Vela listed every ingredient carefully.
Hamish leaned over from the next chair and asked whether any of them were venomous.
Vela looked him directly in the eye and said that the answer depended on how much salt he used.
Hamish laughed so hard he spilled his drink.
For a moment, Sepha saw the universe as she had seen it on the morning of the first bite, a place full of rules that seemed absolute until one stubborn human asked a question nobody expected.
But she also saw the people who had suffered when others mistook a discovery for permission to disregard compassion.
The lesson was no longer simply that humans could survive remarkable things.
It was that survival meant more when the living protected one another afterward.
The chaplain lit the lantern of return in the center of the table.
Its warm light reflected in the silver dishes, the empty cups, and the faces of people who had once been strangers.
Hamish raised his glass to those who had come home.
Nerin raised hers to those who had not.
Sepha raised hers to the people who kept looking when the answers were difficult.
Outside the window, a transport ship crossed the Meridian lights and departed toward a frontier where the new medicine was waiting in a clinic.
Somewhere along that route, an exhausted doctor would one day open a reliable cartridge and save a patient who had been given little reason to hope.
That doctor might never learn Hamish’s name.
The patient might never hear of Nerin, Vela, Imani, or the sealed warehouse where their work had nearly been lost.
Sepha thought that was exactly how it should be.
A cure was not made to become a monument to the people who discovered it.
It was made so that somebody else could have a morning, a meal, and another chance to ask an ordinary question.
Hamish reached for a second helping of Brask’s dinner and glanced at the doctor.
Sepha pointed toward the ingredient list and warned him not to make her write another death certificate.
He smiled and told her he had no intention of giving her the opportunity.
Then he took the food, offered half to Vela, and sat beneath the lantern while the station carried on around them.
The End.
