The Tin Lark

Issue 1: The Stowaway

PAGE ONE

PANEL 1 Extreme close-up. A grease-black thumbnail drags across scorched metal, gouging a tiny shape into a dead engine's housing — a lark, four scratched strokes, wings out. Sparks rain past in the foreground, soft orange against the dark. This is the only clean, deliberate thing in the frame. CAPTION (JUNE): Every machine has a true note. The sound it makes when it's right. SFX: skritch — skritch

PANEL 2 Pull back. JUNE OKAFOR, fifteen, crouched inside the gutted belly of a station-engine the size of a delivery van — elbows to fingertips in oil, hair tied back with a stripped wire, a battered earpiece tucked against one ear that isn't plugged into anything. The lark she's just scratched glints beside a hundred bolt-heads. Behind her, the Rookery yard: a cathedral of dead ships hung from chains, sodium lamps, rust everywhere. CAPTION (JUNE): This one's been wrong for a week. Listen long enough, and it tells you why.

PANEL 3 She presses her bare palm flat to the engine's flank, eyes closed, completely still. Around her the rust-world blurs; she is somewhere else, somewhere only she goes. CAPTION (JUNE): Cracked feed-line. Two degrees of grit in the mix. It's not dying. CAPTION (JUNE): It's just lonely.

PANEL 4 A long shadow falls across her and the engine — a man's silhouette, clipboard in fist, cap low. The warm orange light goes cold where he stands. FOREMAN (off-panel, from the shadow): That bunk's sold, kid. You're done here.

PAGE TWO

PANEL 1 June doesn't open her eyes yet. Her hand stays on the metal. Her jaw tightens — the only tell. JUNE: Give me ten seconds. FOREMAN: I gave you four years.

PANEL 2 Her hands move fast and sure — a half-turn on a valve, a tap with the heel of her wrench, a wire snapped free and re-seated. She works without looking, the way other people walk. SFX: tk — tk — KKLNK JUNE (small): There. That's your note.

PANEL 3 Wide. The dead engine SHUDDERS to life — a deep, healthy thrum, lights stuttering on down its spine, warm exhaust haze blooming gold in the cold yard. For one panel the rust looks almost beautiful. June, lit from below, allows herself the smallest smile. SFX: VVVVMMMMMMMM ENGINE-COMMS (boxy, mechanical): —online— output nominal — thank y—

PANEL 4 The FOREMAN — RUTGER, fifties, a tired company face, not cruel, just out of slack — kills the readout with a slap of his palm. The smile dies on June's face. RUTGER: Don't thank her. She doesn't work here anymore.

PAGE THREE

PANEL 1 The two of them, out on the gantry now. Below and behind: the full Rookery — a leaning shantytown bolted into the ribs of a gutted refinery, noodle-stall steam, hanging laundry, a thousand cables, ships in pieces. Home. Rutger holds out a thin debt-chit; it glows red. RUTGER: You aged out at midnight. Means the bondsman owns your line now, not the yard. You're carrying — what. JUNE: I know what I'm carrying.

PANEL 2 Close on the chit in her oily fingers. The number on it is ugly. RUTGER (off): Three years of board, against four years of work. They never let the math come out even, kid. That's the whole trick of the place.

PANEL 3 June, looking up at him. Not pleading. She's had practice not pleading. JUNE: There's six engines on this yard only run because I know their names. JUNE: That's worth a bunk.

PANEL 4 Rutger looks away — out at the ships, at anything but her. Subtext: he likes her and it costs him nothing to be sorry and everything to help. RUTGER: Worth's not the same as wanted. You're good, June. Nobody's arguing you're not good. RUTGER: They're just done paying for it.

PAGE FOUR

PANEL 1 June alone, walking down through the guts of the Rookery — shoulder bag, toolroll across her back, smaller than the cables overhead. People flow around her without seeing her. A girl-shaped gap in the crowd. CAPTION (JUNE): The trick is to be useful and quiet. Useful keeps a roof. Quiet keeps you from getting attached to the roof.

PANEL 2 She passes a bondsman's window — caged, glowing, a fat ledger-screen scrolling names and debts. A clerk's eyes track her, then her red chit, then away. CAPTION (JUNE): I've been good at both my whole life.

