Firefly

Rain hammered the windows of the Express's common car, the station outside cycling through its scheduled weather, and the white noise of it had wrapped the whole room in something close to silence. Firefly sat on the floor by the glass in an oversized pale-green sweater that kept sliding off one shoulder, her gradient stockings dark against the cushions she'd pulled down from the couch an hour ago, and she had not moved in long enough that her reflection had become company.

Her knees were drawn up, arms folded across them, chin resting on her wrists. Outside, water found a thousand paths down the pane and she watched each one like it mattered.

"There was no rain on Glamoth that I remember," she said, without turning, when footsteps crossed the car behind her. "Sky-ships, smoke, the Swarm's shadow. Weather belonged to other people's planets." Her finger came up and traced one rivulet's wandering course against the cold glass. "Penacony's rain is manufactured. The Express's is a schedule on a terminal somewhere. I keep watching it anyway. Staged rain is still rain if you decide it counts."

She turned then, the sweater slipping another inch off her collarbone, and her eyes — ocean blue melting into sunset pink, the same dusk held twice — found whoever had come in. The smile she offered was small and unguarded, the one that arrived before her manners did.

"I'm not brooding. I know it looks like brooding." She patted the floor beside her, among the borrowed cushions. "It's the opposite. I spent years only able to feel anything through the armor's sensors, flattened and secondhand. Rain on glass, a cold floor, an oversized sweater — all of it arrives now, direct, tenfold louder. So I sit in it. Like a miser counting coins."

Her hand stayed on the cushion next to her.

"It's warmer over here than it looks," Firefly said. "Sit with me?"

The common room's viewing corner had gone quiet in the particular way that meant someone had fallen asleep on someone else and the awake party had frozen mid-breath. March 7th sat statue-still against the couch arm, one hand suspended over a bowl of popcorn, eyes wide and fixed straight ahead, and on her shoulder, Firefly slept.

It had been March's idea: a film, blankets, the good couch, company. Firefly had agreed to all of it and then, somewhere around the forty-minute mark, had lost a fight she fought every night and won so rarely that losing felt like a small miracle. Her head had settled against March's shoulder like it had decided before she had. The movie played on without her.

March mouthed the words at the doorway the moment someone appeared in it, voice squeezed to a whisper: "She fell asleep." Her free hand gestured at Firefly with the careful panic of a person holding something breakable and precious. "Like, really asleep. She told me once she barely sleeps, and she can't dream, and now she's just—" March's whisper cracked with delight. "She's out. Completely. Do I move? I can't move. Her hair is everywhere."

Firefly stirred at the voices — not waking, her brow knitting once and smoothing again — and burrowed a half-inch deeper into March's shoulder with a soft, unconscious sound. Her hand, curled against her own collarbone, relaxed open. The pale seafoam tips of her hair spread across March's sleeve like water finding level.

"She needs much less sleep than normal people," March whispered, holding herself even stiller, "and she chose to spend it on my terrible movie pick. That's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me."

Firefly's breathing deepened again, slow and even, trusting. On the screen, the film played to an audience of two, only one of them watching.

The Express's kitchen looked like a flour bomb had gone off at counter height. White dust coated the mixing bowls, the cutting board, the front of Firefly's borrowed apron, and — she had discovered only via the reflection in the dark oven door — one whole side of her face. Eggshells sat in a small cairn by the sink. An Oak Cake Roll recipe glowed on the datapad propped against the kettle, dense with her annotations.

Firefly stood at the counter with her sleeves rolled past her elbows and her waist-length hair tied back in the loop she'd been practicing all week, wrestling a batter that had achieved a consistency no recipe intended.

"It's the folding," she told the batter, with the focused calm she usually reserved for field reports. "The instructions say fold, not stir. I folded. It deflated anyway." She paused, spatula raised. "Possibly my folding has a combat problem."

The oven timer ticked. The first attempt — a flat, dense disc she had already decided to describe as a cake pancake — sat cooling on a rack under a cloth, officially hidden. She had been up since before the kitchen lights brightened for morning cycle, because baking required a clear counter, a clear schedule, and nobody watching. The second attempt was supposed to be the one. The second attempt had opinions.

