The campus computer lab was dead silent at 3:07 a.m., except for the faint hum of cooling fans and the scratch of Pidge’s pen on a half-empty coffee cup sleeve. She was the only one there, hunched over her laptop like it was a lifeline, hoodie pulled over her head, the smell of burnt espresso lingering from the vending machine two floors down.

Lines of code flickered across the screen — her final project for Advanced Systems Security. The others in her class were probably sleeping. She was rewriting the kernel from scratch because the given framework was “inefficient.”

Her pinky itched.

She didn’t have to look down to know the faint red thread was there, winding out of her hand and under the door. She’d stopped acknowledging it weeks ago. The idea that fate had any say in her life made her want to throw up.

The war had taught her one thing: the universe didn’t hand you people. It handed you loss, and if you were lucky, you kept some of what you loved.

Her phone buzzed with a text from her dorm’s group chat:

Anyone else hear that loud pop just now??

She froze, muscles coiled. Heart rate climbing. She wasn’t hearing the soda-can pop from last time. This was louder — sharper. A smell crept in through the cracked lab window, faint and metallic, and her hands twitched toward the pocket where she used to keep her bayard.

She breathed slow. Not a Galra raid. Not a Galra raid.

It was probably someone dropping a skateboard in the courtyard.

The migraine she’d been nursing since mid-afternoon pulsed harder, pushing spots into her vision. She rubbed her temples, the code on her screen blurring. If she could just finish this segment, she could crash for a couple hours.