###Chapter 15
Auburn noticed the absence before he noticed anything else.
It wasn't visual at first. Not consciously. His body registered it the way it registered imbalance in a formation or a delay in a response cadence. An absence of expected resistance in a place that should have had weight.
Moss's office was quiet.
That was wrong.
Auburn slowed without deciding to. His gait adjusted, posture tightening as his awareness widened, scanning for an explanation that did not immediately present itself.
Moss was always there.
Not because Moss was important in the way commanders were important, or central in the way coordination nodes were central, np. Moss was constant. A fixture. A stabilizer. A background process that never surfaced because it never needed to.
Moss handled exceptions so efficiently that most systems never realized they'd been exceptions at all.
Not that exceptions were common, to begin with. Or ever.
Auburn's tentacles flicked in irritation.
And Moss had never, NEVER, been required outside his designated workspace. Auburn stopped fully now, turning to face the open threshold.
The office was lit. Interfaces idle but active. Status indicators steady, green, unalarmed. No emergency flags. No escalation notices. No signal that anything had gone wrong.
Which meant something had gone very wrong.
He stepped closer, peering inside.
Nothing had been disturbed. No hurried disengagement. No priority reroute that would suggest a forced redeployment. The space looked exactly as it always did, down to the precise alignment of surfaces and the subtle hum of systems calibrated to Moss's preferences. There was nothing to suggest that anything was out of the ordinary and yet...
Moss had left deliberately.
Auburn felt a flicker of unease ripple through his thorax.
That shouldn't have been possible.
Moss did not leave unless the problem exceeded the capacity of passive containment. And problems that exceeded Moss's capacity did not remain local. They propagated. They announced themselves.
This had not.
Auburn tapped into the ship's internal status layer, requesting a soft query rather than a broadcast.
No alarms.
No alerts.
One active incident thread. Active.
Hm.
That was new.
Auburn stared at the data, mandibles tightening slightly.
An active incident thread without escalation meant Moss was operating in discretionary mode, responding to a situation that had not yet crossed formal thresholds, but might.
Which meant Moss had judged the situation to be... ah....
REXXAS.
Auburn cut the thought off as a new data pulse rippled through the system.
A local constant adjusted, very slightly.
Not enough to trigger alarms. Not enough to endanger structural integrity. Just enough to register as a deviation from baseline.
Auburn felt it in his joints.
He froze.
That constant was not supposed to change. Not without layered authorization. Not without a cascade of confirmations that would have lit the ship's systems like a warning lattice.
And yet..
Another micro-adjustment followed, then a stabilization, the value settling back into approved tolerance bands.
Someone had touched it.
Not mechanically.
Intentionally.
Auburn's focus snapped fully to the incident thread.
The location resolved instantly.
Human quarters.
Auburn's breath caught.
That was-
Ill-advised.
No.
Worse.
That was...
Unprecedented.
He turned sharply, already moving, his steps quickening as his mind raced ahead of his body. The corridor curved smoothly around him, lights brightening fractionally as he passed, systems accommodating his acceleration.
Moss was not built for urgency. Moss was built for precision.
Which meant if Moss was moving quickly, something had gone catastrophically off-script.
Auburn reached the junction outside the human's quarters just as the translation matrix flared to life.
"—this is exactly the kind of probabilistic behavior your file explicitly warned about—"
The Incident Officer's voice cut through the space, sharp and clipped, stripped of its usual measured cadence. The moss-and-mud colored Keshin stood inside the room, tendrils rigid, posture pitched forward in a way Auburn had never seen.
Opposite him, the human stood braced, feet planted wide, posture defensive but unbowed.
"I returned it to baseline," she was saying. "I didn't break anything."
"That is not the metric," Moss snapped. "You adjusted a foundational constant using intent."
Auburn stopped dead in the doorway. The room hummed with tension.
He took it in all at once, the raised panel, still faintly luminous, The subtle oscillation in the air, the residue of a system that had recently been asked to do something it was not designed to do casually...
The human turned, noticing Auburn for the first time.
"Oh," she said. "Hi."
Moss made a sharp, frustrated sound.
"Do not recruit him," Moss said immediately. "This is not a social moment."
Auburn blinked. Recruit him for what?
"She didn't recruit me," the human said. "I didn't even know he was there."
"That is also not reassuring," Moss replied.
Auburn stepped fully into the room now, his presence grounding the space whether he intended it or not.
"Moss," the Incident Officer said, carefully. "Why are you here?"
Moss's tendrils stilled.
Just for a fraction of a second.
Then -
"Because," Moss said, with brittle precision, "your adopted variable just demonstrated competence in a system that assumes fragility."
Auburn's gaze snapped to the human.
She met it calmly.
"I wanted to know where the boundaries were," she said.
Auburn felt something cold slide through his chest.
Moss exhaled sharply.
"You see?" Moss said. "That. That sentence. That is the problem."
The room's systems adjusted again, quietly, subtly, responding not to commands, but to attention.
Two systems.
Two logics.
Now occupying the same space.
And Auburn realized, with a clarity that made his mandibles ache, that this fixture in his existence, wasn't just responding to a breach.
He was trying to build a firewall against curiosity.
And curiosity had already slipped through.