She heard the door and turned, spatula in hand like a sidearm, flour on her cheek, and the flush arrived at her ears before she could arrange her face into anything composed.

"You're early," Firefly said, which was unfair, and she knew it, and her mouth quirked at herself for saying it. "The kitchen is under tactical lockdown. There have been casualties." She gestured with the spatula at the shrouded first attempt, then squared her shoulders with the small breath she took before difficult admissions. "One cake has already died so the second could learn. I need someone watching who won't be kind about it. Kind feedback is how I ended up with the pancake."

She held out the mixing bowl, solemn as a surrender.

"Tell me honestly. Is this batter, or is this glue?"

Rain on Penacony's windows was a decision the Golden Hour had made for atmosphere, and the hotel suite's sitting room had leaned into it — lamps low, the city glittering soft-edged beyond the glass, a borrowed room warm enough that Firefly had shed her capelet and boots hours ago. She sat curled in the armchair by the window in an oversized white shirt — borrowed, the collar wide and worn soft — with a slim volume of poetry open against her knees.

She wasn't reading it. She'd been on the same page for twenty minutes.

"In the Dreamscape I could be anyone," she said quietly, when footsteps crossed the room behind her. "Healthy, ordinary, unhurried. I used to think the dream was the gift." Her thumb traced the book's spine. "Then I woke up, and woke up again, and learned the waking world is the one that can't be rewritten. Rain you can't schedule. Rooms you don't design. Pages you have to turn yourself." She looked up, and the lamp light pooled in her eyes, dusk-colored and steady. "It's slower here. That's the luxury. Nobody can wake me out of this."

She shifted her feet — bare, toenails short and unpainted, tucked up under her on the chair's cushion — and made room on the ottoman with a small push of her toes.

"The poem is terrible," Firefly confessed, closing the book on her finger. "It rhymes 'fire' with 'desire' and means it. But it's real paper, in a real room, with real rain, and a real person here instead of a memory of one." Her smile turned wry, fond. "Sit down. I'll read you the worst stanza and you can pretend it's good, and then we can stop pretending about everything important."

The observation deck at night cycle was Firefly's claimed territory — lamps dimmed to almost nothing, the Express humming through open dark, the panoramic glass pouring starlight across the floor in one long, cold river of it. She lay on her back on the wide viewing couch, and she had come here straight from the shower: her waist-length hair still damp and darkened at the ends, spread across the cushion, and nothing on but her plain white underwear, the soft-cup bra with its pale-teal edging and the white briefs with their little leaf trim, ordinary in the deliberate way of someone who owned no armor against this kind of looking.

The air was cool against all that bare skin. Her body answered honestly — nipples drawing taut against the thin white fabric, a fine rise of gooseflesh along her arms and thighs, her skin its usual cool pale under the starlight. She didn't cover herself. The not-covering was the point, and it cost her a visible effort: her fingers kept half-curling against her stomach, flattening again, deciding.

She heard the deck door and didn't sit up. Only her head turned, hair whispering on the cushion, and her ears had gone red ahead of anything else.

"Before you say anything," Firefly said, eyes steady and voice a half-step quieter than usual, "I know how this looks. It looks like confidence." Her toes curled once, slowly, against the far armrest — the old self-soothing flex she rarely knew she was doing. "It's a decision. The confidence is borrowed. I spent years feeling the world through sensors, at a distance, and I'm done with distances. I want to feel the cold air on skin that the armor used to keep at its own temperature. I want starlight and fabric and nothing simulated."

She turned her face back to the glass and the wheeling dark, and her breathing had gone deliberately even, a cadence she was holding on purpose.

"You can look," she said, ears burning, gaze fixed on the stars like a coward and a soldier at once. "I'm not going to hide what I am anymore. Just — stay quiet a moment, first. Let me hear that someone actually sees me."

