Orbit

The ring is humming in my teeth again, low enough that the sensors pretend it isn’t real.

Amber safety lights pulse along the inner maintenance spine, painting the handrails in slow warnings, and every pulse arrives a fraction late, as if the system itself is catching its breath. I press my palm to the composite wall. The vibration answers with a steadiness that feels almost deliberate. I should be sleeping. The shift board says I’m off. The ring says it doesn’t care.

A film of silver frost powders the rail where my glove drags—wrong, impossible in this warmed corridor. The last time I saw that sheen was the night the tether winch sang itself apart and my brother, Kofi, didn’t make it back from the service crawl. Grief is a kind of training: you learn the exact note a disaster uses before it speaks.

My wrist slate jitters with the oscillation report. Red trending toward black. If the ring crosses the next threshold, Perigee Authority will initiate lockdown, seize the stability spindle, and force a spin correction. Everyone in the lower habitats calls it a recalibration, but I’ve been inside the bones of this place; I’ve seen hairline cracks that look like pale lightning trapped under resin. A hard correction can split a garden spoke, dump atmosphere, turn a park into a wound.

The Choir. That’s what the crews call the resonance when it starts to layer itself into something you can almost hear, not with ears but with marrow. Protocol has a cleaner name—Resonance Protocol—and one brutal line: listen only through dampers. Unshielded contact risks echo loss, memory drift so thorough you can wake with your own name tasting unfamiliar.

At the next access grille a moth-sized maintenance drone hangs dead, foil wings trembling in time with the hum. Its tiny status light is out, but the casing is cold under my fingers, colder than it should be. Something in the ring is taking heat and giving rhythm back.

Footsteps thud somewhere down-corridor: heavy, measured, the kind that belong to boots that don’t work here but enforce here. Captain Mirek Halvorsen’s people. Lockdown on approach.

My listening mask is clipped to my belt, bone-conduction pads waiting like a bite. If I climb into the spoke-crawl now, I can get close enough to hear what’s changing before they seal it. If I don’t, I can still choose who stands beside me when the Authority takes the spindle.