Three weeks. The board over BAY TWO reads: VND-1R — RETURN TO DUTY (3 WEEKS). Every shift lead has circled it behind the eyes. Procurement is thin, deliveries “pending,” and you can hear stopgaps in the air if you’ve learned the sounds.

  Tikograd’s mood has gone gray at the edges. The radio says nothing to explain why the Directorate is so on edge. People in lines keep their voices low. In the bays, the rumors have just enough facts to sound reasonable: Federated Suns, “rated high,” “in the know.”

  Kara meets me at the gate without greeting. “Gloves on,” she says, already walking. Then, quieter: “Stay close. Since this is your first test all you will do is watch.”

  Bay Two has the Vindicator open like a ribcage. Leg panels off, coolant manifolds exposed, a forest of patched hydraulic wiring where myomer should rest. Red for high-pressure and first to fail under damage, blue for maintaining after red fails, yellow as the stopgap to ensure functionality until it can be repaired—the colors are clean; the system is not. To push this frame back into service on time, the retrofit has to share space with the PPC capacitor’s purge loop. On charts they don’t touch and have enough space. On the machine in front of me, they will cause heat throttling after using the PPC.

  Wei Rong stands at the central bench, relaxed, eyes moving. Chen’s on a ladder with a lamp, peering inside. Qiao has torque sheets clipped to a board. “Uncle” Bao holds a bleed bottle, hose looped high to trap air. Zhen from logistics—ledger tucked under his elbow—hovers with the protocol and safety documentation. A servitor works the pallet jack to hand Chen something.

  “Sequence start,” Kara says, voice clipped enough to cut. “We follow it as written.”

  Nods, short and sharp. People try to push through their fatigue.

  “Return open,” Qiao calls. “Test at low. Accumulator check. Bao, eyes on gauge. Chen, slow feed.”

  “Return open,” Chen echoes, gentle on the bulb. “Feeding.”

  Bao taps the gauge with a knuckle. “There is some noise,” he says. “Twitchy.”

  I watch the needle because Kara taught me. For a breath it trembles—not with pressure, but like nerves. Then it settles.

  Bao sees it too. Our eyes meet for half a second. He doesn’t blink.

  “Go to mid,” Qiao says. “Nice and slow.”

  “Mid,” Chen answers. The valve turns a quarter-turn, careful fingers.

  The hose at the manifold sighs. Then a noise like biting a tin cup in half. A bright white line whips.

  It is not water.

  It paints Zhen across the knees. The arc swings and stripes the servitor full across the chest and throat. The smell comes a heartbeat later—sweet, mineral, wrong. Cloth smokes. Skin turns slick, then the color of boiled meat. It happens quickly.

  Zhen makes a sound I’ve never heard from any grown man. He claws at the belt as if the buckle is the problem. The protocol hits the floor and slides under the bench.

  “Freeze!” Kara’s voice hits bone. Then she’s already dividing the room. “Chen: main cut, now. Bao—neutralizer. Qiao—eyewash, on Zhen. Rong—call infirmary: chemical exposure, severe, one conscious, one unknown. Move.”

  “Cut!” Chen barks, already yanking the main. The white line that was hitting a corner collapses into a dribble.

  “Neutralizer!” Qiao snaps, and we’re both tearing a lid off the bin. “Jun, dump! Cover everything!”

  Granules hit wet and go to paste with a hiss. Qiao drags the eyewash cradle and gets an arm around Zhen, voice dropping into a soft, fast rhythm. “Zhen—eyes here, eyes in—blink, blink, blink. Breathe through your mouth—good—good—keep breathing—”

  “Infirmary,” Rong says into the wall phone, words clipped and stacked. “Bay Two—chemical spray—one severe conscious, one servitor hit—bring chem-test kit, severe contamination.”

  “Open vents—full,” Kara orders, already on her knees at Zhen’s side, hands clean, movements precise. “Bay doors stay closed. Zhen, listen to me—stop trying to open the belt—blink for me. Good. Again. Qiao, keep the flow—he will live. Bao—more neutralizer to the floor, give us an island.”