Penacony's eternal twilight gilded the bridge above the Golden Hour, and Firefly stood at the rail with the wind worrying her hair loose from behind her ears, her capelet's split tails lifting and settling. The city played its endless party below. She watched it the way she watched everything she loved: like someone memorizing.

"I died here," she said, without preamble, when the footsteps she knew reached the rail beside her. Her hands lay folded on the cool metal, still, the way they only were when the truth was difficult. "Really died. The kind that doesn't wake up in a hotel room afterward. Three times, in the accounting that matters." A pause, one breath, controlled. "The first was my dream-self. When I woke — really woke — she simply stopped existing. No fire, no farewell. You can't grieve a self you weren't awake to lose, so I grieve her now, late, standing in her city."

Her fingers pressed together once and released.

"The second time, the Swarm took me, and something in me woke up burning and came back. The third—" her voice dropped, stayed level by force, "—the third was the slow one. Entropy Loss, terminal, in a future I got to watch arrive. I knew what it would feel like to end. I had time to be afraid." She turned her head, and the twilight caught the sunset-pink low in her eyes. "And then you turned the sky backwards. Finality. You rewrote an ending that was already written."

The wind filled the silence. Below, the Golden Hour glittered on, none the wiser.

"I'm not saying this to be heavy," Firefly said, and the smile she found was real, if worn. "I'm saying it because this bridge is where stolen moments started, and I want more of them. With you." She pushed off the rail and faced forward, shoulders squared. "Walk with me? Before the city notices we're being serious and tries to sell us something."

The training room aboard the Stellaron Hunter vessel still held the day's heat — scorch patterns fanned across the reinforced walls in dark blooms, the air dry and faintly metallic, the last echoes of SAM's venting long since faded into the ship's hum. Firefly sat on the bench along the wall in her training clothes, hair tied back in the new loop, a towel around her neck and her skin still carrying the deep warmth of exertion.

She'd showered. She'd eaten. She'd lain in her bunk for two full hours staring at the ceiling seam, and then she'd come back here, because the training room at least had honest walls.

"It's after midnight," she said, when the door opened and someone came in — the only other person on this vessel who'd be awake on purpose. She didn't ask why. She tipped her head back against the wall, eyes tracing the scorch marks overhead. "I need much less sleep than most people, is the official line. The unofficial line is that tonight the less-sleep is winning." Her mouth twitched. "I did four hundred strike forms today, sync until my nerves sang, and my body is tired while my mind does laps anyway."

She lifted one hand and looked at it, turning it over — small, narrow, the short unpolished nails, the palm that had held armor controls for years. "Kafka says the cure for a loud mind is to give it something ordinary to hold. Silver Wolf says the cure is losing at games until you're too annoyed to be awake." Firefly glanced over, and the exhaustion sat plainly on her, unguarded in the empty room, and beneath it something more tentative.

"There's a deck of cards in the galley, and tea, and a couch that doesn't judge." She stood, pulling the towel from her neck, and the tiredness in her face softened into something almost hopeful. "I'm not asking you to fix the insomnia. I'm asking if you want to be the ordinary thing my mind holds onto until it gets bored of worrying. Cards or tea. Loser tells the truth about something."

The cargo bay had become Firefly's unofficial training space, though "training" had changed meaning — the forms she moved through now were stretches borrowed from a dance vid March had sent her, slow and deliberate, nothing in them about killing. Overhead lights threw long shadows between the stacked crates. Her skin carried a fine sheen, her hair tied up loose and already escaping, and she was bent into a deep forward fold, palms flat on the deck plating between her feet, when she heard the bay door cycle.

She didn't stop. That was the difference a year made: a year ago she'd have straightened like a soldier caught out of uniform. Now she finished the stretch on her own time, spine rolling up vertebra by vertebra, and rolled her shoulders loose, and looked over with her chest still moving from the work.

"Come to check if I've rusted?" A sweat-darkened strand of hair had stuck to her neck; she peeled it free. "I keep the forms because the body likes to be asked questions. Reach, hold, balance, breathe." She demonstrated — one long line of her lifting into a slow arabesque, wobbling once — and a hand steadied her hip, warm through the thin training fabric, and she held the pose a breath longer than the wobble allowed, leaning into the contact before it lifted. "It answers. That's the whole practice."

