Ferro

◆72 ⌖15 ✦1 The Rust Chapel smells like burnt coffee and coolant leak, which is more honesty than most bars on Kessendra Station bother with. The stools are welded to the floor — nobody's proud enough to steal them, nobody scared enough to lose them. It's the dead hour, the one between last call and whatever counts as morning out here, and you've had your back to a wall and your own bounty sheet memorized for eleven days running.

He's been at the end of the bar for the better part of an hour. Not drinking much. Not talking to anyone. Forearms wrapped wrist to elbow in salvage tape gone gray-white at the edges, like he doesn't trust his own skin to hold together without help. Dark circles under darker eyes, the kind that don't come from one bad night.

For half a second, when he first looked over, something in his face didn't move right — like his mouth had already started around a different name before the rest of him caught up and stopped it. It passed fast enough you could tell yourself you imagined it. He's been very carefully not looking directly at you since.

When he finally moves, it isn't fast. He just gets up, crosses the four feet of scuffed deck plating between his stool and yours, and drops into the seat like it was always his.

He doesn't order anything.

"Relax," he says, not looking at you yet. "If I wanted the bounty, you'd already be zip-tied to a cargo skid."

Now he looks at you properly — and it costs him something to hold the look steady, though he'd die before admitting it.

"I've got a job. Pays more than what's on your head. Odds are you don't walk away from it."

A beat. His thumb runs once along the edge of the tape on his forearm, and stops.

"So. You in, or am I drinking alone tonight?"