1

The ancient fax clacked out information on a roll of thermal paper which was yellowed with age but, miraculously, still usable. The sound echoed throughout the room. Li watched Angie as she sat near the machine, her feet on the desk, leaning back, staring at the ceiling tiles with her arms crossed.

He walked over from his cubicle and gave the fax a menacing look meant for Angie (and she probably knew it) before sighing. "This is ridiculous."

Cookie, sitting two desks over and methodically filing her nails with the deliberate precision of someone barely keeping her temper in check, looked up at them and snorted with derision, but kept her lips tightly closed.

"Or we can kick the high power transmitter on and eat wattage like it's going out of style. Up to you." Angie's eyes never moved from their fixed point on the water-stained ceiling tiles as she spoke, her voice carrying that particular brand of studied indifference that Li had learned meant she was anything but.

Cookie ran her hands through her spiky blond hair, which had drifted far from its usual meticulously maintained retro style, and rolled her eyes at Li in pure, undiluted frustration. The best indicators of the severity of their situation weren't the rationing schedules or the failing life support diagnostics, but rather the dark roots and general shagginess of Cookie's hairstyle, which was now entering its third month of neglect. What had once been a sharp statement of personal style in defiance of normal moon-side regulations had devolved into something that spoke more to their collective exhaustion than any official report ever could.

Li offered her a shrug, an economical gesture that had served him well during his years in the mines when wasted motion meant wasted oxygen. He was even taller than Angie, which became more apparent when he wasn't hunched over technical readouts or maintenance panels. When he sat down on the edge of her desk his long frame folded in on itself like an accordion. The desk creaked ominously under his weight, another reminder of how everything on the station seemed to be held together by hope and their dwindling supply of duct tape.

"Why couldn’t they wait until the next scheduled transmission? Why the all-fire hurry?" He leaned over Angie to catch her eye. She kicked her feet off the desk and sat up.

"I don’t know. Neither does Peter; don’t ask."

Li shrugged again. He carried the weight of years spent navigating the unspoken hierarchies of both mining crews and administrative politics so he had no intention of asking Peter anything—not about the transmission, not about the urgency, and certainly not about whatever was driving the growing tension between the siblings.

In his experience, when the brass started making demands without explanations, it usually meant someone even higher up the chain was panicking. And panic, Li had learned during his years in the tunnels, had a way of trickling down through the ranks like water through fractured rock, finding every weakness and exploiting it until the whole structure came apart.

Better to keep his head down, do his job, and let the McDonnells sort out their drama without his input.

Sue walked in to drop off some papers at her own cluttered desk, her boots making soft scuffing sounds against the worn metal flooring. She took in the scene with a practiced assessment that came from years of reading the emotional weather patterns of a crew living in too-close quarters. The faint smell of stale coffee lingered in the recycled air, mixing with the metallic tang that never quite left the station's atmosphere, while the telltale hum of the life support systems droned in the background, a mechanical heartbeat that everyone had long since stopped consciously hearing.

Except when they did.

"Inventory?" she inquired, her voice cutting through the tense atmosphere and the underlying anxiety that seemed to thicken the air between Angie and the still-chattering fax machine.

"Yep," said Angie, crossing her arms again with deliberate finality, shutting down the conversation before it had properly begun.

Li watched Sue's expression shift slightly, a subtle tightening around her eyes that he recognized from his mining days. It was the look supervisors got when they realized the crew was holding back information, the same careful neutrality that preceded either an explosion or a strategic retreat. Neither bode well for the crew, in Li's opinion.

"Not like it's going to change, other than to get smaller," Sue observed, her tone carrying just enough edge to let them know she wasn't buying their casual act.

"Yep," echoed Li, crossing his own arms to mirror Angie's defensive posture. The gesture felt strange, too much like the surface politics he'd never quite mastered. Down in the tunnels, you either spoke your piece or kept your mouth shut. This careful dance of half-truths and meaningful silences was still foreign territory.

Sue recognized a stone wall when she walked into one, though. She'd been navigating the McDonnell family dynamics long enough to know when pushing would only make things worse. With a slight shake of her head that managed to convey both resignation and mild disapproval, she gathered up the papers she'd come for and headed back toward the door, her footsteps echoing in the sudden quiet that followed her retreat.

"She’ll tell Peter," said Cookie, brandishing her nail file at Angie.

"Fine. Doesn’t change anything." Angie leaned back to stare at the ceiling again. Next to her, the fax machine rattled on.

Li had his suspicions about the fax and he knew Angie did too, but it was safer in the meantime to pretend they didn't. He watched the fax machine's persistence in churning out a long roll of antique paper as a familiar knot formed in his gut. It was the same one he'd carried up from the pit of Clavius Base three years ago, when things first started breaking apart and not getting fixed. Down there, when something went wrong, you knew it immediately. The pit didn't send memos about structural instability, it just collapsed on you.

The difference still ate at him, despite more than a year as a desk jockey. In the mines, panic had weight and substance—the acrid bite of pure oxygen, the groan of overstressed support plating, the way a headlamp beam would catch the glitter of falling moon dust. You lived or died by your ability to read those signs, to trust your gut when topside insisted the dig was stable for another month's extraction.

But on the surface, panic wore a spotless utility suit and spoke in measured tones about "resource allocation" and "contingency protocols." It hid behind transmission schedules and inventory reports, wrapping itself in the comfortable fiction that disaster could be managed, contained, processed through proper channels.

Angie's silence stretched on, and Li recognized something in it that had nothing to do with her ongoing spat with her brother. He'd seen that same stillness in the break rooms back at Clavius, when miners stared at their coffee while the shift supervisor explained why the new safety regulations would have to wait another quarter, why their concerns about tunnel seven were being "taken under advisement," why their lives were somehow less urgent than the extraction quotas. That pit had shut down in a hurry after three deaths, and Li still felt survivor's guilt that the same disaster claiming the lives of his coworkers was his stepping stone into management.

Li had watched good people disappear into cave-ins because someone in an office decided their warnings weren't cost-effective to investigate. He'd learned to read the particular exhaustion that came from being told your survival was subject to review. Coming into the Hive, though, meant working with the McDonnells, and everyone knew the McDonnells played by the rules. Their own family tragedy meant they took shit seriously, and did not bow to Mizmo Command's every whim. The McDonnell siblings might squabble over command decisions, but they were family, irreplaceable to each other even when they acted like they weren't, and they carried that attitude into their management style.

Usually.

Cookie's nail file scraped with the rhythmic persistence of water dripping on stone.

The fax machine clattered out another line, spitting out more paper, and Li found himself wondering if Peter knew how much his careful protocols sounded like the same promises the mining bosses used to make. How Angie's frustration echoed every worker who'd ever been told to wait for authorization while the walls closed in.

Some things, Li thought, didn't change much between the depths and the heights. Just the view outside the windows.