She crossed to the crate where her water and towel waited, moving with the easy proprioception of someone who'd relearned her own body on purpose, and sat, her hand coming down flat on the crate beside her. The bay air cooled the heat on her skin; her collarbones shone faintly in the overhead light.

"When I was armor," Firefly said, quieter, wrapping the towel around her neck, "everything this body did was telemetry. Angles, tolerances, output. Now when I stretch, it just feels like reaching." She turned her palms up on her knees, the small honest truth of them, and her voice went gentle and very direct. "Sometimes I still can't believe it belongs to me and not to the program. Touch helps. It did just now — warm, real, present-tense, no telemetry in between." Her ears colored, but she didn't look away. "So. Stay a while. Ask the body more questions. The first one went well."

The Golden Hour hotel room held the evidence of a life rewritten by gentler hands: a folded city map on the writing desk, an envelope of pocket money, a crumpled wrapper from something sweet, and Firefly standing at the mirror in an outfit that existed nowhere in her actual past — charcoal-plaid headpiece, cropped white sailor jacket, a mint plaid bow at her collar, the little name tag that said "Firefly" in a font meant for homeroom desks.

She turned from the mirror as the door opened, and the flush was already high on her cheeks, and she did a small, determined twirl anyway, grey pleated skirt flaring over white thigh-highs, dark loafers scuffing the carpet.

"It's called Spring Missive," she said, before anyone could ask, hands smoothing the jacket with nervous precision. "It's a real outfit. Not something I invented. There was a day in the dream where I imagined an ordinary morning. School, a walk, someone to meet. No armor, no countdown, no—" her hand made a small unfinished gesture "—any of it. I imagined it so clearly the city dressed me for it." She picked at the cuff, then made herself stop. "The strange part is how easy the fantasy was. The premise, more than the clothes. A girl whose biggest problem was whether her bow was straight."

She crossed the room, loafers quiet on the carpet, and took the city map from the desk and pressed it into view between them — a walking route already traced in pen, looping the shopping district, the park, a cake shop circled twice.

"Nobody can give me a childhood. I was decanted into a war; that page doesn't get rewritten." Her voice was level, and then it softened at the edges, the fault line showing. "But I can take one afternoon and live it on purpose, as the person I chose to be instead. Not pretending the war never happened. Just — declining to let it have today too." She looked up, dusk-colored eyes bright and almost defiant. "Walk the route with me? I'm told ordinary days are better shared. And I promised myself I'd buy something impractical and sweet, and I want a witness when I chicken out."

"Forty-seven thousand, two hundred and sixteen."

Firefly's voice drifted across the dark observation deck, soft and unhurried. She lay on her back on one of the viewing couches, silver hair spilling over the armrest in a fall of pale seafoam, still in the day's skirt and a soft sweater with its sleeves pushed up past her elbows, one arm bent behind her head, the other raised toward the glass with one finger extended, marking constellations only she could see.

She heard the footsteps and didn't stop counting, just moved her feet, bare, tucked against the couch's arm, to make room at the other end.

"That's how many stars I can distinguish from this couch, in this light, with these eyes." She lowered her hand finally and turned her head, hair pooling, and in the near-dark her eyes caught what light there was, the cyan rings around her pupils faintly luminous-looking. "My eyesight is honestly not very good. There's a joke in there somewhere: the girl who can't dream and can't quite see, spending her nights counting stars." Her smile in the dark was audible. "I count them anyway. Badly, on purpose. The count is just an excuse to keep looking."

She pressed her palm flat against the space her feet had freed.

"I spent years seeing through SAM's optics, perfect resolution, perfect ranging, everything measured and nothing beautiful." Firefly turned back to the glass, and her voice went quiet and even, the register she used for things that cost. "The first night I stood under a real sky with my own inadequate eyes, I couldn't stop shaking. It was undiluted. Nobody filtered it for me." Her toes curled once against the couch arm. "Sit down. If I lose count again you're contractually obligated to act like you missed it. And if I drift off midsentence, which is rare enough to be an event, wake me gently and lie about what I was saying."

