"No spa," I said, staring at the bridge of his nose rather than meeting his eyes.
"We also offer guided VIP tours of the Exclusion Zone perimeter. You'll be accompanied by one of our native Wardens for an up-close, absolutely safe encounter with the planetary forces."
"No tours. No spa. No drinks," I said, my tone completely deadened. "Just the room."
The concierge's smile faltered for a fraction of a second, a micro-expression of confusion, before snapping back into its rigid corporate place. "Let me just finalize your room access code."
He tapped rapidly across a holographic terminal embedded in the obsidian counter. I leaned against the polished stone, ignoring him and letting my eyes drift. Behind the concierge, a secondary, larger monitoring station tracked the resort's environmental integrity. The screen was a chaotic, scrolling map of green and yellow readouts, tracking tectonic stress, shield output, and thermal loads across the sprawling compound.
In the upper right corner of the display, a small red indicator began to blink, pulsing with the universal cadence of a critical system stress alert. I couldn't read the specific Cynder Bay schematics from this distance, but the color coding and placement were undeniable—something in their environmental perimeter was failing.
A passing staff member, carrying a stack of fresh, chilled cooling towels, stopped by the console. He barely broke his stride. He glanced at the blinking red light, reached out, and tapped the screen, dismissing the alert without opening the underlying data log to check the severity. The red light vanished, instantly replaced by an artificial, pacifying green checkmark.
I stared at the spot where the warning had been. My mind, trained by years of managing cascading systemic failures,instantly recognized the risk protocol violation. The staff member hadn't investigated the underlying cause. He hadn't dispatched a maintenance drone or cross-referenced the data. He had simply erased the notification to keep the board looking green for the tourists in the lobby. The resort management was actively prioritizing the illusion of safety over actual security. They were ignoring the reality of the planet beneath their feet.
I stood there, processing the sheer scale of the negligence. This was a critical failure in the safety perimeter of a resort built on a geologically unstable death-world. A month ago, a year ago, the old Tove would have immediately demanded to speak to the shift supervisor. She would have escalated the issue to corporate, filed a hazard report, and managed the crisis before the shield inevitably buckled. Her pulse would have raced with the adrenaline of problem-solving.
Now? I just stared at the glowing green checkmark.
I realized, with a chilling wave of complete apathy, that I truly didn't care. If the forcefield failed tonight, if the lobby flooded with thousands of degrees of liquid fire, I would burn along with the smiling concierge and his stupid, bubbling drinks. The sterilized, managed danger of this place was boring me anyway.
"Your access code is loaded to your personal datapad, Ms. Sorenson," the concierge said, his voice breaking through my internal void. "You are in the Obsidian Wing, Suite 402. As a reminder, for your own safety, please remember to stay on the designated Cool Paths if you venture out to the viewing decks. Enjoy your stay."
"I'll try," I said. I picked up my duffel, turned, and walked toward the elevators, leaving the concierge standing alone with his frozen, useless smile.
Suite 402 was vast,dark, and perfectly silent. The moment the heavy, reinforced door sealed shut behind me, the faint, ambient hum of the lobby vanished entirely, replaced by an absolute, suffocating quiet. The room was designed in deep charcoal tones and brushed steel, aiming for a cavernous, luxurious aesthetic that felt more like a tomb than a hotel room. But the centerpiece of the suite wasn't the massive bed or the sleek furniture. It was the wall.
The entire western bulkhead of the suite was a single, uninterrupted pane of reinforced transparent alloy. And just twenty yards beyond that glass, a slow, sluggish river of molten rock flowed down the jagged slope of the mountain.
I didn't immediately walk to the glass. I carried the heavy duffel into the center of the room and set it on the edge of the massive, king-sized bed. The linens were spun from high-thread-count bio-silk, impossibly soft and stark white, a jarring contrast to the grit and ash of the planet outside. On the bedside table sat a complimentary basket of exotic off-world fruits and a bottle of synthetically aged wine worth more than my shuttle ticket.
I ignored the wine. I ignored the sprawling bathroom with its sunken tub and cascading water wall. I mechanically unzipped my duffel. I took out my sparse collection of oversized cooling tunics and stacked them on the corner of the mattress with exact, clinical precision. I pulled out my toiletries bag and set it next to the clothes. I was surrounded by the pinnacle of interstellar luxury, a suite designed to indulge every human sense and desire, and I felt absolutely nothing for it. It was just a holding cell. Another place to not exist.
Once the bag was empty, I left the clothes sitting on the bed. I turned toward the wall.
I walked slowly across the plush, dark carpet. I stopped only when the toes of my boots met the cold metal trim at thebase of the window. The room was dark, the automated lights having not yet engaged because I hadn't commanded them to, but I didn't need them. The lava river outside painted the entire suite in shifting, violent shades of crimson, orange, and bruised purple. The ambient light crawled across the ceiling, casting long, wavering, demonic shadows against the walls.
I stepped closer, until my nose was an inch from the glass. I raised my right hand and pressed my bare palm flat against the transparent barrier.
The glass was freezing cold. The resort’s climate control system was fighting a massive, endless war against the thermal radiation of the magma, and the glass was the frontline of that battle. The manufactured cold seeped into my skin, biting sharply at my nerve endings.
I looked past my hand, out into the liquid fire. The magma moved with a heavy, terrifying inevitability. It wasn't fast like water; it was thick and muscular, consuming massive chunks of black rock, melting them down into glowing slag within seconds. The heat out there was absolute. It was a destructive, purifying force that reduced everything it touched to base elements.
Make me feel it,I thought, staring intently into the bright, burning core of the flow.Make me afraid. Make me feel anything.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to imagine the glass suddenly shattering under the pressure. I pictured the heat rushing in, the air instantly combusting in my lungs, the violent, fiery end of my long, exhausting numbness. I waited for my heart to race, for my breath to hitch in my throat, for my palms to sweat against the freezing glass.
My chest rose and fell in a slow, steady, infuriatingly calm rhythm. My pulse remained a sluggish, flat thrum. The numbness held fast, an impenetrable glacier sitting heavy insidemy chest that simply refused to melt, no matter how close I stood to the fire.
I opened my eyes and looked at my own reflection, superimposed over the river of fire. I looked like a ghost haunting my own expensive vacation. My skin was pale, devoid of all healthy color. My eyes were shadowed by dark, bruising circles that hours of sleep could never fix, because the exhaustion wasn't physical. I was twenty-nine years old, and I looked entirely hollowed out. I was colder than the air conditioning.
A sudden, sharp movement outside the glass broke my grim focus.
I blinked, adjusting my vision past my reflection and looking down toward the rocky embankment that bordered the lava flow. It was an employee-only zone, a narrow strip of hardened, cracked basalt just a few feet from the creeping, lethal edge of the magma.
Someone was walking there.
I leaned forward, my brow furrowing slightly. At first, I thought it was an automated maintenance drone, or perhaps a trick of the distorted, heat-hazed light. But as the figure stepped out from the shadow of a jagged obsidian outcropping, the sheer scale of the silhouette registered in my mind.