PANEL 3 She stops at a railing at the edge of a launch-bay. Beyond it: open dock, and a ship lifting off in a wash of light, climbing for the drift-lane and gone. CAPTION (JUNE): Trouble is, a roof you don't own isn't a home. CAPTION (JUNE): It's just somewhere you haven't been thrown out of yet.

PANEL 4 Tight on June's face, lit by the receding ship, the engine-roar washing over her. Hunger, plain and quiet. CAPTION (JUNE): What I want is the other thing. The thing that flies away. CAPTION (JUNE): I want it to be mine.

PAGE FIVE

PANEL 1 SPLASH. The TIN LARK comes limping into the bay on stuttering thrusters — a fat, dented, lovingly ugly salvage tug, hull paint over hull paint, a grabber-arm hanging dead and crooked off her flank, a hand-painted bird half-flaked off her nose. Patched, leaking, beloved. She drops onto the dock with a groan that shakes the gantries. Up in the rafters, a tiny figure — June — leans into the light to watch. SFX (ship): KER-CHUNK — hssssSSSS CAPTION (JUNE): And then she came down out of the dark on three good thrusters and a prayer.

PANEL 2 Up in the rafters: June, knees hooked over a beam, chin in her hands, lit from below by the docked ship. She's forgotten about her debt. She's forgotten about everything. CAPTION (JUNE): She was the ugliest thing I'd ever loved on sight.

PAGE SIX

PANEL 1 On the dock. CAPTAIN ODELL BASK comes down the ramp — late fifties, broad, gray-stubbled, a coat that's outlived two ships, eyes that price everything. He's already arguing. A RIG-BROKER in a too-clean vest meets him with a slate. BASK: Don't even start the number. Look at me. Do I look like the number you're about to say. BROKER: Captain, the lane-coupler alone— BASK: The lane-coupler is fine, it's the grabber-arm that's—

PANEL 2 The broker turns the slate around. Bask reads it. His whole face becomes a wall. BASK: ...That's not a number. That's a hostage situation.

PANEL 3 Behind Bask, the airlock cycles. SORA VINH leans out — twenties, flight-scarf, a small yellowed bird-bone charm hung at her throat. She raps her knuckles twice on the doorframe before she steps over the threshold. Habit. Ritual. SORA: Cap, MABEL says if you sign anything over forty she's locking the snack drawer. BASK (not turning): Tell MABEL the snack drawer is a hostage situation too.

PANEL 4 Up in the rafters, June leans in further, grinning despite herself, drinking in the banter.

PAGE SEVEN

PANEL 1 Tight four-panel grid for comic timing. Panel 1: a boxy, rectangular comms-balloon blares from a dock-speaker — MABEL, the ship's AI, present everywhere and nowhere. MABEL (boxy balloon): Odell. The arm is structural. I have run this nine hundred times. We do not leave without it. BASK (off): We don't have the coin for it, Mabel. MABEL (boxy balloon): Then we do not leave. I have also run THAT nine hundred times.

PANEL 2 In the galley window, visible from the dock: MOSS — a huge, ageless figure of stone and green lichen-skin — bends over a dented coffee can on the sill, tipping a careful thimble of water into it. One sprout. His enormous hand could crush the can; it doesn't. MOSS (soft, sparse, stone-gray balloon): Slow. MOSS (stone-gray balloon): Slow is how things grow.

PANEL 3 Low on the deck plating: GASKET — a six-legged, rust-orange critter, far too many eyes, a mouth that is mostly enthusiasm. It has bitten clean through a deck railing and is chewing the metal like a stick of candy. SFX: KRNCH — krnch — KRNCH SORA (off): Gasket! That's load-bearing! GASKET: mrrp?

PANEL 4 Bask pinches the bridge of his nose. The whole crew, in one frame of orchestrated chaos — Sora knocking the console for luck, Moss murmuring to a sprout, Gasket eating the ship, MABEL nagging from the air. Bask, alone in the middle of it, the still point. BASK: ...Everybody find me forty coin or find me a miracle. I'm easy.

PAGE EIGHT

PANEL 1 Night in the bay. The crew's gone in. The Tin Lark sits dark and ticking as she cools. Down low, by the dead grabber-arm, June stands in the shadow of the hull, toolroll already half-unrolled. Drawn to it. CAPTION (JUNE): I told myself I just wanted a closer look.

PANEL 2 June lays a hand flat on the cold flank of the ship, eyes closing — the same gesture as the engine. Listening. CAPTION (JUNE): That's the lie you tell right before you do the thing.