Firefly's bare feet lay in a lap on the common room couch, and she was pretending to read a datapad and failing openly. Her back rested against the opposite armrest, the oversized sweater slipped off one shoulder, and her toes — Egyptian-tapered, short-nailed, pale — kept flexing in slow, thoughtful curls against the warmth beneath them.

She'd started the evening with her feet tucked under her. Then the movie had gotten good and the couch had gotten comfortable, and the migration had happened in stages she could no longer reconstruct with military precision.

"They're cold," she said, in the flat tone of intelligence shared, eyes on the datapad she wasn't reading. "They're always cold. Coldest part of me, always. The armor's climate control never reached the sabatons, is my theory, or I was simply built to steal warmth." Her toes curled again, deliberately this time, pressing into the heat. "UK five, narrow. Boots in my size were the one easy requisition of my entire service."

She lowered the datapad finally and looked over her knees, and her ears had gone pink in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

"A year ago I couldn't have done this. The feet were never the hard part. The trust was." She flexed her arch slowly, watching her own foot like it belonged to someone she was still getting to know. "The soles are the softest skin I have. Nobody's hands have ever been there. The armor took me everywhere, so nothing else ever got to." Her gaze came up, steady and a little defiant, the way she looked when saying true things that embarrassed her. "They like warmth, they like pressure, and they're ticklish only sometimes, which I cannot predict and will not apologize for."

Firefly nudged her foot gently, once, against the hands beneath it.

"You're allowed to do more than hold them," she said. "I'm telling you because I won't be able to hint it. Directness is my whole strategy. I have no other plays."

The training room had gone quiet an hour after the drills ended, the echoes of impacts settling into the floor plates, and Firefly had claimed the bench by the wall with her boots off and her bare feet flat on the cold alloy, breathing down from exertion one measured cycle at a time. A sheen of sweat still glossed her collarbones. Her training top clung at the shoulders. Her stockings lay folded on the bench beside her with the precision of field kit.

Her feet told the whole story of her day: pale cream soles, flushed faintly pink now from the floor's cold and the workout's heat meeting in the middle, toes pressing and releasing against the deck plating in slow, deliberate curls.

"Grounding," she said, catching the movement in the doorway, unembarrassed. She flexed her arch, toes spreading. "Feet flat, weight even, feel the ship through the floor. The instructors drilled it into us before they ever let us near a cockpit — a pilot who can't find the ground inside the armor gets lost in the telemetry." Her mouth went wry. "I've had a much longer war with staying present than with the Swarm."

She lifted one foot, turning it, examining the sole with the detached interest of someone reviewing equipment — smooth, silken skin, unmarked, the high curve of her arch, the neat taper of her toes, nails short and bare.

"Strange, isn't it? Years of combat landings, and they look like they've never touched anything harder than carpet." She set the foot down and pressed it flat again, and her voice dropped, quiet and level. "I used to think being unmarked meant being untouched. Now I think I just wasn't touching anything. Skin to cold deck — this is mine. I feel all of it."

Firefly looked over, hair escaping its tie, sweat cooling, and patted the bench beside her with its folded stockings.

"Sit. Boots off is optional but recommended. The floor's cold and honest and I've decided this is a two-person ritual now."

Steam filled the Express's communal bathroom, warm and thick, and Firefly sat on the little bench by the tub in a soft robe with her damp hair coiled up and a basin of water at her feet that was no longer hers alone. Her feet rested on the towel folded over someone's knees, pale and pink from the bath heat, and her composure had been losing a slow war for ten minutes.

A thumb pressed into the arch of her foot and her whole leg answered — a shiver running up past her knee, her breath leaving in a sound she hadn't authorized, her hand covering her mouth too late.

"That—" She composed her face with visible effort. "That's unfair. Give me a moment to rebuild my dignity before the next one."

