The crowd was a river of heat and noise, its current pulling him along the upper walkway of the Ceres Down-Spiral. Kaelen kept to the edge, his shoulder brushing against pitted, rust-wept metal. Below, the lower levels fell away into a canyon of flickering neon and shadow, a chasm of competing languages and smells. Ozone from a cracked power conduit mingled with the scent of scorched noodles and something like wet metal. He moved with his head down, a hood shadowing his face, just another piece of human debris caught in the station’s gravity. The psychic pressure of so many minds packed this close was a physical weight, a constant, grinding static that made his teeth ache. It was a roar he felt in his bones, a background radiation of want and fear and boredom that threatened to drown the other, more specific noise that lived inside his skull.
He needed dampeners. The thought was a sharp, clean signal in the wash of ambient chaos. His goal was a specific stall, three tiers down, run by a junker who didn't ask questions as long as the power cells were good. Kaelen navigated the flow, his path a series of small, calculated adjustments to avoid contact. A datapad in a merchant’s hand flickered, its display stuttering for a half-second, a common imperfection in the asteroid’s patchwork grid. He registered it without thought, a baseline flaw in a flawed world. He needed to reduce the input, to build a wall against the ceaseless tide of the Resonance Field. Only then could he hope to silence the ghost.
The stall was a recess carved from the station’s raw rock, its shelves cluttered with salvaged electronics and tarnished chrome. The junker, a man whose face was a roadmap of busted capillaries, was polishing a dented servitor head with a greasy rag. He didn't look up as Kaelen stopped before the counter, the boundary line between the market’s chaos and the junker’s small, grimy kingdom. The air here smelled of solder and stale nutrient paste.
— I need a set of Class-3 dampeners, — Kaelen said, his voice low.
The junker grunted, his eyes finally lifting. They were small and flat, assessing Kaelen’s worn jacket, the tension in his shoulders, the desperation he tried to hide. The man’s objective was simple: profit. Kaelen’s was simpler: silence. The junker reached under the counter and produced a pair of psychic dampeners, their casings scratched, the indicator lights dim. They were an old model, military surplus from a forgotten skirmish.
— Four cells, — the junker rasped, his voice like grinding gears.
Kaelen knew the model. Twenty-five percent noise reduction, a whisper against the hurricane. He needed more, but his options were thin. Arguing would draw attention. He pulled four polished power cells from his jacket and placed them on the counter. A deliberate pause. He added two more. The junker’s eyes flickered to the extra cells and he swept them all into a drawer without a word.
As the junker bagged the dampeners, a sound cut through the market’s din. It was a child’s laugh, high and clear, from somewhere in the crowd behind him. The sound hit a switch deep in Kaelen’s mind. The neon haze of the Down-Spiral dissolved. For a single, gut-wrenching second, he was somewhere else. A different city. The smell of rain on hot asphalt filled his lungs, sharp and clean. He saw gray sky, felt a cool mist on his skin. A memory that wasn't his.
He flinched, his hand flying to the back of his neck, to the crude metal plate of the Ghost-Eater Shunt. The scar tissue around the illegal implant itched with a familiar, agonizing fire. The ghost was still there, a passenger who refused to be ignored. The overlay vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him dizzy and nauseous. The junker slid the mesh bag across the counter, his expression unchanged, oblivious to the war that had just been fought and lost inside Kaelen’s head.
Kaelen grabbed the bag, his knuckles white. He didn't wait for a farewell. He turned and tore the dampeners from their packaging, his fingers fumbling with the activation stud. He pressed it. A low hum vibrated against his skull, and the roar of the bazaar’s psychic field dropped. It didn't disappear. It simply receded, the cacophony of two hundred and fifty minds softening to a manageable murmur. The noise dropped by a quarter, maybe, but the ghost’s specific frequency remained, a thin, high-pitched whine beneath the quiet. It was like trying to block out a scream by putting your hands over your ears.
The junker’s datapad, sitting on the counter, flickered again. The image of his inventory list stuttered, a line of code breaking for a half-second before correcting itself. A glitch. A simple, physical flaw in a machine. Kaelen focused on it, a small anchor in the swirling vortex of his own broken perceptions. The world was broken, too. That, at least, was real.
He turned and pushed back into the river of people, the dampeners a fragile, inadequate shield. He was just another hooded figure, his face lost to the shadows, moving toward a rust-streaked hab-unit that passed for a home. The ghost was quieter now, but not gone. It was a low hum, a patient presence waiting for the dampeners’ charge to fade. Waiting for the next crack in his focus, the next sound or smell that would unlock another door to a life he had erased but could not forget.
The recycled air of the corridor tasted flat and sterile. The distant, rhythmic thrum of the asteroid's rotational drivers was a constant, low vibration in the floor.
The dampeners were a lock, but the ghost was already inside the house.
