Chapter V –
Where the Air Smells of Iron
Ruvo woke
in the dark. No new light, no movement had called him, only a deep and
irregular sound, low like the distant rumble of a sleeping machine. Between
each metallic beat, a tense stillness. He lifted his head, ears angling to
capture the exact direction. The air was different. Colder, with the dry taste
of old dust. And there was a new scent threading beneath everything, fainter
than the oil on the doors, sharper than the plastic of the wiring. Old iron.
Burnt oil. And something subtler still, a memory of dried blood.
He rose
slowly so as not to wake anyone. His paws landed light on the metal floor,
feeling the low vibration running through the hull. The humans’ breathing was
steady, folded into the constant hum of the ship. He crossed the space where
they slept, passing close to Esvin’s chair, Timurq’s coat draped over a bench,
the tools Dekir kept within reach. None of it stopped him. The scent came from
farther away.
The
corridor was quiet, the filtered blue of standby lights stretching long
shadows. Ruvo moved with his nose near the floor, each step guided by an
invisible map of smells. The distance felt wrong, as if the hallway extended
farther than he remembered. The floor changed subtly under his paws, cooler in
some places, as though the ship’s skin thinned here. He stopped twice, head
raised, listening for the faint pulse between the ship’s own mechanical
heartbeats. He could feel the cold seeping into his pads. His whiskers twitched
at every whisper of air from the vents.
Halfway
down, a door stood slightly ajar. It was like the others in shape and color,
but without the usual hum behind it. The new scent leaked from that gap,
stronger now, pulling him forward. He nudged it open with his muzzle and
slipped inside.
The
compartment was small and cold, lit only by pulses of blue light from a source
he couldn’t see. Dust floated in slow spirals. The smell was heavy and layered:
the copper bite of old metal, stale air that had been still for months, maybe
years. In the center sat a woman who wasn’t truly a woman at all. Her body was
entirely mechanical, shaped like a human but with plates open at her abdomen,
cables spilling out into a core unit on the floor. Her head was bowed. She did
not move. The sound he had heard came from her, a slow, uneven cycle of energy
in her chest.
Ruvo
approached in silence, the air dense with the scent of dust and something that
felt older than the ship itself. He sniffed at the smooth plating of her arm,
the sharp oil tang around her joints, then at the cables on the floor. No
breath, no heartbeat, yet the cycle continued. He pressed the tip of his paw
lightly against her boot.
One of her
mechanical fingers twitched.
He froze,
waiting. Nothing more followed. But something in her stillness pressed at him,
a memory of lying beside hospital beds, waiting for people to wake, learning
the shapes of bodies at rest and the long patience of rooms that smelled like
antiseptic and loss. The hum in her chest was not life, but it was not nothing
either.
He circled
once, then noticed a mark carved into the side of the bench she leaned against.
A shallow scratch, human height. He recognised it instantly, even without
understanding why: the same kind of mark Dekir had touched in the wall the day
before, proof that what he found was bound to what the others had already
sensed.
He moved
along the edges of the room, nose low, cataloguing. Faint traces of others
lingered, old and thin: skin oil, synthetic fibers, a hint of welding smoke. He
could taste the difference in the air here, the way it clung to the back of his
throat. He sat for a long time beside her motionless form, ears turning to
every creak of the hull, committing every sound and smell to memory. The pulse
in her chest seemed to slow, then steady, as if aware of his presence.
The blue
light flickered once, casting her face in shadow. He tilted his head. The lens
over one eye reflected the light back at him, not with the dull deadness of an
object, but with the faint awareness of something not entirely gone. His tail
lowered. He backed away, ears flicking toward the door. A fine layer of dust
clung to his paws.
A sound
rose far off in the corridor. Soft footsteps, unhurried but coming closer. He
gave the woman one last look, the blue light brushing over her metal face, then
turned away. He left the door as he had found it, slightly open.
In the
corridor, the scent faded into the cooler smells of metal and recycled air. He
trotted toward the cabin, the low pulse of the woman’s energy still lodged in
his ears like an echo. She would remain there, unmoving, whatever she was, as
the ship carried them farther from the world he remembered. The faint dust
smell followed him, clinging to his fur.
Ruvo
slipped back into the place he had left, curled on the floor near the hatch.
The humans slept on, unaware. His breathing slowed, but his ears stayed sharp.
Behind his eyes, the image of the room remained: the dust, the cables, the
still bowed head. He thought of the slow beat in her chest and the strange mark
on the bench. He closed his eyes, holding the memory of her scent, the twitch
of her finger, and the quiet weight of the room that no one else would know.
The secret was his alone, a thread of iron and dust that he would carry,
silent, until the day it mattered. Long after his breathing matched the slow
rhythm of sleep, his ears stayed pricked for the sound of that hidden pulse,
steady somewhere beyond the cabin walls.
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