[Dropship Workshop — Day 19, Morning]
"That's wrong."
Raven pulled the wire from Cal's hand and held it up to the lamp. Her fingers traced the junction where he'd soldered the new antenna lead into the transmitter's amplification stage. She turned it left, right, squinted.
"The gauge is too thin. You're routing high-frequency signal through twenty-two gauge when you need eighteen minimum. The resistance will eat your gain before it reaches the antenna."
"We don't have eighteen gauge."
"Then we double-wrap twenty-two and braid it. Parallel resistance drops the effective gauge." She was already stripping wire, her injured leg propped on a supply crate, head wound closed with butterfly strips that Clarke had applied and Raven had immediately forgotten about. "You're an engineer. You should know this."
"I'm an engineer who's been building with garbage for three weeks. You're an engineer who rebuilt a hundred-and-thirty-year-old escape pod. I'll defer to the professional."
Something flickered across Raven's face — not a smile, but the ghost of one. The kind of micro-expression she probably didn't know she made, visible only because Cal was watching for it the way he watched for tripwires.
They worked.
For the next twelve hours, they dismantled what Cal and Monty had built and rebuilt it better. Raven's approach was surgical — she'd identify the weakest component in any system, rip it out, and replace it with something she'd fabricated from pod salvage. Her hands never stopped moving. She talked to the machines under her breath, cursing a capacitor for its resistance rating, praising a relay when it held under load, carrying on a running dialogue with the physical world as though electronics were stubborn animals that responded to encouragement and profanity in equal measure.
Cal's approach was structural — load-bearing capacity, redundancy paths, fail-safes. Where Raven innovated, Cal reinforced. Where she pushed boundaries, he built guardrails. The dynamic was combative and productive in a way that reminded him of nothing from his previous life, because in his previous life he'd never met anyone who argued about circuit topology with the intensity of a bar fight.
"Why did you route secondary power through the lower junction?" Raven asked, three hours in. She was examining the internal wiring Cal and Wells had installed on those midnight shifts during Week One — the work that had kept Wells alive while Charlotte circled outside with her knife.
"Crosstalk avoidance. The upper junction shares a ground with the comm array."
Raven traced the circuit path. Her eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch — her version of applause. "That's... actually smart. Who taught you crosstalk management?"
"Ark engineering manuals."
"The Ark manuals I read — and I read all of them — don't cover crosstalk in that junction configuration. They cover standard bypass protocol, which would've routed through the upper path."
Cal kept stripping wire. "Must've been a different edition."
Raven's hands continued working, but her eyes stayed on him for two seconds longer than the conversation warranted. Data point filed. Cal could almost hear the catalogue updating — the mental ledger where Raven Reyes tracked every discrepancy, every impossible competence, every answer that didn't add up.
---
Midday. They'd moved to the exterior — reinforcing the eastern wall section with pod hull plating that Raven had cut to specification using the portable welding torch. The metal panels were light but strong, bolted over the log framework, turning a crude timber barrier into something that could stop an arrow.
Cal held a panel in place while Raven welded. The torch hissed. Sparks arced. The heat was intense against his forearms, and the smell of hot metal mixed with pine resin and the ever-present woodsmoke from the camp's cooking fire.
"Hold it steady," Raven said through the welding mask.
"I am holding it steady."
"You're drifting left. Two millimeters. I can see the gap."
Cal adjusted. Two millimeters. His arms burned from holding the panel at shoulder height for three minutes straight, and the caloric deficit made every second of sustained effort feel like the last mile of a marathon.
The weld finished. Raven lifted the mask and inspected the seam — running her finger along it, testing for gaps, nodding once.
"Not bad," she said. The highest praise she gave.
They moved to the next panel. Cal's stomach growled loud enough to carry across the work site. Raven glanced at him.
"When did you last eat?"
"This morning."
"It's past noon. Eat something."
"After this section."
"Eat something or I'll weld your hand to the wall and tell Clarke it was an accident."
Cal ate. Two ration bars, gone in forty-five seconds, and still the hunger sat in his gut like a stone. The earthbending practice at dawn — he'd skipped it today, too many priorities — had been replaced by twelve hours of physical labor, and his body was running a deficit that food alone couldn't cover. The nanomachines were feeding, always feeding, converting calories into repair and enhancement at a rate that outpaced any reasonable intake.
He ate a third bar and caught Raven watching. Not with judgment — with calculation. The same way she looked at a system drawing too much power.
---
Finn came to the workshop at four in the afternoon.
Cal was inside the dropship, reorganizing Monty's workstation to accommodate Raven's tools, when Finn walked in. His posture was wrong — shoulders curved inward, hands in his pockets, the body language of someone approaching a conversation they'd been rehearsing for hours and still weren't ready for.
"Hey," Finn said to Raven, who was bent over the transmitter, soldering a replacement joint. "Can we talk?"
Raven didn't look up. "I'm working."
"Raven—"
"I'm working, Finn."
The name landed differently than it had at the crash site. Twelve hours ago, "Finn" had been relief and reunion. Now it carried a weight that bent the air between them.
Cal set down the tool kit. "I'll check the antenna alignment." He moved toward the door.
"Stay," Raven said. Flat. The monotone from the character bible playing out in real time — the voice she used when something devastating was being processed, each word measured and even. "Finn was just leaving."
Finn looked at Cal, then at Raven, then at his own hands. Whatever speech he'd prepared died in his mouth. He turned and walked out.
The workshop was quiet except for the hiss of the soldering iron. Raven's hands were steady. They were always steady. She soldered the joint, tested the connection, moved to the next one. Precise, controlled, mechanical.
After ten minutes, her hands stopped being steady.
The tremor was small — a vibration in her fingertips that made the soldering iron wander off its mark. She set it down. Placed both palms flat on the workbench. Breathed.
Cal sat at the opposite end of the bench and picked up a circuit board from the reject pile. He started desoldering components — salvage work, mindless, the kind of task that occupied hands while the brain did something else.
He didn't offer comfort. Didn't ask if she was okay. Didn't say anything. He just worked, three feet away, making the quiet sounds of someone present without demanding presence in return.
Raven picked up the soldering iron. Her hands were steady again.
They worked until dark. Somewhere around hour ten, Raven glanced at Cal — quick, sidelong, the assessment of someone recalculating a variable they hadn't expected.
"You didn't ask," she said.
"Ask what?"
"What happened with Finn. Everyone else has been circling like vultures since I landed. You didn't ask."
"Not my business."
"That's... unusually restrained for someone who has opinions about everything."
Cal set down the circuit board. "I have opinions about wiring configurations and wall reinforcement. People's personal lives aren't a system I'm qualified to debug."
Raven stared at him. Then she snorted — short, humorless, but real. The first sound she'd made in three hours that wasn't directed at a machine.
"Debug," she repeated. "You're such an engineer."
"Guilty."
She picked up a wrench and turned back to the transmitter's housing. Over her shoulder: "Where'd you learn circuit design? And don't say Ark manuals. I've caught you in that lie twice today."
Cal's hands paused for half a second. One beat. The half-second that separated a smooth deflection from a tell.
"Ark manuals," he said.
Raven's eyes were on the housing, but her mouth pressed into a line. Third data point. Filed.
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Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
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