Hamish simply walked back toward the ship with the last group of evacuees.

He felt lightheaded when the adrenaline began to fade.

Sepha noticed and asked whether he needed medical attention.

He said he needed water, a shower, and a very long holiday somewhere without venomous wildlife.

Imani suggested a quiet beach on Earth.

Hamish asked whether she had forgotten that their beaches had jellyfish, sharks, and things that could bite through shoes.

Imani said she had forgotten nothing.

That was why she liked them.

Back on Meridian, Vela waited near the arrival gate with a folded picture in her hands.

She had drawn a small ship approaching a larger station, with a bright yellow lantern between them.

Sepha asked what the lantern meant.

Vela said it was a light to help people find their way back.

She had heard the story of the dinner and the old Liran custom from one of the nurses.

Hamish accepted the drawing and promised to hang it in his cockpit.

Then Vela asked whether they had found her mother.

The silence was immediate.

Sepha took the girl’s hand and explained that they had found evidence Nerin might have survived the laboratory fire.

There was an unregistered platform somewhere beyond the skithra preserve.

They did not yet know whether Nerin remained there.

Vela’s face changed from hope to uncertainty and back again.

She asked if the people who had taken her mother were the same people who had altered the medicine.

Sepha said the evidence pointed toward a connection, but investigators were still examining it.

Vela looked at Hamish.

Will you help find her, she asked.

Hamish did not immediately answer.

He thought about the station’s public messages, the cameras following him, and the way his own survival had made him useful to strangers with plans of their own.

He wanted to be a trader again.

He wanted a route with ordinary freight, honest payments, and no medical emergencies.

But he also remembered Nerin’s warning, written by a mother who had spent her last safe hours protecting a child and trying to save people she would never meet.

He knelt so that his eyes were level with Vela’s.

I’ll help the people looking for her, he said.

But I won’t promise something nobody knows yet.

Vela nodded.

She appeared to trust him more for refusing to make a promise he could not keep.

That night, Sepha began reviewing the unregistered platform’s possible locations.