A red sun hung low over a settlement, and Lila had woken beneath it every day for the better part of two weeks now, though counting days had started to feel less like tracking time and more like a habit she kept out of stubbornness.
High rises rose along the settlement's central spine, dark metal catching what little warmth the sun offered, transport lanes threading between them at three separate elevations, cargo lifts moving in slow, mechanical rhythm from dawn until whatever passed for dusk on a world she still didn't have a proper name for. Workers filled the streets below in numbers that made the place feel closer to a small city than a mining outpost, and yet every single one of them moved with the same closed, purposeful silence, heads down, conversations kept low, nobody lingering anywhere long enough to be noticed.
She'd learned the shape of it slowly, the way you learned a room by walking into its furniture in the dark.
