It took several attempts and a change in thermotorches to get the droid core out of the congealed mass of metal and anomalous liquid — to then upload copies of Thuni's modules onto her datascroll for added safekeeping. Ulin bowed their gratitude in her direction, but Thuni stuck to the terminal, quiet. Vent in view with the abyss to stare at, she waved off the programmer's thanks. Maybe... Maybe I was seeing things, like last time... in the morgue. Neo, cold and pale, in the throes of death, nothing more than a meat sack to those who wanted to figure out his demise. Her nails dug into her palm, and she tasted blood on her tongue. "I'll talk to you two later," she whispered. "Be careful."

In her rush to the tram terminal, she nearly tripped on her imagination. It came closer and the doors into the tram itself opened. Izerva stood in the middle, arms crossed with their tail twitching at the end.

"Izerva?" Nova questioned, trying to sign in Xelnod. "What's the matter?"

Izerva pointed at the terminal for her to click it before responding back with a shaky curl to their clawed fingers, "Is Scientist Neo not with you, Engineer Nova?"

"No, he told me he had something to pick up in the eastern medtower..." Nova held onto the upper rack when the tram rumbled beneath her feet. "Why?"

"I wanted to let him know that they would not allow me to take a look at the scripture he made mention of." Their ears pressed flat against their head, and their hair stood on end.

"Oh, he's going to love that." Nova scoffed into her arm. "Well, what was their reasoning?"

"They weren't letting anybody in the central labs," Izerva emphasised with a circle of their finger.

Nova nodded. "I'll tell him when I see him."

Lights outside of the window flickered down the tracks.

In one pulse, each one cracked and burst into electric embers.

Nova gasped when the tram lurched to a sudden stop, and the momentum sent her face first into the metal flooring when her grip failed on the standing railing. Cheeks burning from pain and embarrassment both, she hauled herself to her knees as red lights peeked out of their holders to send crimson through the darkness. An alarm blared through her hears, and the PA system spoke in a monotone voice:

"Warning. Anomalous breach detected. Lockdown A initialised. Please return to your sectors and await further instructions."

Izerva raised their nose to the curve of the ceiling, straight to the emergency hatch.

"Ow..." Her pain went straight to her temple, but she stopped when Izerva tossed their tail into her lips. "What—?"

Izerva tapped their own muzzle for silence.

Nova leaned close to the floor when Izerva tugged out a blaster with one graceful motion. Metal scraped against rust above her head to send a shiver of cold down her spine. It went silent into the vacuum of space, though Izerva's ears and tail continued to twitch. Awaiting for the signal of safety, Nova released her breath when Izerva nodded down at her, holding a hand out to assist her back to her feet. Nova hung back while Izerva opened the emergency hatch.

Nova followed suit, and their boots hit the tracks to walk the rest of the way to the eastern platform through maintenance. It took several swipes of both their access cards to allow them passage through the station's doors. Level A, though... which means they haven't closed the bulkheads. Back into the activity of the eastern sector, people bustled around in their haphazard confusion, fighting to follow protocol in the sudden panic.

Izerva nudged her in the direction of the living quarters, but when she turned around to ask a question, the lights flickered once more with an eerie moan echoing in the space station.

Someone released a soft noise of fear, frozen in time.

Neo?

She wasn't sure why his name lifted to her lips, until another alarm screamed closer and the people ran from it, fleeing the unseen. The power flickered off when a commanding voice spoke in the intercom, frizzing to the beat of dissonant, empty music. Nova swallowed her fear and rushed back to their room, bursting in for her sense of safety.

Emptiness greeted her in a false home.

Neo left his computer and his millions of tabs open.

Nova checked every inch of it for her best friend, but abandoned it to return to the panic unfolding in the corridor.

"Neo!" she snapped into her communicator. "Neo! Answer me!"

"Nova?" he questioned on the other end.

"Where in the black holes are you?" Nova dodged when one intern scrambled for their room. "We're going into lockdown! You need to get back here."

"I was at the eastern medtower—" Nova readied to sprint to the medbay when his communicator cut out with the dissonance of space, unable to flee his false corpse. "I see. I'll be right there, Nova. Just stay there."

Every sound flared her nerves to her skin. The nebulous cloud continued to shimmer across the starry expanse. Tendrils creeped and wrapped around the station when she returned to their room and paced its interior. Flames of pain drove into her head, unable to keep track of the time it took Neo to return when the commanding voice in the intercom died into white noise.

Alarms rang in her ears.

In the crimson mist, he laid there in place of someone else, and when she touched his hand, it was stiff and ice-cold.

Get a grip! Nova slammed her fist into the counter, to rattle her bones back into reality. Get a fucking grip, Nova Spacyn! Anger burned through her throat when she slammed her other fist to join in on her pounding beat. Nova fought to steady her breathing, and she stumbled into their room to shove herself in the corner of his wall-unit. Just follow the lockdown procedure. Don't panic. Fuck, where is he? Nova fumbled her datascroll and it almost fell smack in her face when she lifted herself off the bed. Doom brought acidic swill to her teeth as she tapped it for further updates, for answers no one gave. Tethered to the sense of agony, she rushed out of their bedroom to their terminals, where her droid's attempt at contact died with the tearing screech of a distress beacon.

