The Watcher Above dimmed itself without being asked. Engines fell to a murmur so soft the bulkheads forgot to hum. In the forward gallery Kael stood out of his armour to the waist-seal, breastplate split and re-laced by Threx's adepts, skin bruised in map-shapes where Curze's hands had argued with bone. The void beyond was a clean sheet of black where a world used to be.
He did not speak. He did not need to. The ship spoke for him.
Shadows moved as if learning to breathe. They climbed the angles of the glass, pooled in the corners like water that had found gravity untrustworthy, then lifted—rippling, tasting the air. A corridor to his left took on depth it didn't own.
Far down in human decks, lamps stuttered and steadied as the dark walked past, courtiers to a king who had not yet noticed their bows.
Kael's jaw worked once. His hand flexed on the rail. In his chest, anger and grief ground against each other like stones, throwing sparks he could not use. He opened his palm.
Darkness flooded it—warm as blood, obedient as ever—and overflowed. It crossed his wrist in threads, mapped veins that were not there, trickled to his elbow. At the edges of the room it found shapes. Hands, at first. Then faces.
The outlines of men he had saved and men he had failed, the ones from Khar, Hub Six, docks and courts and soup lines. Their mouths moved and no sound came because this was his shadow and he did not grant it voices.
"Stop," he said.
It didn't. It showed. It took on a height and a thinness he knew too well: a figure with a gaunt silhouette and eyes like bottomless wells. Curze, sketched in negative, stood in front of the stars. Kael's fingers tightened until knuckles whitened.
"Stop," he said again, softer. The figure melted, became water again, ran back into the seam where glass met hull. The ship dimmed by half a shade—apology.
He breathed. It did not feel like forgiveness.
Across the decks, serfs lowered their heads when corridors whispered their names in his voice. Adepts paused over cogitators that flickered with shadow-static and muttered binharic charms.
In the armoury, lumen strips surrendered for minutes at a time, leaving weapon racks as black cutouts against deeper night. The Watcher Above was not haunted. It was feeling.
Threx felt it first. He sent a tight-band to the others. "Feedback," he voxed, restraint wrapped around concern. "The Captain of Shadows is bleeding into the spine."
Malchion's answer came blunt. "Then we go to the spine."
Joras added, "Before the crew starts praying to the wrong god."
They came as a unit: Malchion in re-sealed ceramite, Joras in a plain officer's coat with a knife stitched into the seam, Threx smelling of oil and hot copper, and Veyra, walking with a cane she refused to name.
Her hair, once a black cut to match the ship's trim, had silvered. Her eyes remained pure Nostraman black—reflective still—but the skin around them had learned years.
They found Kael where the ship had placed him: forward, hands on the rail, the shadows making the glass look thick as water. None of them saluted. That would have been the wrong grammar.
"Captain," Malchion said, voice a hand on a shoulder. "Enough."
The shadows swelled in response—spines and teeth, nightmares trying to be useful.
"Varan," Joras said, gentle as gravity. "They're scaring the crew."
Threx cleared his vox. "They are scaring the machine-spirits," he said, which in his mouth meant me.
Kael did not turn. "Good," he said, and heard the word for what it was. He tongued blood in his mouth and made his voice level. "No. Not good."
The darkness pulsed again, reading him, taking instruction where none had been spoken. A tall, thin shape rose at his shoulder—familiar, terrible, a memory with knives in it. Kael's control snapped.
"STOP."
The room obeyed. The dark collapsed to the floor like cloth. The glass cleared to honest black. Crewmen two decks down stopped halfway through a prayer and felt foolish. Threx's augmetic eyes recalibrated twice and returned to baseline. Malchion let out a breath he had been counting.
Kael sagged against the rail and finally faced them. His eyes were worse than the room. All black, as every son of Nostramo's father; but now there was something behind them that hadn't been there before—a hunger that wasn't for blood. For rightness. For a ledger that would balance if he could hold the pen hard enough.
"I am not angry at you," he said, and the words were true. "I am angry at what I failed to prevent."
"The world failed," Malchion said. "Not just you."
Joras shrugged a shoulder. "And he made it fail."
Threx fussed with a censor unit that did not need fussing. "You must not let grief alter the ship. She responds to you, captain. You are… interleaved."
