"Seventeen minutes."

Kate Morrison opened her eyes. The warning had come faster this time—faster than yesterday, faster than last week. She sat up in bed, pushing tangled brown hair from her face, and stared at the clock on her nightstand. 3:47 AM. The numbers glowed soft blue in the darkness of her quarters—then stuttered, the display blinking to 3:48 before snapping back to 3:47, as if the clock itself had lost its footing for a moment. The pale light cast shadows across the metal walls that had become the only home she could remember clearly anymore.

The warning still echoed in her mind. Not a voice exactly—it had never been a voice—but a pressure that bypassed her ears entirely and settled directly into her consciousness like a stone dropped into still water.

That was the part Nigel could never explain: why the Hollowing let her warn them. It could block the connection—it had tried, early on—a wall of static that left her with migraines for days. But now it let the information flow freely. She was connected to the station's warning array through a neural link that translated her sensations into coordinates and threat assessments, but the data itself came from the Hollowing. Nigel's equipment could track all of it—the dimensional energy signatures, the amplitude spikes, the frequency shifts that preceded each breach. What his scanners couldn't detect was the conversation happening underneath. They measured the heat of the fire but not the words being spoken around it. The Hollowing reached Kate at the level of consciousness itself, a channel that existed below any waveform his instruments were calibrated to find. It wanted her to see. Wanted her to fight. Wanted her to grow stronger.

She tried not to think about why.

"Seventeen minutes until what?" Chelsea's voice came from the doorway. She was already dressed, already alert—sidearm holstered, boots laced, the practiced efficiency of someone who'd stopped fumbling with buckles about six hundred alarms ago. Two years of this had trained her body to wake at the slightest sound from Kate's room. The dark circles under her eyes were permanent now. Her skin was thinner, her cheekbones sharper—two years of broken sleep carved into her face.

"Sector Fourteen," Kate said. Her voice sounded too calm. Too certain. She used to wake from these moments gasping, heart pounding, terror clawing at her chest like something trying to escape. Now she just knew. The knowing came whole now, instant and unremarkable as her own heartbeat. "Station Meridian. The cargo bay. They're coming through in seventeen minutes."

Chelsea was already moving, tapping her comm unit. "Control, this is Park. We have a Code Violet. Sector Fourteen, Station Meridian, cargo bay. Seventeen-minute window." Then, under her breath: "Three-forty-seven. The Hollowing has zero respect for circadian rhythm."

The response was immediate. Professional. Two years had trained everyone. The station's dimensional scanners would register the same breach eventually—they always did—but their processing cycle ran close to forty minutes from raw data to confirmed reading. By the time the scanners finished their sweep, the incursion would already be spreading through Meridian's cargo hold. Kate's seventeen minutes of lead time was the difference between containment and catastrophe. Two years of engineering, and no amount of hardware or algorithm had closed that gap.

Kate swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her feet didn't quite reach the floor—she was still small for nine, still the little girl everyone tried to protect even though she was the one protecting them. The cold metal sent a shiver up her spine. She was already reaching for her shoes, her fingers finding them in the darkness with practiced ease.

"You don't have to come," Chelsea said.

"I know."

"You could stay here. Rest. Let the teams handle it."

Kate looked up at her. In the dim light, Chelsea's jaw was tight, her mouth a thin line—the same expression she'd worn to every warning for two years. Lines had appeared at the corners of her eyes. Gray streaked through her dark hair that wasn't there before.