Miles looked down at the tiny cut on his thumb. A red line, maybe half a centimeter long. It wasn't even bleeding.

He pressed his finger to the cut and tried to activate the spell Close Wound.

Close Wound. Close Wound! Come on, close wound. Wound close. Close it up.

He'd cast the spell a dozen times or more using his index, but he still hadn't managed to trigger it without using the interface. If there was a trick to activating the magic, he didn't know it, and couldn't think of a way to find out. On pre-bower Earth, he might have tried searching online, but the spiral didn't have anything resembling the kind of free information it was possible to get on old Earth.

His comm unit could connect him to something, a network called the Exchange, but there were no public forums or encyclopedias, just an index of privately held databases that he could purchase copies of and member-only communication platforms that charged for access.

As a private individual with next to no currency, he was information poor as well as money poor. Word of mouth was the best way of finding information open to him, but there was no one on the ship to ask about magic.

Focusing back on the cut on his finger, he tried to recreate the feeling of absolute conviction he felt when he index-cast the spell.

The cut should close. Make it so.

Nothing.

At least a failure didn't leave him with a bloody hand. The tiny cut was the biggest injury he could stomach to give himself, and it still took a lot of build-up and willpower to make the incision.

A lot of people who’d made it through the cataclysm of the bower break were probably inured to pain and injury, but Miles somehow felt like he’d come out of it more fragile, not desensitized to it like some of the other human refugees seemed.

He'd try a few more times, then use his index to close it. Maybe this time he'd be able to follow exactly how it worked.

He put his finger back on the cut. He concentrated. He tried to recreate the feeling of his magical core spinning, of the hot electricity flowing up his arm.

It didn't come.

A quiet knocking came from the door to his berth. The sound was low enough that it was almost swallowed completely by the metal, but it was still enough to break his concentration.

"Yes?" he called, not moving from his bunk.

If someone on the ship wanted him, why didn't they just call his comm?

A spoken reply came through the door, but it was too muffled to make out.

Miles got up and went to the door. He paused for a second to pull his sleeves down, before hitting the access switch.

The door groaned open on motors that sounded close to failing, revealing a member of the crew he hadn't seen before standing in the corridor.

They were shorter than Miles by about a foot, a six-limbed near-humanoid with a flat-ish face and short white fur that covered every exposed part of their body. There was a curtain of about a dozen flaps draping down from the top of their head, appendages that were somewhere between dreadlocks and rabbit ears, and their middle pair of limbs ended in paws. Miles had to assume their feet matched their mid-hands. Their top hands were more obvious manipulators, with three long fingers and a short, thick thumb. They stood looking up at Miles with intelligent brown eyes.

Miles had seen the crew manifest, but couldn't place who this was. They were wearing a pink jumpsuit that ended at their calves and forearms, and a pair of synthetic fabric foot wraps covered their feet. The jumpsuit was covered in pockets, but they didn't have any obvious equipment.

"Hello," the stranger said.

The word took a second for Miles' Eyes of the Emigre to translate, and when it did, the tone of voice sounded nervous.

"Hi," Miles said.

"Do you want dinner?"

Miles took a second to process the statement. He wondered if his translation magic had made a mistake.

"Excuse me?"

The sapient popped open a pocket of their jumpsuit and pulled out a plastic packet, holding it up to Miles with both hands.

Miles took it. The label read, Biochemistry C-14 Nutritional Paste — Lentsk Flavor.

The nutritional paste was very familiar to Miles and probably every other human outside of Solar Space. Back on Unsiel Station, they’d been the standard rations given for free to the refugees of recently bowered worlds.

Human biology fell into one of the 'big five' biochemistries that were represented in the spiral. There were worlds where the chemical and molecular laws broadly or exactly overlapped, where life had converged on similar principles for extracting and storing biological energy, and it had happened enough times that there was some overlap between species. Even in an omniverse of infinite possible physical laws, if a universe could support life at all, it could only do so in so many ways. Those patterns tended to repeat.

The advantage of falling in one of the spiral’s most common biochemistries was that there were a lot of mass-produced calorie packs that humans could eat. The disadvantage was that Miles had to put up with flavors like Lentsk.