It tore through her skin in fear when Neo walked through the doorway with his keycard in hand. He shut the door behind him with a thoughtful frown. "I'm sorry I took so long," he said, calm as can be. "They've switched to emergency power in one of the substation cores."

Nova escaped the work corner to lunge at him, causing him to stumble. "Do you know what's going on?"

Neo raised his hands and urged her to sit down. "N-No, when you left with Thuni and Ulin I headed straight to the eastern medtower to compare some of the readings with that autopsy report..." His lips curled in dissatisfaction. "Also had to play messenger boy between a pair of doctors, and then that happened." He waved his hand at the door. "Kind of inconvenient..."

Inconvenient? Nova choked at the casual word in the doombringing silence. No. No, he's right to remain calm... I've been on edge since he touched that anomaly. That's all. Nova hugged him around the middle and rested herself in her best friend's constant warmth. "I'm sorry. I was on the tram when they called it. I fell flat on my face, pretty sure I got my brain rattled." Nova forced a smile on her lips and dragged herself from the event horizon of a false memory. It elicited a warm chuckle from him, so she pressed on, "By the way, Izerva couldn't get access to the anomaly."

"Really?" His laughter and voice died. On a cold table, left to be examined like a sack of bones and blood.

No, stop that.

"Apparently they weren't letting anyone inside."

Neo hummed his song. "Must be serious. Izerva should have been given clearance," he said. "I mean, barring any updates to this lockdown."

"Thuni also wasn't happy seeing his droid the way it was."

"Hm, I suspected as much. Does he blame me?"

Nova shoved him out of her embrace. "No."

Doom's claws grabbed her shoulders.

"Good, I'd hate to be on his bad side. As I said, he could swat me like a fly and I'd probably fall apart."

Nova relaxed the tension in her shoulders. "Why? You haven't done anything to elicit his dislike of you, Neo."

His brow furrowed, and his silence tore open her throat to spread the blood of unsaid words between them. His head tipped to the side with a part of his lips, a whisper of confusion on them. Until he shrugged and stuck his tongue out. "I don't know, you know how bad my memory is."

What... was that face he just made? Nova shook it out of her mind. "Your memory seems to work just fine when it comes to anomalies."

"I mean, that's my job." He puffed out his chest. "Well, did you manage to salvage anything from their droid?"

"I did. I need to get it on my terminal." Nova headed for her desk and placed the drive into it to upload the data. Hesitation curled her fingers at the glitched security footage, where it attempted to make the station remember a different possibility. Her own fault — anything to make everyone forget the truth. Nova frowned down at the screen before turning to Neo, who stared at the wall with his finger against his chin, chewing on the inside of his cheek. "Hey, Scientist Guy," she teased. "I need to pick your brain about something since we're stuck here. It's anomalous."

Neo brought his hands to his chest. "You said the magic words."

"It could just be a glitch in the system, but I don't know..." Nova pointed at the terminal. "You took a look at the security footage, right? Thuni adjusted it and... just look." Using his adjusted imaging, she played back the footage. "He noticed something past the glitching that I don't think anyone noticed the first time around when watching the emergency landing." Nova used her finger to trace the odd movements of the deathly splatter, and how they went up into the vent instead of dripping to the floor. "See it?"

Neo played back the footage again.

He replayed it, over and over.

Saying nothing, too focused on a detail she had yet to notice from the way his eyes narrowed. Not with examination, but something resembling hunger and a terrifying drive of an unknown goal.

"Neo?"

It broke apart into another thoughtful one, and she wondered if it was another trick of the light.

"I see it," he said with a nod and a familiar smile. "Do you mind if I borrow it to take a closer look? I think I have a way to adjust the glitch and get a clearer image."

"Go ahead. I'm going to go try and get some sleep." Nova brushed his back when he sat down in front of his terminal. In the bedroom, safe with the knowledge of Neo's presence, she burrowed underneath her covers to ignore the pulsating in her ears and bones.

Alarms beeped.

Voices cried out behind the metallic screech of the D.S Butterfly's distress beacon.

Footsteps stomped.

Robotic alerts rang through the intercoms.

Until it all fell silent in the orchestra of the cosmos.

One by one, a multitude of voices until it was a single one.

Behold the universe. Open the gateway. Drift into the sea of stars. Burst through the waves of possibility.

Be my eyes of time.

He looked like he was sleeping on the table.

Be my hands through space.

Stiff and cold.

A single heartbeat left.

Nova awoke to the void and the songs of home stopped.

"LOCKDOWN LEVEL Z INITIATED. ANOMALOUS THREAT REGISTERED: ACTIVE AND DANGEROUS. ALL TRAINED PERSONNEL ARE TO REPORT TO CENTER COMMAND."