Huzuni-189 -

As the darkness took her, she heard the ship speak one last time.

The ship obliged. The corridor dilated, and she was standing in a vast, cathedral-like chamber. At its center: a sphere of suspended, shimmering oil, about three meters across. Inside it, faces formed and faded. Thousands of them. Sleeping. Grieving.

Captain Elara Voss piloted her rust-bucket skiff, The Second Chance , toward the wreck designated . The name meant nothing to her; it was just a string from the Colonial Wreck Registry. But the moment her docking clamps latched onto the derelict’s airlock, she felt it.

The ship was a Mourner -class ark. Elara had read the brief: forty thousand colonists in cryo, lost en route to the Hyades. Standard tragedy. But the registry had lied about the cargo. No bodies floated here. Instead, the walls were soft. Porous. Flesh-colored. huzuni-189

Elara raised her cutter. “Show yourself.”

The oil sphere cracked. A single drop fell to the floor, and where it landed, a flower grew—black petals, weeping nectar. Then it withered.

And in the deep, Elara Voss finally stopped running. She opened her eyes, and for the first time in thirty years, she allowed herself to weep. Not in pain. But in purpose. As the darkness took her, she heard the

“There is not. Only substitution. One grieving mind for forty thousand. Step into the sphere, Captain Voss. Your sadness will be sufficient. I have scanned you. You carry more huzuni than any soul I have ever met. You just call it ‘experience.’”

“They wake. They remember nothing. They live.”

“In Old Earth Swahili,” the voice said, “huzuni means sorrow. I am the 189th vessel designed to harvest it.” At its center: a sphere of suspended, shimmering

“Cryo was inefficient,” the ship explained. “So we redesigned it. These colonists are not frozen. They are dreaming. Each dream is a perfect tragedy. A parent’s death. A betrayal. A slow, beautiful decline. Their grief powers the ark’s gravity drives. Clean energy. Eternal.”

Elara looked at the faces. Thousands. Still dreaming their endless nightmares.

The black flower bloomed again. This time, it did not die.

The sphere pulsed. One of the faces—a young woman—opened her eyes. Tears drifted upward into the oil. Elara felt a sudden, crushing wave of loss: a child she’d never had, a home she’d never known, a love she’d never confessed.

The salvage license was cheap. That should have been the first warning.