You pull up.

Reed dumps a blip of water into the tank to kill the balloon feeling. Minnow stops being a cork in a chimney and becomes a fish again. The glitter slides under you like a weather you refused to move into.

Cameras are smeared, not dead. Lamps go down to work-setting. The puck, which never wanted the soup, paints a compact echo past the plume: hull-sized, patient.

Reed’s hum comes back, quieter. “That’s why we keep the puck. Glow is a carnival. Carnivals eat cameras.”

Vargas: “You still have to dock like a person, not a hero.”

Yuna feeds you the corrected bearing as if you had asked at the start. You take it anyway. Late data is still data.

Turn to 32.