Elara didn’t argue. She just began sleeping in the cargo bay.

Elara drilled into the container’s shell. It took six hours with a laser cutter. When the inner seal hissed open, the smell wasn’t rot or chemicals. It was lavender and rain. And inside, curled on a bed of black velvet, was a girl.

“I’m JUY 217,” the girl said, as if it were obvious. “But my real name is Anya. I got lost in the Rift. A man in a silver suit put me in the box to keep me safe. He said someone would come. He said you’d be kind.”

She ran the container’s ID through the ship’s black market manifest—the one the captain thought no one knew about. JUY 217 wasn’t fungal samples. It was a salvage claim from the edge of the Kessler Rift, where time bled like a wound. The cargo had been listed as “biological preservation, unknown origin.” The buyer: a private collector of impossibilities.