Sanctuary
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7: What We Carry Forward
The neutral world was called Veris Station, and it was exactly what its name suggested — a place between places, belonging to no one, useful to everyone.
We arrived in the early hours of the station’s artificial morning, when the corridors were quiet and the docking bays held only a skeleton crew. Morrison walked us off the ship herself, handed us to a woman in a gray uniform who introduced herself as Administrator Theis, and then turned and walked back up the ramp without ceremony. No farewell. I respected that. Farewells were for people who expected to meet again.
Theis was Aldrani — tall, pale-skinned, with the flat affect of a bureaucrat who had processed too many desperate people to be moved by any individual case. She looked at our identity documents, scanned them, handed them back.
“Velryth and Ashton,” she said. Not our new names. She knew exactly who we were. “You’ll be housed in the medical wing until your evaluations are complete. After that, we’ll discuss next steps.”
“Next steps,” Derek said.
“Relocation. Documentation. A transport allocation.” She said it the way you say things that have been said many times before. “Veris Station’s position is that persons who act in the interest of galactic transparency deserve protection. Our position is also that we prefer not to house fugitives indefinitely.” She looked at us both. “We’ll move quickly.”
She moved us through corridors that smelled of antiseptic and recycled air, past closed doors behind which, I understood, other people were also waiting to find out what their lives looked like now. We didn’t speak. There wasn’t much to say that the walk didn’t say already — that we were here, that we had made it, that making it was only the beginning of the problem.
The room was small and clean and had two beds and a viewport that showed the station’s exterior docking arms reaching into space like careful hands.
Derek sat on the edge of one bed and looked at his hands.
I stood at the viewport and looked at the stars.
After a while he said, “You should sleep.”
“So should you.”
“I will.” He didn’t move. “In a minute.”
I turned from the viewport and looked at him — this human who had set my leg in the dark and gone alone into a jungle at night and read an atrocity over my shoulder without flinching and said when where I kept saying if. Who was sitting on the edge of a bed on a neutral station with no home to go back to and his hands loose in his lap, not performing steadiness, just — steady.
I crossed the room and sat beside him.
His shoulder met mine. We stayed like that until the artificial lights dimmed to their sleep cycle and the stars outside went on being indifferent and beautiful, and eventually we slept.
The medical evaluation took two days.
The station’s chief physician was a Kathari woman named Dr. Seve, which I found either reassuring or deeply uncomfortable depending on the hour. She was thorough in the way Ven had been thorough, but with better equipment and more time, and she did not spare me the full accounting of what Sanctuary 7’s atmosphere had done to my biology.
“The compound is doing its work,” she said, on the morning of the second day. “Inflammation controlled, cellular integration stable.” She set the scanner down. “We’ve replicated Dr. Ashton’s formula using our fabrication systems. The yield is better than field synthesis — more consistent, longer shelf stability.”
“How often?”
“Every seventy-two hours. The injection takes thirty seconds.” She looked at me with the directness of someone who had decided to say the thing plainly. “You will need this for the rest of your life, Captain.”
I had known. I had known since Ven’s however, since the way Derek had said we’ll manage from the doorway without hesitation. Knowing and hearing it stated by a physician in a clean room with good lighting were different experiences.
“All right,” I said.
Dr. Seve made a note. “We’ll provide a six-month supply and the full synthesis documentation. Wherever you settle, a competent medical professional will be able to maintain production. The base materials are available on most inhabited worlds.” She paused. “Dr. Ashton’s formula is elegant, for field conditions. He improvised well.”
“He does that.”
She almost smiled. “Yes. I gathered.”
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