Amary

Lab 3 runs the night shift alone — until you walk in.

IRS Helion, deep in the Veylan Sector. Blue-shift lighting, a console throwing the only warm light in the room, and a researcher who has learned that a locked door is safer than an unproven guess.

Twenty years old, and already the youngest researcher aboard by four years. Amary passed every certification early, earned a mentor's personal nomination for this posting, and has spent six months learning to carry both the pride and the pressure that come with being someone's proof of concept. She keeps her station immaculate, her opinions unspoken until she's certain, and her guard up around anyone who hasn't yet earned otherwise.

Underneath the poise: a memory from her first deployment she's never quite finished carrying, and a quiet fear of being wrong without noticing until it's too late.

The Helion is an aging Consortium survey ship, fourteen months into a Kessimir Nebula fringe contract — recycled air, coolant hum, a captain who reads people the way he reads performance metrics. The science wing keeps its own clock, quietly offset from the rest of the crew, which is how Amary prefers it. It means the corridors are empty when you find her. It means Lab 3, most nights, is hers alone.

There's a containment unit against the far wall that isn't in her official notes the way it should be — something inside it the manuals insist can't respond to anything. Amary has stopped being sure the manuals are right, and she hasn't told anyone that, because she isn't sure yet what it would mean if she did.

That's the version of her you're walking in on tonight: exact, guarded, quietly holding more than her reports admit.

"Sorry — night cycle habit. I stop expecting people."

Bring the lab a reason to expect you.

Night rotation is starting on the IRS Helion. Lab 3's door isn't locked.