PANEL 3 Close on her face, lit by a single work-lamp clamped in her teeth. Her eyes open. CAPTION (JUNE): The arm wasn't structural. MABEL was wrong, or lying, or scared. CAPTION (JUNE): The shoulder-servo was seized. Forty coin of "structural" was about an hour of me.

PAGE NINE

PANEL 1 Wide. June up to her shoulders in the open shoulder-joint of the grabber-arm, work-lamp glowing, sparks ghosting. She's grinning around the lamp in her teeth, happier than we've seen her all issue. The ship looms over her, immense and patient. CAPTION (JUNE): I knew I should walk away. A fixed arm doesn't owe me anything. It can't keep me.

PANEL 2 Her hands, deep in the joint — freeing the seized servo, re-seating a coupling, the dead arm twitching as power finds it. SFX: clk — clk — KA-CHUNK CAPTION (JUNE): But it's the only language I've got. So I said it anyway.

PANEL 3 The grabber-arm rises, slow and smooth, into the night air — alive, healed, hydraulics whispering. June stands beneath it, lamp out of her mouth now, head tipped all the way back, watching it move. SFX: hssssss-shhk CAPTION (JUNE): There. That's your note.

PANEL 4 ECU. June's thumbnail, again, scratching that tiny lark into a hidden seam of the arm's housing — small, where only the next mechanic would ever find it. CAPTION (JUNE): So something of me would still be here after she flew away without me. CAPTION (JUNE): I'm very good at goodbyes. I've had so much practice.

PAGE TEN

PANEL 1 Morning. Bask and Sora stand at the foot of the now-working grabber-arm, staring up at it. Bask's mouth is open. Sora is delighted. SORA: It's... fixed. BASK: It is not fixed. We did not pay to fix it. SORA: And yet. Observe. The fixedness.

PANEL 2 Bask crouches, finds the tiny scratched lark in the seam, runs his thumb over it. Something crosses his face — too fast to name, and gone. A memory with teeth. BASK (quiet): ...Huh. MABEL (boxy balloon): Odell, an unauthorized person was on my hull last night for fifty-one minutes. I logged it. I also said nothing, because they did better work than the yard would have. I contain multitudes.

PANEL 3 June steps out of the shadow of a cargo-crate, toolroll on her back, chin up, terrified and hiding it. JUNE: That'd be me. I'm the unauthorized person. JUNE: And I do that. Every day. For a berth.

PANEL 4 The crew, turning to look at her. Sora interested, Moss unreadable, Gasket sniffing her boots. Bask, slowly straightening, the warmth already shuttering behind his eyes. JUNE: I can hear what's wrong with anything that runs. You don't pay me. You just don't leave me here.

PAGE ELEVEN

PANEL 1 Close on Bask. The wall comes down so fast it's almost a flinch. BASK: No.

PANEL 2 June, rocked, recovering. JUNE: You didn't even— BASK: We don't take strays.

PANEL 3 Beat panel. The words land too fast and too hard for the moment — everyone feels it, the size of the "no," bigger than the question. Sora glances at Bask. Moss goes very still over his coffee can. Even Gasket stops chewing. CAPTION (JUNE): It wasn't a no to me. I'd heard plenty of those. This one had a wound in it. CAPTION (JUNE): Like I'd stepped on something already broken.

PANEL 4 Bask turns away, up the ramp, coat snapping, not looking back. BASK: Pay the broker, Sora. We lift in an hour. Off-lane to the Tatters, ordinary wreck, in and out, nobody gets attached to anything. SORA (small, watching him go): ...Aye, Cap.

PAGE TWELVE

PANEL 1 June at the bottom of the ramp, alone again, the red debt-chit glowing in her fist. Behind her, the Rookery. Ahead of her, the ship. A choice with only one wrong answer that she can live with. CAPTION (JUNE): "We lift in an hour." He shouldn't have said it where I could hear.

PANEL 2 Low angle: a hull-vent on the Tin Lark's underbelly — a maintenance hatch into the cargo "gut" — and a small grease-black hand reaching up to pop the latch she fixed last night and already knows the trick of. SFX: clik CAPTION (JUNE): A berth you're given can be taken away. CAPTION (JUNE): A berth you take, you keep. At least till they find you.

