Back on a planet where the sun always shone, warm and constant across skies that had never once carried a storm cloud in living memory, every face turned up toward that same sun now carried something the light itself couldn't touch.
Months had passed since the ships came down. Salvation hadn't come with them, and it hadn't come since.
The Vel'kai workers moved through mining tunnels in long lines, three-legged bodies bent low under the weight of ore sacks, single eyes fixed on the ground because looking up cost time and time cost pain. The air down here tasted like metal and old smoke. Overhead lamps threw a sickly yellow light across walls carved wider every month since the occupation began, tunnels branching deeper into the crust with each new quota handed down from somewhere none of them had ever seen.