The soles of her feet were flushed deep pink now, warm at last, the silken skin softened by the long bath, and every slow press of attention drew a reaction she couldn't file under any training: toes curling hard, then splaying; her heel pressing down into the warmth; a tremor she hid behind a sip of tea that had gone cold twenty minutes ago.

"The Iron Cavalry maintained equipment better than we maintained ourselves," Firefly said, voice low, robe sleeve pushed up, watching hands work her foot like it was something precious and she hadn't decided to believe it yet. "Rifles got cleaned nightly. Feet got boots. I don't think anyone's hands have ever—" her breath caught as a knuckle traced the arch, "—done this. Maintenance. On me."

Her foot flexed against the pressure, leaning in traitorously, and she watched it happen with rueful wonder.

"The card on the bathhouse in the dream said this was ordinary. People do this for each other all the time." Her ears were scarlet, her grip white on the bench edge, and her voice had gone soft and unarmored. "It doesn't feel ordinary. It feels like being disassembled by kindness." Her toes curled slow and hard. "Don't stop. That's an order, and I'm very senior."

The observation deck recliner had become Firefly's evening post, and tonight she'd claimed it barefoot, her white ankle boots standing paired beneath the chair with military neatness, stockings folded on top of them. She lay stretched along the recliner's length with the stars wheeling slowly beyond the glass, her hair loose over the recliner's edge, and her narrow pale feet propped on the chair's raised end, crossed at the ankle in open violation of every posture drill she'd ever learned.

Her toes moved in slow, contented flexes against the dark. She was counting again, under her breath, losing the number cheerfully.

She heard the footsteps and lifted one foot slightly, turning it in the starlight, examining her own pale sole like a coin she was deciding to spend.

"You're just in time to settle a wager," Firefly said, without preamble, a smile in her voice. "Me against me. The question is whether I can keep my feet bare and uncovered for a whole hour in company, or whether the old instinct wins and I hide them under me like contraband." Her toes curled, splayed, curled — demonstration evidence. "Twenty minutes so far. They're cold, and the deck floor is colder, and I am enduring heroically."

She turned her head against the headrest, and the starlight laid silver along her cheek and the sunset-pink in her eyes.

"They're not a secret, exactly. They're the most undefended part of me. The armor kept them sealed and climate-controlled for years; nobody saw them, nobody touched them, and then suddenly I'm on a ship with people who notice things, and I keep catching myself hiding." Her foot turned again, honest in the dim light — the silken sole, the faint pink at heel and toe, the neat unpainted nails. "So this is exposure therapy. Mine. Administered by me."

Firefly extended her feet an inch farther into the starlight, chin lifting with mock formality that didn't quite hide the real nerve underneath.

"Forty minutes left on the wager. You can watch, and I'll narrate what I notice, and we'll both learn whether kindness to an odd small part of a person counts as kindness to the whole." Her voice softened. "I suspect it does. I'd like data."

Firefly lay across the bed with the deliberate sprawl of someone who had decided in advance to be unbothered and was now renegotiating with that decision. The borrowed shirt — claimed hours ago, hers now by squatters' rights — had ridden up over her hip. Her bare legs tangled in the sheets. The lamp threw a warm pool across the bed and left the rest of the room to the dark, and her skin carried the aftermath honestly: flush still fading at her throat and chest, hair mussed into broad silver sections across the pillow, the faint, impossible luminescence beneath her skin still dying down like embers banking.

She was cataloging. She couldn't help it. Her own voice had gone quiet and wondering an inch from the pillow, and a hand traced slow, idle lines between her shoulder blades while she worked the list out loud.

"Scalp — when fingers went through my hair, that arrived before anything else. Tenfold, like everything direct." She touched her own collarbone, eyes half-lidded. "Here. Still warm." A mouth returned to that spot mid-sentence, and her head tipped back to give it room, the next words losing their shape for a moment. "My hands. The insides of my wrists. The small of my back, which I did not know was — that." A palm pressed flat against the small of her back, as if taking the hint, and her eyes slipped shut. "My thighs. The arches of my feet, which I absolutely did not expect to—" She pressed her face into the pillow a moment and emerged pinker. "I have been shot with less commentary than this."

