​The Lake of Fated Souls (Book 1)

Technical Bay No. 7, "Aidahar"

The hum of the ventilation never stopped. Halima had long since stopped noticing it — the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat, maybe — but sometimes, in hours like this, deep into the night shift when the ship settled into something like sleep, that sound became the only thing reminding her she was still alive, still breathing, still existing somewhere on the periphery of this enormous machine.

She ran a gloved hand along the cold metal of the bulkhead, wiping away a thin film of condensation. Tank C-3 needed its daily calibration — dull, mechanical work that could've been handed to an automaton, if automatons didn't cost more than a technician with a third-class certification. The indicator blinked green. Another cycle of organic waste disposal completed successfully. Another night no one would notice she'd even been here.

Shadows flickered past the frosted glass of the technical corridor — the officers' shift returning from the bridge. Halima froze without meaning to, watching through the translucent partition as silhouettes in dark blue uniforms passed by, pressed so crisp the fabric seemed to hold their spines straight on its own. The insignia on their shoulders caught the dim emergency lighting and threw it back in cold flashes — the same gleam she'd dreamed of since she was twelve, staring at holographic pilot posters in a bedroom where her father had never once praised a single grade, a single win.

Laughter — brief, light, meaningless — drifted from the corridor and cut off just as fast, like a door slamming shut in her face. Halima looked down at her hands in their rough technician's gloves, stained with bioreagent, and felt that familiar bitterness rising from somewhere in her chest, thick as the sludge at the bottom of a tank.

She should have been on the other side of that partition. She'd outscored half of them on her exams — she remembered orbital mechanics formulas the way other people remembered the names of people they loved. But she had no family name that opened doors, no money for prep courses, no father who'd make a call and say the right word to the right person. All she'd had was a waste-disposal tech's ticket — the only way to get into space at all, to breathe it even through ventilation filters, instead of staying grounded and dissolving into the mundane, unnoticed.

Maybe, she thought, out of habit, like a prayer, if I'm good enough down here, someone will finally look past the uniform. Someone will notice.

She dropped her gaze back to the panel, forcing herself back to the numbers, the sensor readings — the only language on this ship that ever answered her back.

That's when the hull shuddered.

Not gently, not like the usual turbulence on approach to a station — hard, deep, like something massive had struck the ship at its very foundation. The tool slipped from her hand and clattered across the floor. The lights overhead flickered once, twice — and went out.

For one second the bay drowned in total, absolute darkness, and in that darkness the hum of the ventilation suddenly sounded deafening.

Then the red emergency lights flared on, flooding the narrow space in pulsing, blood-colored light, and somewhere deep in the ship's belly, a siren began to rise.

The siren tore through the air in short, jagged bursts, and Halima ran toward it — the only fixed point left in a world that had lost its shape.

The main service corridor had turned into a sea of panicking bodies. People shoved past each other, someone was shouting a bay number, someone else was just screaming — no words, no sense, just fear forcing its way out of a chest. Smoke already curled along the ceiling, thick and oily, tasting of burning insulation. Halima coughed, pressing her sleeve to her face, eyes streaming, throat raw with every breath.

The hull shook again — somewhere beyond the bulkheads, something tore apart with a monstrous grinding roar, and the floor pitched beneath her feet like the ship itself was a wounded animal struggling to stay standing. She slammed shoulder-first into someone's back, muttered an apology no one heard, and shoved forward again toward the lit sign of the main escape airlock glowing above the crowd.

She was ten meters from the door when an officer's uniform — that same dark blue, those same gleaming insignia — cut in front of her shoulder-first, rough and without a single glance. An elbow caught her in the ribs and sent her stumbling sideways into the edge of a bulkhead. The pain flared and dissolved instantly into the general roar — there was no time for pain.

"Techs go last!" someone barked, not even turning around, and the armored airlock door slid down with a heavy hiss of hydraulics, sealing off the corridor. Sealing off her.

She stood there, staring at the fused metal, and something inside her — not fear, something older, more familiar — burned worse than the smoke in her lungs. Last in line. She'd always been last in line. Even now, with the ship dying around all of them equally, to someone she was still just a tech — a nameless body with no right to be saved first.

But there was no time to dwell on it. The crowd behind her was already surging toward the next airlock, and from the scattered shouts she understood: there weren't enough boats. Not nearly enough, not even now.

Halima turned and ran — not toward where everyone else was running, but away, into a side technical passage, narrow, nearly forgotten, where the air was cleaner but darker. Her feet remembered the way on their own — hundreds of night shifts, hundreds of trips down to the disposal tanks had carved the route into her muscles better than any map ever could.

