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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0700 hrs] The Salvage Job
Last post by Ellen Fitz -The bone was replicated. The knife found no grain, no direction, nothing that pushed back. She carved into it anyway.
The mourning spiral was Okashii Atama work — the kind she had learned before she'd learned to write, her grandmother's claw guiding the tool through the first curve of it while the fire outside the tent made the shadows move. Real bone remembered which way it had grown. The scrimshaw followed that memory, and the elders had called that the art's honesty: you listened for where the bone was willing to go. This bone was willing to go anywhere. It would hold whatever she cut into it without complaint, and that was the problem, and she was making marks regardless.
Her male Vulcine form sat wide across the shuttle seat clothed in the medical department uniform, her ear-length hair combed back from her face as she worked at the bone. Wrong. Not wrong in the way an injury was wrong — wrong the way borrowed clothes were wrong, technically functional, all the edges slightly off. Her third shift in Arven's lab had gone into this form, and it had landed cleaner than the feral, but the proprioception was still arguing with her. She kept reaching for things a half-centimeter from where her hand actually was.
And the other forms pressed.
Not loudly. Not urgently in any way she had language for. More like standing in a doorway while a room full of people waited behind you — each one patient, each one present, each one hers. The feral form worst of all: it had a kind of blunt insistence, pure body knowing what it was, and it had pushed at the edges of the Vulcine shift the entire time until she'd come back out the other side of it, and Arven's equipment had recorded seventeen deviations she couldn't feel from the inside.
The knife followed the outer ring of the spiral without her watching it. She knew this design by repetition; over forty years of scrimshaw had put it below the level of thought, which was the point. Her grandmother had taught her that the hands could hold grief the way the mind couldn't — steadier, quieter, without the mind's habit of turning the thing over and over looking for the angle that hurt less.
There was no angle that hurt less. The Cayuga was out there. She had not looked at the viewport as they cast off from Theurgy and she would not look outside again until they arrived.
The spiral reached its center. She ran her thumb across the cuts — clean, consistent depth throughout — and the bone said nothing back, and she started a second design in the space beside it: the Okashii Atama mark for witness. She hadn't planned it. Her hands had already begun.
Voices at the front of the shuttle. Someone's equipment cycling. The mechanical breath of life support.
She kept the knife moving and did not look at the viewport and did not think about what it would look like when the Cayuga came on screen, what was left of it, what the Savi and the Romulans and the indifferent physics of a drifting ship had made of the place where she had once known where everything was.


