The Bleak Hollow wasn't a place.
It was a silence.
A region of deep driftspace past any active trade spine, too unstable for warp routing, too poor for mining. It had no anchor buoys, no salvage records, no reason for anyone to go there—except that something once had.
Something that still called out.
The signal first arrived as three off-key notes—broadcast not on formal channels but as harmonic distortion piggybacking on beacon pulses. It carried no metadata, no context, no known signature.
Just three tones.
And a feeling.
Kye stood with Zeraphine on Driftroot's upper comms spine, staring at the transmission spool. The tones looped again, faint, unrepentant. Like a whisper sung into an airlock.
"They've been repeating every four hours," she said. "Perfectly imperfect. Not automated. Not quite deliberate either."
Kye nodded. "Like someone's keeping a rhythm alive."
He didn't speak for several minutes.
Then, slowly, he hummed the tune.
Zeraphine's eyes widened.
"You've heard it."
He nodded once. "Back when I was nine. A derelict was towed into Veltrin's lower yard. Nothing salvageable but the nav core. It played those same three notes every time we walked past."
"No one answered it?"
"No one wanted to. It creeped them out. But not me."
Zeraphine turned back to the console. "If the signal has looped for that long, someone—or something—is still playing it."
Kye leaned forward. "Set course. I'm going."
Zeraphine blinked. "Alone?"
He smiled. "You'll anchor the weave here. If we lose contact, you'll know what I found."
Within an hour, Kye boarded the Whisperlight, a repurposed scout ship configured for stealth drift navigation. The Vaultseed gave one final pulse, imprinting a resonance thread into his wrist—not flame. Not anchor.
Permission.
He launched.
The Bleak Hollow swallowed light.
No coordinates. No sky. Only drift.
After twelve hours, the Whisperlight picked up the signal again—closer now. Stronger. Less distorted.
Then… a shape.
Floating in space, like a wound held open by time: a single freighter hull, half-collapsed, half-grown over with crystal lichen that glowed faint green. It wasn't derelict.
It was transfigured.
Kye approached slowly, the Whisperlight thrumming in neutral gravsync.
Inside the lichen-covered ship, the notes continued.
He docked.
The airlock cycled. Manual. Loud. Real.
He stepped aboard.
There was no power.
No gravity.
And yet the tune continued.
Not through speakers.
Through structure.
The hull sang.
Each note came from a pressure plate, a memorylight vein, a warped conduit humming at just the right frequency.
And as Kye moved, he began to hear voices—not loud, not clear. Just echoes.
> "She always made soup when we drifted too far."
"He said stars talk to each other through people."
"We didn't crash. We chose to stop here."
The ship wasn't empty.
It was a choir.
And the song? It was what they'd decided to become when no one came.
Kye sank to his knees.
And sang back.