Most people on Virex-9 learned early not to ask questions.
It wasn't something anyone announced. There were no laws carved into steel or warnings broadcast across colony speakers. It was simply understood, passed down the way survival always was—quietly, through observation.
The ones who asked too much didn't last long.
They weren't executed. That would have been too obvious. Instead, they were reassigned. Transferred to deeper pits. Remote sectors. Places where air recyclers failed more often and oversight reports stopped getting filed.
After a while, people stopped asking where they went.
Kael never stopped asking.
He just learned to do it silently.
The colony lights had dimmed into artificial dawn, bathing the metal structures of Virex-9 in a pale amber glow that flattened everything into the same tired color. Towers of scaffolding stretched like skeletons toward the sky. Conveyor bridges hung between processing blocks like rusted veins. Even the air looked metallic, thick with dust and drifting particles that shimmered faintly in the light.
Kael sat on the roof of Habitation Block C-17, knees pulled up, elbows resting on them as he stared at the horizon.
From up here, the colony almost looked peaceful.
Almost.
The generator fields hummed in the distance, a deep vibration you felt more than heard. Cargo haulers crawled slowly along their tracks, each one dragging chains of ore containers that clanged softly as they shifted. Farther out, beyond the perimeter towers, the wasteland stretched into darkness—an endless plain of fractured rock and abandoned extraction scars.
Most people avoided looking that far.
Kael didn't.
He watched everything.
"You're doing it again."
The voice came from behind him, familiar and calm.
Kael didn't turn immediately. He already knew who it was.
Vera climbed up the last rung of the maintenance ladder and stepped onto the roof with practiced ease. She moved lightly, like someone used to navigating unstable places. Her dark hair was tied back with a strip of cloth, and her sleeves were rolled to her elbows, revealing thin streaks of machine grease along her forearms.
She carried two dented tin cups.
"You're going to burn holes into the horizon one day," she said, walking over and dropping into a seated position beside him.
Kael accepted the cup she handed him. Warmth seeped into his palms instantly, ensured by the cheap thermal lining the mechanics sometimes installed for themselves.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Broth," she said. "Or something pretending to be broth."
He smirked faintly and took a cautious sip. It tasted like salt and metal, but it was warm, and that was enough.
They sat in silence for a while, watching the slow crawl of the colony waking into its next cycle.
Vera was the only person who didn't rush to fill quiet moments. That was one of the reasons Kael trusted her.
After a minute, she tilted her head slightly.
"So," she said, casual but not careless, "what is it tonight?"
Kael hesitated.
He wasn't sure why telling her still felt risky. Vera had never reported him. Never mocked him. If anything, she listened more closely than anyone else ever had.
Still, saying it out loud made it real.
"The stars moved," he said quietly.
She didn't laugh.
Didn't even look surprised.
Instead, she followed his gaze upward.
The sky above Virex-9 was beginning to fade into that strange in-between color that came just before the artificial dawn lamps fully engaged. Not quite dark. Not quite light. A dim violet haze where the stars still clung stubbornly to visibility.
"Which ones?" she asked.
Kael blinked, caught off guard.
"You believe me?"
Vera shrugged slightly. "I believe you think you saw something."
He let out a slow breath.
"That cluster," he said, pointing toward the upper left quadrant of the sky. "Near the broken belt. They… shifted. Not like meteors. Slower."
Vera studied the sky in silence.
The generators pulsed faintly behind them, casting rhythmic vibrations through the metal roof. Somewhere below, a loudspeaker crackled and spat out a garbled announcement about shift rotations.
Neither of them moved.
Finally, Vera spoke.
"You ever notice," she said slowly, "how nothing here changes?"
Kael frowned slightly. "Things break all the time."
"That's not change," she said. "That's decay."
He thought about that.
She wasn't wrong.
Buildings corroded. Machines failed. People aged too fast and disappeared. But the system itself—the schedules, the shipments, the invisible structure behind everything—never seemed to shift.
Like the colony was locked into a pattern no one could touch.
"Maybe that's why you notice things," Vera continued. "Because you're always looking for something different."
Kael looked down at the cup in his hands.
"Maybe I just don't fit here," he said quietly.
Vera didn't respond immediately.
The wind moved gently across the rooftop, carrying the faint scent of heated metal and distant ozone. The artificial dawn brightened slightly, pushing more stars out of sight.
"You ever think," she said finally, "that it's not about fitting?"
Kael glanced at her. "What do you mean?"
She leaned back on her palms, eyes still on the sky.
"Maybe some people aren't meant to fit into systems," she said. "Maybe they're meant to notice when systems are wrong."
The words settled heavily between them.
Kael's chest tightened.
He wanted to dismiss it. Laugh it off. Say she was being dramatic.
But he couldn't.
Because deep down, the thought had already been living inside him.
And last night, on that ridge, when the stars had moved…
It had grown teeth.
A distant siren wailed, signaling the start of another labor cycle. Lights across the colony shifted from amber to stark white, bathing everything in harsh clarity.
The moment shattered.
Reality rushed back in.
Vera stood, brushing dust from her hands. "We should go," she said. "Before they send someone looking."
Kael nodded but didn't stand right away.
He looked up one last time.
The stars were almost gone now, swallowed by artificial daylight.
Still and silent.
As if they had never moved at all.
But Kael knew what he saw.
And as he finally rose to his feet, a quiet certainty settled into him.
If the sky could change…
Then so could everything else.
He just didn't know yet whether that thought was hope—
Or a warning.