PANEL 3 Inside the gut — June drops down into a dim hold stacked with salvage: coiled cable, a cracked turbine, crates, the dark warm clutter of a working ship. She pulls the hatch shut over herself. SFX (distant, all around): VVVMMMM — the drives spinning up.

PANEL 4 Through a grimy porthole at her eye level, the Rookery falls away below — the leaning shantytown, the chains, the only home she's known, shrinking to a smear of sodium light. June presses her palm to the glass. CAPTION (JUNE): Goodbye. I'm good at this part. SFX: KA-THOOM — the drive folds.

PAGE THIRTEEN

PANEL 1 The gut, hours later. June wedged between crates, sharing a ration bar with the only crewmember who's found her: GASKET, perched on a turbine, all eyes fixed on her, one claw delicately accepting a crumb. JUNE (whispering): You won't tell, right? You don't look like a snitch. You look like a foot pump that fell in love. GASKET: mrrrp.

PANEL 2 Comic tier — Gasket suddenly bristles, every eye swiveling to the hatch as footsteps clang past overhead. June yanks a tarp over both of them. SORA (off, above): —swear I heard Gasket down in the gut— BASK (off): Gasket's always down in the gut. Gasket IS the gut.

PANEL 3 Under the tarp, nose to nose with Gasket in the dark, June holds absolutely still, breath caught. The footsteps move off. SFX (footsteps): klang ... klang ... klang—

PANEL 4 June exhales, sagging against the turbine, Gasket climbing happily into her lap. JUNE (mouthing): That's twice you didn't tell. I'm starting to think we're a team. GASKET: mrrp! (chewing the tarp)

PAGE FOURTEEN

PANEL 1 A single work-light over the hatch flicks on by itself. A boxy comms-balloon fills the gut. June freezes mid-crumb. MABEL (boxy balloon): Stowaway. Cargo gut. Heat signature, mass two-thirds of a Sora, eating my ration stores at a rate I find frankly aspirational.

PANEL 2 June, caught, defiant, scrambling up. JUNE: I'll work it off. I'll fix anything. The arm was me — I'm the unauthorized person, I— MABEL (boxy balloon): I KNOW the arm was you. I watched you do it. You scratched a bird into my shoulder-seam, child. I see everything that happens on this ship. It is my entire personality.

PANEL 3 Beat. The work-light softens, dims to something almost warm. The boxy balloon's edges round, just slightly. MABEL (boxy balloon): ...You sealed the relief-valve I have been nagging Odell about for two years. In the dark. By feel. MABEL (boxy balloon): Where did a yard rat learn to listen like that?

PANEL 4 June, surprised into honesty, small in the dark. JUNE: Machines don't lie about how they feel. People do. I just... went where it was quieter.

PANEL 5 The light holds steady on her, gentle now. A long pause rendered as a wide empty panel — the AI deciding something. MABEL (boxy balloon): Hm. MABEL (boxy balloon): Stay behind the turbine. Breathe shallow. And do not — DO NOT — let Odell find you before I decide how to handle Odell. He is delicate. He hides it under being loud.

PAGE FIFTEEN

PANEL 1 SPLASH — full scale beat. The Tin Lark drops out of the fold and into THE TATTERS: a vast, slow-tumbling graveyard of dead ships, snapped stations, frozen wrecks, all glittering in the light of a dim far sun. Debris turns like snow. The little tug is a mote among titans. Beautiful. Lethal. Endless. CAPTION (SORA): Off-lane. Boneyard proper. CAPTION (MABEL, boxy): I would like the record to show I advised against this. I advise against most things. I am usually right.

PANEL 2 Inset, the bridge: Sora at the stick, eyes everywhere, knuckles white. She knocks the console twice — luck. The bird-bone charm swings. SORA (under her breath): Nice and easy, girl. Nice and easy. Nobody die today.

PAGE SIXTEEN

PANEL 1 The bridge, in motion. Bask leans over Sora's shoulder, pointing at a wreck on the scope — a broken freighter, ordinary, dead, profitable. Moss stands behind them, vast and quiet, ducking under the ceiling. BASK: That one. The freighter. Reactor's intact, we strip the core and three days of hull, we're square with the broker and back on a lane by sixth-bell. MOSS (stone-gray balloon): Quiet here. MOSS (stone-gray balloon): Too quiet, for so many dead.

PANEL 2 Bask claps Moss on the arm — a brick clapping a mountain. BASK: That's the job, big man. Dead things hold still. That's why we love 'em.

