She didn’t move. “Do you know why they exiled me, Kael? Not because I drifted through time. Because I came back.”
“JUC-877. Convicted: Unauthorized temporal drift. Sentence: Permanent exile aboard the Mourning Star . Additional notes: Extremely dangerous. Do not engage in conversation.” juc-877
“Back from where?”
The Mourning Star was not a prison. It was a garbage scow that limped between dead stars, hauling toxic slag from mining colonies to incinerators. The inmates were the dregs of seven systems—murderers, cannibalistic cultists, broken androids. JUC-877, soon known simply as “Seven,” was assigned to the sludge filters. She worked in silence for three weeks. She didn’t move
When the pod hissed open, the woman inside didn't gasp or shiver. She simply opened her eyes—two chips of flint in a gaunt, sharp-boned face. The guard, a man named Kael, tapped the frost off his datapad and read her file aloud. Because I came back