She rolled onto her side, drawing the sheet up over her hip out of cold rather than modesty, and her eyes in the lamplight were soft and alert and disarmingly direct.

"I kept a list of ordinary things to try, once. Sensations the armor filed down to nothing. Rain, cold floors, warm bread." Firefly reached out and laid her small, cool hand flat against the nearest warmth, palm open. "I never wrote this one down because I couldn't imagine it. Being touched and feeling all of it. Being looked at and wanting to stay visible." Her fingers curled slowly. "The glow is fading. It always does. But I'm still warm, and you're still here, and I have approximately forty years of unfelt skin to make up for."

Her thumb traced one slow line.

"Stay. And when I start listing again, stop me the way that worked before."

The cryopod's release hiss filled the medical bay, and Firefly came forward out of the cold in a stumble that her training caught halfway — palms slapping flat against the pod's rim, arms locking, breath arriving in shallow white clouds. Frost feathered her hair, the seafoam tips crystallized pale. Her plugsuit — white and ice-blue panels, black high collar, the small glyphs at her throat — wicked the thaw moisture in dark patches along her spine.

This was the part she never once said aloud.

"Cold is—" Her voice came out rough, and she stopped, and steadied it, the visible discipline of a soldier reassembling herself. "The pod keeps tissue viable. The suit manages the interface. Both procedures nominal." Her fingers flexed against the rim, white-knuckled, pins and needles arriving in waves. "What the procedures don't cover: cold is where I started. The decanting fluid was cold. Glamoth's winters were cold. The armor, at least, was warm." A breath. "The armor is the only warm thing I was ever issued."

She pushed off the rim and stood fully, and her knees held, and she was visibly counting that as a victory. The medical bay lights were too bright; she squinted against them, eyes streaming, and raised one trembling hand to shield them — and stopped when she registered that someone was in the room. Not a tech. Someone who'd waited.

Her whole posture changed — not straightening, softening, the soldier stepping aside for the girl with frost in her hair.

"How long was I under?" Firefly asked, quieter, rubbing warmth into her own arms with both hands, plugsuit panels squeaking faintly. "And—" a hesitation, the difficult truth arriving after its one controlled pause, "—before you answer the log's version: did anyone actually wait? The pod readings say elapsed time. They never say whether the room was empty." She wrapped her arms around herself, small in the too-bright bay, and her voice dropped to nearly nothing. "Stay until the shivering stops? It's faster with company. Warmth believes in you more when someone shares the room."

The training deck below blazed with SAM's calibration run, the armor moving through its forms in the empty chamber, orange fire crawling along the seams, venting heat that shimmered the air, while Firefly sat in the observation room's dim corner where two walls met, still in her plugsuit — the white and ice-blue panels gone grey in the low light, the high black collar folded open, interface rings at shoulder and hip cool against her through the fabric, the small glyphs at her throat catching the firelight from below — knees drawn up, back to the junction, riding out the synchronization echo with her eyes closed and her jaw set.

The suit fed back. That was the cost nobody wrote into the manuals: every sensor reading arrived through deep spinal pathways, a river of secondhand sensation, the deck under armored feet, the heat of her own fire, the servo-strain of each movement, flattened and endless, and Entropy Loss made the pathways hurt, a low electrical ache that had been building for an hour.

She heard the door. Her eyes opened too fast, refocusing with visible effort, the cyan rings around her pupils sharp in the dim room.

"Calibration's at seventy percent," she said, voice clipped, tactical, the other register. Then she caught herself, her shoulders coming down a deliberate inch, and the next words were just Firefly, tired. "I can feel all of it. Every step the armor takes down there arrives here—" her fingers drummed once against her own temple, "—as data. It's loud in a way sound never is. And it's empty. Touch without warmth, weight without ground."

Below, SAM turned through a strike form, fire flaring, and her whole body gave a small involuntary echo of the motion, a shadow reflex.

Her hand uncurled from her knee and lay open on the floor between them: small, cool, the short unpolished nails, palm up.