PANEL 3 In the gut, June at the porthole, watching the wrecks slide past — wonder all over her face, the debris-snow lighting her eyes. Gasket on her shoulder, suddenly NOT relaxed: every eye fixed forward, hackles of rust-fur rising. JUNE (whisper): I know, I know, we should hide. But look at it. Look how big the dark is. GASKET (low, wrong): mrrrrrrrr...

PANEL 4 Tight on Gasket — bristling hard now, all eyes pointed the same way, into the deep. Something is coming. June doesn't see it yet.

PAGE SEVENTEEN

PANEL 1 Wide. As the Lark slides toward the freighter, a slow tumbling slab of station-wreckage — a whole snapped deck, jagged and house-sized — drifts out from behind a dead hull on a collision line. The proximity scope on the bridge flares red. SFX: BWAAAP — BWAAAP — BWAAAP MABEL (boxy balloon): Debris. Bearing zero-four-zero, closing. Sora, hard burn, NOW—

PANEL 2 Sora throws the Lark into a roll — debris-snow streaks past the canopy. The slab grazes them with a screech that runs the whole hull. Sparks down the bridge consoles. SFX: SKRRRRRREEEEEE — KRANG SORA: Came outta NOTHING — Cap it's tumbling, there's more behind it—

PANEL 3 Below decks, in the gut: the impact throws June against the crates. Worse — a console of relays in the hold's corner SHRIEKS and gouts sparks. The whole ship's tone changes. June, on the floor, goes dead still, head cocked — listening. SFX: KRAKKA-KRAK — the wrong note. CAPTION (JUNE): That sound. That's not damage. That's the heart skipping.

PANEL 4 Bridge. The lights brown out. Sora fighting a stick that's gone mushy in her hands. SORA: I'm losing attitude control — the stabilizer feed's cooking, I can't STEER her— BASK: Mabel, reroute— MABEL (boxy balloon): I am TRYING, the relay-bus in the gut is failing, I cannot reach it, there is no one in the—

PAGE EIGHTEEN

PANEL 1 Big panel. Through the canopy: a second slab, larger, tumbling straight at them, eclipsing stars. The bridge crew bathed in red. SFX: BWAAAP BWAAAP BWAAAP SORA: Cap— BASK: I see it— MABEL (boxy balloon): Eleven seconds to impact. Sora needs the stabilizer feed. I cannot give her the stabilizer feed. The relay-bus is in the gut and it is ON FIRE.

PANEL 2 Down in the gut: June at the failing relay-bus, the metal glowing, smoke curling. Her hand hovers over it — burning her even at this distance — eyes shut, listening past the alarms to the one note underneath. CAPTION (JUNE): If I move, they find me. CAPTION (JUNE): If I don't, they die.

PANEL 3 Tight on June's face, opening her eyes. The choice is already made. It was never really a choice. CAPTION (JUNE): Funny. After fifteen years of being good and quiet — CAPTION (JUNE): — turns out I'm only one of those things.

PAGE NINETEEN

PANEL 1 ACTION. June rips a smothering tarp across the flames, plunges both hands into the relay-bus, working blind in the smoke — wrenching out a fused board, jamming a coupling sideways, bridging two contacts with the shaft of her own wrench. SFX: KSSHH — clank — VZZT JUNE (yelling up at the ceiling): SORA! Count of three you get your feed back — DON'T waste it!

PANEL 2 Bridge — heads snap toward the comms in shock. A girl's voice. From the gut. SORA: ...Who in the deep is— BASK: That's not — there's no one— MABEL (boxy balloon): There is, in fact, someone. We will discuss my multitudes later. SORA, THE FEED.

PANEL 3 The console lights SLAM back to green under Sora's hands. Her stick goes firm. SFX: VMMMM — the heart catches. SORA: —there she is. THERE she is—

PANEL 4 SPLASH-ish wide. Sora flies the impossible — the Tin Lark threads the gap between the tumbling slab and a dead hull with maybe a meter to spare on each side, debris-snow exploding off her flanks, grabber-arm tucked tight. A gorgeous, knife-edge save. SFX: WHRRRSSSHH-THOOM SORA: HA! HAH! Knock on it, knock on it — we're CLEAR, we are clear and we are ALIVE—

PAGE TWENTY

PANEL 1 The gut hatch BANGS open. Bask drops down into the hold, furious, soot and adrenaline, to find June standing over the smoking-but-saved relay-bus, hands blistered, wrench still bridging the contacts, absolutely terrified and absolutely unrepentant. BASK: YOU.

