Outside on the Greywater's deck stood a pale yet animated man who seemed to become a lighter shade of pale with every dent, crack, and tear he laid eyes upon in the hull's corroded surface. The deck beneath him was a patchwork of warped metal and soft mats of iridescent fungi, exuding a damp, organic scent that mingled with the sharp tang of oxidized steel. Faint echoes of dripping condensation resonated through the chill air, and fungal growths released ghostly motes of luminescence that clung to boots and cuffs alike. His animation came from the mimicry he was partaking in. He stood stoic at one moment, hands clasped behind his back, chin tilted up in grim assessment. Then, he'd flash his hands, point at a buckled plate crusted with moss-colored lichen, and stomp his boot softly on the yielding, fungal-carpeted deck as if barking silent orders at a phantom crew.If Ira had been here to pay witness, he would have immediately recognized the muse Rust was mimicking: Captain Elias Vance, their old commanding officer on the Wind's Resolve before the First Swap they'd served through together. The posture, the sharp, economical gestures, even the imagined timbre of the shouts—all were Vance. It was a ghost dance, a man trying to remember how to be a captain by channeling the ghost of the last one who hadn't broken.Rust's fingers traced a long, shining scar in the hull plating, a souvenir from the phantom mountain's glacial kiss. "See this, Mister Colby?" he muttered under his breath, his voice a low rasp mimicking Vance's gravelly baritone. "That's not stress fatigue. That's a direct insult. You let the weather get personal, it'll skin you every time." He addressed the empty air where a young, nervous deckhand named Colby had once stood. Colby had vanished in the First Swap, leaving behind only a rusted harmonica.Rust's own voice, thin and uncertain, intruded. "But, Cap'n… it wasn't weather. It was… a memory of weather. From somewhere else."The phantom Vance in his mind scoffed. "A memory with teeth is still a set of jaws, son. You treat it with the same respect. Or you end up decorating the scenery."He moved to the next wound, a series of dents from the hail of crystalline ice. As his focus shifted from imitation to the damage before him, the mimicry dissolved, and with it, the persona he had adopted. The pale, haunted man returned, his breath fogging in the chill, alien air. Although the act of mimicry had briefly offered him stability, he was abruptly confronted once more with his own reality—a reality that was, here, too deep and too strange to navigate through performance alone. Vance had known storms, but not storms that stitched different worlds together. He'd known fear, but not the fear of your own hands moving without your permission.The hatch hissed open behind him. Rust didn't jump, but the ghost of Vance evaporated. He schooled his features into a approximation of his old, weary smirk before turning.It was Zadie. She held two steaming tin mugs. She looked as tired as he felt, but there was a new, grim solidity to her, like someone who had made a hard choice and was resolved to live with it."Found some sealed rations. Tea's synthetic. Tastes like boiled leather and regret." She held out a mug.Rust took it, the heat seeping into his cold hands. "My favorite kind." He took a sip and winced. "Yep. That's the stuff."They stood in silence for a moment, looking not at each other, but at their wounded ship, nestled in the glowing, silent necropolis."He buy it?" Rust asked finally, his voice barely audible.Zadie sipped her own tea, her eyes scanning the buckled beam he'd been pretending to lecture. "I think so. He seemed… tired. Guilty, even. Thanked me." She said the last part with a hint of bewildered distaste, as if the thanks were a burr caught in her cloak."Guilty," Rust repeated, rolling the word around like a strange coin. He kicked gently at a clump of glowing fungus. It released a puff of violet spores that drifted lazily in the still air. "He's carrying a world in his head, Zee. A living, breathing, know-it-all world. That's gotta… bend a man. Make him see things differently.""You're defending him?" Her question was sharp, but not an attack. A genuine probe."No," Rust said, too quickly. He sighed, the facade crumbling further. "I don't know. I'm trying to understand the thing that was wearing me like a suit. It used my memories. My skills. It knew how I'd fight, how I'd talk. To fight it, I have to understand what it wanted. And what it wanted was him, and that map." He looked at her, his eyes clear for the first time since the chapel. "I'm not defending him. I'm… assessing the asset. And the threat. They might be the same thing."It was the most lucid, captain-like thing he'd said since they'd dragged him out of the chapel. It wasn't Vance's voice. It was his own, rusty from disuse, but his.Zadie nodded slowly, following his logic. "The map saved you. Its dagger cut the strings."
"And its wielder was ready to fly us into a meat-grinder because it drew a pretty line," Rust countered softly. "The tool and the hand, Zadie. We can't trust the hand. Not fully. Not anymore.""So what do we do?"Rust looked past the ship, to the impossible skyline. The cathedral's spire, driven into the skyscraper's flank like a spear. "We survive. Like we always have. We utilize the asset whenever possible. We guard against the threat. And we remember that before there was a map, there was a crew." He looked back at the hatch. "A fractured one. But a crew."He took another swallow of the terrible tea, a toast to their fragile, necessary conspiracy. The silence that followed was companionable, woven from shared exhaustion and a new, unspoken alignment. They were no longer just following Ira. They were orbiting him, two wary satellites calculating his trajectory, preparing to course-correct if he veered into the void again.Below their feet, in the belly of the ship, the object of their calculus sat alone. Ira finished the last of his own synthetic tea, the taste of leather and regret fitting perfectly on his tongue. He could feel them up there, a new quiet between them. A bond forged not in loyalty to him, but in shared survival from him.The Map, ever-present, hummed a soft, data-stream lullaby against his spine. It showed him the structural damage in vivid detail. It calculated repair times with various resource assumptions. It did not, and could not, show him how to repair the fracture running through the heart of his crew. That was unmapped territory. The most terrifying terrain of all.