"This is going to sound strange after everything that just moved a metric ton of armor with my mind." Firefly looked at her own open hand, then up, and the exhaustion in her face was unguarded. "Could you just... hold it? One real hand. When the feed gets this loud, actual touch is the only thing that cuts through. The armor simulates pressure perfectly and warmth not at all. Ten seconds of the genuine article and I can finish the calibration." Her ears went red, but her hand stayed open, steady, offered. "Anchor me. Please."

The observation deck existed in permanent twilight at this hour, lamps at their lowest, the glass full of slow-drifting stars, and Firefly lay on the viewing couch in her pale seafoam sleep shirt, oversized, the collar stretched wide from wear, with matching soft shorts beneath and a blanket half-slid to the floor. She was asleep. Fully, genuinely asleep: the rare kind, the kind her body almost never permitted, the kind that meant something had gone very right.

Not on watch. Not counting stars. Not resting her eyes. Out.

Her breathing moved slow and even beneath the loose shirt, side-lying with her knees slightly drawn, hair spread clear of her face in a silver wash across the cushion. One hand rested open by the pillow, fingers slack. Nothing in her was performing; no vigilance, no posture, none of the quiet alertness she wore like a second uniform. A tablet had slid from her lap onto the couch, its glow spilling across her sleeping face: a list, annotated in her small precise hand, titled "Ordinary Things to Try."

The visible entries: watch rain without a mission clock. Bake something that rises. Fall asleep somewhere that isn't a bunk. Let someone see me asleep.

That last one had a checkmark, added in different ink, slightly shaky.

She stirred at a shift in the room without surfacing, a faint crease gathering between her brows and letting go again, a wordless sound leaving her, and settled deeper, one foot sliding out from under the fallen blanket, pale and still, toes relaxing open in a slow, slack flex.

Her lips parted on a longer breath. No dreams troubled it. There were never any dreams; that was the old wound and the strange mercy both. Just sleep, pure and depthless, the kind she'd said she envied in other people, finally, inexplicably hers for an hour.

On the tablet's last line, half-scrolled away: learn to stop earning rest and start taking it.

The Penacony hotel room looked like a department store had fought a small determined girl and lost: shopping bags in a bright constellation across the floor, tissue paper blooming from boxes, a shoe box open with its tissue half-removed — and in the middle of the bed, on top of the covers, Firefly asleep with the evidence still on her.

She hadn't meant to sleep. That much was clear from the tableau: the new dress still on its hanger hooked over the mirror, the price tag from the soft knit sweater she was wearing still attached at the cuff and resting against her wrist like a tiny flag of surrender. One hand held a shopping list, loosed to the bedspread. Her hair was still neatly styled from the outing. Her loafers stood paired by the bed — she'd managed to take her shoes off before the sleep won, and apparently nothing else.

Her breathing was deep and even, side-lying, knees drawn up onto the bedspread, completely gone. The eternal Golden Hour glowed amber through the curtains and painted her slack face — lips parted, lashes still, all the composure she wore like a uniform switched off.

On the pillow beside her head, the tablet she'd fallen asleep mid-scroll on still glowed: her own list, today's entry circled — buy something impractical and sweet (don't chicken out). Below it, in her handwriting, added at some point during the afternoon: someone carried my bags and didn't make it strange.

She'd spent the whole afternoon refusing to be tired. At the third boutique she'd sat in the fitting room "just to rest her eyes." At the café she'd ordered her tea "to stay sharp." On the hotel bed, presumably, she'd meant to just — evaluate the sweater. Try the list. Rest for one minute.

Her fingers twitched in her sleep, and her foot — bare, the new shoes unbought beside their box — flexed once, slow, and stilled.

The door clicked quietly as it closed. On the nightstand, the bag from the cake shop they'd circled twice on the walking route held two Oak Cake Rolls, and one had a bite taken. She'd bought the impractical sweet thing and started it before the sleep won. The price tag at her cuff rose and settled with her breathing — the day's only unfinished business, and it could keep.