  Zhen tries to speak and vomits something green. “My—hands—” he gets out. “I can’t—”

  “That’s shock,” Kara says, steady as a bench while her overalls are covered in vomit. “Your job is breathing. In and out. We’re with you.”

  The servitor—still sitting where the spray sent him—does not speak. The paste on his chest has gone from white to slate. He blinks once. Twice. The third time comes slower. He sags a little to the left, as if listening.

  The medics hit the bay at a run, case thumping. “Where?” the first says, already dropping to Zhen’s side.

  “Here,” Rong clips. “Servitor also exposed—unknown.”

  The medics don’t look at the man who is dying. One supports Zhen’s legs and turns him to the machine they brought with a practiced gentleness that ignores panic. The other peels burned cloth back with a knife that slips under cloth without touching skin, voice like clean paper. “Wraps,” he says and gets. “Sir—keep blinking for me—good.”

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  “Name?” the first asks Zhen, not unkind.

  “Zhen,” he says between coughs. “Logistics—Zhen—”

  “Zhen, you’re doing well,” the medic says. “Stay with me. Count with me—one—two—three—four—”

  My gaze returns to the servitor.

  He leans forward another inch and rests his elbows on his knees like he is just resting for a moment. His mouth opens the way mouths open on television when someone is about to say “oh.” Nothing comes out. No one looks at him yet. Do they not see him? Did they already write him off?

  “Pressure spike,” Qiao says, voice low, angry at physics and people.

  Kara’s hand rests on Bao’s shoulder without pressing. “Our performance can be evaluated later,” she says. “Right now, we need to help Zhen and ensure containment of hazardous materials.” She turns to Zhen. “We’re going to lift you in a count.”

  “On three,” the medic says. “One—two—”

  They move him to the cot in one smooth piece of choreography. The machine spraying something on his legs rides with them, sloshing. Zhen coughs again, weaker, and gets his breath back against the mask. He’s still talking, still being told to talk, still being kept in the world by voices that sound like instructions and mean we see you.

  A servitor steps forward and puts a hand under the cot’s edge with a care that would not jostle an egg. No one tells him to help. No one thanks him either.

  “Going,” the medic says. “We’ll send for sample and lot. Wrap the line. Don’t continue or touch the BattleMech.”

  “Understood,” Rong says. “We’re holding the scene.”

  They wheel Zhen out fast. The cot rattles once over the door lip and then is gone into corridor echo.

  Silence lands, stupid and heavy. In it, we all finally look at him.

  The paste has gone dull. His chest is a wrong color in perfect shapes where the spray hit. His eyes are open. They are not looking. His hands are curled like he meant to hold something and forgot what it was. The white liquid under him remains unneutralized.

  Kara doesn’t show the emotions I would expect someone to show when faced with a corpse. She balances back on her heels. “Cover him,” she says to Chen, voice low. “We’ll send word to his line lead. Don’t move him until the infirmary returns for formalities.”

  Chen nods. He pulls a clean drape from the emergency kit and covers him like furniture careful of the liquid around him.

  Suyin arrives in that quiet with a ledger. She stops a meter away, takes everything in with one long look that touches Zhen’s wet footprints, the red-tagged hose, the drape, the number painted on the bracket, and us. When she speaks, the pen is already writing.

  “Order,” she says, even. “Short words.”

  “Mid test,” Kara answers. “Gauge twitched earlier. We deemed it noise. Coolant leak because of”—she hesitates—“probable material failure. Spray struck Zhen. Secondary arc struck servitor Nikolash. Main cut. Neutralizer. Eyewash. Medics triaged Zhen. He’s in the infirmary. Nik was deemed too far gone.”

  Kara says “improper material” like it’s a death sentence, and my stomach goes cold because I hear what it means in our language: to say the words plainly is to say the Authority sourced junk and forced us to use it; to say the words on record is to invite the kind of attention that ends careers or lives; to keep quiet is to agree the dead did this to themselves. In a state that calls itself a family but keeps the belt on the table, you don’t accuse the parent of feeding you poison. You file a form. You cite the lot number. You ask for “clarification” about “variance.” You pretend the word “fault” doesn’t exist.

