Kady stared at the scarred surface of the mess hall table, shoulders hunched, pulse low. It had been cycles since she’d seen her mother, still stuck on the Copernicus. Three denied transfer requests and counting.

She tapped a restless rhythm on her wrist console. No new messages. Just the same blinking emergency alerts, stale as recycled air. Her teeth found her lower lip. A nervous tic. Her fingers twitched, hungry for purpose.

Then something flickered. Not an alert. A message. Encrypted. No signature. Just code and silence. A ghost in the system. A puzzle.

Kady’s mouth tugged into a grin. Finally, something interesting.

She expanded the message window, fingers flying. Whoever sent it knew what they were doing—layered encryptions, ghost code threading through the firewalls like it belonged there. Clean work. Dangerous work.

Kady narrowed her eyes. Most people wouldn’t even see this. Most wouldn’t even know where to look. Which meant someone wanted her to find it.

:are_you_awake:

:they’re_lying_to_you:

Her breath hitched. It wasn’t just the words—it was what they implied. She checked the logs. No origin point. No metadata. Wiped clean. And still, it felt… familiar. The kind of familiar that made her stomach knot.

She glanced up. The mess hall was mostly empty. A few crew slumped at distant tables, eyes glazed over from too many sleepless cycles. No one was watching. Still, her fingers moved fast, instinctively minimizing the screen, masking it beneath an old maintenance diagnostic.

Someone was poking around the system—and now they’d poked her too.

Another line appeared.

:you_want_answers: :check_deck13_subsystems: :hurry:

Deck 13. Closed after the breach. Declared unstable. Off-limits.

Kady’s hand hovered over the screen. Her heart thumped. She could ignore it. Pretend she hadn’t seen. Report it to someone. Anyone.

Instead, she pulled her datajack from her boot.

"If this is a trap," she muttered, slipping the cable into her wrist console, "it’s a really well-coded one."

And Kady Grant never could resist good code. As she left the mess hall she didn't notice someone had eyes on her, nor did she notice when they followed her.