking intermittently; its display screen was showing errors faster than she could read them.

  “When did it start acting up?” she asked.

  “Two hours ago. I’ve rerouted power three times, but it keeps overloading.” He coughed again, harder this time, and had to brace himself against the wall.

  Tess grabbed the wrench from his hand. “Go sit down. I’ll handle it.”

  “Tess…”

  “Dad, go sit down.”

  Marcus grumbled something about stubborn daughters but didn’t argue. He shuffled toward the common area, one hand on the wall for support.

  Tess turned back to the converter and pulled out her scanner. The device beeped, analyzed, and displayed a dozen failing components in cheerful red highlights.

  “Of course,” she muttered.

  The problem wasn’t just the regulator. It was everything. The entire ship was falling apart, one system at a time. Every fix was just buying them a few more days before the next failure.

  She worked fast, rerouting power through a secondary line and bypassing the worst of the damaged circuits. It was just another patch on top of patches but it would hold for now.

  When she finished, the sparking stopped. The converter settled into a low, steady hum.

  Tess wiped her hands on her overalls and walked back to the common area.

  Marcus was sitting at the small table, with a cup of weak tea in front of him. Across the room, near Tess’s quarters, sat a small shape on a charging pad.

  The dog wasn’t a real dog, of course. It was a companion unit made from sleek chrome and black composite, about the size of a beagle, with articulated legs that suggested graceful movement it would never make again. Its design was elegant, almost artistic like it belonged in some corporate executive’s penthouse, not a dying freighter in Tertius-Prime’s dock graveyard. Its smooth panels and LED eyes—which should have glowed soft blue—surrounded a collar interface that probably cost more than Tess made in a month.

  Now those eyes were dark, and the panels had grown scuffed. One of its front legs was bent at the wrong angle, frozen mid-step.

  Tess had found it on a scrap heap three years ago and spent weeks trying to repair it. She’d replaced the power core, rewired the motor functions, even fabricated a new joint for the damaged leg.

  But something in its neural processor was fried beyond her ability to fix. It sat on that charging pad like a monument to her limitations.

  A stark reminder that not everything could be repaired.

  “Still thinking about that thing?” Marcus asked.

  Tess shrugged. “Keeps me humble.”

  “You’re nineteen and can fix half the tech in this district. Humility isn’t your problem.” He took a sip of tea. “How’d the sale go?”

  “Ran into the Kellmar Brothers.”

  Marcus’s expression darkened. “Tess…”

  “I’m fine. They’re idiots with stun batons, not actual threats.” She pulled out the capacitor and set it on the table. “Didn’t get the credits, though.”

  He stared at the device, then at her. “We needed that money.”

  “I know.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. Outside, the distant hum of the city’s failing infrastructure filled the silence—power grids cycling, generators struggling, the ever-present background noise of a place held together by willpower and luck.

  Marcus broke the silence first. “We can’t keep doing this, Tess. Every week it’s something else. The converter. The water recycler. The air recycler. I can barely keep up anymore.”

  “Then I’ll handle more of it.”

  “You shouldn’t have to.” His voice was quiet and tired. “Maybe it’s time we admit we need something more than just good hands and stubbornness.”

  The gray in his hair looked more prominent tonight, and he held himself like standing hurt. Around them, the ship groaned and creaked like an old man’s bones.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  Marcus didn’t answer right away. He just stared at his tea, his jaw working like he was chewing on words he didn’t want to say.

  Finally, he looked up at her.

  “Maybe it’s time you got a class.”

  Her jaw tightened.

  She’d avoided the dungeon for years. Avoided the tutorial. Avoided the whole idea of classes and levels and whatever the hell everyone else did to carve out their place in the galaxy.

  She didn’t need a class to turn a wrench. She didn’t need magic, or skills, or system-granted abilities to fix a busted converter.

  Though, looking at her father now, the exhaustion in his eyes told a different story—the ship was falling apart around them.

  She might not need a class, but they needed something.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  Marcus nodded slowly. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  Tess picked up the capacitor and headed toward her room. Behind her, her father coughed again, the sound following her down the corridor like a ghost.

  Her quarters were barely large enough for a bed, a workbench, and a few shelves crammed with salvaged parts. She set the capacitor on the bench and sat down, staring at the broken companion unit through the open doorway.

  Its dark eyes stared back at nothing.

  Not everything could be fixed.

  But maybe, Tess thought, she could at least try to fix enough.

  She pulled off her boots, lay back on the narrow bed, and listened to the ship groan around her.

  Tomorrow, she’d think about classes, the dungeon, and whatever came next.

  Tonight, she just wanted to sleep.

  Outside, Tertius-Prime flickered and hummed, a dying city built on top of secrets it had learned to ignore.

  And deep below, in the darkness beneath sealed stone and ancient machinery, something waited.

  Something that had been waiting for a very long time.