  Kara is doing none of that.

  She’s putting the sentence in the air where the Mask can hear it and daring them to answer. It’s the nuclear option in Capellan terms: I am a citizen, I have the right to report a hazard, punish me and my fellow citizens will react. She knows exactly how thin that line is. She’s stepping on it anyway.

  Suyin doesn’t look at the drape directly. “Noted,” she says, and underlines something. “We need lot numbers, bracket photo, hose ends, revised sequence.”

  “We’re changing the order,” Kara says. “No tests without a shield in place. Separate brackets for purge and pressure. Shield to make a safe zone. Neutralizer will have to be replenished. I’ll sign the card.”

  Suyin boxes each phrase with a hard pencil. “Signed and time-stamped,” she says. “I’ll file incident, requisition, and next-of-kin for the servitor through House channel. Logistics for Zhen will want updates. Keep the floor as it is until infirmary returns.”

  Bao rubs a hand over his jaw. “We should have honored the signal,” he says, not to defend, not to punish. Just to put truth in the room so it doesn’t sour. “We won’t make that mistake again.”

  “We won’t,” Kara agrees.

  There’s work to do that is not the work anyone wanted. Qiao has the failed hose in a tray already, tagged, ends capped. Bao has cut a fresh hose. Chen draws chalk arrows on the deck to show where spray will go if the shield fails, and for the first time I viscerally understand why you draw maps of accidents after they happen: so the next accident happens somewhere else.

  “Vents remain at half,” Kara says, quieter. “Doors a palm. We keep the air moving.”

  A servitor—another one, tag unreadable under grease—stands at the edge of the chalk and says, soft, “I’ll wash the rest when the infirmary lets me,” as if asking for permission to make the bay decent. No one tells him no.

  “Again,” Rong says after a time that is not silence, because the fans are humming and pencils are writing and boots are scuffing chalk. “Not now. But again. With the shield, with the new order, with the neutralizer forward. We still have a date on that board.”

  “We’ll do it right,” Kara says. “Or we won’t do it.”

  When the shift breaks, no one sprints for the door. People coil hoses that didn’t need coiling. People wipe already-clean tools. Kara closes her ledger with two palms like a benediction. The drape is neat. The tag by the ripped hose is red.

  Outside, the air tastes like nothing. The street noise is half a step lower. A patrol walks past and doesn’t look at the depot door.

  At home I scrub until the lines on my palms go white. Mother pours barley tea. Father waits the length of a slow count and then asks with his usual decorum.

  “Tell me about what happened.”

  “Yes,” I say. I start the recollection and try not to watch it happen again in the Tower.

  He nods. “It doesn’t get easier,” he says. “It does get less surprising.”

  Mother hugs me. She sets the cup in front of me and makes work out of the telling. “Cause,” she says. “Sequence. Changes.”

  “Old braided line,” I say. “Gauge twitch we didn’t pay attention to. Spray crossed half the depot. Kara screamed orders. Afterwards she said the fault lies with materials.”

  Mother breathes out through her nose. “That’s how it is supposed to go,” she says. “You change the order. You pay attention. The city expects you to go back tomorrow.”

  She doesn't comment on the choice Kara made.

  Father studies my face for one more beat. “When you lie down,” he says, “if it starts unspooling in your head, think about something else. Count floor lines. Recite torque. Give your mind something useless to chew.”

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  That night, the needle twitches behind my eyes, the hose rips like a tin cup, the spray is white for a heartbeat, and the medics’ hands are already on Zhen while Nik leans too far to one side and no one says his name until it is too late. I breathe in fours until breath is just breath. When the picture comes back anyway, I set it on a shelf inside the spire with tags I can find again if I have to: Bay Two / Incident / Death.

  We will continue to work faster than we should and not as fast as they want.

  The ground hums.