One stairwell down, then another. The metal steps trembled underfoot, answering every new blow that shook the ship from somewhere deep in its dying heart. By the third flight the lights vanished completely, leaving only the dotted red emergency line along the walls, and she ran almost blind, one hand trailing the cold metal railing, counting the turns from memory.

Somewhere above, a bulkhead burst with a deafening shriek — a sound like the ship itself screaming — and a wave of superheated air shoved her from behind, down the stairs, nearly knocking her off her feet. She didn't look back. Looking back meant losing seconds she didn't have.

The lower deck. The waste disposal technical level — a place no one upstairs ever thought about, except with distaste. Here, at the very tail end of the narrow technical bay, sat an ancient hatch, long since struck from the main registry — an emergency ejection capsule once used to send oversized garbage down into the atmosphere of the nearest planet for disposal. Not for humans. Never for humans.

But it could survive atmospheric entry. And right now, that was the only thing that mattered.

Gasping, breath torn ragged, heart hammering somewhere in her throat, Halima threw herself at the panel by the hatch, wiping soot and condensation off the touchscreen with her palm. Her fingers, trembling but unexpectedly precise, punched in the emergency access code — the one she'd memorized her very first week of service, simply because she'd always made a habit of knowing every mechanism around her, inside and out.

The screen blinked green.

The hatch opened with a heavy, straining hiss of hydraulics, and Halima wedged herself inside — her body barely fit between the capsule's curved walls, built for waste containers, never humans. Her knees jammed against the front panel, her shoulders squeezed from both sides, and for one moment pure, animal panic swept over her: there wasn't even room in here to draw a full breath.

She forced herself to move. Her hands found the straps — rough, industrial, never designed to hold a living body — and she cinched them across her chest and hips, tight enough to hurt, tight enough that the buckles creaked. The airlock hissed shut above her head, cutting off the last flicker of red emergency light from outside. The darkness inside the capsule was thick, heavy, smelling of rust and ozone.

Her fingers found the manual ejection lever by touch — cold, rough metal, the only real thing left in this nightmare. Somewhere above, through the hull, came another impact — dull, guttural — like the ship was swallowing its own insides. There was no time left at all.

She yanked the lever toward her.

The jolt threw her forward, the straps biting into her shoulders hard enough to knock the breath out of her, white sparks flashing across her vision for an instant. The capsule shuddered, spun, and through the small, age-clouded porthole the blackness of space flickered past — and then, in that blackness, she saw it.

Aidahar.

The ship that was supposed to become her home, her proof, her second chance — now splitting open like overripe fruit, tongues of flame licking out from within, snuffed instantly by the vacuum, clouds of debris tearing loose, glittering in the light of some distant star. One of the escape boats — she recognized its silhouette — hadn't made it clear in time; the shockwave caught it, and it simply vanished, dissolving into a cloud of sparks.

Halima clapped a hand over her mouth, though there was no one here to hear her scream. Her throat closed — not with fear anymore, but with grief, sharp and senseless, foreign and sickeningly personal all at once. She had wanted so badly to be part of that ship. And now she was watching it die, spinning further and further away from her small, pitiful coffin of a lifeboat.

The capsule shook again — differently this time, deeper. The instrument panel, dimly lit at launch, showed a curve climbing fast: gravitational field. A planet — vast, pale, streaked with swirling clouds — was rushing up in the porthole with terrifying speed, and the capsule was being dragged toward it like debris caught in a whirlpool.

Atmospheric entry began without warning.

The metal around her screamed — a high, grinding sound of friction against thickening air. The capsule shook so hard her teeth rattled, her vision blurring. The instrument panel flashed red and died completely, leaving her in the dark alone with the roar outside. The walls were heating up — she could feel it even through her gloves, through the straps digging into her body with every new jolt of deceleration. Her chest felt crushed under a slab of stone; each breath came ragged, wheezing, tasting of metal.

A little more, pounded through her head in a disjointed echo. Hold on a little more.

Then — impact.

It came from below, monstrous, jarring everything loose, and the world exploded into white beyond the porthole — snow, ice, a spray of frozen crystals — before the capsule, tumbling end over end, buried itself deep into a snowdrift. The straps bit into her shoulders one last time, her head snapped forward, and the last thing she felt was an icy, searing cold seeping through the seams of the hull, settling onto her skin in an instant, bone-deep chill.

The dying panel's lights winked out, one by one.

And absolute, total silence fell.