Opening

He spent sixteen years in a chamber with no doors and three meals a day. The order's records do not specify what he was imprisoned for. What they describe is what he became inside it: a person who had exhausted rage, exhausted despair, and discovered, at the far end of both, a stillness that turned out to be functional.

He walked out of the most secure facility in the known system without incident. This is where his account begins — or rather, where it becomes observable.

What brought him to Absalom Station, and to the Acreon — a mining ship that returned to dock on autopilot, crewless, pulling unanswered questions behind it — is still being assembled. What is clear is that he arrived carrying a calm that factions have already begun to mistake for availability. The Eoxan Ambassador has made him a contractor. Astral Extractions wants to hire him next. A robot follows him now, patient and designed to witness.

He has not yet boarded the ship. What the Acreon brought back, besides its silence, he does not yet know.