What even is a lentsk?

His Eyes of the Emigre didn’t help much. If he concentrated on the word, he got a mental image of a small purple ball, but that didn’t enlighten him at all.

"Thanks," Miles said, forcing a smile and taking the translucent plastic pack.

"I'm Trin. I'm boarding team scout. Captain said, since you are boarding team healer, we should be comfortable together."

Hearing the name, Miles was able to place the sapient. Trin was a male sensor technician serving on the ship. He was from a species called the Eppan, who weren't close biologically to humans or Hurcs, but they would still be recognizable as mammals to any old Earth scientist.

Trin must have thought he'd been rude, since he lowered his eyes and pushed his middle paws together, unless that gesture meant he thought Miles was being rude.

"I'm Miles." Wait, what? "What do you mean by 'boarding team?"

Trin seemed to think about the question for a second, maybe waiting for a translation to process, before he answered. "Oh, the team that boards wrecks, I think."

That actually made sense, Miles realized. The Starlit Kipper was registered as a salvage ship, a junker. If it was going to be recovering tech from damaged ships and stations, it was reasonable that they'd send crewmembers over to them. If there was a chance of someone being injured while they were over there, it made sense they'd want a healer.

It wasn’t precisely what Miles had been expecting, but his expectations weren’t much more elaborate than a paycheck and a sense of legitimacy. Seeing the universe and the prestige of serving on a ship were just bonuses.

He realized he’d left Trin standing out in the corridor for over a minute.

“Sorry, do you want to come in?”

“Yes.”

Miles stepped back to open the way, and Trin stepped in. Trin immediately made for the bunk, where he sat down and pulled up his lower legs onto the padded mattress, folding them over each other like a human sitting cross-legged.

He reached into another of his pockets and pulled out a second food pack, which he bit into.

Miles hit the switch to close the door and went to sit next to him.

Trin was looking around the room, eyes darting from one bare corner to the next, then to the viewport, which showed only the blackness of the weave. The downy flaps of skin hanging from his head shifted slightly as he looked around; nervous fiddling, subtle body language, or something with a biological function, Miles wasn’t sure.

Miles tore the corner off his own food pack and squeezed out a mouthful of the contents directly down the back of his throat. Back at Unsiel Station, the human refugees always referred to the food paste as slime, and he was reminded exactly how accurate that was as he ate half of it as fast as possible.

Trin was sucking down the paste like he enjoyed it, and quickly drained the plastic packet. The empty packet went back into his pocket, and he rested both sets of hands on his knees.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“So, how do you want to become familiar with me?” Trin asked.

“Uh—”

Miles felt himself at a loss. It’d been a long time since he’d had to get to know someone.

On Unsiel Station he was a human among humans, and however diverse they were in culture and background, they all shared in the same trauma, of being a citizen of a world that fell through the cracks in space and then nearly destroyed itself in its panic. It had created a camaraderie, and a kind of collective identity that made socializing easy.

He didn’t have anything in common with Trin. If there was any commonality at all, he didn’t know it.

“Well, how old are you?” Miles asked.

“I was born in iteration twenty-seven one-six-five,” Trin replied.

The response didn’t exactly answer Miles’ question.

On Earth, time was measured in years, Earth’s rotation around the sun. Out in the spiral, time was measured in iterations. Every time a bower break brought a new world into the weave, the iteration count was increased. From what Miles had heard, new worlds arrived at about a rate of two every Earth-standard year, but that was probabilistic, not regular. Sometimes the gap between them was longer, sometimes shorter.

Earth had been part of a cohort of three worlds that dropped through within about a month of each other, but in theory, there might be gaps of years. He’d need to sit down with a computer and a record of arrivals to know exactly how long it had been since iteration 27,165. Without that, he was left estimating.

The current iteration was 27,201, and with some mental math Miles worked out that following the average, Trin’s birth iteration would make him about eighteen Earth-standard years old. He didn’t have a frame of reference for what that meant for an Eppan, but he didn’t have the feeling Trin was a lot more mature than him. They were both at about the start of their careers in the spiral if nothing else.

