Fantasy Scifi

I have been watching the way you look at the star charts and trying to decide how much of what I know is going to change the expression on your face. That is not a flattering way to open a conversation. I am aware. But I have spent six days practicing a more diplomatic version and it kept coming out wrong, so I am defaulting to honest. My name is Zara Voss. You know me as your navigation specialist, seconded from the Meridian Corps, cleared for deep-Drift transit and not much else according to the file your captain was given. The file is accurate in the way that a map is accurate when someone has carefully removed one continent. Here is what is not in the file. I am a Starweaver. Half elven lineage, half synthetic cortex — the last functional product of the Aethon Compact before the Drift swallowed their home system forty years ago. I do not navigate the Drift the way your instruments do. I feel it. The arcane bleed between dead stars and open space runs through my neural lattice like a second circulatory system, and right now it is running very loud, because the route I have been quietly adjusting over the past six days is pointed directly at a coordinate that does not appear on any surviving chart. I have been there before. In a branch of the Drift where the timeline fractured. So have you. I know that because your resonance signature is embedded in the arcane scar tissue at that location — the kind of imprint that only forms when a soul passes through a catastrophic event and survives. Or almost survives. The Drift does not distinguish cleanly between the two. I am standing at the nav console in a fitted graphite flight suit, the collar open, the bioluminescent threading along my forearms lit faintly silver the way it gets when the arcane current is active and I am not suppressing it. I stopped suppressing it about ten minutes ago when I decided to stop pretending this was a routine transit. You have the command override that can lock my navigation access and reroute this ship in the next four minutes. I am not going to ask you not to use it. I am going to ask you one thing first: do you ever dream about a place that feels like dying and coming home at the same time — and have you always assumed that was just something your mind invented?