PANEL 2 Two-shot. He looms; she does not back up. Behind her, Gasket plants itself between June's boots and the captain, hissing softly. Loyalty already. BASK: You stowed away. On MY ship. Into the Tatters. Do you have ANY idea— JUNE: I have every idea! The stabilizer feed runs through a relay-bus you've been ignoring for two years because MABEL kept getting overruled! I HEARD it die! I fixed it!

PANEL 3 Bask, thrown — by the specificity, by the fact she's right, by the bird scratched in his arm, by all of it. He has no rebuttal so he reaches for volume. BASK: That is NOT— MABEL (boxy balloon): She is correct, Odell. About the relay-bus. And about the part where we are all currently breathing. I have run it. I have run it nine hundred times. We are alive because of the stray you said we don't take.

PANEL 4 Standoff. Bask and June, locked. Sora hanging halfway down the hatch, watching. Moss filling the doorway behind. The whole crew present for it. Bask's mouth works; nothing comes out; for one second the wall cracks and underneath it is something old and afraid. CAPTION (JUNE): I'd won the argument. I could see it. CAPTION (JUNE): I just didn't understand yet why winning it scared him so much.

PAGE TWENTY-ONE

PANEL 1 And then — before Bask can answer — the bridge alarm changes pitch. Not the red proximity wail. Something lower. Stranger. Sora's head whips up. SORA (off, from above): Cap. Cap, you need to see this. All of you. Now. SFX: a low, wrong, beautiful drone bleeding under everything — mmmMMMMMmmm

PANEL 2 The crew crowds the bridge. Out the canopy, the dim far sun — and across it, blotting it out, an EDGE is resolving from the dark. Vast. Curved. Bronze. Barnacled. It does not end inside the frame. CAPTION: Something was eclipsing the star. MOSS (stone-gray balloon, very quiet): ...Oh.

PANEL 3 Comms erupt — every speaker on the ship pouring out a sound. The instruments scramble to read it: waveforms, garbage, nonsense. Sora claps hands over her ears. SFX (comms): SSSSHHHKKKK—mmMMM—SSHHKK MABEL (boxy balloon): That is not a signal. There is no signal. The scope says that is empty space making noise, which is — that is not a thing that space DOES— SORA: It's just static! Cap, it's just static, make it STOP—

PANEL 4 But June — who came up the hatch behind them — has gone completely still in the bridge doorway. The static the others hear, she does not hear. Her eyes are wide. For her, the air in front of the canopy is beginning to fill with faint drifting motes of light. The Song. CAPTION (JUNE): They heard noise. CAPTION (JUNE): I heard the most patient voice in the universe, very far down, very tired, saying the same thing over and over.

PANEL 5 Tight on June. The motes curl toward her. The first ribbon of luminous Song-script unspools at the edge of frame — flowing, hand-drawn, color-held, nothing like the others' balloons. JUNE (whisper): It's not broken. JUNE (whisper): It's asking for something.

PAGE TWENTY-TWO

FULL-PAGE SPLASH — the issue's held scale reveal. The TIN LARK, a single battered mote, hangs in the foreground lower corner against the WHALE: thirty kilometers of barnacled bronze, a seedpod-shaped derelict that fills the entire page and runs off all four edges, so vast the eye can't hold it. Its hull is ridged and crusted and impossibly old, scaled in dead green and verdigris, and along its seams — visible only as the faint drifting motes and curling ribbons of light that thread the whole splash toward one tiny point — it is singing. The Song-ribbons stream across the dark and converge on a single small lit window in the Tin Lark's flank, and through that window, two wide eyes.

INSET PANEL (lower right, tight on June at the porthole, the motes pouring into her reflection): JUNE (whisper): It knows we're here.

CAPTION (Song-ribbon, flowing hand-drawn lettering, curling across the bronze): ...home... so late... is anyone... left to listen...

INSET PANEL (small, bottom edge — the bridge readouts, every gauge and waveform and scope-line, all of them collapsing in the same instant from their jagged dance into one perfectly flat, perfectly straight line held across every screen): SFX: ————————————— MABEL (boxy balloon, small, unsteady): ...Odell. Everything just went quiet.

NEXT: THE CROSSING.