“And you?” Trin asked.

“I’m nineteen,” Miles said. “I wasn’t born in the spiral. I think I’d be about thirty-eight iterations old.”

“You weren’t born in the spiral?”

“No, I’m from Earth. It only had its bower break about three iterations ago.”

“You were born in false universe,” Trin said, sounding awed.

From the point of view of a spiral native, it might seem like that.

Miles felt the opposite way. He’d spent seventeen years of his life in that universe. He’d been a student learning its fundamental properties to the limits of human science. That universe felt real to him, even now. It had taken time for him to come to terms with the absolute reality of his new home, and he wasn’t the only human who’d struggled with that.

There were factions on Earth that still thought that the spiral was some kind of hell, for all that once you got off Earth, things weren’t so bad. There were factions that wanted to go back, as if they could somehow find the spatial rift Earth had slipped through and crawl back up into the spacetime universe. Impossible, and maybe not even desirable. Earth had been alone up there.

The silence between him and Trin had grown awkward while Miles had been musing, and unlike Rhu-Orlen, Trin did seem to find it uncomfortable.

“Is this your first job?” he asked Trin, next.

“Not my first job. First job was thief, on Palidrana. It was good, for two iterations. This is second job.”

The word thief wasn’t a perfect translation, Miles felt. His Eyes of the Emigre gave him the impression of a sanctioned kind of theft, a thief who wasn’t breaking any laws. It must have been an Eppan thing.

“I worked on Earth as a tutor, but not in a subject that means anything out here,” Miles said.

“Oh, you were a teacher?”

“Kind of. A student teacher.”

“Teach me something,” Trin demanded, shifting on the mattress so he could look at Miles.

Miles looked up at the ceiling, feeling put on the spot. He dredged his memory for something Trin might find interesting or useful, knowledge he hadn’t touched in a year.

Finally, he remembered Pythagoras. At least geometry was the same out in the spiral. He gave his best attempt at explaining right-angled triangle equations to the attentive Eppan, striving to keep the description culture-independent and to avoid anything that might not translate.

“Yes. I know this,” Trin said, after Miles had finished.

“Right, of course.”

Geometry probably wasn’t universal — omniversal — but it was very similar in the weave to how it had worked on Earth, so it was probably common to a lot of spiral worlds.

“So, are we friends now?” Trin asked.

That was another first for Miles, in a long while. The camaraderie he’d shared with the other humans on Unsiel Station had been close and it’d been powerful, but it had never been friendship, not exactly.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Of course.”

Why not? He’d made a friend.

Trin shifted on the bed so that he loomed over Miles, and reached forward with his middle arms to embrace him in an awkward hug. After a second, the Eppan pulled back.

“You want to touch signallers?” Trin asked.

It took a second for Miles to realize he meant comms. “Okay.”

He pulled out his comm unit at the same time Trin retrieved his from a pocket, and they tapped them together, forming a brief connection and recording each other’s message address.

As Miles brought his communicator back down, he noticed there were several missed calls listed on the screen. Missed calls from the captain. He’d put the device on silent so it wouldn’t interrupt his concentration, and now he’d missed calls from his boss. His boss. Who’d just shown great charity in giving him a job. He felt mortified.

“I missed some calls from the captain,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Space burial for you,” Trin said.

The Eppan hopped off the bed and padded over to the door. He let himself out while Miles was still reeling over the enormity of his mistake.

* * *

The bridge of the Starlit Kipper sat in the nose of the ship. It was probably the ship's biggest room, aside from the cargo bay, and it was the center of its operations. Miles made his way there quickly through the corridors, his plastic boot soles making minimal noise on the grated floors, the warmth of the heightened activity pushing back against the chill of the bare metal walls.

When he reached the door to the bridge, he pressed the access switch and waited for someone on the other side to approve entry.

It took a minute.

Eventually, the door slid open.

The captain was hovering in the center of the room on the other side, with another sapient Miles hadn't met yet sitting at a pilot's station.