Kael absorbed that without flinch.
"Interleaved," he repeated, and the Watcher Above shifted the lights a patient fraction as if to agree.
Veyra had said nothing. She studied him with the care she gave schedules and pumps. When she spoke, it was the tone she used to tell a dock full of dangerous men how to lift with their legs.
"This frightens them," she said. "Your grief. Your shadow. Not because it is dark, but because it is aimless."
Kael met those black eyes and saw himself very small and very precise inside them. He looked at the lines of age in her face and felt the slow ache of a new kind of fear. He nodded once. "Aim it," he said, to himself as much as to her.
"Good," she said. "Now sit."
He did. He took a bench that had always been there and never used, and it made a noise that said I am furniture and this is fine. Veyra lowered herself opposite, cane across her knees, slate tucked under one arm. Malchion stationed himself by the door, Joras took the gallery rail, Threx hovered at a respectful angle. The room's shadows lay like obedient hounds—still there, but watching.
Veyra began with the obvious. "You called him brother."
Kael's jaw flexed. "Yes."
"Good," she said. "Fathers demand. Brothers can be told no."
"He did not accept the lesson."
"He heard it," she said. "He will carry it like a shard under skin."
Kael looked past her at the glass. "Nostramo is gone."
"Names are not," Veyra said. "We saved as many as we could for as long as we could. The rest is not your ledger."
He almost smiled. It broke immediately. "I wanted him to be better."
"I know," she said. "So did he."
Silence. Not the bad kind. The ship adjusted down one more degree; the bulkhead seams stopped pretending to breathe. Kael studied her hands. The veins stood out now. The knuckles looked like facts. He felt a new, unwelcome arithmetic—days left on a calendar he could not schedule.
"You're aging," he said, no gentler way available.
"Everyone is," she said, amusement clipped but real. "Even you. You creak when you sit now."
"I will creak longer," he said.
"Probably," she conceded. "But I will creak first."
He looked like a man considering mutiny against time. "I do not want to lose you."
"You will," she said, as if explaining weather to a child. "Not now. Not soon. But you will. And then you will keep moving because you are made of movement."
He swallowed. The anger, denied spectacle, sank to coals. The hunger in his eyes stayed, but it looked… employed.
Veyra tapped her slate with the graphite stub. "Listen carefully. You were meant to keep count. Of food, of fear, of names. Do not stop because one tally hurts to look at."
"I won't," he said.
"Say it like an order," she said.
"I will not stop counting," Kael said, and the Watcher Above set its lighting at correct and held it there.
Threx let out a long binharic breath. Joras's mouth twitched—his version of approval. Malchion's shoulders lowered a degree that meant he will live.
Veyra leaned forward and put her palm against the cracked ceramite over his sternum. The plate was nearly mended; the man behind it was not. "You're not a god," she said. "You're a captain. Act like one."
He covered her hand with his gauntlet and was careful not to weigh it down. "Aye," he said. "Quartermaster."
She sat back. "Good. Now: course?"
Kael stood. His shadow rose, curious, and remained still when he didn't invite it. "Terra," he said. "Direct. No flourish."
"Filed," Veyra replied, writing the word TERRA in both tongues on her slate.
"Engineers?"
Threx brightened in relief at something he could fix. "Engines will obey. Spirits soothed. Systems de-haunted."
"Malchion, Joras," Kael said, voice finding its old measure. "Drills. We keep the crew busy until they forget to invent ghosts."
"Acknowledged," they answered together.
They left him with the ship. Veyra rose more slowly than she once would have. Kael did not offer an arm. She would have refused. At the hatch she looked back, eyes black and clear.
"Kael," she said.
He turned.
"You are allowed to grieve," she said. "You are not allowed to perform it."
He inclined his head. "Understood."
She went. The door shut with the sound of work.
Kael faced the glass. The place where Nostramo had been was clean. That was the worst part. Clean finalities are hard to argue with. He opened his hand. The darkness flowed up, curious, then settled like a dog told to wait at the threshold.
"In the silence," he said softly, "we keep count."
The ship dimmed one polite fraction in agreement, and the Watcher Above drifted on, a blade sheathed in shadow, toward the light he had not stopped serving.