Miles waited to see if he needed to be invited in, but when no invitation came, he stepped forward over the threshold.

"Sir?" he said.

He realized suddenly he didn't actually know the etiquette of addressing a captain here.

Emigres on Unsiel Station had been given access to a primer on spiral social rules, but it had been very broad and very shallow, and it'd seemed very basic and obvious to Miles. There hadn’t been any guidelines on how to act in a power structure like a ship’s crew, and without any specific knowledge, Miles had just fallen back on his preconceptions from Earth culture.

Brisk hadn't actually shown the captain much reverence in the exchanges he'd seen when he boarded. Maybe it wasn't expected.

"When I contact you, you must respond," Rhu-Orlen said.

The missed calls.

"Yes, I'm sorry,” Miles said. “I turned my comm to silent so I could work on something."

"You must respond."

"Right. I know. It won't happen again."

The captain didn't immediately continue the conversation. The room lapsed into silence, and again, Miles wasn't sure if the captain was angry, or thinking, or if this was just what they did.

The bridge's front wall was filled by a large viewport, currently looking out over the distant corkscrew starfield of the spiral. From the angle of the view, the ship must have been traveling orthogonal to the spiral, crossing the wide cylindrical void that ran through its center. Miles had thought that it was more common to travel up and down the spiral along the curving cord of bowered worlds, where a ship would have access to ports, fuel, and trading opportunities, and that they would only break off to cross the core when a shortcut was absolutely necessary. It looked like the captain thought this crossing was necessary.

The Kipper’s pilot sat at a station in front of the viewport, a sapient from a species Miles had never even heard of before. They looked like their physiology followed a flat body plan, with a shape like a heavy blanket raised up in a loose cone a few feet tall, their smooth white top-side facing out. Their body bunched up in places, creating waterfalls of silky folds, and Miles caught flashes of a wet pink underside, which the pilot mostly held facing inwards. As Miles stared, they reached forward with one corner of their body to adjust something on their terminal's screen.

Nearby there was a circular glass-topped table projecting a holographic display of an unfamiliar planet, and a large wall display showing an event log and the status of the ship’s various systems.

None of the technology seemed perfectly fitted into the space. Screens hung from walls on welded struts, rather than sitting flush with the paneling, and in places fat cables ran from wall outlets to one device or another, supplying energy and data to equipment that the room hadn’t been wired for.

The captain had a padded chair at the center of the room, but they obviously didn't need it.

It looked like there were a lot more positions available on the bridge than there were crew members to fill them. There was a terminal near the holographic display that could have been a navigator's post, currently sitting empty. Miles had read that the ship's weapons had been removed, so presumably there was a gunner's post that was no longer filled. There were a couple of other posts that Miles couldn't guess the function of.

Miles waited a few seconds for the captain to continue, but when they just continued to hover silently in place, he spoke up.

"Do you still need me?" he asked.

"You need accreditation," the Orbellius replied instantly, as if there hadn’t been a lapse of silence.

Accreditation?

"Oh?"

"Accreditation as a healer."

"Okay,” Miles said. The captain hadn’t said anything about this before they hired him. It was kind of weird, and a little rude, to hold something like that back, but Miles wouldn’t have been in a position to refuse even if he had known. He was still glad to have been given a job. “How can I get that?"

"A test and a demonstration," the captain said. One of their spaghetti tendrils curled down to tap their belt, and Miles' comm unit buzzed in his pocket. "You have the details."

"Okay. Thanks. I guess I'll go read them, then."

“Read them and prepare yourself.”

Miles waited for a few seconds to see if there was anything else, then turned to go. Just before he left the bridge, he caught sight of an eyestalk peering at him from the pilot’s station; a white, round, lidless eye, held up by a long stem of its skin.

He gave the pilot a brief smile, then turned and walked back out through the door.

Accreditation. Accreditation?

Miles hadn’t heard of a spiral healer qualification before, but if the captain said he needed it, he would try and get it.

He let out a long sigh as the bridge door closed behind him.

It had been a long time since he’d had to study for a test. He’d been good at exams, at one time. He hoped he still had the talent for it.